China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton

Author:David Hinton [Hinton, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611807134
Google: ZVj6DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Hsieh Ling-yün began a Ch’an sense of landscape practice in the amalgam of his poetry and the understanding revealed in his Ch’an essay. Then, as Ch’an developed in the centuries that followed, its empty mirror-mind transformed Chinese poetry, grounding it in the clarity of rivers-and-mountains images. This imagistic clarity became the fabric from which poetry was made, poetry that was widely considered a form of Ch’an practice and teaching. And in a culture where there is no distinction between heart and mind, it makes sense. Perception clarified by meditation until it is empty-mind mirroring the ten thousand things, mirroring rivers-and-mountains landscape: it isn’t just an intellectual or spiritual experience, it is also an emotional experience, an experience of the heart. That experience of the heart is presumably the purview of poetry, and indeed there is no end of such rivers-and-mountains poems in ancient China. A quintessential example is work by the great Wang Wei (701–761), a seminal figure in rivers-and-mountains poetry and painting (and whom we will see writing an influential memorial inscription for the Sixth Patriarch):

Magnolia Park

Autumn mountains gathering last light,

one bird follows another in flight away.

Shifting kingfisher-greens flash radiant

scatters. Evening mists: nowhere they are.

Or this especially pure imagistic poem by Tu Mu, who we saw (this page) dismantling the mirror metaphor:

Egrets

Robes of snow, crests of snow, and beaks of azure jade,

they fish in shadowy streams. Then startling up into

flight, they leave emerald mountains for lit distances.

Pear blossoms, a tree-full, tumble in the evening wind.

A rivers-and-mountains poetry of images weaves the identity-center into landscape as accurately as language can. It thereby renders a larger identity, an identity that is made of landscape. This is the heart of Ch’an as landscape-practice: in mirror-deep perception, earth’s vast rivers-and-mountains landscape replaces thought and even identity itself with its breath-emergent blaze, revealing the unity of consciousness and landscape/Cosmos that was sage dwelling for Ch’an practitioners, and indeed for all artist-intellectuals in ancient China. It returns us to our most primal nature, that inner wilds where we are indeed the awakened landscape gazing out at itself.

In the end, Ch’an revered rivers-and-mountains landscape (much like empty-mind) as a great teacher. This is implicit as an assumption throughout the tradition, and we find it stated openly when Wang Wei mourns the death of his great predecessor in the lineage of imagistic Ch’an landscape poetry:

Mourning Meng Hao-jan

My dear friend nowhere in sight,

this Han River keeps flowing east.

Now, if I look for old masters here,

I find empty rivers-and-mountains.

And Visitation-Land states it directly:

A monk asked Master Visitation-Land: “What is my teacher?”

Visitation-Land replied: “Clouds rising out of mountains, streams entering valleys without a sound.”

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