After reading the full-hearted full-throated fully-embodied tumultuous rush of the final paragraph of the book, “Is a River Alive?”, by Rob MacFarlane, in particular the last phrase (which I won’t give away….), on waking the next day, I drew this with brush and water (on my “magic” calligraphy mat) …..
川心 sen shin – river heart (mind-body-heart).
Splash! Fall in!
This feels the most full and direct of my various responses to the question “is a river alive?”
For me “Is a river alive?” is a koan, not a rational question requiring a rational answer. It has to be lived. And the question cannot be answered from the state of mind that framed the question…. Debating whether a river actually has consciousness or not (and what is consciousness anyway, etc etc) is not the point, and immediately “kills” the river. The answer is an action. Kiai. 気合-- an energetic meeting of ki or chi.MacFarlane states early on in the book that he comes from a rationalist upbringing and mindset, and this is his entry point to this enquiry and exploration. It’s notable that he doesn’t answer his own question by coming out with a straight yes or no. Again, it’s not that kind of a question.
It’s also notable that he was told he had to prepare himself fully to engage with the Mutekehau Shipu river. He was exhorted to abandon his notebook, make offerings to the river, fast for a couple of days per week and to define a question to ask the river. He had to let the river show him, take him in. So he would have been in a different, heightened state of consciousness. One that yields different answers to the rational mind.
For Nan Shepherd, to know the mountain to be alive meant “walking out of the body and into the mountains” And then matter is “impregnated with mind”. And the “world exists in a continuous “active mood…. And the grammar of now, the present tense.” “Certain kinds of attention serve to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.” Sustained walking for hour upon hour….”and you walk the flesh transparent.” (An unforgettable line!)
But that doesn’t mean she is “out of” herself. She is entirely in herself, embodied. “That is the final grace accorded by the mountain.”The mountains are then known to be living, and the rivers’ and pools’ “suppressed sparkle” show them to be “living water”. Water which is “so simple it frightens me. …….. It is itself – it does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.” p 22-23
She does not, as Rob MacFarlane notes in his preface to “The Living Mountain” step over the line and say the mountains and rivers are literally alive and conscious. She knows that this is “largely delusory; that granite does not think, that corries do not sense our entry into “their” space, and rivers do not quench our thirst for our pleasure or resentment.” In short, she is not “preaching either a superstitious animism or a lazy anthropormorphism.” I sense that Rob MacFarlane at this point would approve. It’s more like a kind of ‘mind” thing, a human consciousness experience, Mind.
From a Zen perspective:
Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters. ― Dōgen Zenji
It’s a spiritual journey that has to be undertaken in order to see and be in the world in a different way to the one that is dominant now.
I’ve returned to John Daido Loori’s beautiful book of photographs and commentaries on Dogen’s “Mountains and Rivers Sutra”. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Mountains-Rivers-Teachings-Envirnoment/dp/1882795210
The actual sutra by Dogen (in the folder) is full of phrases which just float on and infiltrate the mind….
Mountains and waters right now are the actualization of the ancient Buddha way. Each,abiding in its phenomenal expression, realizes completeness. Because mountains andwaters have been active since before the Empty Eon, they are alive at this moment.. Because they have been the self since before form arose they are emancipation realization.
Because mountains are high and broad, the way of riding the clouds is always reached in the mountains; the inconceivable power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains.
JDL’s photographs of water reveal the beingness of water, and those of the mountains the presence of mountains.
“If you want your practice to manifest in the world, if you want to help heal this great earth of ours which is groaning in sickness, you need to realize what we’ve been talking about. All you need to do to realize it is listen, and through the hum of the distant highway, you can hear the thing itself, the voice of the river. Can you hear it? That’s it… Is that the third thing?”https://www.mountainrecord.org/earth-initiative/river-seeing-river/
Ending of course with another question….
Coming back to the book, “Is a River Alive?” there is discussion of whether a river should be accorded river rights, equivalent to human rights – which then raises the question of how can we speak “for” the river? How can we within our current way of thinking know what the river wants? How can our supercomplex legal system deal with this?
One answer – let it be a river, let it flow! Let it be something “so simple it frightens me. …….. It is itself – it does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.”
And finally, in that final paragraph of the main part of the book, Rob MacFarlane steps over the line… Something is revealed and he is subsumed. And then the return, to do the “work”, along with “the path-menders, forest-planters, river-guardians, artists, scientists…—who are working to restore or pioneer good relations with nature.”https://www.instagram.com/p/DK92AVVxwcU/?img_index=1