Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Soon  after he graduated in 1909, Aldo Leopold headed to the Southwest to take a job with the U.S. Forest Service – the new federal agency charged with the equally new task of “wildlife management.” For Leopold and his colleagues, managing wildlife meant, among other things, killing creatures deemed undesirable by ranchers, farmers, and hunters. Few were deemed more undesirable or made for more exciting targets for young men with guns — than wolves.

“In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold remembered some decades later in his book A Sand County Almanac. So when Leopold and a companion spotted an old she-wolf and her half-dozen pups tangling playfully on a steep hillside, the men started

“Pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy… When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.” As the men moved closer to size up what they had done, something unexpected and arresting happened.

As Leopold recalled: “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

This gaze into the eyes of the other, this glimpse of an animal’s spirit, became a foundational moment in the history of ecological consciousness. Leopold’s account of the dying wolf went on to describe the calamitous consequences of exterminating the entire species: mountains denuded of every edible tree and bush by proliferating deer, rangeland turned into dust bowls by overgrazing cattle. The eradication of the wolf would upset the balance of nature, which the mountain embodied before it was ravaged by men. Like the wolf exterminator, Leopold concluded, the rancher “has not learned to think like a mountain.” (from Harper’s Magazine)

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‘Although mountains belong to the nation, mountains belong to people who love them. When mountains love their master, such a virtuous sage or wise person enters the mountains. Since mountains belong to the sages and wise people living there, trees and rocks become abundant and birds and animals are inspired. This is so because the sages and wise people extend their virtue. 

Know for a fact that mountains are fond of wise people and sages. Rulers have visited mountains to pay homage to wise people or to ask for instructions from great sages. These have been excellent precedences in the past and present…

Know that mountains are not the realm of human beings or the realm of heavenly beings. Do not view mountains from the standard of human thought. If you do not judge mountains’ flowing by the human understanding of flowing, you will not doubt mountains’ flowing and not flowing.’ (Shobogenzo Sansuikyo)