Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘This style, Zen style, I think – not so coincidently, grows up within a context that is also familiar to us – mainly the urbanization of Chinese culture. Who is nostalgic for the landscape? The people who live in the city. Farmers do not get off on dirt, right? [laughter and laughing] and the natural things – they want a more powerful tractor or something to handle. But the people in the city who never get dirty, they are the ones who get off on the natural world – and there is a kind of nostalgia for the landscape, the lost innocence of the countryside in civilizations that are being urbanized – and that’s what was happening in China. This kind of – this style – Zen style of what you might call a nature fetish, developed in the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, precisely at the time when historians say Chinese civilization was becoming urbanized and there was growing up a considerable urban middle class intellectual society – a literati who were involved in government, politics and in the arts and letters – then those are the people from whom Zen Buddhism came.

They are like the white, middle class kids who become Zen Buddhists in this country – this particular stream of society that has built into its culture a certain nostalgia for a lost innocence and they are the ones, then, who glorify nature – really, I think for the first time in the history of Buddhism, who hung out with the landscape paintings that we often think of as Zen art, but in a way we can say “This was the nature art of a particular class to which Zen also belonged” – not necessarily that there was first Zen ideals then there was Zen landscapes. But there were landscapes into which Zen Buddhists imagined themselves. They shared a certain set of values – so landscape painting and nature poetry and these sorts of elite literary and artistic expressions of a sense of longing for a pre-industrial, if you want – a pre-urban environment.

Dogen says right at the very beginning – the title of the text is “Mountains and Waters Sutra” and that is rather surprising, first of all that he’s talking about mountains and water at all, because most sutras are called something like The Sutra in Which The God Brahma asked Shakyamuni to Explain the Doctrine of X – you know, something, it’s all very technical or philosophical or symbolic – but here he says – this is a sutra about the landscape. So that is surprising. But even more surprising – Dogen? I mean just an ordinary Buddhist – an ordinary Buddhist is going to write a sutra? After all sutras are the words of the Buddha – what chutzpah. I’m going to sit down and write a new sutra. Buddhists did it but never admitted it, they always pretended that it had been translated from Sanskrit and – well – But Dogen, in the very first line of this sutra clears up at least part of that surprise, but adds another, more interesting surprise, namely he says, in the very first line, the mountains and waters around us right now are the teachings of the ancient Buddha. In other words, I’m not writing a sutra, the mountains and waters are writing a sutra – or speaking a sutra – sutras were originally chanted – still are chanted – so they are speaking to us. You can hear Tassajara Creek speaking to us – speaking not just about Tassajara Creek, but speaking the Buddha dharma all the time – and the mountains are doing so also, they are a sutra – they are a text that we can read as we walk about. And, as I say, that clears up the problem of genre – he’s not writing a sutra but it creates a much bigger problem that everything, at least in the natural world, is writing a sutra or speaking a sutra.

So you have this sense that the landscape is – I mean in one sense this is a fantastic way of talking about the landscape as a sentient being, but it is also done so through the sense of merging the people who have inhabited the land with the landscape. And I was talking about Gary Snyder – this was very important for him because this is what Gary Snyder loves to do – he wanders around in the great basin finding the old legends of the Indians who lived there. I was thinking about this when my brother and I went up to see Suzuki Roshi’s site up on the hill that I visit every time come down here and I realized these mountains and waters around here have a certain history already, even though we don’t know the history of the Indians here – I mean we can only imagine it, we can only imagine the 19th century Chinese who built the road in here and so on, still – already there is a lore developing in these mountains and rivers that will be part of their meaning for us, I think for many of already – even if it is only a few decades old – if all goes well and things aren’t too impermanent, in that sense the mountains will grow – these are young mountains. We are told the Coast Range and that the young Buddhism is growing with these mountains – so that historical sense of the landscape is going to become richer and richer and richer.’ (from Cuke.com)