So, a number of things tonight. I wanted to continue tonight talking about the Mountains and Water Sutra, which I started talking about at the beginning of the practice period. We're in a week ago, yesterday, when I kind of went over some of the main themes of Dogen's Mountains and Water Sutra, so I want to just review some of those and talk a little more about that. And in terms of Gary Snyder's practice of the wild, I'm basically talking about the theme for this practice period of our interconnectedness with Well, the whole landscape of our world and ourselves as an expression of that, of the environment, of the landscape of the mountains and waters or the prairies and lakes, the whole world around us that we are... To say we're connected with that isn't it because we are it.

[01:19]

we are an expression of the environment. But to start out tonight, amongst other things, and along with honoring Dogen and Gary Snyder and Peter Matheson, tonight's the 50th anniversary of the death of the mother of modern environmentalism, Rachel Carson. And in honor of that, there are kind of actions going on around the world. And so just to honor that, I wanted to call on Laurel to speak about that. Are there events happening concerning butterflies and bees and so. Yeah. So, Laurel, would you speak about that a little bit for us? Yeah, I'll be brief. It's actually really appropriate to talk about this tonight because we've just had a visit from a wonderful Buddhist priest, Florence Kaplow, who's also a botanist who works on conservation of rare plants.

[02:28]

And so it's the 50th anniversary of the death of Rachel Carson. She died quite young of cancer, but she was a powerful person and was the person that, through science and force of will, made it possible to get DDT, a horrible poison, removed from use in this country and thereby made it possible for the survival of butterflies, birds, et cetera. In other words, habitat for living things. And in her honor, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of her death, there was an effort to get individuals like us to participate in the conservation of the monarch butterflies which are in trouble for so many reasons, but they do a long migration, and a plant that they need is milkweed, and it's sort of a desert for the plant that they need.

[03:41]

And so they're asking people to plant milkweed in their yard, in their parkway, in a pod on their deck, wherever you would have an opportunity, if you have a child in a school, if you have influence over your local park district, whatever. And if you don't know how to do that, and if you don't know where to get the seeds, and if you don't know anything about what the plant is, we will put information on the Ancient Dragon website to help you get access to that. It's a very, there are a lot of different, it's not one plant, there's a whole bunch of kinds of milkweeds, they're pink and purple and orange and white, and fragrant and interesting. So if you're at all interested in doing that, it would be not just a gesture, but actually a useful thing to do. When they migrate, they go over two kinds of deserts. And one of the kinds of deserts are agricultural deserts, so cornfields with no habitat for them.

[04:45]

But the other kind of desert is urban deserts. And we have influence over that because we're people who live in cities. It's something we can do. Sometimes people say, I wish I could do something. This would be something you could do. So, thank you very much, Laurel. So, yeah, send me the information and we'll... And the other website would be the Wild Ones website. It's an organization that helps gardeners know how to grow wild plants, but we'll put it on our website. Yeah, we'll get it on the Ancient Dragon Facebook and on the news on the website, too. You might make a link to the Xerces Society. Xerces Society, yeah, very good. That's the society that studies and promotes invertebrates. But also they emphasize sort of habitat preservation. Good. Pollinators. Thank you very much, Laurel. Yeah, and just to add, as Laurel mentioned, yesterday we had Florence Kaplow here, who's written a wonderful book, co-edited a wonderful book called Hidden Lamp about the history of women in Buddhism, but also with

[05:55]

comments, reflections by modern women teachers. So we had her giving the Sunday morning Dharma talk, but also discussion in the afternoon. That will be on also soon on the Ancient Dragon website. Wonderful. And the morning Dharma talk also dealt a lot with the way in which we're connected to all our relations in the world of the landscape of the mountains and waters. So a lot of this is coming together in this practice period and some of you are formally participating in that, but all of us are, all of you, whether or not you're doing that practice, this practice period formally, this is what we're talking about for a couple of months, this way in which we are part of this landscape. So this writing by our 13th century founder of Soto Zen Dogen, very rich essay,

[07:01]

It's available, the text is available in the back. Thank you for that. And a week ago, Sunday, when we began that, I went over some of the major themes. I'm not going to go over all of that, but I'll just touch on some of them and then talk about some parts of read a little bit of the Mountains and Waters Sutra, and a specific commentary on it by Gary Snyder. And I want to have some time for discussion as well tonight. So part of the theme of this is simply mountains and waters, which in Chinese and Japanese, shanshui, or sansui in Japanese, means landscape. Mountains and waters literally is the word for landscape. So this is the whole of our environment, the whole of the world around us.

[08:02]

And this applies whether we're living in the mountains or living in the mountains of the skyscrapers of the Loop and the waters of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. This is about how we are connected with the world around us. And also, of course, all of us as as the human, the two-legged type beings, and how we are connected with each other. So this is also about Sangha, and this landscape as Sangha, how we are connected to each other. So there are many aspects. This is a long essay, and we're not going to try and cover everything in it, but there are numbers of themes. And one of the themes is about walking. So one of the... sayings that Dogen comments on is from one of the teachers in our lineage in China who said, the green mountains are constantly walking.

[09:05]

A stone woman gives birth to a child at night. This night is the night of the harmony of difference and sameness when light and dark, and the dark is the chance to see the sameness of all things. And then the mountains walking connects us, there are many aspects of this, connecting us with deep time, with geological time, with how it is that the that change happens in the world itself. So we don't usually think of mountains walking. We think of mountains as the most solid, permanent thing in the landscape of our planet. But actually, of course, mountains erupt. Mountains shift. Mountains get older, like the mountains on the East Coast, or they may be younger, like the mountains on the West Coast.

[10:06]

Mountains are constantly walking. as are we. And Dogen talks about how we have to know, we can only know our own walking by studying the walking of the mountains, and we have to study our own walking as well. And then there's another aspect of this that walking, one of the Chinese characters for walking also means conduct or practice. So we should study the practice and the behavior of mountains to learn about our own walking and our own practice. So there are many layers of what Dogen is talking about in this long essay. And another theme is just shifting our perspective on ourselves and the world and how we're related to the world. So it's a very rich topic that we're playing with. during this practice period, how we see the world, how we see our place in the world, how we respond to the world, how we take care of the world, especially at this time when

[11:14]

The world is changing. The climate is changing. Things are in danger. Species are disappearing. We, Florence Kaplow and I went with Laurel today to the Field Museum and the wonderful exhibit of the planet evolving. shows the various mass extinctions. Are we in the 6th or the 7th now? The 6th. The 6th. And there were, this morning when we went to it, there were how many? 18 species that had gone extinct since 8 a.m. in the morning? So this is what's happening in the world today. And maybe this has always been happening, but sometimes it happens much more intensely. So how do we take care of this? So anyway, this is a little bit about what how we are in the world today. And so I want to go back to look at this landscape by just looking at the opening of this Mountains and Water Sutra.

[12:24]

It's kind of bold of Dogen to call this a sutra. Sutra is usually the words of the Buddha Shakyamuni, who lived 2,500 years ago, long before Dogen, who lived in the 1200s. But it has that power. So I'm going to just read the first few sentences, and then I'm going to read a commentary explicitly about it by the great American Zen pioneer Gary Snyder. Dogen says, the mountains and waters of the immediate present are the manifestation of the path of the ancient Buddhas. Together abiding in their Dharma positions, they have consummated the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness. Because they are events prior to the empty aeon, they are the livelihood of the immediate present. Because they are the self before the emergence of signs, they are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality."

[13:31]

So, actually, even before we began the practice period formally, We could go Sunday. I've been talking about this for the past month, and just these few sentences are very powerful to me. They are the livelihood of the immediate present. So our zazen is about finding this liveliness, this livelihood, this vitality of the immediate present as we sit. Where do we find our livelihood? Where do we find our way of nourishment in this immediate present? Where do we find the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality? Something about, this is from Tom Ferry's translation, something about that is, I think very powerful. This is from a wonderful book by Gary Snyder called The Practice of the Wild. It's just an amazing book.

[14:34]

I think it's one of the most important books of the last 50 years. And there's a lot in it. One of the chapters is explicitly about this mountains and water sutra, but there's, all through the book, there are many interesting, wonderful things about, that relate to this. But there's, I'll start with this chapter that is about the, well, he says, the blue mountains constantly walking. Different translations say blue or green. There's a character that can be translated either way, I'll read it this way. He starts off by just quoting it. So I'll read it again. This is from Pashtun Hashi's translation. The mountains and rivers of this moment are the actualization of the way of the ancient Buddhas. Each abiding in its own phenomenal expression realizes completeness.

[15:35]

Because mountains and waters, and again this means landscape, have been active since before the eon of emptiness, they are alive at this moment. because they have been the self since before forms arose, they are liberated and realized." So, Gary Snyder goes on to say, this is the opening paragraph of Dogen's astonishing essay, Sansuikyo, Mountains and Water Sutra, written in the autumn of 1240, 13 years after he returned from his visit to Song Dynasty China. At the age of 12, he had left home in Kyoto to climb the well-worn trails through the dark hinoki and sugi, cedar and sequoia-like forests of Mount Yei, which is northeast of Northeast corner of Kyoto, I lived in the foothills of that for a couple of years. It's where the ancient center of Tendai Buddhism, the main form of Buddhism before Zen and Pure Land was, and where Dogen was first ordained.

[16:42]

Anyway, he climbed these trails up to Mount Yei. Gary continues, this 3,000-foot range of the northeast corner of the Kamo River Basin, the broad valley now occupied by the huge city of Kyoto, was the Japanese headquarter mountain of the Ten Dissected Buddhism. Dogen became a novice monk in one of the red-painted, shadowy wooden temples along the ridges. And then he quotes this line that Dogen mentions later in the next paragraph, the blue mountains are constantly walking. In those days, travelers walked. The head monk of the Daito-koji Zen Monks Hall in Kyoto once showed me the monastery's handwritten yearly tasks book from the 19th century. So Gary Snyder himself was a Rinzai monk for many years in Daito-koji in Kyoto. And then he says, it had been replaced by another handwritten volume with a few minor updates for the 20th century. These are the records that the leaders refer to through the year in keeping track of ceremonies, meditation sessions, and recipes.

[17:50]

It listed the temples that were affiliated with this training school in order of the traveling time it took to get to them, from one day to four weeks' walk. Student monks from even those distant temples usually made a round trip home at least once a year. He goes on, virtually all of Japan is steep hills and mountains dissected by fast shallow streams that open into shoestring valleys and a few wider river plains toward the sea. The hills are generally covered with small conifers and shrubs. Once they were densely forested with a cover of large hardwoods as well as the irregular pines and the tall, straight enoki and sugi trees, traces of a vast network of well-marked trails are still found throughout the land. They were tramped down by musicians, monks, merchants, porters, pilgrims, and periodic armies. And then he goes on, we learn a place in how to visualize spatial relationships as children on foot and with imagination.

[18:57]

Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities. So, if you remember walking to school as a child, that sense of space And, you know, where you lived and how far it was to various places you walked to, that sense of actually walking to some space, that was marking your space with your body, with your walking. A mile was originally a Roman measure of 1,000 paces. Automobile and airplane travel teaches us little that we can easily translate into a perception of space. To know that it takes six months to walk across Turtle Island, or North America, walking steadily, but comfortably, all day, every day, is to get some grasp of the distance.

[19:59]

So from, you know, from the West Coast to the East Coast, six months of walking. That's actually a better sense than to look at a map. Of course, we can fly across it in one day. The Chinese spoke of the four dignities, standing, lying, sitting, and walking. So we say the four postures, but actually, literally, the four dignities. They are dignities in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes. I think many of us would consider it quite marvelous if we could set out on foot again with a little inn or a clean camp available every 10 or so miles and no threat from traffic to travel across a large landscape, all of China, all of Europe. That's the way to see the world in our own bodies. And he talks about sacred mountains and pilgrimage and there's so much in here and I could just read the whole thing but I wanted to

[21:02]

I'll just pick out a few parts for today. I'll say a little bit more about this idea of landscape, which he talks about. There is the obvious fact of the water cycle and the fact that mountains and rivers indeed form each other. Waters are precipitated by heights. carve or deposit landforms in their flowing descent, and weight the offshore continental shelves with sediment to ultimately tilt more uplifts. In common usage, the compound mountains and waters, shanshui in Chinese, sansui in Japanese, as I was saying, is the straightforward term for landscape. Landscape painting is mountains and waters pictures. So when I first started sitting, there happened to be an exhibit in a museum in New York where I started, of these wonderful landscape paintings, these Chinese and Japanese brush paintings.

[22:11]

And just that sense of space was, for me, part of learning Zazen. So we have here, you know, Kaze's version of He left us this one-stroke painting called The Snow Within, and you can see a mountain there. Of course, now this shows us what it's like outside, where the snow is celebrating spring in Chicago, out on Irving Park Road, but there's snow within and there's snow without. It can remind us in the summer of our inner cool. Anyway, a landscape painting is a way of sensing our own inner space as well as, because we're part of that, and often in Asian landscape paintings, there'll be little figures, you know, a hermit walking or sitting in a little hut to show us our place in the landscape, little figures. Anyway, just to finish what Gary says, A mountain range is sometimes also termed mai, a pulse, or vein, as a network of veins on the back of the hand.

[23:17]

One does not need to be a specialist to observe that landforms are a play of stream-cutting and ridge-resistance, that waters and hills interpenetrate in endlessly branching rhythms. The Chinese feel for land has always incorporated the sense of a dialectic of rock and water, of downward flow and rocky uplift, and of the dynamism and slow flowing of earth forms. So this is the walking of mountains and waters. There are several surviving large Chinese horizontal hand scrolls from postmodern eras titled something like Mountains and Rivers Without End. And then Gary Snyder wrote a book-length poem called Mountains and Rivers Without End, which also is relevant to the Mountains and Rivers Sutra. Some of them move through the four seasons and seem to picture the whole world. Mountains and waters, unquote, is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature. As such, it goes well beyond dichotomies of purity and pollution, natural and artificial.

[24:20]

The whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages, cities, and the once comparatively small, dusty world of human affairs. So we're part of the landscape, we're part of the mountains and waters, or, you know, in the Midwest, the prairies and lakes and rivers. So this is about learning our own terrain, walking through our own bodies and cultures and cities. So one of the things that we can do for practice period participants, formally or informally, Practice walking. We do walking meditation here between periods of sitting, but you can do walking meditation outside, too. You don't have to walk in a formal posture and walk very, very slowly. You can just walk and feel your feet and feel your breathing. You can walk at different paces.

[25:23]

Anyway, I can keep babbling, but I want to stop and welcome your responses, comments about mountains and waters, or walking, or anything else. So please feel free. Yes, Jen. I wanted to add a website. It's a Facebook page, Loyola Dunes Habitat Restoration. Say it again? Oh, Loyola Dunes Habitat Restoration. Thank you. And when the, when the, when we lose there, there's two types. There's the kind of swanky bright, bright orange. And then there's the taller one that has mauve or real pale purple blossoms. And so there's at least two types. It's not that I know every type. But it's a wonderful thing to see.

[26:26]

It's a really, really nice website. And when you're in Rogers Park and you're going on Sheridan Road, When you pass Kraft, you should just go into Kraft because when you get, you could leave your car and walk along the pier and the Royal Olympic Reservation has a town. Along the lake there? Right behind your deck at Kraft on the lake. Cool. It's a really beautiful place. I was walking along the beach one day and thought, gee, if we could only… set aside part of the speech for, you know, not for sunbathing and swimming, but just for... And about three months, about a month later, they set aside part of the speech. And it wasn't me that did it. Well, who knows, you know? It could have been. Our thoughts have power. I mean, it might have had an influence, but I have been, I have been, worked there, and Caitlin has gone,

[27:27]

work there with me, too. We got rid of all the alfalfa, which is called sweet clover, and my son did that. I wanted to say one more thing. The place that the United States government decided they would put our nuclear waste was called Yucca Mountain. The Native Americans who lived in that area called Yucca Mountain Creeping Mountain. Oh, I didn't know that. That was their name for it. Because it, you know, in generations they saw that it actually did move. Of course, we've given that up as a site for nuclear waste. Obviously, if it's going to creep, it's not the best Interesting. I didn't know that. I knew about Yucca Mountain, but I didn't know that it was called Creeping Mountain.

[28:29]

Yeah, the Native Americans called it Creeping Mountain. Thank you. And the place where we are putting the waste in, New Mexico, the WIPP, I forget what that stands for. They're now just really crazy. But they're getting ready to do fracking right near where all the nuclear waste is. But it's not going to work. I mean, it's anyway. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. Maybe, Laurel, you could include that website in what you sent me. Thank you. So other comments or responses about mountains and waters or anything else? Well, that's kind of, in a way, it's a stock phrase.

[29:37]

It's pretty interesting to me. He says, events before the empty eon, or the empty kalpa, so in one view of Indian cosmology, kalpa is a very, very long period of time. There are four kalpas, and one is the kalpa of emptiness, and there's the kalpa of arising, where everything is formed, all form arises and there's the kelpa of abiding and there's the kelpa of decay. So that's where that comes from, but it's related to in It's related to Zen kind of sayings about, and inquiries about, the ultimate. So there's also the question, what was your face before your parents were born? It's kind of like that. What was your face before, in the empty kalpa, in the empty eon, when there was nothing before? And I've been translating it recently as, well, what was the events before the Big Bang?

[30:40]

And they've just recently, you know, modern physics is fascinating and they've recently discovered right after the Big Bang there was this period, this thing called inflation where everything spread out. They've just made some discoveries about that. Some of the people who sit in Nyozon's group, the group that Nyozon leads in Hyde Park are physicists at University of Chicago and know a lot about this. But anyway, there's all kinds of interesting developments in modern physics, and yet they don't know anything about before the Big Bang. It's like the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, and yet from the point of view of Buddhist cosmology, I think, As I read it, there were universes before that universe. And actually, as experimental physicists say, well, maybe there was that we don't know. So for those of you who have television, I'm going to give a TV plug here.

[31:46]

For those of you who have television and have There's two shows I want to mention. There's a show called Cosmos with a physicist named Neil deGrasse Tyson, and it's really interesting. It's beautifully produced. It's very visually beautiful, but he talks about a lot of this stuff about time and space and modern physics, and it's fascinating. There's another show that started last night called Years of Living Dangerously, which is about climate and climate change. And a lot of Hollywood luminaries are involved, are doing this to try and just spread the word. Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Don Cheadle. Anyway, it's actually a really good show. It's going to be a series. So Don Cheadle is one part of it, was in Texas talking about climate change with

[32:47]

of Christian evangelicals who think that climate change is, oh, they're in the middle of a drought, and their local plant, because of the drought, closed, and all their jobs are gone, and they say that the drought will end, thanks to God, and then Don Cheadle says, well, here in California, he goes there from California, where everybody thinks extreme weather, is due to climate change and so he's trying to talk to these Christians and there's this lady who's a climate scientist who also happens to be a Christian evangelical whose husband is an evangelical preacher and she's talking to them about climate change from the point of view of not Democrat, Republican, or any of that, but from the point of, as a Christian. And so it's really interesting. How do we talk about all this stuff without getting polarized? And just talk about the reality of science without, anyway. So it's a very interesting series. So excuse the plug.

[33:54]

But they're both really interesting series.

[33:57]

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