Mountains and Rivers 2

I was at a celebration yesterday for a friend who just got her masters degree. One of the very few times this year I've been socializing. Part of the get together was ceremonial and included a Navajo elder who provided blessings and songs and a surprisingly detailed explanation of Navajo religious perspective -- which of course includes mountains and waters.

Mountains personified. Waters alive. Sometimes when I drive by Mt. Taylor, one of the four sacred mountains, I see upon it/as it a sleeping woman with long black hair. The mountain and the woman are the same, indivisible, and some of what the elder had to say yesterday was aligned with if not identical to the view I've long had about Mt. Taylor/Tsoodzil. Of the other three sacred mountains, I'm only familiar with San Francisco Peak/Dookʼoʼoosłííd outside of Flagstaff. It too has quite a personality, one that changes depending on the time of year, the angle of the sun and the distance you are from the mountain. 

On the way to and from this get-together, I was contemplating the mountains we passed by and the ones in the distance. Each mountain and mountain range has their own personality, their own beingness. 

In some of the study we've been doing, "mountains" are stand ins for ourselves sitting zazen. That seems to be the consensus for what Dogen is saying in his (to me) bewildering Mountains and Waters Sutra. We are mountains when we sit? Metaphorically, perhaps. But I see his metaphors in a somewhat different way, metaphors without a literal analogy. He uses the mountain metaphor as an approach to the ineffable. The vastness and the sameness of the non-duality realm, the ground state, as I call it, of all that is, was and will be.

The mountain flows. The mountain walks. Walks forward and backward. The mountain is never still.

In our usual perception, the mountain doesn't walk, the mountain doesn't flow, the mountain is among the stillest things in our environment.

And yet it does, it flows. It walks. We don't see it -- unless there is an eruption or massive earthquake. But in Dogen's metaphor, the mountain walking and flowing has no reality in our common perception. Not even in an eruption or earthquake. The mountain walks beyond our ability to "see" or "know."

No, his metaphor is about the inner-being-nothingness of the mountain (and thus, yes, of we ourselves sitting in zazen or not.) In that realm, the mountain (and we ourselves) don't actually "exist." Not as separate entities. We are one and the same, and we can walk and flow and dissolve into the mist and reconstitute at will. Or not.

When I see Mt. Taylor as a woman sleeping, it's real to me, but it's not. It's an illusion. A mirage. But then... so is the mountain. And so am I.

So are the waters. And so am I.