An Ancestral Tableau (Carter)

Concluding thoughts on Mountains and Waters Sutra, May 2, 2021

 

“Know that eastern mountains travel on water is the bones and marrow of the buddha ancestors. All waters appear at the foot of the eastern mountains. Accordingly, all mountains ride on clouds and walk in the sky. All mountains are the tops of the heads of all waters. Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water. All mountains walk with their toes on waters and make them splash. Thus, in walking there are seven vertical paths and eight horizontal paths. This is practice-realization. (p. 158)

 

            If one sits at the base of a mountain overlooking the waters of a lake to the east, the mountain will be reflected in the lake. At the top will be clouds dancing around, floating by, and all of us – the mountain, the clouds and I – will be moving upon the waters with the breeze of the morning. And all of us will be touched by the warm sun rising to kiss each of us as it passes by on its way to the other side, like a slow plane buzzing by that also looks like a boat on the water, because it will be reflected there, too. I must look like an ant to all of the players in this tableau, especially if I cannot sit long enough to be see the mountain walking and its toes splashing. 

But, if I can sit long enough, I can bodily become part of the natural tableau, intertwined or interconnected with the nature of all that is presenting itself, whether or not one has “eyes” to see it moving. Can the body feel the clouds moving on the water? The human body is simply a new collection of molecules that compounded after the walking of another mountain, another buddha of the past. All of us are flowing like water from within the mountain – the past of our ancestors – and down to the pool below. If you sit still enough, you can feel the water flowing within your own body, just as you can hear the trickle of water from the stream at the top of the mountain flowing downhill, while sitting in the mountain. In no-thought one can sense the surrounding on the outside and the movement within, just as the mountain can sense its surrounding on the outside, the movement of the stream within and the sight of its connection with the sky, clouds and the sun in the mirror of the lake.

            I’ve been sitting at the base of the mountain of my ancestors the last few days, watching my mother die in the hospice hospital. She is no longer responsive, but her kidneys are functioning, blood is circulating and her breathing is shallow and regular. I’m sitting by her side and looking east to a pond outside the door that opens from her room to the spring air. She was a mountain of a person, too, actually. Loud, vivacious, prone to anger, now silent and shrinking. Her toes are pointed east and she would have happily put her toes in the water to splash around. The longer I watch her, the more I feel that is exactly what she is doing now, breathing in the flowing waters of her body in its last dance in the coarse and solid nature of the gross body, a no-thought being peacefully lying horizontally. I wonder if she senses her daughter sitting vertically, watching her and wondering if she is feeling her reflection in me and if she is walking as she lies there. At one point I looked at myself in the mirror and saw my mother looking back at me. It’s an astonishing feeling of connection.

            As Ms. Herreid said, Dogen asks us to go beyond our own senses or perspective and find something new, completely different, that you can’t solve the riddle and can’t just accept it either. I agree with her, and also with her comment that I just don’t know what to do with this. Dogen seems to be suggesting that the place between reason and nonreason is dropping into the human experience and feeling the humanness of being human. That “place” might be the poetic imagination that appeals to the felt-sense, the emotional body that reacts, not acts, that flows through time, just as water flows to the lake, gathering dirt and debris along the way. And in the life-giving water of the pool reflecting all that there is, we see the pattern of past moving into now and flowing into the beyond. 

            I’m not sure why Dogen says there is one more horizontal path than vertical path, seven vertical and eight horizontal. But, it makes me think about time, birthing, and progeny. Living on the earthly plane seems to grow and in time one mountain can birth many stone children, the Buddha created worlds of Buddhas, and one person can produce a huge family. It seems more difficult to grow worlds vertically or spiritually outside of or within time. Dogen would probably believe that is merely a lack of imagination, but he may also may say to just be here now. My mother was adopted when she was two weeks old. Had her birth mother decided not to give her away, I would not be here, nor would my three siblings, our nine children and fourteen grandchildren. Sitting at the foot of my mountain is practice-realization.