Running Mountains (Herreid)

 

https://www.simonnorfolk.com/when-i-am-laid-in-earth

[This photograph is from a series by Simon Norfolk called When I Am Laid in Earth. The images depict mountaintop glacial recession by showing the previous extent of the glacier’s reach using flame and a slow exposure.]

“Because mountains are high and broad, their way of riding the clouds always extends form the mountains; their wondrous power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains.

Priest Daokai of Mount Furong said to the assembly, 'The green mountains are always walking; a stone woman gives birth to a child at night.'” (154)


We tend to mythologize mountains as being somehow unaffected by time. They are eternal because we want them to be. We need constant landmarks to provide comforting order in an otherwise chaotic world, because we equate change with chaos, and order with consistency. “My life may feel like it is falling to pieces, but the mountains will always be there. I can depend on them. After I’m gone, they’ll still be here.”


I don’t know why this illusion provides such comfort. Perhaps it is a desperate attempt to grasp onto (or maybe hide from) time, a coping mechanism that makes us feel grounded and safe. Maybe it makes things seem more meaningful and real. If something is long-lasting, it must be significant, right? The constancy of the mountains that I (falsely) perceive "proves" their existence, and maybe mine as well. "I think the mountains are unchanging, and therefore I am...." am what?


But the mountains are riding the clouds, they are soaring, they are walking, they are traveling on water... and my comforting fantasy is shattered.


Now it's so obvious: the rising and falling of mountains over thousands of years, erosion rendering an old friend unrecognizable. With the plethora of readily available data in the age of the Anthropocene, these transformations are even harder to ignore. Mountain glaciers draw back from the climbing heat; we decapitate mountains and scoop out their insides, easy as carving pumpkins in the fall. The mountains may have been walking in the thirteenth century, but they’re running now. The illusion of any sort of constancy seems laughable in retrospect. Absolutely ridiculous.


There is nothing more to cling onto. I’m trying to become more comfortable with that. We fear change and the unknown, but we crave it at the same time; a paradoxical compulsion, and a perfect recipe for continual unhappiness. When I am honest with myself, I realize that the only thing I fear more than change is staying the same.


If we see the mountains for what they are rather than what we wish they were, maybe we can redefine our very being, and our relationships with time and impermanence. Perhaps we can learn how to “exist without having a place to rest” (159), how to be like water, and how to be like mountains. In a sense, we are already doing just this. We are like mountains and water at this very moment. The trouble appears when we fail to see the similarities, or when we take comfort in false comparisons. We trip ourselves up, even though we all know how to walk.

Comments

  1. Patrick AndersonMay 8, 2021 at 8:17 PM

    The emotional implications of Buddhist teaching are profound, even if they aren’t often expressed by these readings themselves. I tend to lose sight of them because it is difficult enough to figure out what the text is saying in the first place, but it is also important to make an effort to consider how seeing the world through the eyes of a Buddhist changes something inside us. I think your idea that “we equate change with chaos, and order with consistency” is absolutely right. Psychologically speaking, it is very human to relate to change and order this way, and to flee from what we perceive as chaos towards what appears to be consistent. This helps explain why we might be inclined to resist what appears to be the teaching’s embrace of becoming over being, even when there may be greater wisdom in learning to accept change.

    On a collective level, so much of modern history has been the story of what were once eternal features of the world being swallowed by time and becoming temporal processes. There was a time (in the West, at least) when processes were thought to be the exclusive domain of human activity, and to stand apart from what Hannah Arendt calls—beautifully, in my opinion—the “indefatigable cycle in which the whole household of nature swings perpetually”. Not only are geology and climate, like ourselves, now understood to exist within linear time, they are even seen to change meaningfully within a single human lifetime. The world has had many generations to absorb the implications of modern geology, human evolution and cosmology, but within the last few decades alone the absence of solid ground has become more apparent than ever before.

    I wonder if one reason these Buddhist texts are so plausible to the modern reader is that we live in a world more saturated by flux and becoming than any group of people who have ever lived.

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    Replies
    1. M HerreidMay 18, 2021 at 7:35 AM

      Yes to all of this! The thing I have been most struck by throughout this program is just how relevant these texts are to our experiences in a "modern" world. Many conflicts today are fueled in part by our quest to find certainty by any means possible, even if it is no more than a fiction. Philosophy, science, and religion all are dealing with the unknown, (in differing ways, perhaps), but the more we probe into any of these, the number of questions we have only grows. Therefore, it is important to explore our emotional responses to uncertainty and change so we are better equipped to look at and live in the world as it is, rather than how we wish it would be.

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