Everything is
Holy
Katy Butler SUMMER 2005
tricycle
Every Wednesday morning
when I can afford the time, I park at the foot of the valley I live
in and climb Mount Tamalpais, my holy mountain. It is more sacred
to me than any temple, and as powerful a place of
practice.
My path is as ritualized as the stations of the
cross. I take a wooden footbridge over a stream and climb through
second-growth redwoods and past blackberry bushes, now sere and
brown in the winter cold. My worries come with me: I chew on a
conflict with my eighty-year-old mother, a disastrous visit
home.
I climb steep railroad-tie steps to Cowboy Rock.
My glutes and lungs burn, driving me into my body. I pant. I sweat.
I take off my fisherman’s knit sweater, machine-loomed in England
and bought at a local mall. Then up past the county water-tank and
the dozen expensive houses built where the Flying Y Ranch used to
be.
At ten o’clock, I breach a ridge and enter a
vast bowl of unpopulated hills. Car sounds die away. Finches
twitter in the chaparral. I follow the trail beneath a bay laurel,
upswept by the winds into a clinging topiary. A madrone shows its
red bones. “Mountains,” the Zen master Eihei Dogen told an assembly
of Japanese monks in 1240, “are our Buddha ancestors”—our
primordial teachers. Inside my brain, an invisible hand turns the
volume knob down.
Now I am moving deep into the sock of the
valley—the only visible human. Except for a ribbon of yellow-lined
asphalt below me, there is no sign of human making. Beyond the last
hills lies the Pacific.
An hour later I round a ridge and the peak of
the mountain reveals herself, rising. I remember Mirabai, the
sixteenth-century devotional poet who abandoned her aristocratic
family and wandered India, singing, “I worship the mountain energy
night and day.” The trail switchbacks take me down deeper. An hour
after noon, I stop at a flat, thick wooden bench in a grove of
old-growth redwoods that the loggers left behind. Here I sit zazen,
robed in silence and filtered brown light. The natural world
restores my soul. It soothes me like a mother. I rest my head on it
and lay my burdens down before it the way some Christians rest
their heads on the cross.
California is not my native home. I was raised
in Oxford when England was recovering from the Second World War.
The country had been a coal-burning industrial power for more than
a century, but compared to the way Americans live today, we lived
almost as frugally as Thoreau at Walden Pond.
Eggs and butter and meat were rationed. Shoes
were polished and repaired. A big black dray horse named Flower
clopped down our street twice a week, pulling a cart from which my
mother chose vegetables to cook with dinner. Our cramped brick row
house had no central heating, and white furry mold grew up the
walls of the cellar. People took buses or walked everywhere. Even
after our family bought a car, my father was one of thousands who
mounted bicycles and flooded the city at rush hour like swarming
bees.
My mother, who had no outside job, knitted
sweaters and darned socks in the evenings before the fire. She had
a washing machine but no dryer. Before she hung the laundry up to
dry, she cranked it through the rollers of a mangle to squeeze the
water out. Nobody called her “ecological” or understood that her
daily work was an expression of respect for the natural world. But
she was as frugal and attentive as the cook in a Zen monastery. One
of her favorite phrases was “elbow grease.”
One day when I was very young, she stopped the
car on a road through a great beech woods. It was autumn. All the
leaves were golden yellow. The branches of the beeches met high
above our heads, making an arched and open cathedral. The very air
was yellow with the glory of the trees.
My mother turned off the ignition and put the
keys in her pocket.
“We are going to build a house for the fairies,”
she said, and opened the door. We walked into the glowing woods. At
a hollow place at the foot of a tree, my mother knelt down. She
brushed away leaves and stuck forked twigs into the ground. She
balanced sticks across the clefts, making roof-beams, a ridgepole,
then rafters. I propped beech leaves against the sides and set them
along the roof— they were broad-bladed, like flattened spears, and
their points made a jagged line along the peak. We put moss in the
front garden, and round white stones to lead the fairies to the
door. My mother was an agnostic, a rebel, and a lover of modern
architecture. She had nothing good to say about reverence. But that
day she led me to something she could not give me and built
something close to an altar.
My parents were nominally Anglicans, and on
Sundays, when I grew older, they sent my brothers and me to the
church of St. Michael and All Angels. There, in the basement Sunday
school, I glued images of martyred saints onto cardboard. I was
told that God was everywhere and saw everything, and I imagined him
as a series of transparent shower curtains embedded with
multitudinous fish eyes, moving in every wind.
At night, I’d kneel by my bed and beg for a sign
of His reality. But God was silent—at least in the forms that I
expected Him to speak – until Saturday, when I would ride my bike
to green fields bordering a stream and lie face down in the mossy
grass, letting the green energy rise up into me.
There, I had an inkling of a wholeness beyond
the logic of my family. I didn’t have to work for it. All I had to
do was put myself in a position to receive. Green things continued
to feed what I call my soul long after I abandoned hope of ever
seeing the luminous fish eyes of God waving in the transparent
wind. I worshiped holy water and holy dirt long before I called it
prayer.
When I was eight, my family moved to America and
my parents built a Bauhaus-inspired four-bedroom house overlooking
a lake in the suburbs of Boston. America amazed us: the
supermarkets, with row on row of perfect, pesticide-kissed fruit;
the oil furnaces in the basements of big houses, blasting hot air
into every room; the ice cream parlors with their banana splits and
three-scoop ice cream sundaes; the giant milk-fed children; the
enormous superhighways and big cars—all summing up what my mother
called America’s “higher standard of living.”
In due course my father got a better job and a
bigger house and our family acquired many little machines: a
television, station wagon, lawnmower, second car, blender, coffee
grinder, microwave, rice cooker, toaster oven, hairdryer, air
conditioner. Friends of my parents moved into a new development
where clotheslines were forbidden.
We didn’t think we were trying to satisfy
endless craving. We didn’t see a connection between what we bought
and the destruction of wild places we loved. We just wanted to be
warm, safe, fed, and comfortable. We did not know that something in
the human brain never hears or whispers “enough.” We were part of a
liberal, affluent society that believed that “the greatest good for
the greatest number” was mathematically translatable into “the
greatest number of goods for the greatest number.”
We knew nothing of Buddhism. We’d never heard of
a then-obscure British economist named Ernest Friedrich Schumacher,
who, in a 1966 essay called “Buddhist Economics,” suggested another
path, especially for developing nations: the greatest possible
human enjoyment from the smallest quantity of goods.
The Buddhist ethos of right livelihood, E. F.
Schumacher argued, could be extended to an ethos of right
consumption. He argued against elaborately sewn,
soon-to-be-outmoded suits and in favor of the loosely draped
medieval robes of the monk—always in fashion! No ascetic, he argued
for a middle way in material matters—in favor of enjoyment and
against craving. Happiness, his work suggested, was not typified by
the ice cream sundae wolfed down alone in front of the television,
but by a cookie and a cup of green tea, brewed in awareness and
sipped at leisure with friends, while watching the rising
moon.
When I was twenty-eight and working as a
newspaper reporter in San Francisco, my roommate and I went on a
camping trip in the Ventana wilderness inland from Big Sur. On a
whim, we drove down a long dirt road to a hot springs resort deep
in a knifelike canyon in the Santa Lucia mountains. The place
turned out to be Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and by chance I ran
into an old San Francisco friend who had become a resident there.
He arranged a cabin where we could spend the night, and the next
morning before dawn he led me to the zendo.
Two and a half hours later, I came out into an
early morning light in a state of clarity I’d never before known.
Something I had not known was still alive inside me had been
listened to, and I had faith that it would someday find its voice.
I spent the whole of the next summer there.
As we walked up and down the canyon to clean
cabins, chop vegetables, light kerosene lamps, and sit in the airy
wooden zendo, we were soaked in the natural world. Crickets,
streams, silence, and the rising force of the surrounding mountains
permeated everything we did. I still wonder if Buddhism would have
grabbed me the way it did if I’d first encountered it in a
city.
One morning in the zendo I saw a lizard crawling
along the shoulder of a man’s black robe. Another evening in the
zendo, we prostrated ourselves over and over in the Full Moon
Ceremony, and I climbed a hillside afterward in the astonishingly
bright light of the full moon.
In the library, I came across Dogen, who brought
an invigorated form of Ch’an (Zen) from China to Japan in the
thirteenth century. His work was dappled with natural images: the
moon flooding the water with light; a water bird paddling and
leaving no trace; a vegetable leaf transformed into the golden body
of a Buddha; mountains flowing, mountains walking, mountains
traveling on water. “The color of the mountains is Buddha’s body,”
he wrote. “The sound of flowing water is his great
speech.”
The Christian theology I’d been raised in had
posited a hierarchical “great chain of being” with God on top,
humans in the middle, and all other creatures and plants arrayed
systematically below. Dogen suggested a radically democratic “flow
of being” in which we humans could be instructed by the ten
thousand interpenetrating and flowering things of the natural
world. In Dogen’s view, each thing flowed without effort from form
to form: from cloud to rain to stream to cloud and back again; from
corpse to rot to compost to earth to flower. These were not
metaphors for transience, reincarnation, no-self and
interdependence, but manifestations of them.
“Walls and fences cannot instruct the grasses
and trees to actualize spring,” Dogen wrote. “Yet they reveal the
spiritual without intention, just by being what they are. So too
with mountains, rivers, sun, moon, and stars.”
When the summer was over, I drove back to the
city and started meditating each morning in a basement zendo near
the freeway. I spent hours each day meeting deadlines on a computer
under fluorescent lights downtown. Something wordless that had
risen up in me in nature—a yearning for beauty and an ecstatic
gratitude for life—had helped pull me back into religious life and
into a new religion. Now I lost touch with it again. I saw no
connection between the awe I’d felt in the mountains surrounding
Tassajara and the chanting and bowing I did in an urban Buddha hall
each morning.
Awe seemed out of place in my city practice and
city life. A fellow student told me he saw Buddhism as a philosophy
and a practice, not a religion. He couldn’t understand why we bowed
at all. Like many of the people I knew who practiced within the
Vipassana tradition, he wanted simply to count the breaths, sweep
the body, examine the workings of the mind, and practice walking
meditation. His strain of American Buddhism, growing within a
secular, consumerist urban culture, seemed rationalized, almost
denatured, spun clean in a centrifuge. I kept hiking and
meditating, but saw only my meditation as a form of
practice.
Like Christianity, Buddhism is one of the great
abstract second-generation world religions. Its overarching
principles are universal and portable, not bound to culture or
place. But in place after place, both Christianity and Buddhism
have been enriched by animism’s fertile, complicating stains. In
Europe, Christian holy days were pegged to pagan festivals that
brought a ragged joy into a religion flavored with self-denial;
churches were built at the sites of wells and hills sacred to
indigenous religions. Likewise, nature worship permeated Asian
cultures before the Buddha was born.
Natural images abound in the early Buddhist
sutras: Shakyamuni was born under a tree; he awakened on a cushion
of buffalo grass in the light of the morning star; he touched the
earth in response to the temptations of Mara; and he held up an
Udambara flower to enlighten his disciple Ananda. He delighted over
the beauty of the rice fields. He told his monks to meditate at the
foot of trees. A decade ago, I went on a tour of Japanese temples
as a travel writer for Vogue. Signs of Shinto nature worship were
everywhere. In fields, folded white papers hung on shocks of rice
to draw the attention of nature spirits. In the mountains, I walked
under torii gates to a clearing in a cedar grove and found a small
altar hung with red lanterns and guarded by two stone foxes. The
trunks of cedars rose, as smooth as masts, far above my head, and
then opened into a canopy of feathery branches. I was standing at
the bottom of a hundred-foot-high column of filtered light. The
shrine did not create the sacredness of the place, but simply drew
attention to it.
This was my wordless introduction to folk
Shinto, Japan’s indigenous, pre-Buddhist religion. It has no
founder, no dogma, and no scriptures—just rituals tied to the
natural world. It honors a world spontaneously brought into being
by the hard-to-translate kami— spirits of nature embodied and
embedded in everything beautiful and therefore sacred: a rock, a
lightning bolt, a waterfall, a grove.
“Do not be attracted by the sounds of spring or
take pleasure in seeing a spring garden,” Dogen told his disciples
in thirteenth-century Japan. “When you see autumn colors, do not be
partial to them. You should allow the four seasons to advance in
one viewing and see an ounce and a pound with an equal eye.” But
outside his monastery gates, rice farmers were welcoming the spring
with Shinto festivals and giving thanks for the harvest in autumn,
knowing full well that the seasons would turn and come again. I
picked up a broom, entered the little enclosure, and swept the
shrine free of fallen leaves.
A few days later, in the mountains near Yoshino,
I watched two young monks chant the Heart Sutra in a small temple
built over a stream. They were followers of an ascetic and
syncretic Shinto-Buddhist mountain tradition called Shugendo, which
venerates snakes and waterfalls as well as buddhas and
bodhisattvas. Blowing on conch shells, they exited the temple and
walked up a series of stone steps, bowing at dozens of small
altars. They bowed equally to peaceful stone bodhisattvas lined
against a rock face running with water, and to a huge dragon-headed
metal snake twined around a Shinto spear. I followed them, bowing,
the two halves of my religious life finally coming
together.
It is usually three or four in the afternoon
when I retrace my way off the mountain, leaving the redwood grove
and moving through bays and grasslands, passing a red-tailed hawk
swooping across the bowl of the hills. Car sounds return. I descend
past the rich houses of Flying Y Ranch and Cowboy Rock, into the
valley of my daily life. I put my sweater back on, and start
thinking about dinner. I start the car and drive home, to our
dishwasher, coffee grinder, microwave, computers, and panoply of
electric lights. The joy of my day on the mountain has fueled my
efforts to live a saner life. It somehow helps me meditate for the
rest of the week.
At home, I pick up the phone, call my mother,
and reconcile. Then I take Dogen down from my bedroom bookshelf and
read “Instructions to the Tenzo,” a practical guide for the head
cook at a Zen monastery. Its severe tone seems at first to have
little in common with the mysticism of his Mountains and Waters
Sutra. Lose not a grain of rice, he says. Take care of the
monastery’s rice and vegetables “as though they were your own
eyeballs.” And when you boil rice, “know that the water is your own
life.”
I try to obey. At dinner, I put the newspaper
aside, light candles, and eat with full attention. “Innumerable
labors brought us this food,” goes the meal verse we chanted at
Tassajara. “We should know how it comes to us.” I try to remember
where everything I use comes from and where it is going. I feel a
mixture of guilt and gratitude. I try to regard every thing I
handle—my rice, my sweater, my vacuum cleaner—as if they were my
own eyeballs.
I blow out the candles. I clean the table and
stove using super-cleaning microfiber cloths that require only hot
water rather than chemicals. I apply elbow grease.
These forms of attention are more mundane and
difficult for me to practice than the ecstasy I often feel on the
mountain. Yet they too express a reverence for the natural world
and an understanding of interdependence, just as my mother did when
she squeezed water out of her laundry in England, and as Mirabai
did when she worshiped the mountain energy night and day.
Ultimately, Dogen says, housewifery and ecstasy are not that
different. “Taking up a green vegetable, turn it into a
sixteen-foot golden body,” he challenges me.
My altar holds not only a Buddha, but a
seashell, a metal cricket, a snake, and an image of Mary. Likewise,
my religious practice now is a hodgepodge of nature worship and
Buddhist meditation and twelve-step programs, and I cannot make it
all sound logical or consistent. When I’m tired or lonely and want
to be numb, you can often find me driving alone up Highway 101,
feeding the hunger that isn’t hunger, stopping at Whole Foods and
Costco and Trader Joe’s, loading up on Brazilian papayas and toilet
paper from the forests of the Northwest and my favorite yogurt from
Greece. Sometimes I think I’m in the realm of the gods when in
reality I’m acting like a hungry ghost. I forget that there is
something in the brain that never hears “enough.”
Yet I don’t want to become so ascetic, taking no
pleasure in a spring garden, but rather to open my heart and my
senses to the vivid love I have for the natural world. The paradox
is that when I open myself fully to pleasure, I use and waste
less.
The next morning at breakfast, I light the
candles, bow over my food and chant. I eat a bowl of oatmeal and
half a papaya with a squeeze of lime. I dig the spoon into a bowl
of smooth Greek yogurt. I let it roll off my tongue. It is not only
asceticism that will save us, but delight. All the universe is one
bright pearl, wrote Dogen. Everything is holy.
Wilderness Journey
“I found myself in a workshop one day talking
about Zen and the environment,” says John Daido Loori, abbot of Zen
Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, “and I realized how
stupid it was because, you know, Zen is very experiential. You
don’t talk about it. You do it. So I decided I should take these
people, most of whom had never been in the wilderness, out into the
wilderness and let them experience it for themselves.”
That first canoe trip, a grueling 125-mile
cross-country jaunt, was so successful and generated so much
excitement that Loori and the monastery developed an array of
programs and workshops known collectively as the Born as the Earth
program, Each uses the wilderness experience and the natural
environment to teach the interdependency of the self and the
universe, and outdoors skills and knowledge to overcome feelings of
fear or anxiety about being out in the wilds.
Founded by Loori in 1980 in the tradition of the
Mountains and Rivers order of Zen Buddhism, Zen Mountain Monastery
sits on a 240-acre parcel of land in the Catskill Forest Preserve.
In its first meeting, the monastery board designated 80 percent of
its land to be forever wild. “If a tree falls,” says Loori, “it
rots where it falls.”
Established as a contemplative retreat, the
monastery was jolted into environmental activism when the New York
State Department of Environmental Conservation attempted to
appropriate five acres of its land under eminent domain in the
early nineties. The monastery decided to resist and found several
environmental lawyers, field biologists, and ecologists among the
alumni of the Born as the Earth programs willing to take on the
DEC. They formed the Green Dragon Society under the auspices of a
new nonprofit corporation called the Zen Environmental Studies
Institute (ZESI) and won the case. The society is currently
involved in a class action suit along with twelve other
environmental groups to halt the development of a resort on Bellair
Mountain, in the Catskill Forest.
All of these activities are based on a
conviction that love of nature is a far more powerful force in
protecting the natural environment than science, legislation,
religion, or self-interest.
As the ZESI brochure points out, ”We take care
of the things we love.”
—James Keough