Over the past several years I've read a fair amount of Chinese hermit poetry. It helps keep me nominally sane. When I lived in an A frame cottage amidst the pines on a western-facing ridge of Kitsap county in Washington state, I would go out the back door, sit on the porch and look out across Hood Canal, observing the shifting view of the eastern side of the Olympic mountains. Weather would come blowing off the ocean and skirt the southern end of the mountains, then veer north. The Olympics always elicited a visceral sense of being Asian to me -- the mists blowing through, obscuring then revealing different peaks. Best thing that ever happened to the Olympic peninsula was for almost the entire thing to become a national park.
I fancifully tried to piece together some fake geology to see if indeed the land that attached itself to continental America in the Pacific Northwest had actually drifted all the way across from Asia, and maybe some of it has, but the Olympics were formed by orogenic uplift, eruptions originating on the Pacific floor. Lift and fold, then repeat. So much for fanciful theories.
There's a guy who lives in Port Townsend, on the northeastern tip of the peninsula, named Bill Porter -- or the Chinese translator rubric "Red Pine" by which he also goes -- who lived in a monastery in Taiwan for a while then was a wide-ranging radio show guy based in Hong Kong, I believe. Bill knows China like the back of his hand and has written many wonderful books about his treks there, for instance, hunting down the grave-sites of nearly all the famous poets in China's past, whereupon he would produce two cups from his pack and drink a toast to the poet, pouring the second libation on the ground in honor of his absent host.
His book about the poets is called "Finding Them Gone." Bill also went up into the mountains to find that there are still many Taoist hermits up there, seeking immortality, and he wrote a book about them called "Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits." I've got two copies, maybe I'll send you one. If you see a crane, perhaps one of them made "immortal."
There's a pal of Porter's who also lives in Port Townsend named Mike O'Connor. There's a slew of them up there, guys who grew up on the peninsula, working in the woods, or failing at organic farming, or maybe relocated, people who pushed until they ran out of land and wound up there. All of whom came under Red Pine's influence, and some of whom traveled to China with him. Poets, drunkards, and recluses. Kerouac's children. Actually, they're probably all good family men by now.
Together, Red Pine and Mike O'Connor edited my favorite introductory volume to the Chinese Buddhist hermit/poets called "The Clouds Should Know Me By Now." Mike has some nice books of his own. Red Pine has also translated many sutras and the Zen poets like Han Shan, or Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, and some others who are more obscure.
Then there's a guy who lives in the NE named David Hinton. I like him less because he takes himself very seriously. Whereas Red Pine will slip into gratuitous jokes, Hinton believes he understands all the great Chinese poets because he actually meditates too. So of course he's happy to explain it all to you. However, he is a useful introduction to many of the more obscure poets from China. In particular, I'm reading a volume of his right now entitled "Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China."
The main take-away from this is that the whole genre, the shan-shui (mountains and rivers) genre of writing and landscape painting, all began at the same time, during the lifetime of the first poet who wrote about the mountains, a guy named T'ao Ch'ien, who lived from 365 to 427, CE. He wrote in a personal voice about his experience in those landscapes, those locales, and he was an early practitioner of a combined Taoist renewal that blended with the early introduction of Buddhism into China that give birth to Ch'an, or "Zen," meditation and the resultant fixation with "emptiness" that developed thereafter in China and Japan.
The most important term I picked up from Hinton's intro was tzu-jan. It literally means "self-ablaze." This evolved into "self-so" or "the of-itself" and touches somewhat our sense of "spontaneous" or "natural," although it goes beyond both. The final translation of tzu-jan became "occurence appearing of itself." This seems to me -- and I'm not a Buddhist -- to differ from the Buddhist idea of dependent origination, whereby you can't separate anything individually from the Whole. Buddhism is big on negating individuality, whereas it seems to me that Taoism recognizes a kind of mysterious sense of manifestation for every individual thing in existence. Personally, I like the second explanation better, and I'm happy that it also evades rational and discursive dissection by the left brain. So much the better. Did humanity evolve by rationality? Most unlikely. We probably survived more readily by being attuned in a way which we can't quite articulate, but had the wits to trust. So sayeth I.
Hinton's brief explication of the etymology of the phrase tzu-jan helped me to grasp more fully Gary Snyder's approach to nature, as well as helping me to appreciate the sensibility with which much poetry in China was steeped over the course of about a thousand years.
One sentence of Hinton's introduction states "The vision of tzu-jan recognizes earth to be a boundless generative organism..." And here we've now made contact with the indigenous perspective of the first peoples of our own continent, and the slowly burgeoning perspective of eco-psychology, or eco-spirituality. Perhaps someday we interlopers who are gradually becoming accustomed to this place, becoming grounded here, and being changed by the organic energies of the land itself, will have a spirituality which is indigenous to this continent, but which bridges all continents and cultures throughout the world.
The night before last, I couldn't really sleep and kept drifting in and out of consciousness. But I was aware the entire time -- as I crossed from sleep/dream into some dim form of awareness -- that I was spending the entire night writing poetry -- in Chinese. Quatrains in Chinese. Which I neither speak nor read.
Oh, what does it all mean?
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