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Mountains And Rivers Without End
Mountains And Rivers Workshop, Mark Gonnerman, Stanford Humanities Center, Kresge Auditorium
The talk explores East Asian Buddhist liturgical poetry, particularly the Daikin Shin Dharani, examining its magical qualities despite its lack of meaning and how it embodies a universal expression of compassion. It also delves into the interconnectedness of life and death, the transient nature of existence through natural cycles, and draws parallels between ancient geological shifts and human spiritual evolution. The speaker further highlights the unique qualities of chanting in various cultures, underscores the sacredness and narrative value of natural landscapes, and concludes with reflections on impermanence and the ongoing cycles of nature and human expression.
Referenced Works:
- Daikin Shin Dharani: Highlighted as a liturgical poem that transcends linguistic meaning, signifying an intention to spread compassion universally.
- Milarepa's Towers: Used as a metaphor for continuous love and effort in spiritual practice, suggesting recurrent and foundational spiritual endeavors.
- Vimalakirti Sutra: Referenced in the context of tea drinking and space, pointing to themes of emptiness and spiritual understanding.
- Stories of Pine-nut Gathering: Implied as a historical reference, illustrating the sustenance and narrative richness provided by the natural world.
- Wovoka: Mentioned to indicate spiritual teachings carried within cultural narratives and histories, enriching communal and spiritual life.
AI Suggested Title: Chants of Compassion Across Time
Side: A
Speaker: Gary Snyder
Location: Stanford University
Possible Title: Mountains & Rivers Without End
Additional text: Kresge Auditorium, Stanford Humanities Center, 2 of 2, Mark Gonnerman, Mountains & Rivers Workshop
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Recording starts after beginning of talk.
Another liturgical, if you like, poem from the East Asian Buddhist world of the Dharani for removing disasters, the Daikin Shin Dharani. Amo karatano. Pora yaya namu ori abhorya piji zivarari dogo namu nara kiji piri mopo hodo shami sabo tojo. Satsang with Mooji [...] It's my favorite language.
[01:07]
It's magical Sanskrit, which, as mispronounced in Japanese, which has no meaning in Sanskrit either. Totally magical. It belongs to another universe. Nobody knows what it means. So we chant it every day. The intention is to spread compassion to all the corners of the universe. Old wood rats, a stinky house. The whole universe is an ocean of dazzling light. On it dance the waves of life and death. A service for the spirits of the dead. Coyote and earth maker, whirling about in the world winds, found a meadowlark nest floating and drifting. stretched it to cover the waters and made us an earth. Us critters hanging out together, something like 3 billion years.
[02:37]
300-something million years, the solar system swings around with all the Milky Way. Ice ages come, 150 million years apart. They last about 10 million, then warmer days return. A venerable desert wood rat nest of twigs and threads, plastered down with ambered urine, is a family house in use about 8,000 years. And 4,000 years of using writing equals a lifetime of a bristlecone pine. A spoken language works about five centuries, the lifespan of another fur. Big floods, big fires, every couple hundred years. A human life lasts 80, a generation 20. Hot summers every eight or 10, four seasons every year.
[03:38]
28 days for the moon, day, night, the 24 hours. And a song might last four minutes. A brat is a brat. Two. All this in 5,086 coyote scats. Pocket Dover Elk, Elk Cat, Deer, Field Mouse, Snowshoe Hare, Crown Squirrel, Jack Rabbit, Deer Mouse, Pine Squirrel, Beaver, Jumping Mouse, Chipmunk, Wood Rat, Pika, House Cat, Flying Squirrel, Duck, Jay, Owl, Grebe, Fish, Snake, Grasshopper, Cricket, Grass, Pine Nuts, Rose Seeds, Mushrooms, Paper, Rag, Flying, Orange Peel, Matches, Rubber, Tin Foil, Shoe String, Paint Rag, Two Pieces of a Shirt, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And around the Great Basin, people eating cattail pollen, bulrush seeds, raw baby birds, cooked ducks and geese, antelope, squirrel, beetles, chub, and suckers.
[04:58]
10,000 years of living in the thousands of imio-human droppings in the Lovelock Bay. Great tall wood rat heaps. Wood rat nests. Shale flaked beads. Sheep scats. Flaked points. Thorns. Piled up for centuries. Placed under overhangs. caves and cliffs. At the bottom, antique fecal pellets, orange, yellow, urine amber, with shreds of every bush that grew 8,000 years. Another rain, another name. Cottontail Boy said, Woodrat makes me puke. Shitting on his grandmother's blankets, stinking everything up, pissing on everything. Yucky old wood rat. Makes his whole house stink.
[06:00]
Coyote says, you people should stay put here. Learn your place. Do good things. Me, I'm traveling on. Cross-legged under the low tent roof, dim light, dinner done, drinking tea. We live in dry old west, lift shirts bare skin, lean touch lips, old touches, love made points, making always knew same stuff, life after life.
[07:04]
As though Milarepa four times built a tower of stone, why, each time was the first. Our love is mixed with rocks and streams. A heartbeat, a breath, a gaze makes place in the dizzy eddy. living this old clear way, a sizzle of ash and embers. Scratchy breeze on the tent fly, one sip tea, hunch on bones. We do need hear what comes. Now I'm going to go to the most spacious point in this whole sequence called the mountain spirit.
[08:06]
And this is at a somewhat different pace than what you've been hearing so far, though I will not slow it down as far as no drama would flow it. I will be, in a certain sense, singing parts of it. Singing has a broad range of possible meanings. As you know, if you listen to music from all different corners of the planet, the operatic or lyrical or leader voice of Western Europe is, with lots of melodies, by far, is far from being the only kind of scene that there is. And indeed, the word chant also is from a root that means sing, and yet chanting is Some people would think chanting is not singing, and yet chanting is a kind of singing that is not so easily acknowledged in the Occidental sense of music these days.
[09:14]
Asia is quite different, and many other cultures are quite different, with other kinds of voicing. The voicing of the singing in no drama, the uttai, is a surprising kind of voicing for the Western ear, and I cannot do it. But I heard a lot of it. And I like to play around the edges of it. So I'll take it in that light. The Mountain Spirit. Ceaseless wheel of life Ceaseless wheel of life Red sandstone gleaming gold all night
[10:16]
Ceaseless wheel of life, red sandstone in white dole of might. Driving all night south from Reno, through Coolport's Bridgeport, past Model Lakes, pale glow past tongues above city and low stopped chill and the angled granite face of the east sierra front ah here I am arrived in Bishop Owens Valley, called Payahunadu not so long ago.
[11:24]
Ranger Station on Main Street. I am a traveler. I want to know the way to the White Mountains and the Bristlecone Pines. She gives me maps. Here. The trail to the grove at Timberline, where the oldest living beings thrive on rock and air. Thank you for your help. I go to the pass, turn north, end of day, climbing high, find an opening where a steep dirt side road holds, a perch in the round dry hills, prickly pinon pine boughs shade, a view to the last
[12:43]
Chance range and make a camp. Nearby, a rocky point. Climate. Passing a tidy scat arrangement on a ledge. Stand on a dark red sandstone strata outcrop at the edge. Plane after plane of desert ridges, darkening eastward into blue-black haze. A voice. There it is. You had a bit of fame once in the city for poems of mountains. Here it's real. What?
[13:45]
Yes, like the lines walking on walking underfoot. But what do you know of minerals and stones? For a creature to speak of all that scale of time, what for? Still, I'd like to hear that poem. I answer back, Tonight is the night of the shooting stars. Mirfak, the brilliant star of Perseus, crosses the ridge at midnight.
[14:52]
I'll read it then. Who am I talking to, I think? Walk back to camp. Evening breeze up from the flats From the valleys, salt and death Venus and the new moon sink In a deep blue glow Behind the palisades to the west Needle clusters shirring in the wind. Listen close. The sound gets better. Mountain ranges, violet haze back fading in the east.
[15:59]
Puffs of sailing, dark-lit cloud. A big owl's swift, soft whip between the trees. Unroll the bedding, stretch out blankets on the crunchy, dry pine needles, sun-worn, rosinous ground. formation, dip and strike my sleep. If the no orchestra was here, you'd hear some very interesting sounds behind me right now. Yo, yo, yo. A song approaching in a tree. Bitter ghosts that kick their own skulls like a ball.
[17:01]
Happy ghosts that stick a flower in their old skull's empty eye. Good and evil, that's another stupid dream. For streams and mountains, clouds and glaciers, is there ever an escape? Erosion always wearing down, shearing, frosting, deep plates crumpling, still uplifting ice-carved cirques, dendritic endless fractal streambed rifts on hillsides. Bitter ghosts that kick their own skulls like a ball. What's it all for? A meteor swift and streaking like a tossed white pebble arcing down the sky.
[18:05]
The mountain spirit stands there, old woman, white ragged hair, in the glint of alcohol. I can't say no. I speak. The poet called the mountain spirit. Walking on walking underfoot earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. Walking on walking underfoot earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. As the mountains lift and open, underground out, dust over seashell, layers of roofs display how it plays.
[19:17]
buttresses fractured looming friction only soon to fall each face a heap of risks tailless slopes below flakes weathered off the buried block trekked off at old Pluton and settles somewhere ever lower down gives a glimpse of streaks and strains warp and glide a braided gritty mudwash slides where cliffs lean to the raven necklace sky Calcium spiraling shells, no land plants then wind, sands and stones flush down the barren flanks of magma-swollen uplands, slurry to the beach, ranges into rubble, old shores buried by debris, a lapping trough of tide flats and lagoons,
[20:26]
lime rich wave-washed soothing shales and silts a thousand miles of chest deep reef sea bottom riffled suave swirl turned and tilled by squiggly slime swimmers many armed millions of tiny different tracks criss-crossing through the mud trilobite winding salt sludge calcite ridges diatom babies drifting home swash of quartzy sand dream hundred million years be rolling on and then ten million years ago an ocean floor glides like a snake beneath the continent, crunching up old seabed till it's high as Alps.
[21:28]
Sandstone layers script of winding tracks, and limestone shines like snow where ancient years grow. When the axe strokes stop, the silence grows deeper. Peaks like Buddhas at the heights send waters streaming down to the deep center of the turning world. And the mountain spirit always wandering, hillsides fade like walls of cloud, pebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea. Old woman, mountain years, shifting sand, tell the wind,
[22:37]
Nothingness is shapeliness. Mountains will be Buddha's then. When bristlecone needles are green, when scarlet pepstemon flowers are red, Mountains feed the people, too, stories from the past, of pine-nut-gathering baskets quickly full, of help at grinding, carrying, healing, ghosts of lost landscapes. herds and flocks, towns and clans, great teachers from all lands, tucked in Wovoka's empty hat, stored in baby Krishna's mouth, kneeling for tea in Vimalakirti, one small room.
[23:40]
Goose flocks, crane flocks, Lake Lahontan, come again. Walking, on walking, underfoot, bird turns. The mountain spirit whispers back, all art and song is sacred video. as such. Bristlecone pines live long on the taste of carbonate, dolomite, spiraled, standing, coiling, dead wood with the living. 4,000 years of mineral glimmer, spaced out growing in the icy, airy sky.
[24:50]
White bones under summer stars. The mountain spirit and me, like ripples of the Cambrian sea, dance the pine tree. Old arms, old limbs, twisting, twining, scatter cones upon the ground, stamp the root foot down. And then she's gone. Ceaseless wheel of lives. Red sandstone and white dolo. A few more shooting stars. Back to the bed roll. Sleep till dawn. Earth verse.
[25:53]
White enough to keep you looking. Open enough to keep you moving. Dry enough to keep you honest. Prickly enough to make you tough. Green enough to go on living. Old enough to give you dreams. Now we're going to finish with a final poem. finding the space in the heart. I first saw it in the 60s, driving a Volkswagen camper with a fierce gay poet and a lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice. We came down from Canada on the dry east side of the ranges, Grand Coulee, Blue Mountains, lava flow caves, and the Alvord Desert, the Pronghorn Ranges, the glittering, obsidian-paved dirt track toward Vaya,
[27:11]
seldom seen roads late September, thick frost at dawn. Then follow a canyon and suddenly open to silvery flats that curve over the edge. Oh, ah, the awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion. We followed the rim of the playa to a bar where the roads end. and over a pass into Pyramid Lake from the Smoke Creek side by the ranches of wizards who followed the teething path. The next day we reached San Francisco in a time when it seemed the world might have a new way. And again in the 70s, back from Montana, I recklessly pulled off the highway, took a dirt track onto the flats, got stuck, scared the kids, slept the night, and the next day sucked free and went on.
[28:17]
Fifteen years passed in the 80s. With my lover, I went where the roads end, walked the hills for a day, looked out where it all drops away, Discovered a path of carved stone inscriptions tucked into the sagebrush. Stomp out greed. The best things in life are not things. Words placed by an old desert sage who died two years ago. Faint shorelines seen high on these slopes. Long gone, Lake Lahontan. Cutthroat trout spirit. Silt Colombian mammoth bones 400 feet up on the wave-etched beach ledge. And the curly-horned desert sheep outlines pecked into the rocks. And turned the truck onto the playa, heading for Nonot.
[29:21]
Bone-gray dust boiling and billowing, mile after mile, trackless and featureless, let the car coast to a halt on the crazed, cracked, flat, hard face where winter snow spirals and summer sun bakes like a kill, off nowhere to be or not be. All equal, far reaches, no bounds, sounds swallowed away, no waters, no mountains, no bush, no grass, and because no grass, no shade but your shadow. No flatness because no not flatness, no loss, no gain, so nothing in the way. The ground is the sky. The sky is the ground. No place between, just wind-wet breeze, tent-mount leeward.
[30:23]
Time, me, here. We meet, heart to heart, leg, hard twine to leg, with a kiss that goes to the bone. Dawn, sun, comes straight in the eye. the tooth of a far peak called King Lear. Now in the 90s, desert night, my lover's my life. Old friends, old trucks drawn round. Great arcs of kids on bikes out there in darkness, no lights, just lying at Venus, glinting, by the calyx crescent moon, and tasting grasshoppers roasted in a pan. They all somehow swarmed down here, sons and daughters in a circle eating grasshoppers, riveting, singing sutras for the insects in the wilderness.
[31:24]
The wideness, the foolish loving spaces, full of fun. Walking on walking, underfoot, earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. The space goes on, but the wet black brush tip drawn to a point lifts away. Thank you very much.
[32:07]
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