given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Bellingham Dharma Hall
September 05, 2001
Henry David Thoreau is often quoted as saying, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Here is the full quote to start our wilderness retreat:
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
Tomorrow we begin an experimental retreat to enter the wilderness together in the spirit of mindfulness and attention. But what is the wilderness? Where is it? Is it a place? A state of mind? Is the wilderness somehow beyond suffering? Beyond the day to day world of jobs, relationships, schedules? And why is going there beneficial? Is it just a beautiful break room for human beings? Or is it more than that?
John Muir equally famously wrote,
"Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer,.Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Natures peace flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drip off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail."
And like several of us here, being in the wilderness has been an important part of my spiritual development. I have experienced deep feelings of completeness and fulfillment in the wilderness. Everything is somehow just right, just as it is. I've experienced this feeling both when things were so-called right, sitting on a warm rock in a beautiful high country meadow gazing on alpine lakes and peaks, and also when things have been so-called hard or challenging: stumbling down a mountain during a storm. Working hard to be alert, not to fall, to take the best route, merging with the place and the elemental forces in the air to return to the lowlands.
So it is very moving and wonderful, truly a priviledge for human beings to enter places where sky and rock, not cars and freeways, are the main thing. To be like quiet pilgrims entering a vast temple, the home of marmots, gray jays, and bear. To remember that we are just visitors, briefly passing through, paying our respects to sub-alpine fir and mountain hemlock. A land far above even the tallest Tower of Babel.
And yet, wilderness is also a construct of thought, like any other. An idea of a place beyond. A place different from the regular world. Our political leaders defined wilderness legally in 1964, with the ground-breaking Wilderness Act, this way:
(c) A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
And yet, as we've all experienced, having the idea that our life is somehow lacking. That, well this is okay I'm surviving and everything, but what I really want to do... what I really need... where I really want to be is.... That reaching outside of this moment into some idea of another life, another place, some notion of something we can find outside of ourself is a classic and potent recipe for deep and profound suffering.
I've known people who are wilderness junkies. They have jobs that they slog through like zombies during the week, they have good coping skills maybe, but mostly they are shut down, a fraction of themselves, until the weekend comes and the hop into their Suburu four wheel drive wagon and bomb up some dirt road as fast as they can throw on their pack and head back into the wilderness. Then they are alive and content, funny and inspiring, truly themselves.
And of course you can subsitute just about anything in the place of going to the wilderness into that pattern, right? Playing music, taking drugs, international travel, watching movies, even going to Zen retreats!
And yet, walking step by step. Entering the mountains. Complex and complete shapes of a tree. The infinite variety of colors in a leaf or a rock. The soaring overhead of a hawk. A spider methodically building her web. Nature's peace really does wash into you. It doesn't matter what you think about it. The creations of human beings are mirrors for the limitations of our small mind. Leaving the city and entering the wilderness our big mind has complete freedom.
And of course, there is wildness everywhere. Wildness is a force human beings will never be able to completely control. I share my block with skunks and racoons. With kingfishers. Walking downtown I'm moved by the shapes and colors of trees. Everywhere there are plants in cracks strong enough to slowly turn our roads and buildings into dust. And how can say that we're any smarter than crows?
I don't know really if the important thing about wilderness is the place or that you have to walk to get there. And now that most remaining wilderness is high in the mountains, you have to work hard in your walking. Cutting across steep stream-cut valleys, climbing switch-backs up the sides of vast mountains carved by glaciers. You can't get much ahead of yourself traveling this way. Slowly, mindful of your breathing (because you have no choice but to be mindful of your breathing hiking in the mountains!). Step by step.
I'm convinced that a very important part of practice up until very recently was walking. When Dogen went to China to study he traveled to several different monasteries, finally finding his teacher Rujing and practicing there for three years. Gary Snyder estimates he walked at least a thousand miles during his years in China.
And the accounts of the Buddha and his sangha in the Pali cannon are full of references to the monks walking from town to town. Slowly and mindfully along dusty roads and tracks. Practicing always. Walking for days.
It takes about six months walking steadily every day to cross North America by foot. How will you practice as you walk?
Gary Snyder writes:
In [Dogen's time] travelers walked. The head monk at the Daitoku-ji Zen monks' hall in Kyoto once showed me the monastery's hand-written "Yearly Tasks" book from the nineteenth century. (It had been replaced by another handwritten volume with a few minor updates for the twentieth century.) These are the records that the leaders refer to through the year in keeping track of ceremonies, meditation sessions, and recipes. It listed the temples that were affiliated with this training school in order of the traveling time it took to get to them: from one day to four weeks' walk. Student monks from even those distance temples usually made a round trip home at least once a year.
I've made is a practice during rohatsu sesshin, the sesshin held in early December - maybe someday we'll starting having rohatsu sesshin - anyway on the last night it's traditional to practice all night. Some people sit in the zendo, but I like to go walking deep into the night. Slowly walking down long trails and dirt roads. Letting go of all idea of time. All idea of destination. Just walking, walking on the earth, walking through the mind.
Thanissaro Bhikku is coming to town and he's actually giving a talk tomorrow night on practice and the wilderness! You should all go if you're not coming with us. It's at the library.
In Thailand, there was a revival of meditation-based practice about 30 or 40 years ago. As often happens, organizations run by human beings eventually become warped to serve our own desires and Buddhism had become a kind of corrupt state religion. This revival didn't come out of nowhere though. There were teachers who started coming in from the jungle. Small bands of practitioners in the remote northern parts of the country had been living much like Shakyamuni Buddha. Sitting most of the day every day. Living simply in in the woods. Owning nothing but a bowl and a robe. Living completely off of what little food people in tiny farming villages could share with them. I may have the details wrong, but basically that's what happened. This was what they now call the Thai Forest Tradition.
And Thanissaro Bhikku has a dream to start this kind of practice here in America. Not like the backpacking trip we've organized either. We have wonderful food all planned out by Sandy and packs full of high tech camping gear. The idea of wandering mendicant practice is that you bring almost nothing with you. You live on the outskirts of towns, sleeping where you find yourself, dependent on the generosity of others for your meals and basic needs. It will take a major shift in our culture for this to work. At first the new wandering monks will be seen as bums. Homlessness is a problem and an pejorative in our culture. A Zen teacher in New York has developed sesshin called "street retreats" where you actually live with street people for a week as your practice. Learning how to survice. But, in Shakyamuni Buddha's day entering the homeless life meant ordaining as a monk. That's the phrase they used. I have now gone forth into to the homeless life.
John Muir somehow traveled into the wilderness with this spirit. Like many spiritual seekers, Muir had a major traumatic experience. He loved to tinker with machines as a young man and nearly lost his sign in an industrial accident. After he recovered, he set off walking. He just headed south from his home in Wisconsin and walked to Florida. A thousand miles of walking. And somehow he deeply entered the landscape. Transcended his small sense of self and entered into connectedness with plants, animals, rocks.
John Muir gained insight into the interconnection of birth and death in his walking: On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseperable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony. And I also remember that Muir used to head off into the mountains in Yosemite for a week with just a loaf of bread in his pocket. He was a kind of nature yogi - so deeply entranced by the wilderness that the mountain's good tidings was his nourishment. Or possibly he had a touch of mania in his rapture and would simply forget to eat. Who knows? We must each make our own way.
What is our intention these three days? Can we, like John Muir, enter into the landscape as sacred space? Be a part of Muir's divine harmony? When our stuff arises can we set it down? Walking, walking, walking, up the trail together into the mountains. Walking into our life. Each step is just this.
In our tradition, Dogen-zenji wrote a famous essay in his Shobogenzo called the Mountains and Waters Sutra, Sansui-kyo is the Japanese title. It's about practice in the mountains which he highly recommends:
Because mountains are high and broad, the way of riding the clouds is always reached in the mountains; the inconceivable power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains.
We will be reciting and studying the Mountains and Rivers Sutra a little during the trip. Dogen is himself a steep mountain for us. Uncompromising. Urging us to settle for nothing less than the summit. The only way to study Dogen is as a humble pilgrim, step by step. Reading and reciting phrases over and over. Entering into Dogen's way.
Can we enter into Dogen's mountains together? Of course there is no where to go really. Dogen also wrote "Why forsake the seat in your home and go off to practice in the dusty lands?" and "Here is the place, here the way unfolds." Even though there's no where to go, we go to the mountains. We must make that effort. We must go beyond our idea of mountains and enter the true mountains. We will find, absolutely without fail, that we have entered our true home.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.