One of the characteristics of Eastern body-mind theories is the priority given to the questions, 'How does the relationship between the mind and the body come to be (through cultivation)?' or 'What does it become?' The traditional issue in Western philosophy, on the other hand is "What is the relationship between the mind-body?' In other words, in the East one starts from the experiential assumption that the mind-body modality changes through the training of the mind and body by means of cultivation or training. Only after assuming this experiential ground does one ask what the mind-body relation is. That is, the mind-body issue is not simply a theoretical speculation but it is originally a practical, lived experience, involving the mustering of one's whole mind and body. The theoretical is only a reflection on this lived experience.
It was late in my life that I found myself, by a set of unexpected coincidences, in Japan. I now teach there regularly, and have been increasingly impacted by the depths of that culture as I get more familiar with it through contacts with scholars, teachers of the old practices, and graduate students. Through them, and through my own wanderings, I have discovered fresh perspectives on themes that have long occupied me. Ancient Shinto roots, still vibrant in the population even though not widely practiced formally, create a deep sensitivity to fundamental connnections between person and nature that are more tenuous among Jewish, Christian and Islamic cutures.
One of the most tangible signs of the difference between Japan and the US in popular attitudes towards the natural world is in wilderness preserves. In Japan, sites are protected from development because they are sacred to Shinto or to the Buddhism that originally grew out of Shinto. One enters such places through the traditional torii, the gateways one sees all over Japan reminding one that he or she is entering a sacred space. Within the preserves, there are markers everywhere to remind one of the sacred. Old growth cedars and sequoias are circled with thick ropes with red silk tassels. Each small spring coming out of the mountains is marked by a traditional Shinto shrine containing a small basin through which the water passes and bamboo dippers for the hiker to use for blessing and purification. In some places, one sees a hollow bamboo pipe sticking up out of the ground where one can stop and listen to the orchestral sounds of the underground waterways.
Looming over Kyoto is Mount Hiei, one of these nature preserves, covered with forests of old-growth cedars, one site of ancient pre-Buddhist spiritual seekers. In the 8th Century, a Buddhist monk named Saicho fled the power struggles of Nara for the remote and wild mountain to practice his meditation among the hermits living there. The Japanese philosopher YasuoYuasa uses the phrase “archaic man” to describe Saicho and some of his contemporaries: men still close to the primal and earth-rooted sensibilities of the earlier culture, and at the same time highly educated intellectuals, familiar with literature imported from Korea, China, and India. They imported into their teachings of Buddhism their primal sense of connection with the world of trees, rocks, water, and sex. and went on to found Tendai Buddhism, which is today the most popular form in Japan and closely related to the indigenous nature-traditions of Shinto blended with what he learned from Tantric Buddhist monks on Mount Tien Tan in China. His student So-o wrote this passage which summarizes the essence of how the natural world figures in their spiritual practice: “The mountain itself is a mandala. Practice self-reflection intently amid the undefiled stones, trees, streams, and vegetation, losing yourself in the great body of the supreme Buddha.”[1]
The monastic practices here, known as daihogyoja, were given some notice in the US in the 1980s when Shambala published a book by John Stevens entitled The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei. Their spiritual practice consists of 40 km daily runs around the mountain, meditating naked under one of the many waterfalls at all times of the year, and constantly cleaning the various paths around the mountain.Now the mountain is covered with nearly one hundred monasteries and temples, some hardly one room, nestled here and there among the vast forests. When I visited there, it was spring; the forests were radiant. I was very moved there, walking among the paths the daihogyo clean everyday among ancient cedars, dogwood, wild japanese iris, fresh springs and waterfalls with carefully tended shrines. It turns out the one of the monks has actually come to Mt Tam and ferretted out an appropriate path.
Mount Koya is sixty miles to the south of Kyoto. Its long monastic history began when Saicho’s pupil Kukai also fled Nara and Kyoto for the silence of the wilderness. The phrase Sokushijobutsu is from Kukai (774-835). It means “becoming a buddha in this very body.” He is the founder of Shingon Buddhism, which is derived from what he learned about Tibetan Buddhism from the Chinese mountain monks, and now, next to Tendai, the most widely practiced form of buddhism in Japan. Weary of the wealth and politics surrounding the buddhist temples in Nara he went up to Mt Koya (where I lived three days in one of his monasteries), and founded what evolved into something of a monastic city in the basin of an ancient volcano filled with first-growth cedars.
What touched me was the profundity of the sense of body and earth, a sense of how what Saicho and Kukai saw, which, as usual, has been ritualized and turned into yet another reason for conflict, is not unlike what many of us have found in our own ways, the sanity that comes from inhabiting our breath, feet, orgasm, and feelings of the wind. My days there bore out the teachings: there was a palpable sense of insertion into the natural world, unlike the temples of Nara and Kyoto, where there is a sense of the cultivation leading one out into the emptiness of consciousness; here the feeling was of descent into the thick depths.
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