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Dogen and the Unknown Knowns: The Practice of the Wild after the End of Nature Jason M. Wirth Department ofPhilosophy, Seattle University, 90112th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122; [email protected] Thinkers like Slavoj ZHek and Tim Morton have heralded the end of our ideolo^cal constructions of nature, warning that popular "ecology" or the "natural" is just the latest opiate of the masses. Attempting to think what I call Nature after Nature, I turn to the Kamakura period Zen master Dogen Eihá (1200-1253) to explore the possibilities of thinking Nature in its non-ideolo^al self-presentation or what Dogen called "mountains and rivers (sansui)." I bring Dogen into dialogue with his great champion, the American poet Gary Snyder (who understands the process of sansui as "the mid"), as well as with thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Kundera, Zizek, Agamben, and Muir. Beyond Nature being any one thing, what Badiou derides as the "cosmolo^cal one," I arguefor the reawakening and sobering up to multiple Nature, beyond its appearance as an object to a discerning subject, as the biore^ons which give us our interdependent and dynamic bang. Awakening from the Opium Sleep Amid the worsening ecological catastrophe, there is much talk these days about the end of nature—not that nature itself is coming to a cataclysmic end but rather that there should be an end to the idealogical construction that we call nature. On the one hand, the earth record is rife with ruinous events, but on the other hand, the more we are attached to the assumptions that govern how we have become accustomed to understand "nature," the more we seem to exacerbate such catastrophes. Far from the starry-eyed nostalgia for an unsullied nature that, left to its own devices, will take care of us and save us from ourselves, Slavoj Zizek derides this as a reactionary fantasy that obscures our capacity to understand and respond collectively to the ongoing ecological catastrophe. "Humanity has nowhere to retreat to: not only is there no 'big Other' (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self- reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, nudged off its course, by unbalanced human interventions" (Zizek2008, 442). Nature is neither the foundational source of our meaning (natural law, human nature, Envirmmmtal Philosophy 10 (I), 39-62. Copyright © 2013 iy Environmental Philosophy. Printed in the United States of America. All rights resened.

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Thinkers like Slavoj ZHek and Tim Morton have heralded the end of our ideolo^calconstructions of nature, warning that popular "ecology" or the "natural" is just thelatest opiate of the masses. Attempting to think what I call Nature after Nature, Iturn to the Kamakura period Zen master Dogen Eihá (1200-1253) to explore thepossibilities of thinking Nature in its non-ideolo^al self-presentation or what Dogencalled "mountains and rivers (sansui)." I bring Dogen into dialogue with his greatchampion, the American poet Gary Snyder (who understands the process of sansuias "the mid"), as well as with thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Kundera, Zizek,Agamben, and Muir.

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  • Dogen and the Unknown Knowns:The Practice of the Wild after the

    End of NatureJason M. Wirth

    Department of Philosophy, Seattle University, 90112th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122;[email protected]

    Thinkers like Slavoj ZHek and Tim Morton have heralded the end of our ideolo^calconstructions of nature, warning that popular "ecology" or the "natural" is just thelatest opiate of the masses. Attempting to think what I call Nature after Nature, Iturn to the Kamakura period Zen master Dogen Eih (1200-1253) to explore thepossibilities of thinking Nature in its non-ideolo^al self-presentation or what Dogencalled "mountains and rivers (sansui)." I bring Dogen into dialogue with his greatchampion, the American poet Gary Snyder (who understands the process of sansuias "the mid"), as well as with thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Kundera, Zizek,Agamben, and Muir. Beyond Nature being any one thing, what Badiou derides as the"cosmolo^cal one," I argue for the reawakening and sobering up to multiple Nature,beyond its appearance as an object to a discerning subject, as the biore^ons which giveus our interdependent and dynamic bang.

    Awakening from the Opium SleepAmid the worsening ecological catastrophe, there is much talkthese days about the end of naturenot that nature itself is comingto a cataclysmic end but rather that there should be an end to theidealogical construction that we call nature. On the one hand, theearth record is rife with ruinous events, but on the other hand, the morewe are attached to the assumptions that govern how we have becomeaccustomed to understand "nature," the more we seem to exacerbatesuch catastrophes. Far from the starry-eyed nostalgia for an unsulliednature that, left to its own devices, will take care of us and save us fromourselves, Slavoj Zizek derides this as a reactionary fantasy that obscuresour capacity to understand and respond collectively to the ongoingecological catastrophe. "Humanity has nowhere to retreat to: not onlyis there no 'big Other' (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimateguarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, nudged off its course, byunbalanced human interventions" (Zizek2008, 442). Nature is neitherthe foundational source of our meaning (natural law, human nature,

    Envirmmmtal Philosophy 10 (I), 39-62.Copyright 2013 iy Environmental Philosophy.Printed in the United States of America. All rights resened.

  • 40 JASOXM. WIRTH

    etc.) nor a wholesome and beneficent womb of human life (so long asit is not tampered with by the evils of technology, industrialization,urban living, etc., it is our loving and caretaking iriother). Riffingon Donald Rumsfeld's list of wartime epistemological criteria (the"unknown unknowns" that surprised the Bush government in their Iraqadventure), Zizek argues that ecology is rife with false consciousnessand the "unknown knowns" (ibid., 457) of our unconscious ideologicalassumptions:

    Ecology often lends itself to ideological mystifications: as a pretextfor New Age obscurantisms (praising pre-modem "paradigms," andso forth), or for neo-colonialism (First World complaints that the fastdevelopment of Third World countries like Brazil or China threatensus all"by destroying the Amazon rainforests, the Brazilians arekilling the lungs of our Earth"), or as an honorable cause for "liberalcommunists" (buy green, recycle . . . as if taking ecology into accountjustifies capitalist exploitation), (ibid., 439)

    As did Nietzsche before him, Zizek warns of the difficulty of breakingour metaphysical addiction to ultimate meaning. Far more terrifyingthan any specific threat, nihilism, as the revelation that there is nosupersensible order to either nature or human nature, "the terror of therebeing no big Other," confronts us with the unmooring force of ultimateabsurdity"the fact there is nothing to fear is the most terrifying factimaginable" (ibid., 434). As Nietzsche famously diagnosed the problemin the Genealogy^ "the will would rather will nothing than not will at all,"so deep do our attachments run! "Nature" is just another obscurantistdelusion by which we deny that "there is no firm foundation, place ofretreat, on which one can safely count" (ibid., 442). Scientists exposethe manipulability and fragility of nature (and hence make it harderand harder to maintain our nostaligic fantasies) while at the same timebeing both irrationally abstractwhat good is the formula for water toa sailor drowning at sea?and a new church and inquisition, dismissingall other approaches as irrational and untrue.

    At the same time our immersion in the "life-world" and commonsense dulls both our ethical imagination and our awareness of just howsevere the ecological crisis is.

    I know very well (that global warming is a threat to the entirehumanity), but nonetheless... (I cannot really believe it). It is enoughto see the natural world to which my mind is connected: green grassand trees, the sighing of the breeze, the rising of the sun . . . can onereally imagine that all this will be disturbed? (ibid., 445)

  • DOGEN AND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 41

    The narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground called this "the rightto be stupid." Yes, I know that 2 -^ 2 = 4, but I perversely demand tolive in the world where it might be 5 and the echo chamber backs meup. One need only think of the memorable evening on November 6,2012, when Fox News and Karl Rove struggled to make sense of theunexpected shock that Obama had just carried Ohio and thereby wonthe election despite the incessant declarations by the Fox pundits thatthe allegedly "surging" Romney was assured of a victory. As Roveprovided a fundamental demonstration of the right to be stupid,insisting that the election was not over and that it was far too early tocall Ohio for Obama, even anchorwoman Megyn Kelly had to ask him,"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feelbetter or is this real?" In a world where Fox "News" and Republican"math" are not just spin, but the spell of a particular life-sphere, a spherein which one really believes that one is reporting what is true, a spherethat the Underground man favored over and against the "stone wall"of the world, we find ourselves opiated by the "unknown knowns" thatobfuscate our awareness of the threat of global warming, the pervasiveecological degradation of the earth, the relegation of huge portionsof an exploding world population to slums, the global decimationof non-human species in the Sixth Great Extinction event, and thefantasy that economies can grow in perpetuity, using a limidess supplyof inexpensive fossil fuels, relying on science and technology to tidyup any little messes that this scenario presents along the way. And soZizek admonishes us: "We should really 'grow up' and learn to cut thisultimate umbilical cord to our life-sphere" (ibid., 445).

    As a small contribution to ecological thinking after the opiatingbender of "nature," this essay will consider the space that opens upwith the founder of what came to be called Sot Zen, Dgeri Kigen(1200-1253), around the issue of the question of nature. How does Nature(after nature) give itself to be thought? This is not a reactionary and nostal-gic fantasy that attempts to retrieve what Timothy Morton' or Zizekdismiss as "nature." One of the names that Dogen will give it is sansui,mountains and rivers, which Gary Snyder, a deep reader of Dogen, willcall "the wild." Both are ways of thinking nature after "nature" (NAN),

    1. See Morton 2007. Although my approach differs somewhat, I remainsympathetic to the Buddha Dharma implications of his approach, includinghis turn to thinkers like Gary Snyder and his embrace of Dgen's sansui ormountains and rivers (form and emptiness) as well as to Schelling. (See Morton2007, 70.) For an important exercise in how a thinker like Paracelsus can be athinker of nature before nature in such a way that he is also now after nature,see McGrath 2013. For more on this issue from the perspective of Schelling, seeHamilton 2006. For Schelling in dialogue with the late Merleau-Ponty on theproblem of nature, see Wirth and Burke 2013.

  • 42 JASOJVM. WIRTH

    although in the end it is only a question of preference if we replace theword "nature" or if we try to think it as NAN. It is just a word, albeitone with a difficult and pernicious modern genealogy. Dogen warnedagainst "word attachment" and one should not confuse the idea (orideology) of the earth with the earth itself.

    In Ks Sanshoku {Valley Sounds, Mountains Colors^ 1240) and otherfascicles, Dogen recounts the story of the diligent monk-studentXiangyan who was challenged by Guishan: "You are bright andknowledgeable. Say something about yourself before your parents wereborn, but don't use words learned from the commentaries" (Dogen2010, 87). Xiangyan took to his books working overtime to Bndsomething in his books that allowed him to say something outside ofhis books. "Deeply ashamed, he burned his books and said, "A paintingof a rice cake does not satisfy hunger. I will be just a cooking monk,not expecting to understand Buddha dharma in this lifetime" (ibid.,87). Xiangyan's folly would be an example of what Dogen strikinglyc^ ubs "bondage to Buddha," namely, "being bound by the view that ourperception and cognition of enlightenment is actually enlightenment"(Gybutsu apt 1241) (ibid., 261). In the same vein, one should be waryof confusing the "perception and cognition" of the earth with theearth itself. By NAN, sansui, the wild, or whatever we call it, we do notmean the big Other that confirms us in our identities nor do we meana reactionary retreat to a lost paradise where everything was wholesomeand organic. Nor, as Schelling already warned in the early nineteenthcentury with his Xaturphilosophie, do we want to embrace the ideologyof scientism. Schelling shall famously in the Freedom essay claim thatthe positivistic representation of Nature, or more precisely, its view ofNature as represen table, is the fatal flaw that epitomizes hiodernity:"Nature is not present to it" for modernity "lacks a living ground [dieXaturfur sick nicht vorhanden ist, und da es ihr am lebendigen Grunde fehlt]"(Schelling 1927,1/7, 361).2

    Although Schelling, along with Goethe and others, vainly foughtfor the soul of science, he did not prevail. The scientific positivism ofthe nineteenth century made nature into a series of representationswhile Romanticism longed for a return to a lost nature that never was.Heidegger's poetic turn and his retrieval of (fjffi attempted to recoverthe injury already detectable, according to Heidegger, in Plato's turn to

    2. Except where noted, all translations of Schelling are my own. Citationsfollow the standard pagination, which follows the original edition establishedafter Schelling's death by his son, Karl. It lists the division, followed by thevolume, followed by the page number. Hence, (I/I, 1) would read, divisionone, volume one, page one. It is preserved in Manfred Schrter's criticalreorganization of this material (Schelling 1927).

  • DOGEN AND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 43

    the iSea which, as Badiou has argued, made possible the forgetting ofthe presentation of ii)i;

  • 44 JASON M. WIRTH

    The Realization of the Wide and LongTong^eThe prevailing Western metaphysical habit contrasts nature withculture (the realm of human centered and human originated affairs).The natural is therefore nature as nature does, as opposed to the domainof artifice brought about in the rise of the Anthropocene Age^ byhuman ingenuity and activity. This account of competing origins andtheir respective domains, however, assumes that the human domain issomehow separable from that ofnature and that, from within the refugeof the border that maintain this divorce, the human domain attemptsfurthermore to subjugate the natural domain, to remake it into a moreanthropocentric home. This account also gives rise to ecology as themass opiate^ in which our political energies are devoted to erasing ourcarbon footprint so that the earth might return to the Edenic tranquilitythat was violated by our dominating ways. Whether we construe natureas the raw materials for anthropocentric consumption or as a thusdefiled paradise, nature is something f^ rc iw and thus^orwj (it makes nodifference whether or not God gave us our repository of raw materialsfor human cultural activity, or our once and future peaceful garden,

    5. This is the now famous termed coined by Paul Josef Crutzen and EugeneStoermer in 2000 to describe the ascendant role of human manufacture inthe prevalent geological character of the earth. The climate scientist WilliamF. Ruddiman's provocative study, Ruddiman 2007, makes a case that theAnthropocene is not coterminous, as Cruzen and others have argued, with theIndustrial Revolution but rather the interaction between human populationnumbers (their rise and fall, including the effect of pandemics on overallpopulation numbers), cultural practices (starting with things like deforestationfor agriculture, which increases when population numbers increase), and theclimate. The implication of his argument is startling: there is not an independent,pure, healthy, ideal climate that would exist independent of industrialization(for the latter merely shifts the direction of the effect of the AnthropoceneAge, namely, towards the widespread heating of the planet), but rather thatwhether the earth is heating (post eighteenth century) or cooling (the enigmaticLittle Ice Age that began in the mid-fourteenth century), the climate of theAnthropocene is inseparable from the widespread presence of human culture.That is nothing less than to say: already at a meteorological level it no longermakes sense to divorce "natural climate" from "human cultural activity." Thetwo are rather parts of a more complex whole emerging out of the interplayof these two sets of trajectories. We are not in the climate as if it were our meresurroundings (environment). In some very real sense it makes more sense tosay that we are (of and towards) the climate. It is a feedback loop in which theanthropos is the leading indicator species.6. I am borrowing this reworking of Marx's famous phrase from SlavojZizek's article, "Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium forthe Masses" (lacan.com, 9 January 2008). See also "Unbehagen in der Natur,"where the opiate of deep ecology is "again a deeply conservative oneanychange can only be a change for the worse" (Zizek 2008,441).

  • DGENAND THE UNKNOWNKNOWNS: THE WILDAFTER THEEND OFNATURE 45

    both are there for the taking). The earth is something objective for theautonomous human subject.

    In the 1806 Darlegung des wahren Verhltnis der Naturphilosophie zu derverbesserten Fichteschen Lehre, written after Schelling and Fichte haddecisively broken around the question of Nature, Schelling claimed,"The moralist desires to see nature not as living, but as dead, so that hecan tread upon it with his feet" (Schelling 1927,1/7, 17). Dead natureis the mere surface beneath our feet, land that we imagine as being therefor us, simply at our disposal. If nature is what is before us to treadupon, whether or not we leave a carbon footprint, it has not emergedin thinking as a living question. In contrast, we can look to a passagefrom Dogen's 1240 fascicle Keisei Sanshiki [River Valley Sounds and MountainColors\^ Dogen turned to the elemental words of the great Song poetand lay Buddha Dharma practitioner. Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101, inPinyin Su Dongpo and also known as Su Shi and in Japanese, Toba).Su was enlightened when he heard the sound of a mountain streamflowing in the night.

    In his poem "We Wash Our Bowls in This Water" from Mountainsand Rivers Without End, Snyder quotes Dogen's commentary on Su'sremarkable words in the poem that Su had successfully presented tohis teacher, Chang-tsung, as proof of his awakening (1996,137-9). Su,who "sat one whole night by a creek on the slopes of Mt. Lu," began:"The stream with its sounds is a long broad tongue / The loomingmountain is a wide-awake body" (ibid., 138). The voice of the waterwith its encompassing tongue alludes to one of the Buddha's canonical32 characteristics. The river, covered in darkness, was the Buddhaspeaking. The imposing form "looming"of the mountain, thatis, the mountain suggesting the looming of all form as such, is themanifesting body of the Buddha, whose ongoing wakefulness calls us toawaken. Mountains and rivers, form and emptiness, are the inseparable,impermanent earth song of the Buddha. One can say that what onehears is the active silence of the Buddha speaking (the wordless word)through the voices of nature as well as that what one sees [the formsand shapes and colors present to the eye and mind] is the formless orempty ("pure" or unconditioned) body of the Buddha. That is to say,one simultaneously "hears" and "sees" the silent emptiness of what is

    7. The title poetically speaks of River Valley (kei) voices or sounds (sei),mountain (sar^ colors or forms (shik), that is, nature (sansui., mountains andwaters), as it gives itself to be heard (the waters speaking) and seen (mountainsshowing themselves in their dramatic forms and colors). I adapt this briefdiscussion of the title from the prefatory paragraph to the translation of thisfascicle in Dogen 1994, 85.

  • 46 JASON M. WIRTH

    audible and visible in the presencing of nature. The poem continues:"Throughout the night, song after song" (ibid., 138).

    Through the night, beyond visibihty but through hstening to thevoice of mountain-valley streamDogen will later use language ofseeing with one's ears and hearing with one's eyeSu hears each andevery thing ever taught in all possible schools of the Buddha Dharma,hearing not the mere words of the verses, but that of whose song theytoo sung.^ And finally the poem concludes: "How can I speak at dawn"(ibid.. 138).

    How does one transmit the Dharma? How does one speak theelemental language? This is the concern of the present essay. Perhapswe could already suggest that this song is a deeply geological song, notin its current usage of the study of the history and laws of earth solids,for that is to confuse the earth with its looming forms, but in the archaicsense of the Xyoc and song of Ffj fully awakened as Foca. Snyder allowsDogen to weigh in immediately:

    Sounds of streams and shapes of mountains.The sounds never stop and the shapes never cease.Was it Su who wokeor was it the mountains and streams?

    Billions of beings see the morning starand all become Buddhas!\you^ who are valley streams and loomingmountains,can't throw some light on the nature of ridges and rivers,

    who can?(Snyder1996, 138-39)

    How does one transmit the Dharma? How does, as Schelling tried to do,provoke (fodern), let arise, and let ori^nate before the eyes of the reader\yor dem Augen des Lesers tnisieh^n zu lassmY (Schelling 1927,1/2,11) thecoming to be seen and heard of nature in its silence and audibility, itsvisible, singing objects and its invisible, still, and pure subject? Yet Suhas spoken! The question now becomes how will we hear what he hastold us and see what he has shown us? When the finger points to themoon, will we quibble over it after we have hypostasized it yet anotherdogmatic doctrine vying for universal validity? One can only see

    8. The characters for "song after song" are sometimes read as referring to theeighty-four thousand verses, a classical way of evoking the immense breadthand variety of the Buddha's teaching, although it can also be heard as sayingthe immense breadth and variety of the Buddha Dharma and its vast and variedhistorical manifestations around the world.

  • DGENAND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 47

    what has been shown by the Buddha eye with one's own Buddha eye.Communication for Dogen is not an exchange of information or thesuccess of a logical demonstration. One does not communicate personto person, but from enlightened mind to enlightened mind, Buddhato Buddha. It is alwaysyuibutsuyobutsu, "only Buddha and Buddha." Ina sense, one could say that communication is the possibility of two ormore people speaking the language of nature.

    This poem, Dogen tells us, was approved by his Zen Master, butDogen also entreated his monks to think more carefully at the nature ofLayman Su's accomplishment. Did he hear nature as if it were an objectto be heard? And did he hear it because he applied Zen Master Chang-tsung's teaching to the sounds of the river-valley? Is this something hedid, or the master did, or nature itself did? Dogen suggested that theMaster's teachings "have not stopped echoing, but are secretly minglingwith the sounds of the mountain stream in the night" (Dogen 1994,87).Nature is awakening; nature is realizing itself in language, and this istherefore also to say that Su is awakening, that whoever hears the wideand long tongue awakens to hear the constant awakening of the wideand long tongue.

    One could protest at this point that Dgen's and Snyder's respectiveefforts are in this context just a variation of Heidegger's poeticreawakening of ^iiaiq. Certainly the Zen tradition has always insistedon some kind of radical awakening, and there is, as Heidegger himselfobliquely recognized, genuine resonances between his project and theZen tradition.^ It would be silly to suggest, however, that Song Chinaand Kamakura Japan were under the sway of the Platonic iSea and hadto resort to Zen practice to reawaken the self-presentation of nature.Nor would it suffice to say that Dogen and Snyder oppose the poeticword to all forms of discursivity. One need only look at the remarkablework of the great Chilean neurobiologist Francisco Vrela to see thepower of Buddha Dharma on scientific thinking (see Vrela 1997).If anything, the Buddha Dharma account of the three poisons (ourdelusional attachments and aversions) and its role in the painful andpernicious emergence of the self-standing subject offers a much moreprofound and less mythic account of what amounts to an ancient yetstill pervasive practice of false consciousness and the reign of "unknownknowns." Nature (in the sense of NAN) is neither the guarantor of thesubject nor its refuge, but rather its annihilation.

    Just as death comes unbidden, so does our obsession with speakingabout ourselvesas if our hyper auto-narrativity emerged because we

    9. In addition to Heidegger's meetings and work with many of the luminariesof twentieth-century Japanese philosophy (Kuki, Tanabe, Nishitani, DaisetzSuzuki, Hisamatsu, etc.), see May 1996 as well as Bchner 1989.

  • 48 JASOXM. WIRTH

    are just that curious about each other. The ego is the nub of the reignof the unknown knowns. In Milan Kundera's novel. The Book of Laughterand Forgetting^ Tamina endeavors to help her colleague Bibi to meetthe writer Banaka in order to help her write a novel although Tamina"knew that there wasn't a single book at Bibi's and that reading boredher" (1996, 122). When Bibi and Banaka meet. Bibi announces thatshe wants to write a novel "about the world as I see it" (123). Banakaastutely informs her that a novel has many different kinds of characters,many of whom might see the world differently from Bibisurely shecould not be interested in that! But neither is Banaka who considersnovels the "fruit" of the "illusion of the power to understand others.But what do we know of one another?" (123-24). Banaka draws theobvious conclusion: "All anyone can do . . . is give a report on oneself.Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie" (124). Bibiis overjoyed. All she had wanted to do was to offer up such a report.Yet what had Bibi done? Not much in terms of adventures and othergreat actions. But Bibi does have a much more interesting feeling "thatmy experience iriside is worth writing about and could be interesting toeverybody" (124). Banaka is sympathetic, explaining that since Joycebrought Homer's Odyss^ into the realm of interior life, and even thoughwe have done little with our lives, we are all great adventurers and it isthe way of great adventurers to want to share their stories with everyone.Bibi can hardly contain herself or her narratives:

    I often have the impression my whole body is filled with the desireto express itself. To speak. To make itself heard. Sometimes I thinkI'm going erazy, beeause I'm so bursting with it I have an urge toscream. . . . I want to express my life and my feelings, whieh I knoware absolutely original. (125)

    And so goes the great war of all narratives against all narratives as we fillthe stores and clog bandwidth with our books and blogs, interruptingeach other to make sure that it is our narrative that is heard. Listening tothe narrative of another becomes a momentary pause before we pounce,changing the subject to our own experiences. Oh, yes, that reminds meof when I. . . .

    This self which is driven to speak but not listen, write but not read,is an experience of the first noble truth odukkha (turmoil and suffering),of the self comprised of the three poisons by which the delusion ofselfhood emerges from the congestion of attachment and aversion, theparts of our lives that we love and hence make permanent features ofourselves and the parts of our lives that we detest and cast out as longas we can. This feverish self, whose senses are aflame with the delusionsbom of these loves and hates, is a lonely, alienated self, a self separated

  • DGENAND THE UNKNOWNKNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OFNATURE 49

    from its living soil. It is also a highly aggressive self, a self whose masternarrative is driven to master all other narratives.

    This is part of what drove the Buddha away from the eternalism ofthe tman and toward antman. In the Pli Canon we learn of the bhikkhuSati who held and attributed to the Buddha the "pernicious" view that itis the "same consciousness, and not another, which transmigrates" and issubject to samsara (Holder 2006, 61). The Buddha famously dismantlesSti's adherence to a fixed self by exposing all of the relations co-dependently working together that underlie the self. Pratityasamutpda,dependent co-origination, demonstrates that the independent, freestanding self is nothing but abstraction that if taken to heart causesturmoil. The self is dependent on its relations just as there is no absolutefire, but rather only fire that is dependent upon what it burns"a firethat burns dependent on a log is reckoned as a 'log-fire'; a fire thatburns dependent on kindling is reckoned as a 'kindling-fire'" (ibid., 63),and so on.

    In the Mahyna traditions, this perniciously incompleteunderstanding is sometimes referred to as the Senika Heresy, afterthe lamentable intellectual efforts of the Brahmacarin called Senikain the Nirvana Sutra who argued for an eternal self that, much like theWestern conception of the soul, eternally survives its incarnations.In the famous early fascicle Bendowa, Dogen takes the Senika heresystraight on, refusing to accept that there can even be a mind (or soul)wholly separate from a body (they stand in correlation and have noindependent standing). When one goes, so goes the other. Dogen alsodenies that life and death are something that we even need to escape ortranscend. "To think that birth-and-death must be rejected is the mistakeof ignoring buddha dharma" (Dogen 2010,15). Dogen dismissed suchviews as ihsane"don't listen to the tongues of mad people" (ibid!,15)perhaps also suggesting that our aggressive war of narratives,our bellicose agon of self-spinning, is so consummately insane that itsmaster stroke is to declare itself sane, normal, and healthy. Yes, Bibi hadbeen driven insane by dukkha.

    The annihilation of the subject, however, is not mere nihilism, butrather an awakening to the multiplicity ofnature. This was, for instance,the teaching of tathgata-garbha and Buddha nature in the LankvatraSutra, a text that was pivotal to the East Asian development of Zenpractice (Bodhidharma legendarily gave it to Huike as part of the firsttransmission of Zen practice.) The Buddha explains that the tathgata-garbha is "taught to attract those members of other paths who areattached to a self so that they will give up their projection of an unrealself" (The Lankavatara Sutra, 110). NAN emerges as the non-entitativeBuddha nature of all beings.

  • 50 JASOJM. WIRTH

    The Preservation of the Question of NatureThe deserved success of Ken Burns' documentary on America's nationalpark system, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," drives homethe vexing problems of just how nature gives itself to thought. On theway hand, one is perhaps tempted to say that America's best idea wasto stop being so "American" and experiment with putting limits onour acquisitive mania. On the other hand, it is another opportunity toreflect on just how difficult the question of nature is to hear.

    The primary question that one brings to nature is not a questionthat allows nature to arise in thinking: what is in it for me?

    Unsettled by the grotesque commercialization and huckster-maniaof places like Niagara Falls, whose extraordinary charms were the lureof travelers and honeymooners, the early protectors and preservers ofother such wonders attempted to protect them for the rapacity of theAmerican commercial spirit by arguing that they were of no specialinterest to economic exploitation. Since the land had no commandingcommercial value because it cannot be farmed, or is too rugged formineral or gas exploitation, and since its only immediate value is asa scenic diversion, it can be preserved for aesthetic consumption. Ofcourse, this strategy never works for long and it eventually leads tointense battles to protect the land from sheepherders, cattlemen, lumbercompanies, mining interests, etc.

    These aforementioned interests systemically regard all suchborderlines as battle-lines and the expansionist imperative, oftenhighly capitalized and with the political influence that this affords,is an ongoing and formidable threat. John Muir was to some extentsympathetic to the sustainable use of nature, but dreaded the "meredestroyers . . . tree killers, wool and mutton men, spreading death andconfusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever planted" (1997, 720).For Muir, the great Gardener was God, and the wild expressed the gloryof divine immanence. He regarded the enemies of the natural templesas "plunderers, who are as unconscionable and enterprising as Satan"(ibid., 719). For Muir, as his break with Pinchotand the conservationistsindicates, Satan sometimes disguises the spread of death and confusionas sustainability.

    This is not, however, to erect an untenable bifurcation betweenpreservation and conservation, as if these were mutually exclusive,but rather to insist that all claims of sustainability do not ipso factoreceive a free pass. One need only think of Zizek's disparagementof the "honorable cause for 'liberal communists' (buy green,recycle . . . as if taking ecology into account justifies capitalist

    exploitation)" (Zizek 2008, 439). It may make little sense for example,to speak of a sustainable petroleum economy or to hold all claims ofpreservation hostage to the prerogatives of conservation, which, in the

  • DCEXAMD THE UlfKKOWK KjfOWKS: THE WILD AFTER THE ExD OE NATURE 51

    end, is always conservation for us. This is not in any way to dismiss theinterests that govern conservation, but its overdetermination can perhapsin a practice of the wild be tempered by a radical extension of the veil ofignorance of the Rawlsian original position: if you did not know whatspecies you would instantiate, which species would you preserve? In anygiven ecology, if you did not know if you would be a human being or anowl, to whom would you give priority? Conservation assumes that thesurvival of others be measured against the preeminence of the human,whereas preservation has at least the radical possibility of gauging itssuccess from the fate of the least (at least from a human perspective) ofits co-inhabitants. As such, it is not that preservation and conservationare flip sides of the same coin, but rather that a radicalization of thepreservation ethic, that is, the cultivation of the practice of the wild,is the home within which to weigh'our responsibilities to conserve.Preservation teaches us another measure of conservation.

    In order to protect the divine raiments of nature from plunder, therewas an understandable imperative to accentuate the singular beauty oflands designated for protection. If the parks were full of appreciativevisitors, then this would add value to them and thereby help stave offthose who would assess them as repositories of raw materials. Yet whennature becomes the hot commodity of must-see scenery, the effort toshow that it was more valuable as a product for tourist consumptionled to the pressure of unsustainable throngs of well-intentioned visitors.

    The extreme beauty of the parts of nature designated as parksshames and inspires us, and this is for the good. Many visitors as aresult find themselves reinvigorated, more willing than ever to preservethe fragile domains that call our ordinary mindset into question andthat quicken the pulse of our imaginations. As powerful and worthy asthis contrast is, as a contrast, it runs the risk of hypostasizing the polesof the contrast, creating a sense that we leave our homes in order tojourney into the wild, which, wholly other than the artifice of humanliving, is the journey into the wild as the journey into our lost opposite.John Muir famously refused this simple opposition. In his reflectionson "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West," Muirapplauded the emerging interest in wilderness hiking. "Thousands oftired, nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out thatgoing to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; andthat mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains oftimber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life" (1997, 721).

    Civilization as such was not the sickness, but rather over-civilization,that is, civilization in its mode of being sick and thereby destructive ofthe hfe whose prolongation it is doubtless extending, but at the expenseof denigrating human life to the default fact that it lives simply becauseit has not yet died. The mass promotion of the quantity of human life

  • 52 JASOXM. WIRTH

    has compromised the quality of human life. Sickness, too, is a life, butits movement runs counter to the vitality of the wild. The dull quantityof the long but not well lived life is suddenly exposed to the electro-shock of "tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch with the nervesof Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them,learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, andrejoicing in deep, long drawn breaths of pure wildness" (ibid., 721).

    From the perspective of the over-civilized, wildness is somethinglike how the young mind, longing for flight from its confinement indull institutions, tends to mis-read what Nietzsche had called theDionysian. Rather than the wild life at the heart of form, it is merelythe call for form to go wild, to be crazy and excessive, to become "partyanimals," and to become lost in an irresponsible intoxication whereall is permitted and everything is everything else. My advice: do notgo hiking in such a Dionysian state. That such a misreading prevailsis an indication of the hold of over-civilizationa way of thinking thecollectivity of the subject hypnotized in the life-spherewhose deathgrip makes one imagine that its repressed life is reckless and spastic,that disorganization as such is preferable to cultivating the generativityof new forms of life. One forgets that Nietzsche, whose Zarathustracounseled us to remain "faithful \treii\ to the earth," that is, to be abetter, more loyal lover (for the betrayal was the mere conservation ofthe wild in over-civilization), conceived these ideas while wandering inthe Alps around Sils Maria, engaged in his own practice of the wild.

    In Muir's practice of the wild, the domains are no longer separate,but rather "the nerves of Mother-Earth" are the home out of which theconservation of human civilization emerges. It is the home of thehuman house and the interaction between the two is not the divorceof the two, but rather their non-dual belonging together in a morecomplete ("whole-souled") home. In the home of all, including humancivilization, as well as the many other forms congregating and being inpacks that pulsate through life, one comes to see that even rocks are alive,that they too have their own songs, songs particular to their own livinggeology. Already by 1797, in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, Schellinghad denied the duality of the organic and the inorganic, the living andthe dead. All of nature was self-organizing, that is organic, determinednot from some transcendent creator from without, but from within itsown self-progressing immanence."'This insight is also clearly present in

    10. "But no mechanism [determinism from an external cause] alone is far frombeing what constitutes nature. For as soon as we enter the icdXm oorganic nature,all mechanical linkage of cause and effect ceases for us. Every organic productexists for itself. . . . The organic . . . produces itself, arises out of itself (Schelling1988, 30).

  • DGEN AND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WllD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 53

    Dgen's own practice of the wild, in what he called bendowa, negotiatingDao, and where in the fascicle of the same name we find the followingastonishing claim. In Zen mind, one realizes that "trees, grasses, andland involved in this all emit a bright and shining light, preaching theprofound and incomprehensible Dharma; and it is endless. Trees andgrasses, wall and fence expound and exalt the Dharma for the sake ofordinary people, sages, and all living beings. Ordinary people, sages,and all living beings in turn preach and exalt the Dharma for the sakeof trees, grasses, wall and fence" (Dogen 2002, 13).

    Hee-Jin Kim rightly insists that the sansui or mountains and waterspractice of Dogen, which included the remote mountain location ofhis temple, Eihei-ji, was not the "romantic exaltation of them which wesee, for example, in nature mysticism, any more than it is the scientificand technical manipulation and exploitation of nature." The "naiveveneration or exaltation of nature," evident, for example in the morereactionary, infantile, anti-scientific giddiness about trees and birds inthe worst excesses of Romanticism, was for Dogen "a defiled view ofnature, enslaving humans in a new captivity" (1987, 187). Rather Kimsees in Dgen's "love" of nature "not a deification of nature, but theradicalization of naturenature in its selflessness. Only then is natureundefiled and natural (ibid., 191).

    To be clear, Dogen is not advocating, nor would he even recognizeas sensible, any call to return to a pristine, undefiled nature. There isno unmediated access to nature nor is true nature some thing in itselfin some private reality beyond our integument in the veil of Maya andits web of representations. The infinite ground of nature is not a thing,either in itself or a representation originating in human subjectivity. Yes,nature is always interpreted, and human beings engage the question ofnature within the historical milieu that grants them access to it. This isnot, however, to advocate the subsumption of nature under culture, forthe living core of nature is not an object that resists the advances of adiscerning subject, but rather nature itself is not something, as Merleau-Ponty, following Schelling, claimed, that as such can be studied. Theinfinite depth of our immanence is the alterity of the home within whichwe emerge.

    And so Snyder rightly laments, "It's a real pity that many in thehumanities and social sciences are finding it so difficult to handle therise of 'nature' as an intellectually serious territory. For all of the talkof 'the other' in everybody's theory these days, when confronted witha genuine Other, the nonhuman realm, the response of the come-latelyanti-nature intellectuals is to circle the wagons and declare that natureis really part of culture"(1999, 388-89). Snyder is not resorting toZizek's Big Other because his concern is not nature as the guarantor ofhuman meaning, but rather the biodiversity that ecosystems support.

  • 54 JASOJM. WIRTH

    an "awareness that wilderness is the locus of big rich ecosystems,and is thus . . . a living place for beings who can survive in no otherhabitat" (ibid., 388). Nonetheless, the "wild," never as pristine (that is,human-free) as we fantasize, is nonetheless not fundamentally about us,although, at the same time, it exposes the illusion that nature is what isisolated and sequestered in national parks and some national forests (atleast the ones not destroyed by economic exploitation and multi-use);it is not the opposite of our civilized lives, but rather a more subtleexpression of them. This is the distinction between a wilderness, which"is always a specific place, and it is there for the local critters that live init" and the wild, which is "the process that surrounds us all, self-creatingnature: creating plant zones, even humans and their societies" (389).

    Finally, it seems to me that there is another, quite serious problemwhen the question of nature is subsumed under culture, that is, whena culture becomes total, and can hear nothing external to itself. Byculture in this context, I also include the possibility of the rise ofv0ptO7ioc to the extent that his or her totally administered earth hearsnothing external to the claims and interests of &v0pcTroc, that Foucault'ssandcastle of the Age of Man will not soon wash away in the surgingtides of time. I call this problem the dust of the sah world in its technolo^callyenhanced and multi-national capitalized permutation of the Gestell. ' '

    11. In my judgment, we owe David Loy a sincere debt of gratitude as oneof the mavericks of what I would here call Dharma critical theory. In hisclassics The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Sodal Theory (Loy 1997) and A BuddhistHistory of the West (Loy 2002), among other works, Loy argues that the Buddha'sthree poisons should not be understood only on an individual level, but ona social and institutional level as well. Witness this trenchant critique from ABuddhist History of the West as Dr. Loy assesses the great defiling poisons or klesas(defilements that cloud the mind)/oM (or rga in Sanskrit), greed, dosa (ordve?a in Sanskrit), malice, hostility, and ill-will, and moha (or avidy), delusionat work in the very fabric of our way of life: "Our economic system promotesand requires greed in at least two ways: desire for profit is necessary to fuelthe engine of economic growth, and consumers must be insatiable in order tomaintain the markets for what can be produced. Although justified as raisingthe standards living worldwide, economic globalization seems rather to beincreasing inequality, unemployment, and environmental degradation. . . .Long after the end of the Cold War, the U. S. federal government continue todevote the largest percentage of its resources to maintaining an enormouslyexpensive war machine. Most other countries continue to spend more on armsthan social services. . . . The media that might inform us about these problemsdistract us with 'infotainment' and sports spectacles to promote their realfunction, advertising. One would expect universities to be encouraging anddeveloping the critical thinking necessary to reflect on these developments,but in the midst of the greatest economic expansion in history we are toldthat budget cutbacks are necessary because there is less money available for

  • DOGEN AND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 55

    I will briefly develop this in two ways.Slavoj Zizek, in his First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, observes that the

    most "surprising" thing about the immense global economic meltdownand credit contraction at the end of 2008 is that it was so successfullyspun as a surprise (2009). Serious economists, including most audiblyfolks like the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stightz and Paul Krugman,had already declared such a catastrophe all but inevitable, and publicdemonstrations had to be forcibly shut down so that this idea would notgain wider currency. However, when this crisis burst into the full lightof day, it was not clear what to do about it, how to keep this "sucker"from going down.

    In part the nebulous nature of the solution was inseparable fromthe nebulous iiature of the problem. Zizek, as have many economistsand political observers recently, returned to the famous analogy of thestock market to a beauty contest in the twelfth chapter of John MaynardKeynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes proposeda fictional newspaper beauty contest in which contestants had to pickthe six most beautiful women out of hundreds of photographs and thewinner would get a prize. A naive contestant would simply pick the sixmost beautiful, but this strategy is a hopeless shot in the dark. A savvycontestant would try to figure out what the other contestants likelythought the most beautiful women to be, and an even sawier contestantwould of course try to figure what the other contestants thought theother contestants thought were the six most beautiful women, and thisstep back would take another step back each time a contestant got betterat playing the game. Keynes: "It is not a case of choosing those that,to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even thosethat average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reachedthe third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating whataverage opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some,I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth, and higher degrees" (1958,140).

    Fixing the economic mess involves starting a new beauty contest tofix the now decimated beauty contest. If we all believe that we all believethat the economic recovery is working, then perhaps it might work.Draconian budget cuts, conveniently eliminating important elementsof the safety net, are touted as restoring confidence to the market. Itwould work for the very reason that the now decimated contest had

    education. Increasingly, the need to become more market oriented is divertingacademia into corporate research and advanced job training for those eagerto join and benefit from a morally questionable world order. . . . In short,our global economy institutionalizes greed; the military industrial complexat the heart of most developed nation-states institutionalizes aggression; ourmedia and even our universities institutionalize ignorance of what is actuallyhappening" (87-8).

  • 56 JASON M. WIRTH

    once worked: a widespread group sonambulance in which the sharedspeculations actually created real value.

    So of course, we should stop this horizontally aistuhnita folie deuxand return to the real economy, to the reality in which things of realvalue are created. Down with Wall Street and up with Main Street! Butthe horizontal axis at this point reveals a vertical axis, which had, likethe horizontal axis, succeeded in direct proportion to its capacity toocclude itself and hide itself from lucid analysis. The corporations thatwere too big to fail were, well, simply too big to fail. Their ongoingcollapse would have destroyed Main Street. The raw wound of theeconomic collapse made them more visible, but that did not ipso factoopen the realm of real value creation. As Zizek argues, "the relationshipis non-transitive: while what is good for Wall Street is not necessarilygood for Main Street, Main Street cannot thrive if Wall Street is feelingsickly, and this asymmetry gives an a priori advantage to Wall Street"(2009, 13). The left, if they are to save the victims of a decimated MainStreet, have no choice but to recapitalize Wall Street, making theposition of the Left no longer a sensible alternative to the corporatecontrolled right. It also gives us our first peek into this historicaldevelopment of the saha world: horizontally distributed delusion withvertical, albeit displaced (we say, despite their legal status in the U. S.as "persons" with the right to free speech, corporations y rather than proper.names like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot) total dominance.

    To put this a second way, this seems to me to be similar to GiorgioAgamben's recent project in works like Homo Sacer: Sovergn Power andBare Life where he attempts to think the intersection between the verticalor top down model of totalitarian sovereignty in Hannah Arendt andthe horizontal dimension o biopouvoir and the biopolitical in Foucault,locating this "hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power" (1998, 6). Theintersection of these two axes produces what Agamben called "homosacer" the bare life, excluded by from all political life by virtue of whatis included in it, and "who may be killed but not sacrificed" (ibid., 8).Naked factical life, what the Greeks called COT), has the life force byvirtue of which all living things live, and its entry into the realm of thepolis and of right involves becoming another form of life, ioc TTOA-ITIKOC.Political life has evolved into the vertical, sovereign enforcement ofhorizontally distributed biopouvoir and hence "ioc and tor), right andfact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction" (9) such that wr)belongs to the political order as the kind of life that it has excluded asproper political life. (Or to put in Jacques Rancire's terms, wr] are "apart of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor" [1999,11].)This, for Agamben, is the aporia of democracy itself which, in trying tofind the proper way of life for all life, attempting to locate the loc of

  • DGENAND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 57

    ), wanting to "put freedom and happiness of men into play in thevery place"bare life"that marked their subjection" (9-10). The lifeof nature itself comes to appear as the exception, that which belongsby virtue of being proscribed. Nature is the bare hfe within all bare life.

    Tliis intersection of the horizontal (vastly distributed power withno one in charge and where no knows where the Man lives, althoughthe Man is everywhere but nowhere in particular) and the vertical (thesovereign and total dominance of certain ideological interests) is moreor less what the venerable political scientist Sheldon Wolin has dubbed"inverted totalitarianism" or an "upside down" version of the top downmodel of a strong, ideologically fixated central government (2008,11).The man is everywhere but nowhere to be found when you want to kickhis ass. This is the model of a totally administered globe, but one inwhich the vertical element is tacit, yet universally distributed throughthe population.

    At this intersection of exclusionary interests (the 1%, the mastersof the universe, etc.) and their universal horizontal distribution, theexternality of nature does not appear because the external, as such, isregulated and kept at bay. Not only is this the one-dimensional societyabout which Herbert Marcuse so powerfully warned, a society whosespell of presence can no longer be shattered from the outside, and inwhich the "efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognitiont,hat it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive powerof the whole," it is also the rise o one dimensional nature, an earth withoutwilderness, regulated within the historical epochs that appropriate it(1964,11).

    Mountains and WatersFor Dogen the question of nature does not open up in its fundamentaldimensions until it becomes a question of what he called bendwa,negotiating Dao. Hence, the thesis of this essay: the question of natureemerges for the first time in its proper dimensions with the practice of thewild, which in turn is another way of saying bendwa. I take this term, ofcourse, from Gary Snyder, who is a marvelous reader of Dogen. In thefinal chapter, called "Grace," in his duly celebrated Practice of the Wild,he explains that at his house they say a Buddhist grace that begins,"We venerate the Three Treasures [teachers, the wild, and friends]"(1990, 185). The three treasures are universally acknowledged by allnegotiators of the Buddha Dharma to be the Buddha, which Snyder,using his own upaya or skillful means, renders as "teachers," the Sangha,the community of practitioners, whom Snyder renders as "friends," andfinally, and most strikingly, the Dharma, which Snyder renders as "thewild."

  • 58 JASOX.M. WIRTH

    In what manner can the Dharma, the very matter that is transmittedfrom Buddha Dharma to Buddhist negotiator, be translated as the wild?It all depends on how one hears the word "wild."

    Typically "wild" and "feral" (ferus) are "largely defined in ourdictionaries by whatfrom a human standpointit is not. It cannot beseen by this approach for what it j" (ibid., 9). Hence, a wild animal is ananimal that has not been trained to live in our house (undomesticated)and has not been successfully subjected to our rule (unruly). Whenwe break the rules of our normalized lives, we go "wild," and become"party animals."

    What happens though if we "turn it the other way"? What is the wildto the wild? Animals become "free agents, each with its own endowments,living within natural systems" (9). As Snyder begins to explore thisturn, he indicates the ways in which the wild "comes very close to beinghow the Chinese define the term Dao^ the way of Great Nature: eludinganalysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful,surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete,orderly, unmediated . . ." (10). And the Dao, as we know from the richinterpntration of Mahyna and Daoist traditions in East Asia, is "notfar from the Buddhist term Dharma with its original senses of formingand firming" (10).

    In a sense, the fundamental practice of Dharma, of negotiating Dao,is the practice of the wild. Dgen's Sansui-ky (1240), Mountainsand WatersStra^ brought many things together for Snyder. Dgen's title alludesto Chinese landscape painting, a spectacular example of which opensSnyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. Snyder had already studiedthis tradition with the great Chiura Obata at Berkeley, becoming "awareof how the energies of mist, white water, rock formations, air swirlsachaotic universe where everything is in placeare so much a part of theEast Asian painter's world" (1996,153). When Dogen attempts to allowthis chaotic but not disorderly universe to speak, he resorts to phraseslike the "whole earth without an inch of soil left out."

    Dgen's Sansui-ky is not itself a sutra (ky), nor is it a commentaryon a canonical sutra. Tlie sutra is the wild itself, which Dogen, followinga venerable Chinese tradition, calls sansui (Chinese shan-shui, \h^->mountains and waters). This is the term for something like "landscape,"especially with reference to paintings, but it is not landscape in thetypical sense of a panoptic view of scenery. Rather it is earth as theinterpntration of yin and yang, waters and solids, emptiness andform, free, unconditioned ground and interdependent beings, in thespontaneous, organic auto-generation of Dao. San, mountain, rises intoform in the most formidable of ways, as if it were an especially violentexpression of form's self-insistence, yet, it too flows, for JMZ, water, is pureelasticity, having no form of its own, yet capable of taking any form.

  • DGEN AND THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS: THE WILD AFTER THE END OF NATURE 59

    Sansui, the insistence of form and its concomitant emptiness, is natureas both the stubborn, hard as a diamond, bright as the sun aspirationof Fud My-, the Immovable Wisdom King, and the dark as themoon, beneficently pliable, overpowering compassion of Kannon, thebodhisattva Avalokitesvara who looks down and hear the cries of theworld. In Mountains and Rivers Without End, in the first part of a sectionentitled "The Flowing," perhaps itself a way of thinking the manner inwhich mountains walk and flow as time, Snyder sings of the Blue-facedgrowling Fudo, / Lord of the Headwaters, making / Rocks of water,waterout of rocks" (ibid., 68). In the final poem of Snyder's earth sutra,which speaks through the No play Yamamba (OldMountain Woman), wehear the words:

    Peaks like Buddhas at the heightssend waters streaming downto the deep center of the turning world.

    And the Mountain Spirit always wanderinghillsides fade like walls of cloudpebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea

    old woman mountain hearsshifting sand

    tell the wind "nothingness is shapeliness"

    Mountains mill be Buddhas then(ibid., 145)

    It is not, therefore, that we oppose our homes to nature, as if we canonly be at home in the domain of human artifice or, failing that, amidstimpending ecological disaster, we become nostalgic for the lost Edenofnature that never was. We are not alienated from nature as if it weresomething outside of us (Hegel's force of the negative) or inside ourideological epochs. The problem is more fundamentally that we are alienated fromour home, the biore^ons, nottheideolo^es, that pve us our bang. We are not in thesebioregions. We are these bioregions, these great unknown knowns that areour invitation to practice.

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    Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Badiou, Alain. 2006. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London and

    New York: Continuum.Bchner, Hartmut, ed. 19^9. Japan und Heidegger. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke.Dogen Kigen. 1994. Master Dgen's Shobgenz. Translated by Gudo Nishijima

    and Chodo Gross. Book 1. London: Windbell Publications.

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    Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. OneDimensionclMan. Boston: Beacon Press.May, Reinhard. 1996. Hde^er's Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on his Work.

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