The Way of the Mountain (Excerpts)

Joan Halifax

Joan Halifax is a cultural ecologist and Buddhist teacher who has long been at the forefront of cultural and spiritual exploration. She is the author of Shaman: The Wounded Healer and The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth, the coauthor, with Stanislav Grof, of The Human Encounter with Death, and the editor of the anthology Shamanic Voiced. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is the founder and president of Upaya, a Buddhist studies center of environmental inquiry. "The Way of the Mountain” is an excerpt from her book The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth (HarperCollins, 1993).

Everybody has a geography that can be used for change. That is why we travel to far-off places. Whether we know it or not, we need to renew ourselves in territories that are fresh and wild. We need to come home through the body of alien lands. For some, these journeys of change are taken intentionally and mindfully. They are pilgrimages, occasions when Earth heals us directly.

Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage places where peoples have been humbled and strengthened. They are symbols of the Sacred Center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body, we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surroundings. The closer you come to the mountain, the more it disappears. The mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it. Its body begins to spread out over the landscape, losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain, the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step. Its crown is buried in space. Its body is buried in the breath. . . .

Mountains are extolled not only for their qualities but also for their effect on those who relate to them. Taking refuge in them, pilgrimaging to them, and walking around or ascending them has long been a way for the shaman and the Buddhist to purify and realize the mind of the mountain. The surface of inner and outer landscape, of the above and below, meet in the mountain body. The sense of place is confirmed in the mountain body. iThe spirit of place is confirmed when the mountain disappears into the landscape of the mind. Thus one reveres mountains.

Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both i the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me, and changed me: Mount Fuji, Mount Shasta, Mount Kailas, the Schreckhorn, Kanchenjunga. Mountains are abodes for ancestor and deity. They are places where energy is discovered, made, acquired and spent. Mountains are symbols, as well, of ensuring truth and of the human quest for spirit. I was told long ago to spend time with mountains.