from Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 23, Number 1

Singing The Dyads: The Chinese Landscape Scroll and Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End

Anthony Hunt

University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

Anthony Hunt, "Singing the Dyads: The Chinese Landscape Scroll and Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End," Journal of Modern Literature, XXIII, 1 (Fall 1999), pp. 7-34. ©Foundation for Modern Literature, 2000.

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To hold the physical book in hand, slowly turning the pages of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End, reinforces the impression that this work of a lifetime is, quite literally, an extended verbal landscape painting. Because the end papers reproduce images taken from a well-known Chinese horizontal hand scroll Ch'i-shan wu-chin ("Streams and Mountains Without End"), the thirty-nine sections of Snyder's long poem appear as an interconnected extension of that horizontal turning.¹ Nor is it a surprise to discover that "Endless Streams and Mountains," the opening section of Mountains and Rivers Without End, has been inspired and shaped by the scroll it describes, Ch'i-shan wu-chin.

Although the poet had been impressed by East Asian landscape paintings in Seattle as a young boy, he points to a critical moment in the development of his aesthetic sensibility--and of the genesis of his poem--when he was a student in Oriental languages at the University of California at Berkeley. While he practiced sumi painting under the tutelage of Chiura Obata, whose "Evening Glow at Yosemite Waterfall"² illuminates the book's dust jacket cover, the poet was equally involved in understanding the spirit and mind of East Asian aesthetics:

In museums and through books I became aware of how the energies of mist, white water, rock formations, air swirls--a chaotic universe where everything is in place--are so much a part of the East Asian painter's world. In one book I came upon a reference to a hand scroll (shou-chuan) called Mountains and Rivers Without End. The name stuck in my mind.³

To say "landscape painting" in China is, in fact, to say "mountains and rivers":

. . . landscape is Master of Chinese painting. And yet "Landscape," as you understand it in the West, is a misleading term; with you it includes leafy lanes, moorland, ploughed fields, forests, and downs--every possible aspect of the "land." The Chinese term is "Shan-shui," literally "Mountain and Stream," and these two predominating elements of our well-loved country have long stood as symbols of all the aspects of Nature.⁴

Depending on the writer, the Chinese ideograms are sometimes translated as "mountain-stream," "mountain-river," or "mountain-water"; yet however the phrase is translated, Chinese landscape painting attempts to capture the essence of life, in all its complementary nature:

In Chinese, the expression mountain-water means, by extension, the landscape, and so landscape painting is called mountain and water painting. . . . Mountain and water constitute, in the eyes of the Chinese, the two poles of nature, and they are charged with rich meaning.

. . . to paint mountain and water is to paint the portrait of man--not so much his physical portrait (although this aspect is not absent) but more that of his mind and spirit: his rhythm, his gait and bearing, his torments, his contradictions, his fears, his peaceful or exuberant joy, his secret desires, his dream of the infinite, and so forth.

. . . Through the richness of their content and through their relationship of contrast and complementarity, mountain and water become the principal figures in the universal process of transformation. . . . [I]n spite of the apparent contradiction between the two entities, they have a relationship of reciprocal becoming. Each one of them is perceived as a state that is constantly attracted and complemented by the other. Just like yang, which contains yin, and yin, which contains yang, mountain, which is characterized by yang, is virtually water, and water, characterized by yin, is virtually mountain.⁵

Mountains and Rivers Without End unquestionably deals with the same relationships and correspondences, the "universal process of transformation," the same "reciprocal becoming" of the mountains-rivers dyad. Snyder himself tells us that when he first went to Japan he "read geology and geomorphology" and came to see the yogic implications of "mountains" and "rivers" as the play between the tough spirit of willed self-discipline and the generous and loving spirit of concern for all beings: a dyad presented in Buddhist iconography as the wisdom-sword-wielding Manjushri, embodying transcendent insight, and his partner, Tr, the embodiment of compassion, holding a lotus or a vase. I could imagine this dyad as paralleled in the dynamics of mountain uplift, subduction, erosion, and the planetary water cycle.⁶

His realization of these relationships only grew deeper as the years went on. In 1964, Snyder told Gene Fowler that "More and more . . . [he was] aware of very close correspondences between the external and internal landscape. In my long poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, I'm dealing with these correspondences, moving back and forth."⁷

During the early development of Mountains and Rivers Without End Snyder often referred to being inspired by a scroll located in the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. Even as late as the early 1980s, he told Katherine McNeil that

"Mountains and Rivers" is a title for a number of Chinese landscape paintings. One is by the Yüan Dynasty painter, Hsü-pen, whose work inspired me. I'm writing about the complementarity of mountains and rivers, but that's really the planet, taking that on.⁸

Eventually, the curators at the Freer concluded that Lu Yüan, and not Hsü Pen, was the painter of the handscroll. At some point during this period, the poet began to allude to an anonymous scroll with a similar title residing in the Cleveland Museum of Art.⁹ In the 1995 Orion publication of "Endless Streams and Mountains" (the introductory section of Snyder's long poem), the narrator-poet says that he saw the Cleveland scroll "in the 1970s," a reference which--taken at face value--indicates that he had already been studying it, and most likely many others, at the same time that he was making references to the Freer painting.¹⁰

Although the Cleveland scroll is only occasionally on display, it is well known to art historians:

The physical aspects of the Cleveland landscape are as well known as those of any early Chinese painting. It is an unsigned handscroll (35.1 by 213 cm.) done in ink and slight coloring on silk with nine colophons that provide information about the work's early history. Forty-eight seals of collectors, including eight belonging to Liang Ch'ing-piao (1620-1691), give further evidence of the transmission of the scroll from the 1340s on.¹¹

The dating of the scroll is somewhat controversial. Susan Bush points out that it was "Originally placed in the first quarter of the twelfth century (late Northern Sung), [but] it is now thought by several eminent authorities in the field to be more likely to date around 1150 (early Chin), although one dissenting opinion would have it be as early as the last quarter of the eleventh century."¹² Regardless of its date, it seems fitting that a landscape scroll with an unnamed creator should be an inspiration for a poem that takes on the entire planet. Snyder himself draws attention to the scroll's anonymity in a note that concludes the first section of his long poem: "Even then [in the thirteenth century] the painter was unknown, 'a person of the Sung Dynasty'" (p. 9). It is quite possible that Snyder's choice of the Cleveland scroll was motivated by the relatively large body of critical material available for its study. In addition to scholarly essays, the scroll has been meticulously described in a full-length monograph written by Sherman Lee and Wen Fong, a book which Snyder refers to in the endnotes published with his long poem.¹³ Moreover, photographs and slides are available from the Cleveland Museum of Art for a detailed study of its images. In the final analysis, however, as the poet himself told me, the sixteen-foot Freer scroll--with its wealth of design and its multitudes of representational objects for contemplation--was just "too rich."¹⁴ In contrast, the Cleveland scroll, a little less than half as long, is easier to take in at a single glance while apparently depicting all of the elements that Snyder wishes to capture for his aesthetic purposes.

Beyond specific scrolls, the genre of Chinese landscape painting may well be the "aspect of the Chinese imagination which has had the longest influence on Snyder's poetry."¹⁵ The poet revealed to Dan McLeod that his first encounter with the world of Chinese landscape painting came before he was a teenager:

The cascades of Washington, and the Olympics, are wet, rugged, densely forested mountains that are hidden in cloud and mist much of the year. When I was a boy of nine or ten I was taken to the Seattle Art Museum, and was struck more by Chinese landscape paintings than anything I'd seen before, or maybe since. I saw first that they looked like real mountains, and mountains of an order close to my heart; second that they were different mountains of another place and true to those mountains as well; and third that they were mountains of the spirit and that these paintings pierced into another reality which both was and was not the same reality as "the mountains."¹⁶

Although Snyder has told the story of his early visit to the Seattle Art Museum to more than one interviewer, in this version his sophisticated perception of these painted mountains reminds one of Dgen's observations about painting that serve as an epigraph for Mountains and Rivers Without End.

If you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real, the Dharma is not real.

Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting. (p. ix)¹⁷

The misty painted Chinese mountains seen by Snyder in Seattle are "real" on several levels: in a generic sense they appear to him as a true (or real) reflection of the kind of mountains with which he grew up, the verifiable Cascade and Olympic ranges. Yet the mountains painted by the Chinese artist were not, of course, the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, but in their carefully drawn verisimilitude they are a real image of those Chinese mountains. These painted landscapes are real also in that they capture the essence of what a mountain range truly is, an animated and animating spirit which would not exist without correspondence to the physical mountains. Undoubtedly, such sophisticated observations about mountains (and rivers) developed at a later stage in Snyder's thinking, yet their origin may be traced to that insightful moment in the mind of a ten-year-old boy.

Much of Snyder's thinking about the historical development of Chinese landscape painting is captured in the still unpublished manuscript which he shared with McLeod. T'ang landscapes, for example, are said by Snyder to be "still half-tied to journeys, topographies or poems," until, eventually, with the Sung dynasty, the landscape artists

opened out to great space: with the rock formations, plants and trees, seasons, ways of appearance and disappearance. . . . [V]ast scenes . . . become visionary timeless lands of mountain rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas; in which people are small, but lovingly rendered, doing righteous tasks, or reclining and enjoying their world.¹⁸

Snyder goes on to speak of those Sung landscape painters who didn't always walk the hills they portrayed. With a known vocabulary of forms and the freedom of the brush they could invent mountains that . . . seemed to float in mist. But the life is what counts: this vision of earth surface as organism, in which water, cloud, rock, and plant growth all stream through each other.¹⁹

These are mountains that Snyder feels are "magical and difficult, the routes are not clear, yet they are passable." After the Yüan dynasty, Snyder theorizes that "painting kept love of nature alive" for a civilization that was "living more in cities and farther from the hills." These were paintings "done by people who had never walked the wild, for people who would never see it." He singles out a painting (Wang Hui's Landscape in the style of Chu-jan and Yen Wen-Kuei) from the 1700s that "does one more turn":

it draws out to sea at the end, where the sea-fog is twisting into scrolls that take us back to the very beginning. Fine. Mountains were meant to be deeply entered, on foot, where the naked energy can be touched anew.²⁰

Among these comments one also sees into the process of the developing imagination of Gary Snyder. At times, Snyder walks the spaces of the landscape painting as if they were actually under his feet; the trails of the painting are maplike in his mind. At other times, his understanding moves outside the painting as he coolly becomes critical of its style or of the civilization that style reveals. And then there are the times when he clearly imagines going "beyond" into the spaces farther than the spaces of the painting, into "visionary timeless lands of mountain rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas." Nor is the ecological vision of planetary interdependence absent; among the Sung painters--even those who did not always walk the hills they portrayed--Snyder notes the presence of this "vision of earth surface as organism, in which water, cloud, rock, and plant growth all stream through each other."

In using the horizontal handscroll as a structural model for his long poem, Snyder had access both to a set of aesthetic principles and to a usable content in one stroke. It is fairly obvious, even to one with little or no expertise as an art critic, that the Cleveland scroll may be divided into distinctly different sections. At the outset, then, there is an instant comparison: a complete scroll with discrete parts and a long poem of thirty-nine sections that are gathered into four units. According to some art historians, the scroll appears to be a composite of several landscape styles. With its "shifting points of view or arbitrary spatial juxtapositions, and the relatively abbreviated depictions of motifs," Susan Bush suggests that it is an intentional review of earlier landscape styles: "an hommage à five early masters of monochrome landscape painting." Her theory is that a viewer who looks at the complete scroll from left to right will see in its "compressed mountainscapes" a reference in "historical sequence to the styles of the five founders of monumental ink landscape traditions, the tenth-century masters Ching Hao, Kuan T'ung, Li Ch'eng, Yen Wen-Kuei, and Fan K'uan."²¹ The five styles in the Cleveland landscape, Bush speculates, recall the "five schools of Ch'an [Zen] Buddhism," an echo that Snyder would surely not miss if he were aware of it.²² Yet it is far more likely that Snyder has simply been drawn to the scroll's observable variation in landscape styles:

The conceptually up-ended ranges of the middle portion have the overdramatized quality of cardboard stage sets by contrast with the misty, level reaches or layered stretches that open and close the painting. . . . In these introductory and concluding sections, the broad sweep of continuous ground leading up to foothills and the distancing of farther peaks through believable mist effects must be seen as signs of a contemporary realism.²³

Some sections of the painting emphasize the human in the midst of nature while other sections, perhaps reminiscent of other styles, depict elemental scenes of hard-edged rock and water, the veritable "wild." As a whole, it is a remarkable painting to view, even in reproductions and slides.

Sherman Lee's description of the scroll also notes its varying landscape styles:

it is a somewhat eclectic picture . . . and [it] recapitulates much of the previous development [of the historical progression of landscape painting in China]. It begins with a small, low, intimate landscape in the then up-to-date and fashionable style of Zhao Lingran, goes on to a mountain-encircled space recalling Wang Chuan Villa, then proceeds to a style of painting rather like Dong Yuan's, rolling and resonant in its form, followed by a crystalline style based upon another Northern Song [Sung] master, Yan Wengui, then moves to a climactic mountain unit painted very much in the towering style of Fan Kuan, and finally ends with a forest and distant mountain area, perhaps close in style to Guo Xi.²⁴

Here Lee characterizes the different parts of the scroll as it unrolls to the left from the right in terms that are, for the most part, easily understood by anyone examining the scroll: a "small, low, intimate landscape," a "mountain-encircled space," a "rolling and resonant" form followed by a "crystalline style," a "climactic mountain unit," and finally a "forest and distant mountain area" to conclude. Lee comments that such handscrolls not only allow for the "development of pictorial structure within a frame formed by the beginning and end of the painting," but also require "organization in time and space."

. . . one can vary the frame by rolling either end, or both, thus creating innumerable small pictures at will. At the same time, in moving along the composition from right to left, viewing a few feet at a time, one passes in time through a landscape, something not possible in the hanging scroll or album painting.²⁵

Lee's method for reading the scroll is equally legitimate for readers of Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. The various sections of his long poem can be read in and for themselves, yet the sections have been gathered into four larger units, each of which may be appreciated as an integrated module on its own. In still another manner for literary understanding and appreciation, one may read the entire poem from beginning to end as a singular long poem. One might even imagine that the poet's close study of the handscroll affected the harmonious placement of certain sections of his poem. Without imposing a cause-and-effect relationship upon the two works, it seems to me quite demonstrable that the final section of Mountains and Rivers Without End ("Finding the Space in the Heart") flattens out geographically into the horizontal space of a Great Basin playa and drops off in poetic intensity, just as surely as the last section of the Cleveland scroll levels out visually.

Lee goes so far as to posit a musical quality to the Cleveland handscroll:

Sequence and spacing can be used to create "movements," as in music. Streams and Mountains Without End, for example, begins with a gentle, quiet theme, then gradually shifts to a first climactic theme of mountain peaks and village. This alters to a strong and rolling but quieter passage, ending in a second climactic variation of the mountain theme, which recalls the recent past and hints at things to come. Here a new, staccato motif begins, of vertical mountains with an almost crystalline structure. This ends, and a rocky variation prepares us for the final great climactic mountain theme. . . . Finally, the scroll ends with a variation on the quiet opening passage, incorporating mountain elements that have occurred throughout most of the picture. This coda, though not dramatically as powerful as some earlier passages, summarizes the whole.²⁶

Focusing on merely one example, we might say that if "The Mountain Spirit" is the "final great climactic mountain theme" of Snyder's poem, then "Finding the Space in the Heart" is its closing element, "a variation on the quiet opening passage," a "coda, though not dramatically as powerful as some earlier passages, [which] summarizes the whole." The end of Snyder's poem, as Lee states of the painting, is a "variation" on the beginning, as the poet returns to "walking on walking" and "lifts away" the wet black brush tip that was set down in the first section. The harmony between the two artistic forms, while hardly formulaic, is tantalizing. As aesthetic works, exact parallels between them will never be found, but there is no doubt that Snyder's poem has been composed in a similarly rhythmic fashion. Mountains and Rivers Without End may be said to resonate with the felt "rhythms" of the Cleveland handscroll.

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In an interview from the early 1970s, Snyder discusses the possibility of finding a different "fluidity" in form and "formal patterning" if one extended measurement over a sustained period. He speaks specifically of the music of India with its raga (melodic mode) and tala (rhythmic mode) that had given him a model for "a longer range sense of structuring with improvisatory possibilities taking place on a foundation of a certain steadiness that runs through it."²⁷ The longer range that he speaks of may easily be applied to either his poem or the handscroll. All one has to do is to "step back" to view the whole. Dramatic evidence of structural patterning in the Cleveland scroll may be found by studying the miniaturized photo of it that has been reproduced across a two-page spread in Sherman Lee's A History of Far Eastern Art.²⁸ There, displayed in horizontal fashion for a single glance of the eye, the planes of the opening and closing units, the lifting and dropping of various ridge lines, the triangular peaks and intermittent valleys, the misty places set off by those places which are precisely drawn, all unfold into a unified gestalt of rhythmic patterning. If this reading of the scroll's rhythm seems farfetched, it would be good to remember that Snyder has spoken of observing real ranges of mountains in a similar manner. In his interview with Jacoby, Snyder explains his "evolving ability to visualize the whole of the landscape of the Sierra Nevada, to sort of feel it all moving underneath me." He speaks of the "periodicity of ridge, gorge, ridge, gorge, ridge . . . an interlacing network of, oh, 115-million-year-old geological formation rhythms."²⁹ When Jacoby asks Snyder how to do that in poetry, Snyder asks him if he has "ever tried singing a range of mountains" and then proceeds to tell him how to do so:

Well, you sit down somewhere where you're looking at a long mountain horizon. Then you sing it up and down all the way along like that. . . . I tried it on the mountains up above Death Valley, the Panamint range, one time. I tried it many times until I got it right. You know, until I got to know that skyline so well that I knew when I was following the melody that the mountains were making. At first it was hit or miss kind of. And then you get closer. Then you begin to feel it. Then you get so that it's a kind of source of form, right?³⁰

Evidently, Snyder is able to sing the rhythm of actual mountains as well as those that exist on silk or on paper. It is as Dgen says, "if you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real . . ." (p. ix). The sung rhythms of the Sierra may be heard just as surely as the periodicity of the ridges and gorges of the Cleveland scroll; the sections of Mountains and Rivers Without End also lead toward an observable rhythm. Some sections are short; some are of average length; some are extended. Some sections are prosaic; others are intensely poetic; others combine these modes of presentation. Some sections seem flat; others rise to moments of heightened emotion. However one chooses to measure the beat, it is clear that a cadence does exist and that it exists on several levels. The rhythm of the eye corresponds to the rhythm of the ear, and both are grounded in actuality. Tracing the measure in the units of the poem develops one's sense of the "longer" form, yet stepping back to observe the totality also serves to underscore the periodicity of the units. Any way one looks at it or hears it, rhythm is a "way in" to the poem.

As Sherman Lee states, the "representational organization is fully as important as the aesthetic one."³¹ From the very beginning, if it was nothing else, Mountains and Rivers Without End was a poem replete with travelers seen against a background of the planet's rocks and waterways, especially--although not exclusively--those of Asia and the American West. As the reader journeys from section to section while the poem unrolls, the names of hundreds of mountains and rivers flow off the tongue with ease.

Of mountains and mountain ranges, to select only some of the most prominent: the Olympics and the Cascades ("Night Highway . . .," "Three Worlds . . ."); the Sierras (Mt. Whitney in "Bubbs Creek"); the Brooks Range of Alaska (Doonerak in "Arctic Midnight TwilightÖ"); the White Mountains of California/Nevada ("The Hump-Backed Flute Player" and "The Mountain Spirit"); the circumambulated Mt. Tamalpais; King Lear Peak ("Finding the Space in the Heart"); the Central Asian Pamir ("The Hump-Backed Flute Player"); the Himalaya ("An Offering for Tr").

Of rivers and watercourses, to name only a few: the Elwha River; the profusion of rivers found in "The Hump-Backed Flute Player" (Sweetwater, Quileute, Hoh, Amur, Tanana, Mackenzie, Old Man, Bighorn, Platte, the San Juan); the Ganges in "The Market"; the Kamo and Columbia rivers in "The Flowing"; the Hiellen River of the Queen Charlotte Islands; the Tatshenshini (or Raven's Beak) River in British Columbia; the Morava River of the Czech Republic; the unnamed watery location of "Afloat" (actually Adams Inlet, Glacier Bay); even the ancient geological Tethys Sea in "An Offering for Tr," and Lake Lahontan of "Finding the Space in the Heart," both of which no longer exist. Nor should we forget the metaphorical "Sea of Economy" in "Walking the New York Bedrock." We earthlings truly wash our bowls in this water.

Among these mountains and rivers, the city becomes interconnected with the wild. In the mid-1980s Snyder seems to have come to terms with the city landscape as a part of his poem. Two sections of the final poem--"Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin" and "Walking the New York Bedrock"--explore the wilderness in the city landscape. It is not that the city did not exist for him before this; very early sections of the poem, including "Night Highway 99," "Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads," and the displaced section, "Hymn to the Goddess San Francisco," all deal with a cityscape. Yet the tone of these early sections inclines toward rejection rather than the acceptance of or accommodation to the city that one finds in the later city poems.³²

Ultimately, Snyder also leveled his poetic landscape. Somewhere in his imagining of this poem, whether it came from exploring the Chinese handscrolls or from developments in his own life, Snyder lowered the heights and broadened the rivers. In the mid-1980s, as he began writing into his poem again after almost a decade of having set it aside for other projects, Snyder de-emphasized the linear rivers and vertical peaks. When, in 1993, he quietly published a third book of "mountains and rivers" sections, it was significantly entitled: North Pacific Lands & Waters: A Further Six Sections.³³ The rivers had become "waters" and the mountains became "lands." Both the Hiellen River of "Haida Gwai . . ." and the Tatshenshini River of "Raven's Beak River" eventuate in unique "doabs" (a confluence of rivers): in the former, the setting depicts the place where the river meets the ocean; in the latter, the meeting between the river and Alsek Lake takes place under the watchful eyes of the glaciers. "Afloat" is set in an ocean bay. At the same time, while one cannot deny the fact of a mountain landscape in "Arctic Midnight Twilight . . .," it is the only poem of these six "further sections" to deal with such a setting, and even within the poem the peaks of Doonerak and Midnight Mountain are made subservient both to the clouds that surround them and to the sheep that take to their slopes. It also is interesting to note that the Brooding Heron book includes an early poem, "Greasy Boy," as a named section of Mountains and Rivers Without End. Before its publication in North Pacific Lands & Waters, there had been no indication that this nineteen-line poem would become a part of the longer sequence and, in fact, it has not been included in the final book. For a moment, then, among this late grouping of sections we see the presence of "Greasy Boy" and question it. One answer may lie in the landscape that it evokes with its omnipresent dirt and "sand blown grim soot" in a windy "scab land" (p. 19). Clearly not a mountain setting, this flat landscape may be an early instance of what will become explicit desert scenes in the later "Earrings Dangling and Miles of Desert" and "Finding the Space in the Heart," the last poem in the final sequence.

Snyder has painted numberless little travelers across the scroll of his poetic landscape. Some are historical, while some are mythical or legendary; some are ghostly; many are human, and many more are animal. "Fellow travelers in the scroll," as Snyder himself has said, "are the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang, bears, an elderly farm woman, wild sheep, the female Buddha Tr, woodrats, Coyote, Raven, macaque monkeys, the poet Su Shih, the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka, and many others."³⁴ Nor should we forget that the journey undertaken here is as much an act of the land as it is of the beings upon it. In some of the sections--"Arctic Midnight Twilight . . ." is a good example--the landscape itself calls forth the beings, sheep in this case. Indeed, the line-breaks in the quintessential lines of the poem--"walking on walking/ under foot/ earth turns"--leave readers wondering whether it is the walking foot that turns the planet or the turning planet that has taught the foot to walk. In the immense images of Mountains and Rivers Without End, the very mountains and rivers are travelers, always in motion, always flowing. There are both continental drift and volcanic uplift; entire "seas" come and go (only to come again with some future turning of the universe); there is historical and mythical movement from the Paleolithic via migrations of the Ice Age(s) to the present moment. In all, it is a vast dance of all beings interrelated with the ongoing rhythms of the universe. Yet, at the heart of this space, in the midst of the enormous movements implied and activated by the poem, sits a listener, a reader who hears the rhythms. There, with the melody of flute players in the background, in a space that can and cannot be defined, sitting quietly, cross legg'd in the emptiness, we may meditate with Snyder on the curl in the horns of sheep or on the twisted branches of the oldest living being on the planet, the Bristlecone Pine. We listen for the rhythm in the whorl.

The horizontal dimension of the scroll may be seen as a symbol for Snyder's personal journey in time and space and for humanity's general historical and cultural journey starting from some dim recess of time in the Paleolithic era and continuing into the present of our so-called civilized eras and places. Yet Snyder's poems commemorate no mere picaresque wandering in time. This horizontal sweep co-exists with a vertical dimension which disappears into the recesses of our minds even as our eyes begin to perceive it. Journeys that begin as if they were rooted in the physical wander into a different dimension of SPACE; the path winds up into the "upper silk void" represented by the cloud-air-mist-white space in the Chinese landscape paintings. As Chiang Yee states:

It is illuminating to see the later Sung masterpieces with large areas of empty space occurring as part of the composition, while only the topmost peaks of a few mountains are limned in, or a single leafy spray of peach blossom or other flower. Ever since [the later Sung period], SPACE has been the most outstanding characteristic of our landscape painting.³⁵

The merger with empty space is as important as the journey that follows the path; yet one way does not negate the other. The onward-and-forward trip in time down the road-of-cause-and-effect is truly a journey "without end" because the road does loop back on itself as the traveler follows endlessly the turning wheel of life. This interminable trip is analogous to several journeys--the author's, his fictional counterpart's, or the reader's--taken throughout Mountains and Rivers Without End, but most especially in "The Mountain Spirit," the climactic section in which we find, yet again, the lines: "Walking on walking/ under foot earth turns" (p. 143). Here, on a peak in the White Mountains of California, readers meet Snyder's Westernized version of the mythological Japanese mountain being, Yamamba, who epitomizes the Buddhist and planetary, "ceaseless wheel of lives" (p. 140).

Snyder's concept of space always includes the possibility of Buddhist enlightenment, a moment when one "awakens to a nowness of emptiness (shnyat), wherein one comprehends "the true nature of things" by knowing that "the entire universe is emptiness" including oneself.³⁶ This "consciousness," or prajñ, is not the result of logical reasoning, but a moment of "immediately experienced intuitive wisdom."³⁷ The Buddhist concept of the "void" or "emptiness" is not nihilistic; the world of emptiness is not separate from the world of phenomena but inheres in it. It is not that "things do not exist but rather that they are nothing beside appearances."³⁸ In "Night Highway 99," in the midst of describing thousands of miles of journeys taken at various times over the same highway running south from Washington State to California (and back again), the poet speaks of a "Chinese scene of winter hills and trees/ us 'little travelers' in the bitter cold" (p. 21). Five lines later, Snyder alludes to the potential of a merger with emptiness: "The road that's followed goes forever;/ in half a minute crossed and left behind" (p. 21). These are the same travelers described by Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) to Ray Smith in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums: ". . . little men hiking in an endless landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with the fog in the upper silk void."³⁹ Ultimately, even words are dyadic; they are, themselves, "empty." All talk of "the void" can be couched only in metaphorical terms. Yet these words, these forms, these metaphors are the only ones we have; they are what we cling to. The white spaces of the scroll, whether left empty by the artist, or imaged as tangible cloud-mist-air, remain metaphors for the indescribable. It is no different for the words of a long poem entitled Mountains and Rivers Without End. If we had hopes of being transported somewhere "beyond," the Zen masters would bring us back down to earth with a reminder that all such wisdom gained is ultimately nothing special. The wisdom of beyond is rooted in the earth. Still, as one can spot the painter's intention in composing the "upper silk void" of a handscroll, so attentive readers may detect similar hints in Snyder's poem. At such moments, often with only a slight poetic slippage in time or space or customary logic, the poet endeavors to alter the reader's perception in a profound way.

So, in "Journeys," the reader struggles with the reality of Snyder's dream visions, visions that conclude with a deadly falling over a cliff which opens up "the way to the back country" (p. 56). In "Bubbs Creek Haircut," the consciousness of the mountain-climbing narrator is altered as he meditates on the slippery solidity of our world during his ritualized haircut. The "Blue Sky" attempts to cut across the normal sense of time and language, to make matters whole under a single, curving, turquoise-blue sky of consciousness. When the eagle of that section "flies," it flies to the same place that exists beyond the road that is left behind; it flies into the wild or falls into the back-country, that is, it encounters the wisdom of the void. In the "Humpbacked Flute Player" it is the wisdom which we find in the prophet Wovoka's "empty hat": like Black Coyote, we are asked to see the "whole world" where an instant earlier there appeared to be nothing (p. 81). Although the wisdom of emptiness permeates all of Mountains and Rivers Without End, it nevertheless culminates, momentarily, in the non-dual space described in the final section, "Finding the Space of the Heart." Stepping back from this long poem at its end, a reader finds that the true wisdom of the poem, hinted at in earlier sections along the path of one's reading, is one's grasp of the dynamic itself: that the universe, be it mental or physical, up or down, poet's or reader's, is a vast network of interrelationships which is perceived only in glimpses and guesses in any given time span. The trick, if it may be called that, is to realize ourselves as integral with the entire landscape that we inhabit even as we stand apart from it, musing upon the paths which we have already traversed and those which we may yet explore. With the scroll unrolled and laid out before us, we may see in the distance, and perhaps even hear, the rhythms of its drawn dimensions. As we come closer to its representational world, we note the travelers on their journeys among the mountains, the tiny boats floating on the rivers, the small birds in the "chinquapin" or "liquidambar" trees (p. 6).

When one is truly "there," as T.S. Eliot has said in another impressive long poem of religious intent, one will not be able to speak of "where" one is, only that one is "there."

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.⁴⁰

As a mystic, Eliot is unquestionably correct about where he has been, yet one must insist with equal rectitude that "except for the turning world"" there would also be no dance. A fundamental paradox of Buddhist logic, this "empty" world, the only one that we will ever have, is the path to enlightenment. In the epigraph to Mountains and Rivers Without End, Dgen tells us that the world we know, the entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky in which it resides--everything that we might possibly see, touch, taste, hear, and smell--is nothing, nothing but a painting. Yet it is the same painting that leads to "unsurpassed enlightenment."

Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting. [p. ix]

What a marvelous painting it is; what mountains, what rivers, what vistas of open space, what tiny trails we humans have walked upon for thousands upon thousands of years. What flora and fauna reside there. It slips by--all of it--in each moment of time, all unrolling forever.

* * * *

As the opening section of Mountains and Rivers Without End, "Endless Streams and Mountains" both introduces and mirrors the larger work. A preview of the poetic trip that Snyder is about to take us on, it reflects the lifetime journey of the poet and the journey of the world itself as it whirls its way down the corridors of time in the vastness of space. The journey will, at times, merge us with Snyder's traveling persona. While on the road with him, his eyes become our eyes, and we see and experience the world as if we were partakers of his original perceptions. At other times, we are distanced from that close contact. Our viewpoint is broadened, shifting into what appears to be a more objective mode, and we are invited to see, in the words of the poem,

. . . this land from a boat on a lake

or a broad slow river,

coasting by. (p. 5)

Knowing of Snyder's appreciation for Ezra Pound, some readers may be reminded of the "periplum" described in Canto LIX of Pound's Cantos:

periplum, not as land looks on a map

but as sea bord seen by men sailing.⁴¹

Daniel Pearlman, speaking specifically of Pound's Pisan Cantos, explains the concept further:

The word implies not only a voyage of discovery . . ., but in the case of a poet, a voyage of spiritual discovery. As a narrative device, the "periplum" image binds the disparate elements of the Pisan Cantos into a pattern of continuity.⁴²

Something of the same effect can be seen in Snyder's intentional use of the boat image in "Endless Streams and Mountains." Unquestionably, the reader of Mountains and Rivers Without End is being asked to participate in, and to evaluate the nature of, spiritual discovery in several of the long poem's sections. Moreover, just as the painted boat image imposes a unique perspective upon the author's persona as he reads the painting before him, so it affects the mind and eye of the reader of Snyder's poem. As if we were coasting our way across the successive landscapes of an unrolling scroll, we thread a path through "Endless Streams and Mountains" and the various sections of Mountains and Rivers that follow it. Moving among and across the sections of the long poem, readers both discover and create (and, with each new reading, recreate) a "pattern of continuity" embodied by the long poem. In sum, a perfectly valid way of perceiving the complex interconnected structure of Mountains and Rivers Without End is to see the entire poem as a dynamic sequence of periploi.

In "Endless Streams and Mountains," as well as in the longer poem that it introduces, we observe verbalized landscapes unrolling before us as we drift back and forth among lines, stanzas, and pages. As the poem goes by in sections and subsets of sections, we notice echoes; we discover associations. As participants, however, we place ourselves among the tiny people found in the scroll-poem; at times, we imaginatively become those people. In his note to the Orion publication of "Endless Streams and Mountains," Snyder makes this point directly. Commenting on a line from K'ang-li Kuei-kuei's 1332 colophon to the scroll Snyder observes:

The remark leads a viewer to turn the handscroll slowly and to journey through the streams and mountains and into the mists and clouds. The scroll is read from right to left and one is affected by the nature as if actually there. The journey a viewer makes through the canvas is marked clearly: There is a path that can be followed even if, at times, there are alternate paths to create variety, and always along a passage, a reader experiences a harmony with nature.⁴³

As with the viewer of the landscape, so with the poet-traveler and the reader; simultaneously, one finds oneself both in and outside this poem-painting. As Snyder's persona enters the world of the handscroll, so we enter the world of the composed poem. We too start by "Clearing the mind and sliding in/to that created space" (p. 5). As we come in, we will find "Endless Streams and Mountains," like so much of the longer poem, to be a mélange of imaginative writing and prosaic fact. We may see with the guidance of Snyder's poetic eyes, yet his immediate naming of the actual scroll as "Ch'i Shan Wu Chin" (p. 5) encourages us to consider its verifiable original source.⁴⁴ Toward the end of the section, he will factually locate it for us--"Now it's at the Cleveland Art Museum, which sits on a rise that looks out toward the waters of Lake Erie" (p. 8). Even with the mystery of its anonymity, this handscroll is no mere poetic fiction; it really exists. Similarly, Mountains and Rivers Without End may be located by a precise time and place of publication, yet Snyder's authorship of this very real poem may be construed as ambiguous. Although this poem was made by Gary Snyder, it has just as surely been brought into being by the energy-mind-dance of the planet itself.

It is obvious from the opening lines that "Endless Streams and Mountains," like the larger poem that contains it, is a matrix of places. Finding ourselves in the "created space," we are immediately presented with "a web of waters streaming over rocks" (p. 5), a phrase whose words artfully play upon the title both of the section and of the long poem and, at the same time, reinforce the concepts of an interconnective "web" and the dyad of water-rock which are mainstays of the entire poem. On a path that twists and turns in the landscape of boulders and trees, we begin to realize that there is no "we," no "I" leading us. There are only eyes gazing over shifting scenes, eyes that affect and are affected by the world which they inhabit as they view it. At first glance, the locale is neither urban nor agricultural nor wild. It appears well-kept with its "tidy cottages and shelters," and somewhere there must be travelers and laborers, for there are "gateways, rest stops, roofed but unwalled work space." Further on, the trail leads, as we might have suspected, upwards. Layer beyond layer, it climbs until the mind's eye roams the "Big ranges" beyond the foregrounded "outcrops," "rocky uplifts" and "brushy cliffs." Finally, our eyes are lifted to the distant "vague peaks" whose tangible ambiguity is surely representative of the emptiness that intermingles with the relatively well defined objects and shapes below (p. 5).

Then, just as swiftly, our gaze returns, this time to people: three on land and two more in a boat just "a bit offshore" (p. 5). These people, like the path described before them, exist in the actual scroll; they are real. Snyder, however, emphasizes the uncertainty of what he is seeing; he is not sure if the third man carries a "roll of mats or a lute." Vision, like fixed perceptions, becomes unstable. There are diverse paths, and just as soon as we become accustomed to one of them, we are pulled off the trail to look at it from somewhere "beyond."

If we unroll the scroll another turn, and then another, closing the previously opened sections as we go, different people come and then go: "someone's fishing"; "Rider and walker cross a bridge"; "[a] man with a shoulder load leans into the grade"; "Another horse and a hiker" (p. 6). Trails come and go, winding through the landscape, sometimes up or back into the disappearing distance, only to return again with new people, different locations. Still, there is always the strong hint that these many paths are one path, that these various people are somehow connected, if only by their relation to the path upon which all of them appear. On the trail or off the path, at work or in recreation, fishing, hiking, riding, perhaps just sitting in meditation--these people are part of a single scroll, an unrolling painted universe. We are there with them; we watch them; we step into their shoes; we sit in their places.

From somewhere higher up in the mountains, water endlessly descends: a "frothy braided torrent," a "cascading streambed"; sometimes there are bridges in sight; sometimes we know that we must enter the water to cross. Vagueness is juxtaposed with distinctiveness: a "jumble of cliffs," "ridge tops edged with bushes," "valley fog below a hazy canyon" (p. 6). Suddenly, there is specificity as we return to a named world. Snyder tells us that the trees along the trail are "chinquapin or/ liquidambars" (p. 6), and we wonder how he knows this.⁴⁵ Is this Snyder's bow to the artist's skill? is it possible to know the exact type of tree depicted merely from viewing the scroll? With some landscape artists, the answer would surely be affirmative; yet here, in this place in this scroll, it is more likely that we are observing Snyder's expansion of reality. The painted world which he observes becomes three dimensional as he inhabits the world he meditates upon. These painted trees merge with those of his actual experience of chinquapin or liquidambars. This dynamic engagement with reality enters and re-enters Mountains and Rivers Without End in many of its sections as dream worlds become real worlds, and real worlds become dreamlike. All worlds are real in a world of non-duality.

The trail's end is upon us. There are "[t]wo moored boats" and a boatman "lost in thought" (p. 6). The eye of perception, transported as if by a foregrounded boat drifting across the face of the entire unrolling scroll, may also feel the impulse to become moored. Yet further landscapes are located beyond; we gaze upon distant "[h]ills beyond rivers, willows in a swamp,/ a gentle valley reaching far inland" (p. 6). Indeed, our journey is not over, nor does Snyder bring our vision to a distinctive ending point, a terminus. Instead, he simply states that "[t]he watching boat has floated off the page" (p. 6). There are always other heights and other distances, another depth and another dimension, to be found in such landscape scrolls or in poems that celebrate them. To the artists who made them as well as to imaginative viewers of them, they are truly "without end."

Yet the representational world of the painting has just ended. Momentarily using prose, the poet unrolls the scroll one more turn, bringing his readers in contact with the conventional placement of "seals and poems" (p. 7) on the scroll. In the world of East Asian landscape painting, as various people come into possession of a scroll of this type, it is commonplace for them to add their personal comments. No art work exists without some form of commentary upon it. Snyder himself says that "In a way the painting is not fully realized until several centuries of poems have been added."⁴⁶ Analysis, interpretation, criticism, evaluation--all become part of the work to which they are attached, increasing the value of the art work accordingly. Demonstrating the Chinese practice of intermingling verbal and visual art, Chinese artists and their patrons certainly felt no reservations about placing their comments--sometimes in prose, more often in the form of a poem--directly on the face of a painted work of art. Patrons often marked a painting with an official seal merely to indicate that it had been in their possession. Even as the verbal Mountains and Rivers Without End must be understood visually as a landscape, so this particular section, "Endless Streams and Mountains," is a colophon added to or impressed upon the painted scroll that it describes.⁴⁷ By adding his own poem-colophon to the existing group, Snyder draws attention to those colophons that he has chosen to quote from in the section: he chooses five of the actual nine in evidence on the scroll. As Snyder does not quote entire colophons or rely on the translations printed in the edition by Lee and Fong, it is clear that his choices are not randomly made.⁴⁸

The opening verse by Wang Wen-wei underscores the presence of Ch'an [Zen] Buddhism that pervades so many of the East Asian landscape scrolls.⁴⁹ The "Fashioner of Things," who "has no original intentions," is a reference to the Zen condition of original mind (p. 7). In the realm of ordinary human existence it is not possible to make (create, fashion, do) anything without having some intention. Similarly, it is likely that both the poet Gary Snyder and the anonymous painter of "Endless Streams and Mountains," as "fashioners" of their works of art, have some intention attached to their creative efforts. Yet every practitioner of Zen continually strives toward a state of "no intention"; thus, Snyder begins "Endless Streams and Mountains" by "clearing the mind and sliding in." Wang Wen-wei marvels at the "miraculous" creative ability of the anonymous painter, but it is more likely that he is attesting to the ability of the artist to let go of his conscious intention in order to let the Fashioner of Things use him. In this manner, these painted "mountains and rivers" embody the "condensed spirit," the ultimate energy of the "Fashioner of Things," yet they remain, in Dgen's words, nothing but a painting. The anonymity of the artist conveys the same idea. We cannot know who, indeed, has "come up with/ these miraculous forests and springs," who or what speaks to us in this "pale ink on fine white silk" (p. 7).

Throughout Mountains and Rivers Without End, and not just in this first section, Snyder often calls his own ego into question. At times, he appears to insist on his real self as Gary Snyder, either as a character in his own poem or as the author of it. At other times, he either fails to put in an appearance when we expect him to, or we observe him as he willfully vanishes from sight. The opening lines of "Endless Streams and Mountains" begin with "clearing the mind," but the subject of this phrase is never specifically identified. We do not know whose mind it is that must be cleared. The answer comes with the closing lines of the poem, when the anonymous "mind" speaks aloud once again: "Step back and gaze again at the land" (p. 8). Is this the poet speaking to himself, we may ask, or is it a command for the reader to follow? Eight lines afterwards, the Snyder "I" is brought into the open when he says: "I walk out of the museum" (p. 8). For most of the section, we are rarely aware directly of Gary Snyder, either as character or as author; when he does appear, it is noticeable.

Li Hui provides some comic relief as he speaks of an urban "noise of dogs and chickens" (p. 7). As Li Hui's "I" complains of his odd tastes and love for "streams and boulders," (that is, the wilderness), the words sound as if they came from Snyder's own mouth. He seems to be lightly mocking his own "odd taste" for inordinately loving the "Mountains and Rivers" with which he is so closely associated.⁵⁰ Snyder's self-directed irony is even more compelling if we consider that the last section of the long poem forgoes mountains and rivers for a desert setting, a contrast of locales that seems startling, yet is less so if one remembers Li Hui's observation.

The interdependent dyad of mountains-rivers returns in the translation from Tien Hsieh of Wei-lo: "The water holds up the mountains,/ The mountains go down in the water . . ." (p. 7).⁵¹ In other words, one should focus neither on the mountains nor on the water but on that misty world of non-duality brought forth by an awareness of their mutual interpenetration. In addition to its Buddhist implications, Snyder's translation clearly underscores the importance of the planetary water cycle, yet another major thematic strand of Mountains and Rivers Without End.

One wonders why Snyder has selected the 1332 quotation from Chih-shun.⁵² Like Chih-shun, we may also marvel at the truly wondrous quality of the anonymous scroll, so perhaps Snyder is in a straightforward way extolling its virtues and nothing more. Readers, however, automatically substitute Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End for the scroll at such moments of generalization. It seems out of character to think of the author egotistically saying of his own work, "this is truly a [poem] worth careful keeping"; nevertheless, it is a rare poem, rarer still in that it was forty years in the making and that it actually did survive a test of fire brought on by drought years at Kitkitdizze, Snyder's home in the Sierras.

Wang To's comment seems aimed facetiously at readers and critics of the future; he expects that they too will be "learned," have "good taste," and write "good prose and poetry" (p. 8).⁵³ Most interestingly, Snyder has chosen to include only some rather mundane comments from the complete colophon. Talk about brothers and brothers-in-law brings us away from aesthetic and spiritualized planes of discussion. Unconnected to a specific subject, the quotation serves as a reminder that enlightenment, if it comes, may ensue from the hands of one's in-laws or neighbors. A little learning and perhaps some good taste may help us to recognize it when it arrives; it is, nevertheless, not distant and unattainable.

The final two names mentioned--Liang Ch'ing-piao and Chang Ta-ch'ien--are mentioned merely to round out the transmission of the scroll from its anonymous beginnings in Shansi province to its present resting place in the Cleveland Museum of Art, where Snyder encountered it. As next in line, Snyder's poem will serve as his own colophon, leaving its mark on the scroll just as surely as Wang Wen-wei and the others have.

Before we leave "Endless Streams and Mountains," one grand yet subtle step remains to be taken:

Step back and gaze again at the land:

it rises and subsides--(p. 8)

Snyder, a character in his own poem, now stands back from this horizontal scroll that he has just observed and described in some detail for us. His movement, for those who recognize it, has the sound and feel of an actor in a Japanese N play. With a burst of concentrated poetic energy, Snyder makes his way toward the final three lines of "Endless Streams and Mountains":

Walking on walking

under foot earth turns

Streams and mountains never stay the same. (p. 9)

These words will resound again in the voice of "Yamamba," the "mountain spirit" of the Japanese N play Yamamba, whom we will meet in another guise in the climactic section of Mountains and Rivers Without End.⁵⁴ Here, at the conclusion of the first turning of his scroll-poem, as if it were an epic invocation, Snyder chants these lines to call forth her muse-like presence and to prepare the way for interconnections that will arise among the sections to come.

The entire scroll may now be taken in at a single glance. Casting his eyes upon it--swinging them from left to right, right to left--Snyder sees the outline of the mountains rise and fall, as if the line where the earth meets the sky, that line of peaks, ridges, and valleys, were a graph plotted on a two-dimensional axis. On trails that thread their way among the mountains and along the rivers, we walk our linear way, rarely having the opportunity to see such totality. From such a perspective, the mountains do not appear to move; the person does the moving. Stepping back for the total picture, one sees the dynamics of the entire range over time. The step back from the logic of self-involvement to the "geo-logic" of planetary time and space provides an opening for enlightenment; it is a view captured best in the words of Heinrich Zimmer:

It was as though the mountains--permanent when considered from the standpoint of our brief human span of some seven decades--should be beheld, all at once, from the perspective of as many millenniums. They would rise and fall like waves. The permanent would be seen as fluid. Great goals would melt before the eyes. Every experience of value would be suddenly transmuted; the mind would be hard put to reorient itself, and the emotions to discover solid ground.⁵⁵

Snyder may indeed be the person who steps back to gaze in this section, but, unnamed as he is, he allows readers to partake of his insight into totality much as they have shared his linear views while trudging along the path or his coastal view while drifting in a boat on the "edge" of the scroll. We watch, yet feel our bodies move even as we watch. The speaker stamps his foot, walks with "it," claps, and turns. His movements parallel those taken by the principal actor in a N drama; the reader is invited to imagine the stylized grace and dignity with which these final actions swiftly move the section toward its concluding lines. "[T]he creeks come in, ah!" (p. 8). One hears the creeks flow; one may even imagine an "om" to accompany the "ah" as Snyder transports himself and the reader closer to enlightenment through attentive listening. The "ah" is significant; its saying marks an awesome moment of relationship between the self and the planet:

The phenomenal world experienced at certain pitches is totally living, exciting, mysterious, filling one with a trembling awe, leaving one grateful and humble. The wonder of the mystery returns direct to one's own senses and consciousness: inside and outside; the voice breathes, "Ah!"

. . . In mantra chanting, the magic utterances, built of seed-syllables such as OM and AYNG and AH, repeated over and over, fold and curl on the breath until--when most weary and bored--a new voice enters, a voice speaks through you clearer and stronger than what you know of yourself; with a sureness and melody of its own, singing out the inner song of the self, and of the planet.⁵⁶

As the creeks are "strained through boulders," so the "mountains" walk "on the water," and "water ripples every hill" (p. 8). With this echo of the two lines that Snyder quoted earlier from the Tien Hsieh colophon--"The water holds up the mountains,/ The mountains go down in the water"--we are reminded once again of the interpenetration of the mountains-and-waters dyad. We feel the intense energy, the dance, the sheer rhythm of spirit moving in these lines. The painting becomes real in that the energies that it represents, which were placed there by the "Fashioner of Things" through the anonymous artist, coalesce with the dynamic body movements of the speaker, who now performs as a N dancer. No longer solely a narrative description, the landscape in "Endless Streams and Mountains" now pulsates with dramatic tension.

Instantly, the scene shifts again. A moment ago, one was inside--not just in the museum, but in the world of a landscape painting; now one is with the poet outside the museum in a landscape of another kind: "I walk out of the museum--low gray clouds over the lake--chill March breeze" (p. 8). Which landscape is the painted rice cake? The change of perspective is instructive, if unsettling, for it leads to doubts about reality, and the encounter with a wavering world is a first step on the path toward the knowledge of emptiness. Here, at the end of "Endless Streams and Mountains," Snyder, a traveler in a N drama of his own making, Mountains and Rivers Without End, feels the emerging presence of the other half of his own ongoing dyad, an energizing feminine spirit whose walking embodies the ceaselessly shifting planetary landscape. Under different guises, their encounters will occur and recur with rising intensity throughout the poem, each engagement leading to wisdom, which, in turn, points the way toward compassion, the "heart" that waits at the center of emptiness at the end of the poem. As with mountains and rivers, so with wisdom and compassion, so with the traveler and the spirit that he must meet, so with the reader and the poem: it is the act of coming together that brings enlightenment; a meaningful existence depends on such eternal interpenetration.

There will be ghosts, as indeed there are in all N plays of this type. The planet's "Old ghost ranges, sunken rivers" (p. 9) hearken back to the Paleolithic and even further into the misty past of the earth itself. Like the blank space before the artist, be it painter or poet, the tale of the planet begins in emptiness, the "broad white space" (p. 9). Some force makes marks upon the white void. Snyder, the word-artist, impelled by the anonymous maker of "Endless Streams and Mountains," impelled by the raw spirit and energy of SPACE itself, awakened by the Fashioner of Things, begins his creative re-enactment. Out comes the brush or pen that will limn the narrative of the beings of the planet, the paths they traverse. The planet turns, leaving traces of its own tale. The mountains themselves "grind the ink" of their own substance; the waters "wet the brush" (p. 9). In the broadest sense, the ranges and rivers, the veritable landscape, tell these stories. The planet itself "walks" the paths and "sits" the rains:

Walking on walking

underfoot earth turns

Streams and mountains never stay the same. (p. 9)

Once more, the performance begins; once more, we intuit the approach of the spirit; unendingly, the scroll unrolls anew.

NOTES

¹ The original hardbound publication--Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint Press, 1996)--reproduces the scroll as end papers; in subsequent paperbound printings the reproductions appear as front matter only. Unless otherwise noted, all textual references are to the first hardbound edition. For their enormous assistance in facilitating much of the research that has gone into this essay, I would like to take this opportunity to thank John Skarstad, the Head of Special Collections, and his staff, at the Shields Library of the University of California at Davis.

² Chiura Obata, "Evening Glow at Yosemite Waterfall [1930]," Obata's Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from His Trip to the High Sierra in 1927, Eds. Janice Driesbach and Susan Landauer (Yosemite Association, 1993), p. 127.

³ Gary Snyder, "The Making of Mountains and Rivers Without End," Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint Press, 1996), p. 153.

⁴ Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye: An Interpretation of Chinese Painting (Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 134.

⁵ François Cheng, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting (Shambhala, 1994), pp. 83-85.

⁶ "The Making of Mountains and Rivers Without End," p. 155.

⁷ "The Landscape of Consciousness" [Interviewer: Gene Fowler], The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979, ed. Wm. Scott McLean (New Directions, 1980), p. 5.

⁸ Katherine McNeil, Gary Snyder: A Bibliography (The Phoenix Book Shop, 1983), p 23.

⁹ The scroll at the Freer Gallery--entitled Mountains and Rivers Without End--is now attributed to Lu Yüan and dates from the Ch'ing dynasty. Snyder carefully separates the two scrolls in his notes on "The Making of Mountains and Rivers Without End": "In Cleveland I saw the Sung Dynasty Streams and Mountains Without End, the one that is described here in the opening section. The curators at the Freer generously let me have two private viewings of Lu Yüan's Ch'ing scroll called Mountains and Rivers Without End--more likely the very one that first came to my attention," pp. 156-57.

¹⁰ Gary Snyder, "Endless Streams and Mountains," Orion, XIV (Summer 1995), p. 40.

¹¹ Susan Bush, "Yet Again 'Streams and Mountains Without End,'" Artibus Asiae, XXXXVIII (1987), p. 197.

¹² Bush, p. 197.

¹³ Sherman E. Lee and Wen Fong, Streams and Mountains Without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting, 2nd rev. ed. (Artibus Asiae, Supplementum XIV [1967; 1st ed. 1954]).

¹⁴ Our conversation took place in Washington, D.C., on 24 November 1996, when our paths crossed quite serendipitously at the Freer Gallery, where I had arranged for an appointment to view the Lu Yüan scroll. Snyder was to read from his newly published poem at the Library of Congress that evening.

¹⁵ Dan McLeod, "Some Images of China in the Works of Gary Snyder," Tamkang Review, X (1980), p. 378.

¹⁶ McLeod, p. 378. In his essay on "The Making of Mountains and Rivers Without End," Snyder gives his age at the time as "from the age of ten on," p. 153.

¹⁷ See Dgen, "Painting of a Rice-cake," Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dgen (North Point Press [Farrar, Straus, & Giroux], 1985), pp. 134-39. For related material, see also Dgen's "Mountains and Waters Stra" in the same book.

¹⁸ McLeod, p. 379.

¹⁹ McLeod, p. 379.

²⁰ McLeod, p. 379.

²¹ Susan Bush, pp. 199-200.

²² Susan Bush, p. 204

²³ Susan Bush, p. 202.

²⁴ Sherman E. Lee, A History of Far Eastern Art, 4th ed. (Harry Abrams Inc., 1982), pp. 351-2.

²⁵ Lee A History..., p. 352.

²⁶ Lee, A History..., p. 352.

²⁷ John Jacoby, "An Interview with Gary Snyder," Espejo 12.2 (Spring 1974), pp. 38-9. The essay is reprinted in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964-1979, pp. 44-51.

²⁸ Lee, A History..., pp. 352-53.

²⁹ Jacoby, p. 44.

³⁰ Jacoby, p. 44.

³¹ Lee, A History..., p. 352.

³² See John Whalen-Bridge, "Spirit of Place and Wild Politics in Two Recent Snyder Poems," Northwest Review, XXIX (1991), pp. 123-31. Whalen-Bridge points to Snyder's accommodation to the city in "Walking the New York Bedrock."

³³ Gary Snyder, North Pacific Lands and Waters: A Further Six Sections (Brooding Heron Press, 1993).

³⁴ This statement, conveyed to me in an e-mail message by Snyder, was intended for publication on the dust jacket of the published book. It was not finally used.

³⁵ Yee, p. 157.

³⁶ "Enlightenment," The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, Eds. Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, and Michael S. Diener (Shambhala, 1991), p. 65.

³⁷ "Prajñ," The Shambhala Dictionary, p. 171.

³⁸ "Shnyat," The Shambhala Dictionary, p. 203.

³⁹ Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (Viking, 1971), p. 157.

⁴⁰ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1943), p. 5.

⁴¹ Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1970), p. 324.

⁴² Daniel D. Pearlman, The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 239.

⁴³ Gary Snyder, "Endless Streams and Mountains," Orion, XIV, 3 (Summer 1955), p. 40. The line from K'ang-li Kuei-kuei's colophon that Snyder remarks upon is: "In the Streams and Mountains Without End a single look causes one to have thoughts of mists and clouds."

⁴⁴ Several small line changes and a major rearrangement of the section were made between the time of journal publication in Orion and the appearance of the section in the final published book. In the Orion publication, Snyder begins by quoting the colophons; the description of the painting itself is left to the latter part of the section.

⁴⁵ These specific tree types are not mentioned in the journal publication. Both species are found in North America and in East Asia, in landscapes that Snyder knows well.

⁴⁶ Gary Snyder, "Notes," Mountains and Rivers Without End, p. 159.

⁴⁷ "This poem . . . is . . . within the tradition of Chinese painting, one more colophon--commentary poem on the painting--to be added to its story." Gary Snyder, "Endless Streams and Mountains," Orion, XIV, 3 (Summer 1995), p. 38.

⁴⁸ "Most of the colophon/poem translations are my own." Gary Snyder, "Notes," Mountains and Rivers Without End, p. 159.

⁴⁹ Snyder's translates four non-contiguous lines from the twenty lines of Wang Wen-wei's Colophon 1. As printed in Lee and Fong, these lines read: "The creator has no original intention;/ Mountains and streams are but crystallized pure air/. . . . /Who has picked these tasteful forests and springs,/ And laid them on this white piece of silk with light ink" (p. 51).

⁵⁰ Lee and Fong translate these lines from Colophon II as: "Other people living with the noise of chickens and dogs/ Are happily at peace under a good government./ Why then is my love so foolish/ That I crave the company of rocks and streams?" (p. 52). There are twenty-four lines in their translation.

⁵¹ The line referred to in Lee and Fong is a single line of a sixteen-line colophon: "While the water joins the mountains, the mountains are actually planted in the water" (Colophon III, p. 53).

⁵² The lines are taken from the four-line Lee and Fong Colophon VI: ". . . It is truly a painting worth/ careful keeping. . . ./ Its survival from the danger of war and fire is a rarity" (p. 56).

⁵³ Snyder translates the first two and one-half sentences exactly as they are found in the seven-sentence prose translation of Lee and Fong (Colophon IX, p. 57).

⁵⁴ Significantly, these lines do not appear in the original Orion publication of "Endless Streams and Mountains," in which the section is seen as a poem in its own right and not automatically linked with other sections of the book.

⁵⁵ Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 23-4. Zimmer, in elucidating the Hindu sense of time, uses these words to describe the transforming moment when Indra undergoes a radical shift in perspective.

⁵⁶ Gary Snyder, "Poetry and the Primitive." Earth House Hold (New Directions, 1969), p. 123.

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