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;
mrthj@seattleu.edu
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 Eih (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 naturenot 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 selfreproduction 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.

40

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etc.) nor a wholesome and beneficent womb of human life (so long as
it is not tampered with by the evils of technology, industrialization,
urban living, etc., it is our loving and caretaking iriother). Riffing
on Donald Rumsfeld's list of wartime epistemological criteria (the
"unknown unknowns" that surprised the Bush government in their Iraq
adventure), Zizek argues that ecology is rife with false consciousness
and the "unknown knowns" (ibid., 457) of our unconscious ideological
assumptions:
Ecology often lends itself to ideological mystifications: as a pretext
for New Age obscurantisms (praising pre-modem "paradigms," and
so forth), or for neo-colonialism (First World complaints that the fast
development of Third World countries like Brazil or China threatens
us all"by destroying the Amazon rainforests, the Brazilians are
killing the lungs of our Earth"), or as an honorable cause for "liberal
communists" (buy green, recycle . . . as if taking ecology into account
justifies capitalist exploitation), (ibid., 439)
As did Nietzsche before him, Zizek warns of the difficulty of breaking
our metaphysical addiction to ultimate meaning. Far more terrifying
than any specific threat, nihilism, as the revelation that there is no
supersensible order to either nature or human nature, "the terror of there
being no big Other," confronts us with the unmooring force of ultimate
absurdity"the fact there is nothing to fear is the most terrifying fact
imaginable" (ibid., 434). As Nietzsche famously diagnosed the problem
in the Genealogy^ "the will would rather will nothing than not will at all,"
so deep do our attachments run! "Nature" is just another obscurantist
delusion by which we deny that "there is no firm foundation, place of
retreat, on which one can safely count" (ibid., 442). Scientists expose
the manipulability and fragility of nature (and hence make it harder
and harder to maintain our nostaligic fantasies) while at the same time
being both irrationally abstractwhat good is the formula for water to
a sailor drowning at sea?and a new church and inquisition, dismissing
all other approaches as irrational and untrue.
At the same time our immersion in the "life-world" and common
sense dulls both our ethical imagination and our awareness of just how
severe the ecological crisis is.
I know very well (that global warming is a threat to the entire
humanity), but nonetheless... (I cannot really believe it). It is enough
to see the natural world to which my mind is connected: green grass
and trees, the sighing of the breeze, the rising of the sun . . . can one
really 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 Notesfrom Underground called this "the right

to be stupid." Yes, I know that 2 -^ 2 = 4, but I perversely demand to
live in the world where it might be 5 and the echo chamber backs me
up. One need only think of the memorable evening on November 6,
2012, when Fox News and Karl Rove struggled to make sense of the
unexpected shock that Obama had just carried Ohio and thereby won
the election despite the incessant declarations by the Fox pundits that
the allegedly "surging" Romney was assured of a victory. As Rove
provided a fundamental demonstration of the right to be stupid,
insisting that the election was not over and that it was far too early to
call Ohio for Obama, even anchorwoman Megyn Kelly had to ask him,
"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel
better 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 sphere
in which one really believes that one is reporting what is true, a sphere
that the Underground man favored over and against the "stone wall"
of the world, we find ourselves opiated by the "unknown knowns" that
obfuscate our awareness of the threat of global warming, the pervasive
ecological degradation of the earth, the relegation of huge portions
of an exploding world population to slums, the global decimation
of non-human species in the Sixth Great Extinction event, and the
fantasy that economies can grow in perpetuity, using a limidess supply
of inexpensive fossil fuels, relying on science and technology to tidy
up any little messes that this scenario presents along the way. And so
Zizek admonishes us: "We should really 'grow up' and learn to cut this
ultimate umbilical cord to our life-sphere" (ibid., 445).
As a small contribution to ecological thinking after the opiating
bender of "nature," this essay will consider the space that opens up
with 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 Zizek

dismiss as "nature." One of the names that Dogen will give it is sansui,
mountains and rivers, which Gary Snyder, a deep reader of Dogen, will
call "the wild." Both are ways of thinking nature after "nature" (NAN),
1. See Morton 2007. Although my approach differs somewhat, I remain
sympathetic to the Buddha Dharma implications of his approach, including
his turn to thinkers like Gary Snyder and his embrace of Dgen's sansui or
mountains and rivers (form and emptiness) as well as to Schelling. (See Morton
2007, 70.) For an important exercise in how a thinker like Paracelsus can be a
thinker 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, see
Hamilton 2006. For Schelling in dialogue with the late Merleau-Ponty on the
problem of nature, see Wirth and Burke 2013.

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WIRTH

although in the end it is only a question of preference if we replace the

word "nature" or if we try to think it as NAN. It is just a word, albeit
one with a difficult and pernicious modern genealogy. Dogen warned
against "word attachment" and one should not confuse the idea (or
ideology) of the earth with the earth itself.
In Ks Sanshoku {Valley Sounds, Mountains Colors^ 1240) and other

fascicles, Dogen recounts the story of the diligent monk-student

Xiangyan who was challenged by Guishan: "You are bright and
knowledgeable. Say something about yourself before your parents were
born, but don't use words learned from the commentaries" (Dogen
2010, 87). Xiangyan took to his books working overtime to Bnd
something in his books that allowed him to say something outside of
his books. "Deeply ashamed, he burned his books and said, "A painting
of 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 strikingly
c^ubs "bondage to Buddha," namely, "being bound by the view that our
perception and cognition of enlightenment is actually enlightenment"
(Gybutsu apt 1241) (ibid., 261). In the same vein, one should be wary
of confusing the "perception and cognition" of the earth with the
earth itself. By NAN, sansui, the wild, or whatever we call it, we do not
mean the big Other that confirms us in our identities nor do we mean
a reactionary retreat to a lost paradise where everything was wholesome
and organic. Nor, as Schelling already warned in the early nineteenth
century with his Xaturphilosophie, do we want to embrace the ideology
of scientism. Schelling shall famously in the Freedom essay claim that
the positivistic representation of Nature, or more precisely, its view of
Nature as represen table, is the fatal flaw that epitomizes hiodernity:
"Nature is not present to it" for modernity "lacks a living ground [die
Xaturfur

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 fought
for the soul of science, he did not prevail. The scientific positivism of
the nineteenth century made nature into a series of representations
while Romanticism longed for a return to a lost nature that never was.
Heidegger's poetic turn and his retrieval of (fjffi attempted to recover
the injury already detectable, according to Heidegger, in Plato's turn to

2. Except where noted, all translations of Schelling are my own. Citations

follow the standard pagination, which follows the original edition established
after Schelling's death by his son, Karl. It lists the division, followed by the
volume, followed by the page number. Hence, (I/I, 1) would read, division
one, volume one, page one. It is preserved in Manfred Schrter's critical
reorganization 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 of
the presentation of ii)i;<n in concentrating on the "evident aspect of what is
offered-it is the 'surface,' the 'faade'
What is decisive in the Platonic
turn, following which nature forgets (|5vai, is not that <j)vcri should have
been characterized as iSct, but that iSscx should have become the sole
and decisive interpretation of being" (Badiou 2006, 124). Badiou also
provocatively argues, however, that the poetic disclosure of {j)i)ffi does
not prevent a "second disposition," namely the radical rethinking of
the power of the matheme (mathematical notation), beyond the danger
of nostalgia for a pre-Platonic originary manner of thinking. Poetic
mourning is not our only philosophically astute manner of retrieving
(jjvai, indeed it does not account for the power of philosophy as such,^
and the introduction of the iSsa does not necessarily spell the loss of the
self-presentation of nature. Badiou rethinks nature as the problem of
the multiple, which becomes "natural" when it consistently "counts as
one,"* but which in itself can only be given the proper name of the void
and the empty set, hence avoiding "any reference to Nature, in which
it is still too easy to read the substitutive reign of the cosmological
one" (ibid., 148). There is nothing that is nature in itself. Schelling had
already argued in his Naturphilosophie for the belonging together of the
scientific and the poetic, both of which allowed, each in their own way,
NAN to manifest, neither as the cosmological one nor the beneficent
womb, but as the philosophical problem par excellence.
This post-opiated manifestation of NAN, in which there is room for
the originary dimensions of both science and art, is the concern of the
present essay. Although Dogen will be my primary interlocutor, others
who have taught us to hear and see NAN, like John Muir, Friedrich
Schelling, Milan Kundera, and Gary Snyder, will assist him, but in the
end it is this question itself that will guide these present reflections,
which I have divided into three complementary sections.
3. "I willingly admit that absolutely originary thought occurs in poetics and
in the letting-be of appearing. This is proven by the immemorial character of
the poem and poetry, and by its established and constant suture to the theme
of nature. However, this immemoriality testifies against the eventual emergence
of philosophy in Greece . . . What constituted the Greek event is rather the
second orientation, which thinks being subtractively in the mode of an ideal or
axiomatic thought" (Badiou 2006,125-26). For another way to approach these
two dispositions, see Sallis 2012. See also in this respect Schelling's ongoing
attempt, beginning in the Weltalter period, to derive a "formula of the world."
See, for example. The Ages ofthe World (Schelling 2000).
4. "A natural multiple is a superior form of the internal cohesion of the
multiple" (Badiou 2006, 127); "for us stability necessarily derives from the
count-as-one, because all consistency proceeds from the count" (ibid., 127);
"naturalness is the intrinsic normality ofa situation" (ibid., 128).

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The Realization of the Wide and LongTong^e

The prevailing Western metaphysical habit contrasts nature with
culture (the realm of human centered and human originated affairs).
The natural is therefore nature as nature does, as opposed to the domain
of artifice brought about in the rise of the Anthropocene Age^ by
human ingenuity and activity. This account of competing origins and
their respective domains, however, assumes that the human domain is
somehow separable from that ofnature and that, from within the refuge
of the border that maintain this divorce, the human domain attempts
furthermore to subjugate the natural domain, to remake it into a more
anthropocentric home. This account also gives rise to ecology as the
mass opiate^ in which our political energies are devoted to erasing our
carbon footprint so that the earth might return to the Edenic tranquility
that was violated by our dominating ways. Whether we construe nature
as the raw materials for anthropocentric consumption or as a thus
defiled paradise, nature is something f^rc iw and thus^orwj (it makes no
difference whether or not God gave us our repository of raw materials
for human cultural activity, or our once and future peaceful garden,
5. This is the now famous termed coined by Paul Josef Crutzen and Eugene
Stoermer in 2000 to describe the ascendant role of human manufacture in
the prevalent geological character of the earth. The climate scientist William
F. Ruddiman's provocative study, Ruddiman 2007, makes a case that the
Anthropocene is not coterminous, as Cruzen and others have argued, with the
Industrial Revolution but rather the interaction between human population
numbers (their rise and fall, including the effect of pandemics on overall
population numbers), cultural practices (starting with things like deforestation
for agriculture, which increases when population numbers increase), and the
climate. 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 Anthropocene
Age, namely, towards the widespread heating of the planet), but rather that
whether the earth is heating (post eighteenth century) or cooling (the enigmatic
Little Ice Age that began in the mid-fourteenth century), the climate of the
Anthropocene is inseparable from the widespread presence of human culture.
That is nothing less than to say: already at a meteorological level it no longer
makes sense to divorce "natural climate" from "human cultural activity." The
two are rather parts of a more complex whole emerging out of the interplay
of these two sets of trajectories. We are not in the climate as if it were our mere
surroundings (environment). In some very real sense it makes more sense to
say that we are (of and towards) the climate. It is a feedback loop in which the
anthropos is the leading indicator species.
6. I am borrowing this reworking of Marx's famous phrase from Slavoj
Zizek's article, "Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for
the Masses" (lacan.com, 9 January 2008). See also "Unbehagen in der Natur,"
where the opiate of deep ecology is "again a deeply conservative oneany
change 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 the
autonomous human subject.
I n the 1806 Darlegung des wahren Verhltnis der Naturphilosophie zu der

verbesserten Fichteschen Lehre, written after Schelling and Fichte had

decisively broken around the question of Nature, Schelling claimed,
"The moralist desires to see nature not as living, but as dead, so that he
can tread upon it with his feet" (Schelling 1927,1/7, 17). Dead nature
is the mere surface beneath our feet, land that we imagine as being there
for us, simply at our disposal. If nature is what is before us to tread
upon, whether or not we leave a carbon footprint, it has not emerged
in thinking as a living question. In contrast, we can look to a passage
from Dogen's 1240 fascicle Keisei Sanshiki [River Valley Sounds and Mountain

Colors\^ Dogen turned to the elemental words of the great Song poet
and lay Buddha Dharma practitioner. Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101, in
Pinyin Su Dongpo and also known as Su Shi and in Japanese, Toba).
Su was enlightened when he heard the sound of a mountain stream
flowing in the night.
In his poem "We Wash Our Bowls in This Water" from Mountains
and Rivers Without End, Snyder quotes Dogen's commentary on Su's
remarkable words in the poem that Su had successfully presented to
his 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 looming
mountain is a wide-awake body" (ibid., 138). The voice of the water
with its encompassing tongue alludes to one of the Buddha's canonical
32 characteristics. The river, covered in darkness, was the Buddha
speaking. The imposing form "looming"of the mountain, that
is, the mountain suggesting the looming of all form as such, is the
manifesting body of the Buddha, whose ongoing wakefulness calls us to
awaken. Mountains and rivers, form and emptiness, are the inseparable,
impermanent earth song of the Buddha. One can say that what one
hears is the active silence of the Buddha speaking (the wordless word)
through the voices of nature as well as that what one sees [the forms
and shapes and colors present to the eye and mind] is the formless or
empty ("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 and
waters), as it gives itself to be heard (the waters speaking) and seen (mountains
showing themselves in their dramatic forms and colors). I adapt this brief
discussion of the title from the prefatory paragraph to the translation of this
fascicle in Dogen 1994, 85.

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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 the
voice of mountain-valley streamDogen will later use language of
seeing with one's ears and hearing with one's eyeSu hears each and
every thing ever taught in all possible schools of the Buddha Dharma,
hearing not the mere words of the verses, but that of whose song they
too sung.^ And finally the poem concludes: "How can I speak at dawn"
(ibid.. 138).
How does one transmit the Dharma? How does one speak the
elemental language? This is the concern of the present essay. Perhaps
we could already suggest that this song is a deeply geological song, not
in 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 archaic
sense of the Xyoc and song of Ffj fully awakened as Foca. Snyder allows
Dogen to weigh in immediately:
Sounds of streams and shapes of mountains.
The sounds never stop and the shapes never cease.
Was it Su who woke
or was it the mountains and streams?
Billions of beings see the morning star
and all become Buddhas!
\you^ who are valley streams and looming
mountains,
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) the

coming to be seen and heard of nature in its silence and audibility, its
visible, singing objects and its invisible, still, and pure subject? Yet Su
has spoken! The question now becomes how will we hear what he has
told us and see what he has shown us? When the finger points to the
moon, will we quibble over it after we have hypostasized it yet another
dogmatic doctrine vying for universal validity? One can only see
8. The characters for "song after song" are sometimes read as referring to the
eighty-four thousand verses, a classical way of evoking the immense breadth
and variety of the Buddha's teaching, although it can also be heard as saying
the immense breadth and variety of the Buddha Dharma and its vast and varied
historical 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 the
success of a logical demonstration. One does not communicate person
to person, but from enlightened mind to enlightened mind, Buddha
to Buddha. It is alwaysyuibutsuyobutsu, "only Buddha and Buddha." In
a sense, one could say that communication is the possibility of two or
more people speaking the language of nature.
This poem, Dogen tells us, was approved by his Zen Master, but
Dogen also entreated his monks to think more carefully at the nature of
Layman Su's accomplishment. Did he hear nature as if it were an object
to be heard? And did he hear it because he applied Zen Master Changtsung's teaching to the sounds of the river-valley? Is this something he
did, or the master did, or nature itself did? Dogen suggested that the
Master's teachings "have not stopped echoing, but are secretly mingling
with the sounds of the mountain stream in the night" (Dogen 1994,87).
Nature is awakening; nature is realizing itself in language, and this is
therefore also to say that Su is awakening, that whoever hears the wide
and long tongue awakens to hear the constant awakening of the wide
and long tongue.
One could protest at this point that Dgen's and Snyder's respective
efforts are in this context just a variation of Heidegger's poetic
reawakening of ^iiaiq. Certainly the Zen tradition has always insisted
on some kind of radical awakening, and there is, as Heidegger himself
obliquely recognized, genuine resonances between his project and the
Zen tradition.^ It would be silly to suggest, however, that Song China
and Kamakura Japan were under the sway of the Platonic iSea and had
to resort to Zen practice to reawaken the self-presentation of nature.
Nor would it suffice to say that Dogen and Snyder oppose the poetic
word to all forms of discursivity. One need only look at the remarkable
work of the great Chilean neurobiologist Francisco Vrela to see the
power of Buddha Dharma on scientific thinking (see Vrela 1997).
If anything, the Buddha Dharma account of the three poisons (our
delusional attachments and aversions) and its role in the painful and
pernicious emergence of the self-standing subject offers a much more
profound and less mythic account of what amounts to an ancient yet
still pervasive practice of false consciousness and the reign of "unknown
knowns." Nature (in the sense of NAN) is neither the guarantor of the
subject nor its refuge, but rather its annihilation.
Just as death comes unbidden, so does our obsession with speaking
about ourselvesas if our hyper auto-narrativity emerged because we
9. In addition to Heidegger's meetings and work with many of the luminaries
of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy (Kuki, Tanabe, Nishitani, Daisetz
Suzuki, Hisamatsu, etc.), see May 1996 as well as Bchner 1989.

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are just that curious about each other. The ego is the nub of the reign
of the unknown knowns. In Milan Kundera's novel. The Book ofLaughter
and Forgetting^ Tamina endeavors to help her colleague Bibi to meet
the 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 bored
her" (1996, 122). When Bibi and Banaka meet. Bibi announces that
she wants to write a novel "about the world as I see it" (123). Banaka
astutely informs her that a novel has many different kinds of characters,
many of whom might see the world differently from Bibisurely she
could not be interested in that! But neither is Banaka who considers
novels the "fruit" of the "illusion of the power to understand others.
But what do we know of one another?" (123-24). Banaka draws the
obvious conclusion: "All anyone can do . . . is give a report on oneself.
Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie" (124). Bibi
is 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 other
great actions. But Bibi does have a much more interesting feeling "that
my experience iriside is worth writing about and could be interesting to
everybody" (124). Banaka is sympathetic, explaining that since Joyce
brought Homer's Odyss^ into the realm of interior life, and even though
we have done little with our lives, we are all great adventurers and it is
the 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 isfilledwith the desire
to express itself. To speak. To make itself heard. Sometimes I think
I'm going erazy, beeause I'm so bursting with it I have an urge to
scream. . . . I want to express my life and my feelings, whieh I know
are absolutely original. (125)
And so goes the great war of all narratives against all narratives as we fill
the stores and clog bandwidth with our books and blogs, interrupting
each other to make sure that it is our narrative that is heard. Listening to
the narrative of another becomes a momentary pause before we pounce,
changing the subject to our own experiences. Oh, yes, that reminds me
of 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 of
selfhood emerges from the congestion of attachment and aversion, the
parts of our lives that we love and hence make permanent features of
ourselves and the parts of our lives that we detest and cast out as long
as we can. This feverish self, whose senses are aflame with the delusions
bom 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 master
narrative is driven to master all other narratives.
This is part of what drove the Buddha away from the eternalism of
the tman and toward antman. In the Pli Canon we learn of the bhikkhu
Sati who held and attributed to the Buddha the "pernicious" view that it
is the "same consciousness, and not another, which transmigrates" and is
subject to samsara (Holder 2006, 61). The Buddha famously dismantles
Sti's adherence to a fixed self by exposing all of the relations codependently working together that underlie the self. Pratityasamutpda,
dependent co-origination, demonstrates that the independent, free
standing self is nothing but abstraction that if taken to heart causes
turmoil. The self is dependent on its relations just as there is no absolute
fire, but rather only fire that is dependent upon what it burns"a fire
that burns dependent on a log is reckoned as a 'log-fire'; a fire that
burns dependent on kindling is reckoned as a 'kindling-fire'" (ibid., 63),
and so on.
In the Mahyna traditions, this perniciously incomplete
understanding is sometimes referred to as the Senika Heresy, after
the lamentable intellectual efforts of the Brahmacarin called Senika
in the Nirvana Sutra who argued for an eternal self that, much like the
Western conception of the soul, eternally survives its incarnations.
In the famous early fascicle Bendowa, Dogen takes the Senika heresy
straight on, refusing to accept that there can even be a mind (or soul)
wholly separate from a body (they stand in correlation and have no
independent standing). When one goes, so goes the other. Dogen also
denies that life and death are something that we even need to escape or
transcend. "To think that birth-and-death must be rejected is the mistake
of ignoring buddha dharma" (Dogen 2010,15). Dogen dismissed such
views 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 its
master stroke is to declare itself sane, normal, and healthy. Yes, Bibi had
been driven insane by dukkha.
The annihilation of the subject, however, is not mere nihilism, but
rather an awakening to the multiplicity ofnature. This was, for instance,
the teaching of tathgata-garbha and Buddha nature in the Lankvatra
Sutra, a text that was pivotal to the East Asian development of Zen
practice (Bodhidharma legendarily gave it to Huike as part of the first
transmission of Zen practice.) The Buddha explains that the tathgatagarbha is "taught to attract those members of other paths who are
attached to a self so that they will give up their projection of an unreal
self" (The Lankavatara Sutra, 110). NAN emerges as the non-entitative
Buddha nature of all beings.

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WIRTH

The Preservation of the Question of Nature

The deserved success of Ken Burns' documentary on America's national
park system, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," drives home
the vexing problems of just how nature gives itself to thought. On the
way hand, one is perhaps tempted to say that America's best idea was
to stop being so "American" and experiment with putting limits on
our acquisitive mania. On the other hand, it is another opportunity to
reflect on just how difficult the question of nature is to hear.
The primary question that one brings to nature is not a question
that allows nature to arise in thinking: what is in itfor me?
Unsettled by the grotesque commercialization and huckster-mania
of places like Niagara Falls, whose extraordinary charms were the lure
of travelers and honeymooners, the early protectors and preservers of
other such wonders attempted to protect them for the rapacity of the
American commercial spirit by arguing that they were of no special
interest to economic exploitation. Since the land had no commanding
commercial value because it cannot be farmed, or is too rugged for
mineral or gas exploitation, and since its only immediate value is as
a scenic diversion, it can be preserved for aesthetic consumption. Of
course, this strategy never works for long and it eventually leads to
intense battles to protect the land from sheepherders, cattlemen, lumber
companies, mining interests, etc.
These aforementioned interests systemically regard all such
borderlines as battle-lines and the expansionist imperative, often
highly capitalized and with the political influence that this affords,
is an ongoing and formidable threat. John Muir was to some extent
sympathetic to the sustainable use of nature, but dreaded the "mere
destroyers . . . tree killers, wool and mutton men, spreading death and
confusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever planted" (1997, 720).
For Muir, the great Gardener was God, and the wild expressed the glory
of divine immanence. He regarded the enemies of the natural temples
as "plunderers, who are as unconscionable and enterprising as Satan"
(ibid., 719). For Muir, as his break with Pinchotand the conservationists
indicates, Satan sometimes disguises the spread of death and confusion
as sustainability.
This is not, however, to erect an untenable bifurcation between
preservation and conservation, as if these were mutually exclusive,
but rather to insist that all claims of sustainability do not ipso facto
receive a free pass. One need only think of Zizek's disparagement
of 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 of
preservation 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 the
interests that govern conservation, but its overdetermination can perhaps
in a practice of the wild be tempered by a radical extension of the veil of
ignorance of the Rawlsian original position: if you did not know what
species you would instantiate, which species would you preserve? In any
given ecology, if you did not know if you would be a human being or an
owl, to whom would you give priority? Conservation assumes that the
survival of others be measured against the preeminence of the human,
whereas preservation has at least the radical possibility of gauging its
success from the fate of the least (at least from a human perspective) of
its co-inhabitants. As such, it is not that preservation and conservation
are flip sides of the same coin, but rather that a radicalization of the
preservation 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, there
was an understandable imperative to accentuate the singular beauty of
lands designated for protection. If the parks were full of appreciative
visitors, then this would add value to them and thereby help stave off
those who would assess them as repositories of raw materials. Yet when
nature becomes the hot commodity of must-see scenery, the effort to
show that it was more valuable as a product for tourist consumption
led to the pressure of unsustainable throngs of well-intentioned visitors.
The extreme beauty of the parts of nature designated as parks
shames and inspires us, and this is for the good. Many visitors as a
result find themselves reinvigorated, more willing than ever to preserve
the fragile domains that call our ordinary mindset into question and
that quicken the pulse of our imaginations. As powerful and worthy as
this contrast is, as a contrast, it runs the risk of hypostasizing the poles
of the contrast, creating a sense that we leave our homes in order to
journey into the wild, which, wholly other than the artifice of human
living, is the journey into the wild as the journey into our lost opposite.
John Muir famously refused this simple opposition. In his reflections
on "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West," Muir
applauded the emerging interest in wilderness hiking. "Thousands of
tired, nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that
going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and
that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of
timber 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 of
the hfe whose prolongation it is doubtless extending, but at the expense
of denigrating human life to the default fact that it lives simply because
it 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, but
its movement runs counter to the vitality of the wild. The dull quantity
of the long but not well lived life is suddenly exposed to the electroshock of "tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch with the nerves
of Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them,
learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and
rejoicing in deep, long drawn breaths of pure wildness" (ibid., 721).
From the perspective of the over-civilized, wildness is something
like how the young mind, longing for flight from its confinement in
dull institutions, tends to mis-read what Nietzsche had called the
Dionysian. Rather than the wild life at the heart of form, it is merely
the call for form to go wild, to be crazy and excessive, to become "party
animals," and to become lost in an irresponsible intoxication where
all is permitted and everything is everything else. My advice: do not
go hiking in such a Dionysian state. That such a misreading prevails
is an indication of the hold of over-civilizationa way of thinking the
collectivity of the subject hypnotized in the life-spherewhose death
grip makes one imagine that its repressed life is reckless and spastic,
that disorganization as such is preferable to cultivating the generativity
of new forms of life. One forgets that Nietzsche, whose Zarathustra
counseled us to remain "faithful \treii\ to the earth," that is, to be a
better, more loyal lover (for the betrayal was the mere conservation of
the wild in over-civilization), conceived these ideas while wandering in
the 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 the
conservation of human civilization emerges. It is the home of the
human house and the interaction between the two is not the divorce
of the two, but rather their non-dual belonging together in a more
complete ("whole-souled") home. In the home of all, including human
civilization, as well as the many other forms congregating and being in
packs 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 living
geology. Already by 1797, in his Ideasfor a Philosophy ofNature, Schelling
had denied the duality of the organic and the inorganic, the living and
the dead. All of nature was self-organizing, that is organic, determined
not from some transcendent creator from without, but from within its
own self-progressing immanence."'This insight is also clearly present in

10. "But no mechanism [determinism from an external cause] alone is far from
being 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 product
exists for itself. . . . The organic . . . produces itself, arises out of itself (Schellin
1988, 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, negotiating

Dao, and where in the fascicle of the same name we find the following
astonishing claim. In Zen mind, one realizes that "trees, grasses, and
land involved in this all emit a bright and shining light, preaching the
profound and incomprehensible Dharma; and it is endless. Trees and
grasses, wall and fence expound and exalt the Dharma for the sake of
ordinary people, sages, and all living beings. Ordinary people, sages,
and all living beings in turn preach and exalt the Dharma for the sake
of trees, grasses, wall and fence" (Dogen 2002, 13).
Hee-Jin Kim rightly insists that the sansui or mountains and waters
practice of Dogen, which included the remote mountain location of
his temple, Eihei-ji, was not the "romantic exaltation of them which we
see, for example, in nature mysticism, any more than it is the scientific
and technical manipulation and exploitation of nature." The "naive
veneration or exaltation of nature," evident, for example in the more
reactionary, infantile, anti-scientific giddiness about trees and birds in
the worst excesses of Romanticism, was for Dogen "a defiled view of
nature, enslaving humans in a new captivity" (1987, 187). Rather Kim
sees in Dgen's "love" of nature "not a deification of nature, but the
radicalization of naturenature in its selflessness. Only then is nature
undefiled and natural (ibid., 191).
To be clear, Dogen is not advocating, nor would he even recognize
as sensible, any call to return to a pristine, undefiled nature. There is
no unmediated access to nature nor is true nature some thing in itself
in some private reality beyond our integument in the veil of Maya and
its 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 of
nature within the historical milieu that grants them access to it. This is
not, however, to advocate the subsumption of nature under culture, for
the living core of nature is not an object that resists the advances of a
discerning subject, but rather nature itself is not something, as MerleauPonty, following Schelling, claimed, that as such can be studied. The
infinite depth of our immanence is the alterity of the home within which
we emerge.
And so Snyder rightly laments, "It's a real pity that many in the
humanities and social sciences are finding it so difficult to handle the
rise of 'nature' as an intellectually serious territory. For all of the talk
of 'the other' in everybody's theory these days, when confronted with
a genuine Other, the nonhuman realm, the response of the come-lately
anti-nature intellectuals is to circle the wagons and declare that nature
is really part of culture"(1999, 388-89). Snyder is not resorting to
Zizek's Big Other because his concern is not nature as the guarantor of
human 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 other
habitat" (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 is
isolated and sequestered in national parks and some national forests (at
least the ones not destroyed by economic exploitation and multi-use);
it is not the opposite of our civilized lives, but rather a more subtle
expression 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 in
it" and the wild, which is "the process that surrounds us all, self-creating
nature: creating plant zones, even humans and their societies" (389).
Finally, it seems to me that there is another, quite serious problem
when the question of nature is subsumed under culture, that is, when
a culture becomes total, and can hear nothing external to itself. By
culture in this context, I also include the possibility of the rise of
v0ptO7ioc to the extent that his or her totally administered earth hears
nothing external to the claims and interests of &v0pcTroc, that Foucault's
sandcastle of the Age of Man will not soon wash away in the surging
tides of time. I call this problem the dust ofthe sah world in its technolo^cally
enhanced and multi-national capitalized permutation of the Gestell. ' '
11. In my judgment, we owe David Loy a sincere debt of gratitude as one
of the mavericks of what I would here call Dharma critical theory. In his
classics The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Sodal Theory (Loy 1997) and A Buddhist

History ofthe West (Loy 2002), among other works, Loy argues that the Buddha's
three poisons should not be understood only on an individual level, but on
a social and institutional level as well. Witness this trenchant critique from A
Buddhist History ofthe West as Dr. Loy assesses the great defiling poisons or klesas
(defilements that cloud the mind)/oM (or rga in Sanskrit), greed, dosa (or
dve?a in Sanskrit), malice, hostility, and ill-will, and moha (or avidy), delusion
at work in the very fabric of our way of life: "Our economic system promotes
and requires greed in at least two ways: desire for profit is necessary to fuel
the engine of economic growth, and consumers must be insatiable in order to
maintain the markets for what can be produced. Although justified as raising
the standards living worldwide, economic globalization seems rather to be
increasing inequality, unemployment, and environmental degradation. . . .
Long after the end of the Cold War, the U. S. federal government continue to
devote the largest percentage of its resources to maintaining an enormously
expensive war machine. Most other countries continue to spend more on arms
than social services. . . . The media that might inform us about these problems
distract us with 'infotainment' and sports spectacles to promote their real
function, advertising. One would expect universities to be encouraging and
developing the critical thinking necessary to reflect on these developments,
but in the midst of the greatest economic expansion in history we are told
that 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 meltdown
and credit contraction at the end of 2008 is that it was so successfully
spun as a surprise (2009). Serious economists, including most audibly
folks like the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stightz and Paul Krugman,
had already declared such a catastrophe all but inevitable, and public
demonstrations had to be forcibly shut down so that this idea would not
gain wider currency. However, when this crisis burst into the full light
of 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 from
the nebulous iiature of the problem. Zizek, as have many economists
and political observers recently, returned to the famous analogy of the
stock market to a beauty contest in the twelfth chapter ofJohn Maynard
Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes proposed

a fictional newspaper beauty contest in which contestants had to pick

the six most beautiful women out of hundreds of photographs and the
winner would get a prize. A naive contestant would simply pick the six
most beautiful, but this strategy is a hopeless shot in the dark. A savvy
contestant would try to figure out what the other contestants likely
thought the most beautiful women to be, and an even sawier contestant
would of course try to figure what the other contestants thought the
other contestants thought were the six most beautiful women, and this
step back would take another step back each time a contestant got better
at 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 those
that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached
the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what
average 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 to
fix the now decimated beauty contest. If we all believe that we all believe
that the economic recovery is working, then perhaps it might work.
Draconian budget cuts, conveniently eliminating important elements
of the safety net, are touted as restoring confidence to the market. It
would work for the very reason that the now decimated contest had
education. Increasingly, the need to become more market oriented is diverting
academia into corporate research and advanced job training for those eager
to join and benefit from a morally questionable world order. . . . In short,
our global economy institutionalizes greed; the military industrial complex
at the heart of most developed nation-states institutionalizes aggression; our
media and even our universities institutionalize ignorance of what is actually
happening" (87-8).

56

JASON M.

WIRTH

once worked: a widespread group sonambulance in which the shared

speculations actually created real value.
So of course, we should stop this horizontally aistuhnita folie deux
and return to the real economy, to the reality in which things of real
value are created. Down with Wall Street and up with Main Street! But
the horizontal axis at this point reveals a vertical axis, which had, like
the horizontal axis, succeeded in direct proportion to its capacity to
occlude itself and hide itself from lucid analysis. The corporations that
were too big to fail were, well, simply too big to fail. Their ongoing
collapse would have destroyed Main Street. The raw wound of the
economic collapse made them more visible, but that did not ipso facto
open the realm of real value creation. As Zizek argues, "the relationship
is non-transitive: while what is good for Wall Street is not necessarily
good for Main Street, Main Street cannot thrive if Wall Street is feeling
sickly, 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 Main
Street, have no choice but to recapitalize Wall Street, making the
position of the Left no longer a sensible alternative to the corporate
controlled right. It also gives us our first peek into this historical
development of the saha world: horizontally distributed delusion with
vertical, 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 Giorgio
Agamben's recent project in works like Homo Sacer: Sovergn Power an
Bare Life where he attempts to think the intersection between the vertical
or top down model of totalitarian sovereignty in Hannah Arendt and
the horizontal dimension o biopouvoir and the biopolitical in Foucault,
locating this "hidden point of intersection between the juridicoinstitutional and the biopolitical models of power" (1998, 6). The
intersection of these two axes produces what Agamben called "homo
sacer" the bare life, excluded by from all political life by virtue of what
is 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 by
virtue of which all living things live, and its entry into the realm of the
polis and of right involves becoming another form of life, ioc TTOA-ITIKOC.
Political life has evolved into the vertical, sovereign enforcement of
horizontally distributed biopouvoir and hence "ioc and tor), right and
fact, 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 as
proper political life. (Or to put in Jacques Rancire's terms, wr] are "a
part 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 to
find 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 the

very place"bare life"that marked their subjection" (9-10). The life
of nature itself comes to appear as the exception, that which belongs
by virtue of being proscribed. Nature is the bare hfe within all bare life.
Tliis intersection of the horizontal (vastly distributed power with
no one in charge and where no knows where the Man lives, although
the Man is everywhere but nowhere in particular) and the vertical (the
sovereign and total dominance of certain ideological interests) is more
or less what the venerable political scientist Sheldon Wolin has dubbed
"inverted totalitarianism" or an "upside down" version of the top down
model of a strong, ideologically fixated central government (2008,11).
The man is everywhere but nowhere to be found when you want to kick
his ass. This is the model of a totally administered globe, but one in
which the vertical element is tacit, yet universally distributed through
the population.
At this intersection of exclusionary interests (the 1%, the masters
of the universe, etc.) and their universal horizontal distribution, the
externality of nature does not appear because the external, as such, is
regulated and kept at bay. Not only is this the one-dimensional society
about which Herbert Marcuse so powerfully warned, a society whose
spell of presence can no longer be shattered from the outside, and in
which the "efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition
t,hat it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power
of the whole," it is also the rise o one dimensional nature, an earth without
wilderness, regulated within the historical epochs that appropriate it
(1964,11).
Mountains and Waters
For Dogen the question of nature does not open up in its fundamental
dimensions until it becomes a question of what he called bendwa,
negotiating Dao. Hence, the thesis of this essay: the question of nature
emerges for the first time in its proper dimensions with the practice of the
wild, which in turn is another way of saying bendwa. I take this term, of
course, from Gary Snyder, who is a marvelous reader of Dogen. In the
final 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 all
negotiators 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," and
finally, and most strikingly, the Dharma, which Snyder renders as "the
wild."

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JASOX.M.

WIRTH

In what manner can the Dharma, the very matter that is transmitted
from 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 our
dictionaries by whatfrom a human standpointit is not. It cannot be
seen by this approach for what it j" (ibid., 9). Hence, a wild animal is an
animal that has not been trained to live in our house (undomesticated)
and has not been successfully subjected to our rule (unruly). When
we 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 wild
to the wild? Animals become "free agents, each with its own endowments,
living within natural systems" (9). As Snyder begins to explore this
turn, he indicates the ways in which the wild "comes very close to being
how the Chinese define the term Dao^ the way of Great Nature: eluding
analysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful,
surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete,
orderly, unmediated . . ." (10). And the Dao, as we know from the rich
interpntration of Mahyna and Daoist traditions in East Asia, is "not
far from the Buddhist term Dharma with its original senses of forming
and 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 Waters
Stra^ brought many things together for Snyder. Dgen's title alludes
to Chinese landscape painting, a spectacular example of which opens
Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. Snyder had already studied
this tradition with the great Chiura Obata at Berkeley, becoming "aware
of how the energies of mist, white water, rock formations, air swirlsa
chaotic universe where everything is in placeare so much a part of the
East Asian painter's world" (1996,153). When Dogen attempts to allow
this chaotic but not disorderly universe to speak, he resorts to phrases
like the "whole earth without an inch of soil left out."
Dgen's Sansui-ky is not itself a sutra (ky), nor is it a commentary
on a canonical sutra. Tlie sutra is the wild itself, which Dogen, following
a 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 the
typical sense of a panoptic view of scenery. Rather it is earth as the
interpntration of yin and yang, waters and solids, emptiness and
form, free, unconditioned ground and interdependent beings, in the
spontaneous, organic auto-generation of Dao. San, mountain, rises into
form in the most formidable of ways, as if it were an especially violent
expression of form's self-insistence, yet, it tooflows,for JMZ, water, is pure
elasticity, 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 nature

as both the stubborn, hard as a diamond, bright as the sun aspiration
of Fud My-, the Immovable Wisdom King, and the dark as the
moon, beneficently pliable, overpowering compassion of Kannon, the
bodhisattva Avalokitesvara who looks down and hear the cries of the
world. In Mountains and Rivers Without End, in the first part of a section
entitled "The Flowing," perhaps itself a way of thinking the manner in
which mountains walk and flow as time, Snyder sings of the Blue-faced
growling 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), we
hear the words:
Peaks like Buddhas at the heights
send waters streaming down
to the deep center of the turning world.
And the Mountain Spirit always wandering
hillsides fade like walls of cloud
pebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea
old woman mountain hears
shifting 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 can
only be at home in the domain of human artifice or, failing that, amidst
impending ecological disaster, we become nostalgic for the lost Eden
ofnature that never was. We are not alienated from nature as if it were
something outside of us (Hegel's force of the negative) or inside our
ideological epochs. The problem is more fundamentally that we are alienated from
our home, the biore^ons, nottheideolo^es, that pve us our bang. We are not in these

bioregions. We are these bioregions, these great unknown knowns that are
our invitation to practice.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Hovw Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by

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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JASON M.

WIRTH

. 2002. The Heart ofDogen's Shbgenzo. Translated by Norman Waddell and

Masao Abe. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
. 2010. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye \Shbgenz\ Edited by Kazuaki
Tanahashi. Boston and London: Shambhala.
Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2006. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. London and New
York: Continuum.
Holder, John J., ed. and trans. 2006. Early Buddhist Discourses. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 2006.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1958. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
New York: Harcourt Brace. First published in 1936.
Kim, Heejin. 1987. Dogen Ki^: Mystical Realist. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press.
Kundera, Milan. 1996. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Aaron
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