Santoka Taneda (1880-1942; Japan, Poet, Zen Buddhist Monk) -
Westerners like to conquer mountains; Orientals like to contemplate them. As for me, I like to taste the mountains.
*Sumita Oyama. Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda: Japan's Beloved Modern Haiku Poet. Includes a Translation of Santoka's "Diary of the One-Grass Hut." Trans. with intro. William Scott Wilson.
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Surface(s), anything of the physical realm, including mental. The mental is a function of the physical. Rocks and air and thoughts and desires, for example, are surfaces. Depth(s), the underlying subtleness of surfaces. The surface and the depth are not the same yet not separate. These are spoken of differently in varied religious or spiritual traditions, and traditions tend to prefer abstract or personal for these aspects.
Confusion of the two domains is often an error in religious and spiritual discourse, and the two being treated as separate. Again, however, union does not mean sameness.
Below, therefore, surface means physical, mental, and emotional. Depth refers to the Intangible underlying and encompassing it all, the source, or wellspring, whatever words you use: Reality, God, Creator, Source, the Divine, Great Spirit, the Self, the Light... .
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A key aspiration in Zen is one I often write about: intimacy. Intimacy is central to Dogen's (Japan, 1200-1253) teaching; he founded Japanese Soto Zen.
Recently, in a gathering, the group was asked what we each wanted to experience spiritually. We were to give a word or few. I stated my aspiration was and is to experience the depth through the surfaces. Earlier in life, I wanted to escape the surfaces in some sense of airy spiritualized elevation, what I often call "false transcendence." I mistakenly interpreted the goal of a spiritual life as such world-denying elevation. This was aided by early teaching that the body, as flesh, is somehow evil. The treatment of sex as dirty and not to be spoken of accompanied such a conservative worldview.
Yet, one cannot go into the subtle but through the gross. For example, there is an intangible subtlety within each person you meet. And you honor the material manifestation fully to "enter" that subtle presence. When you do, you discover it is the same subtleness within and through your material appearance. There, you meet yourself. As Buddhists teach, the moon shines upon the water. Moon represents the changeless presence, the water changing phenomena. One moon is shining in a myriad of different shapes of water, whether an ocean or a puddle. You are one of those shapes.
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Metaphors of depth or height are often seen in religious or spiritual teachings. Both connote the same matter. Each refers to a more subtle experience of being. These metaphors connote a contrast to living on the surfaces as mere surfaces.
Santoka speaks of this union of surface and depth, so we do not need to abandon matter to experience something more. Spirit and matter co-inhere. We do not have to choose.
Santoka walked about among the mountains. He experienced mountains intimately. He did not conquer them, he says, which is one way of treating nature. Yet, neither did he only contemplate them, which is another way. He tasted them. A mountain in the mouth. We can taste mountains... and buildings, people, trees, laughter, dust motes, windows, clouds, thunder, and skies. You can taste a whole ocean in one moment or a person in one look.
Now, how more intimate can you get than tasting something? Even when kissing, people are usually not satisfied with the lips; they join their tongues. They want more intimacy in the kiss than lips on lips, they want mutually within. And, of course, intercourse is a means of expressing a profound, instinctual need for withinness: the English intimacy literally can read withinness.
Sex is a powerful means of tasting. Yet, too, sex is a window onto a more profound need to experience depth. Intimacy with matter resonates from and with a need for something that matter cannot provide. Hence, another person's body, any body, or the world body can be a door opening to the Temple.
In a subtle sense, the way to love the world of things is having sex with it. We cannot just penetrate the world of things, it must penetrate us. Union arises from both sides. There must be the joining of active effort and passive receptivity. The spiritual aspirant will learn to balance the yin and yang, the masculine and feminine.
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Santoka tastes mountains, for he experiences intimacy with the appearance of mountains. Yet, the intimacy is a non-appearance.
In Christian symbology, the scriptures speak of the sacramentality of surfaces. Jesus, for example, uses the wording of cannibalistic tone -
So Jesus said ..., "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man [i.e., Jesus] and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, ... for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them." (Gospel of John 6.53-56, NRSVUE)
In the Hebrew Bible, we see a similar verse on intimacy with the Sacred One - "Taste and know the LORD is good" (Psalm 34.8; my trans.; good, or tov, can mean, also, among other meanings, "beautiful"). How does one know without tasting? One knows sacredness only through intimacy with it. Why should I respect the dogma of the rationalistic materialist who has never tasted there is more due to their not experiencing more? That same goes with dogmatic atheists and those who criticize all religion as though they have experienced all religion - which they have not. One knows only through direct, unmediated experience. I know the taste of water only by tasting water.
Whether we agree or not with the potential theological imports of these scriptures, they point to a universal verity, not because they are religious or spiritual but because this is how life works. In our lives, we can witness how relating only to surfaces alerts us to a more subtle yearning. We are built for more, so to speak.
Hence, again, in conquering and contemplating, we maintain distance; we seek to control, to manage, to tame. In tasting, we welcome intimacy. All true spiritual paths point us in this direction, and this is both the attraction and challenge of walking the Way. And, if we welcome this call from within, from something more about us than the surface, we come to the point of realizing that emerging into more depth will keep leading us into more depth. Intimacy opens to intimacy. Depths deepen, again and again. The Way is closer and closer.
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In sexual sharing, we can experience fulfillment from sex accompanied by a sense of lack of satisfaction. The same is true of our common intercourse with all surface structures. All we do and engage can only meet our need in a limited sense. Such life experience is present to bring fulfillment and, at the same time, awaken our need for more intimacy with depth and the surfaces we commune with. "Commune with" indicates prior "objects" becoming subjects or sharing with. Things do not change, however, consciousness changes. Consciousness sees and experiences differently. Consciousness enfolds the capacity to see a rock as a round piece of hard stuff or a face of the Subtle Itself.
Some people realize this point where the depth calls us deeper and explore further, seeking ways to address this subtle need. Some people try to silence the call for more. Some no longer feel the need, unfortunately. No matter how much we accumulate of goods, relationships, or experiences, none can fulfill the subtle need for a deepening intimacy before and unencompassed by surfaces themselves.
Surfaces are hints; appearances are invitations. And the hint, the invitation, lives in you. You are so much more than what you see in the mirror, yet you are that, too, and so is every single thing you ever see, touch, taste, smell, or hear.
