Watts - Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown: a mountain journal

ALSO BY ALAN WATTS

The Spirit of Zen

The Legacy of Asia and Western Man

The Meaning of Happiness

The Theologia Mystica of St. Dionysius

Behold the Spirit

Zen

EasterIts Story and Meaning

The Supreme Identity

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Myth and Ritual in Christianity

The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism

The Way of Zen

Nature, Man, and Woman

This Is It

Psychotherapy East and West

The Joyous Cosmology

The Two Hands of God

Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship

Nonsense

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing

Who You Are

Does It Matter? Essays on Mans Relation to Materiality

Erotic Spirituality

In My Own Way: An Autobiography

The Art of Contemplation

VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1974

Copyright 1968, 1970, 1971, 1973 by Alan Watts

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1973.

Portions of this book were first published in Mademoiselle, Playboy, and Earth.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

Lin Yutang, for permission to use his translation of Chia Taos poem Searching for the Hermit in Vain, from My Country and My People, published by John Day Company. Miss Dorothy E. Collins and Dodd, Mead & Company, for permission to quote from The Song of Quoodle, taken from The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton. (Published in Great Britain by Methuen and Company.)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Watts, Alan Wilson, 1915
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.

1. ReligionAddresses, essays, lectures.
I. Title.

[BL50.W32 1974] 200.1 7313747
eISBN: 978-0-307-80786-1

v3.1

To Sandy Jacobs

SEARCHING FOR THE HERMIT
IN VAIN

I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, The masters gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.

Chia Tao (777841)
Trans. Lin Yutang

The poem on the preceding page, by Chia Tao of the Tang dynasty, suits my mood and provides the title of this book. I live between two placesa ferryboat on the Sausalito waterfront and a lonely cottage in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco; a mountain sacred to the Indians which wraps itself in an atmosphere of strange beneficence. During the past three years I have done almost all my writing in this cottage. This includes my recently published autobiography, In My Own Way, and a considerable number of short pieces written for my Journal (published for subscribers), and for such magazines as Playboy and Earth. Most of the latter are assembled here in the form of a journal with dated entries, though they are ordered by content rather than chronology because my thinking spirals: it does not go ahead in a straight line.

Some critics will therefore call me repetitious, but I have found, in the process of teaching, that most students do not understand ones ideas unless they are repeatedunder differing analogies or in varying forms of words, as a musician constructs variations on a theme. Besides what I mean by understanding is not simply verbal comprehension: it is feeling it in your bones.

The form of this book is therefore that of a mountain journal concerned with the philosophy of nature, ecology, aesthetics, religion, and metaphysics, and the entries are grouped more or less according to those topics. The dates will allow those who are chronologically oriented to rearrange them in their minds eye.

A LAN W ATTS

Druid Heights, California
Spring 1972

The Water

April 1970

Ever since I can remember anything at all, the light, the smell, the sound, and motion of the sea have been pure magic. Even the mere intimation of its presencegulls flying a little way inland, the quality of light in the sky beyond hills which screen it from view, the lowing of foghorns in the night. If ever I have to get away from it all, and in the words of the Chinese poet wash all the wrongs of life from my pores, there is simply nothing better than to climb out onto a rock, and sit for hours with nothing in sight but sea and sky. Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves.

Thus, I have come to live right on the edge of the water. I have a studio, library, a place for writing on an old ferryboat tied up on the waterfront of Sausalito, north of San Francisco. I suppose this place is the nearest thing in America to a Mediterranean fishing village. Steep hills clustered with little houses, and below along the rim of the bay a forest of masts rocking almost imperceptibly against a background of water and wooded promontories. In some ways this is a rather messy waterfront, not just piers and boats, but junkyards, industrial buildings, and all the inevitable litter-ature of our culture. But somehow the land-and-seascape absorbs and pacifies the mess. Sheds and shacks thrown together out of old timbers and plywood, heaps of disused lumber, rusted machinery, and rotting hullsall of this is transformed in the beneficent presence of the sea.

Perhaps it is the quality of the light, especially early in the morning and towards evening, when the distinction between sky and water becomes uncertain, when the whole of space becomes opalescent in a sort of pearly luminous grey, and when the rising or setting moon is straw yellow. In this light all the rambling mess of sheds and junkyards is magical, blessed with the patterns of masts and ropes and boats at anchor. It all puts me in mind of landfalls a long way off, and all the voyages one has dreamed of.

I look out now across a wide space of nothing but water and birds ending in a line of green slopes with clumps of trees. Right over the edge of the boat the water contains seemingly just under the surface a ceaselessly moving network of reflected sunlight through which a school of very tiny fish passes delightfully uncaught. Yet only a few yards from where we are moored, tackle shops sell the salmon and crabs with which this particular area abounds.

This is the paradox of the ocean. Sand, flying spray, pebbles and shells, driftwood, sparkling water, space incredibly luminous with cloudbanks along horizons underlying skies into which ones imagination can reach without end. But under the surface of both sky and water there is the grim business of preying. Men and birds against fish, fish against fish. The tortuous process of life continuing by the painful transformation of one form or body into another. To creatures who do not anticipate and reflect imaginatively on this holocaust of eating and being eaten, this is perhaps not so terrible. But poor man! Skillful beyond all other animals, by being able to think in time, and abstractly knowing the future, he dies before he is dead. He shrinks from the sharks teeth before they bite him, and he dreads the alien germ long, long before its banquet begins.