Stephen Legault - Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao te Ching for Activists

CARRY TIGER
to
MOUNTAIN

The Tao of Activism
and Leadership

STEPHEN LEGAULT

CARRY TIGER TO MOUNTAIN
Copyright 2006 by Stephen Legault

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means
graphic, electronic or mechanical - without the prior written permission of the publisher,
except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying
in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS
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Canada V6A 1Z6
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and
the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada
through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.

Front cover photograph by Stephen Legault
Back cover photographs by Joshua Berson and Matt Jackson
Illustrations by Mark Holmes
Text and cover design by Shyla Seller

Printed and bound in Canada on recycled paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Legault, Stephen, 1971

Carry tiger to mountain: the Tao of activism and leadership / Stephen Legault.

Includes index.
ISBN 1-55152-200-4

1. Taoism. 2. Social justice--Religious aspects--Taoism. 3. Leadership--Religious aspects--Taoism. I. Title.

BL1923.L43 2006 299.5'1417 C2006-900336-X

ISBN-13 978-1-55152-200-5

EISBN 978-1-55152-321-7

More information can be found at www.CarryTigertoMountain.net

The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of the sale of this book to the Hollyhock Scholarship Fund. This fund makes it possible for individuals in need of financial support to participate in programs at the Hollyhock retreat centre on Cortes Island in British Columbia. Hollyhock exists to inspire, nourish, and support people who are making the world better.

For my boys:

Rio Bergen
Rivers and mountains without end
Born January 25, 2002

&

Silas Morgen
Dawn's man of the woods
Born July 19, 2005

& with a deep bow to the "Old Boy,"
Lao Tzu

Dr. Jim Butler

In the 1970s, there were probably more Americans and Canadians initially exposed to and influenced by the teachings of Taoism than there were to Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, or any other Eastern religion or philosophy. This awareness of Taoism came from a remarkable television movie and subsequent weekly TV series, Kung Fu, that became a global phenomenon. David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine, a man of peace, raised as a child to be a Taoist monk at a Shaolin Temple in China, where he was taught remarkable martial arts skills.

The story of his travels through the violent, racially unjust American West was intercut with flashbacks to his Taoist lessons as a child and the wisdom of his teachers Master Kan and the blind Master Po (played respectively by Philip Ahn and Keye Luke). Kung Fu presented a spellbinding alternative to the usual television westerns when it first appeared in February 1972, and it triggered a tidal wave of popular interest in martial arts, including Aikido and Tai Chi Chuan.

Like many others, I was enthralled by the character of this wandering Shaolin monk. This led me to dabble in most Eastern religions over the years through readings, lectures, and workshops, and later I spent time with teachers in wats, temples, and Zen gardens. In Thailand I was ordained a Buddhist monk, but in practice, as an environmentalist and a professor who created and taught a university course on environmental advocacy at the University of Alberta, I try to honour and embrace the best of what all of these religions have to offer, especially with their relevance to my relationship to nature and my ecological underpinnings. But the Tao te Ching has been an influence on me ever since a woman I dated in college, who later became my wife, first introduced me to her own copy and encouraged me to read it.

The Tao te Ching has become a source of inspiration for grounding oneself and connecting in harmony with the energies of nature and the earth. In my understanding of the Tao, I see these energies becoming manifest in viable ecological systems and abundant dynamic biodiversity that not merely struggle to persist but flourish, evolve, and diversify. All of this nourishes, in turn, the human spirit and the evolution of its own path to a more holistic spirituality. In Taoism, that path is referred to as the "way of water," a path of flowing and accepting. The power of water is not in its individualness but its unity and persistence. Water journeys across the landscape into streams and rivers until it returns to the mighty ocean where even the illusion of the individuality of a drop of water is lost because it never existed in the first place. That's Taoism, more or less, in a nutshell.

The Tao te Ching is all about harmony, and environmentalists are all about the preservation and restoration of harmony. In Taoism, living in harmony with the Tao is to be in wu wei, which is a state of unity and oneness with no sense of personal separation. Wisdom in Chinese Taoism is "to conform to the rhythm of the universe, to the natural order." In the Shinto religion of Japan, evil is defined as that which disrupts the natural order of things; therefore, what is good is that which restores order and harmony. Aldo Leopold, a father of the North American conservation and wilderness movements, believed that environmental destruction of the land was really a moral issue of right vs. wrong. He seemed to support the Taoist perceptive in his land ethic when he wrote that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Stephen Legault has chosen some wonderful symbolism in his title of Carry Tiger to Mountain. The charismatic power and mysticism in both tigers and mountains is why they are two of the most common objects to be painted in Chinese art. Mountains symbolize the eternal Tao: harmony happiness and oneness of nature. Every mountain had its own deity. The mountain images represent the peace of the cosmic order and were inspiring symbols of veneration. To the conservation biologist, mountains are the wild refugium for many rare and symbolic wildlife, from grizzly bears and golden eagles to fragile cloud forest wildflowers. Tigers in eastern symbolism are revered, respected, and feared for their courage and bravery. It is said that their image alone has the power to drive away the demons. They are a guardian spirit of agriculture, and in China are considered the greatest living power on earth.

In my work over the years, I have crossed paths with wild tigers in the Liang Shui Reserve in the Lesser Hinggan Mountains of Heilongjiang, China, Khao Yai in the central mountains of Thailand, and Gunung Leuser National Park in Northern Sumatra. In a most unusual event in the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre at Bukit Lawang, the head ranger and I moved unarmed and on foot through a thick bamboo forest following the blood trail of an orangutan dragged by a Sumatra tiger who had proven a repeat predator on the gullible, formerly captive, orangutans being rehabilitated to the jungle. We both came to a stop for a rather large and annoyed king cobra. This in itself was adventure enough and fully stimulating. But it was the next event, still in proximity to the cobra, that covered my arms and legs in goosebumps and made the hair rise on the back of my neck. We were motionless and silent, giving the snake right of way. A twig snapped in the silence of the bamboo jungle. Again it happened. The sound came from just ahead of us where the drag path was leading. Our eyes met; the ranger gestured that we quickly return and took the lead. I no longer knew where the king cobra was, nor cared. It was inconsequential. Everything else in the world was suddenly inconsequential. Tigers have that effect.