A STORY IS A GESTURE OF HISTORY AND ONESELF
一個故事 和一個時代
This story is a revisit of a lost time and a remembrance of both the personal and the
collective that follows the footprints of recent history. One lifts the veil of the past
through storytelling and lets the forgotten images, people and places regain a
shimmering presence ...Suddenly, the bygone rises like a nocturnal animal turning its
dark eyes toward you...
I was born in Shanghai after WWII and the end of Japan's invasion of China where
some 4 million Chinese were killed. I was raised in Taiwan as my family left China and
a comfortable life behind just before the Communist Party established its sovereignty.
Though I have no experience of the war, I learned the atrocity through books and films
and was able to understand the poem Death Fugue by Paul Celan and the work of W.G.
Sebald, a German writer, whose narratives read more like posthumous memoirs. They
meant to stir up the silenced history of the Holocaust. Sebald wanted to call the ghosts
out of the past to tell the truth. His elegiac historicism is a refusal to accept the erasure
of the Nazi's genocide that one needs to dig no further than a few feet deep to reach the
realm of the Hades. In the meantime, both the East and the West, with an unfailing
optimism, were busy rebuilding the cities from rubble. The popular book, Man's Search
for Meaning (1956) by Viktor Frankl, meant to be a consolation for those who had
endured the nightmares of the war. This was the backdrop of my entry into the
Twentieth century.
My adulthood in the postwar era was baptized by the writings of the French thinkers of
the 50s. Existentialism was a popular read among students; and the waves of counter
culture had reached as far as Taipei. A brilliant young thinker and a student of
medicine, Wang Shan-Yi 王尚義 introduced existential writers such as Camus, Sartre,
T.S. Eliot, Kafka and Hemingway ...etc. to my generation. His essays in From the
Stranger to the Lost Generation 從異鄉人到失落的一代 were a literary tour de force.
Wang reminded me of the English writer Colin Wilson, whose book The Outsider
asserted much influence during the same period. Both authors dealt with the theme of
alienation and estrangement. Wang 王尚義 died of liver cancer at the age twenty six
soon after his graduation.
In the late 1940s, many distinguished scholars followed the Nationalist Party and fled
to Taiwan; thus, they helped to preserve China's thousands of years of cultural heritage.
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One of them was Professor Fong Dun-Mai 方東美, a celebrated philosopher at the
National Taiwan University 台灣大學. He taught a course on Mahayana Buddhism of
the Tang Dynasty and the Taoist philosophy of Lao-Tze and Chuang-Tze. Fong’s
approach was more aesthetic than didactic. His classes were always packed and ran
about 3 hours for both graduate and undergraduate students. Discussions often
continued after class.
With my Classmates
On the other hand, professor Yin Hai-Guan 殷海光, a rationalist, taught us western
philosophy. He introduced some of the contemporary thinkers such as Alfred North
Whitehead, Bertrand Russell and Carl Popper...etc. Yin Hai-Guan rejected the
traditional feudalistic mentality and was in the forefront propagating liberalism
自由主義 during the period of the White Terror 白色恐怖 in Taiwan history, a time
when anyone who spoke against the government would be executed or jailed (the
martial law didn't end until 1987). Professor Yin often invited his favorite students to
his house for coffee and discussions. Being an outspoken liberalist in the 50s and 60s.
Yin was persecuted by the government and was banned from teaching and publishing. I
sometimes noticed that there were plain clothes agents with watchful eyes standing
near his residence. Under the martial law many liberal writers and political activists
were put in prisons. Professor Yin's influence during my formative years, the exercise
of critical thinking, continues till this day.
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殷海光
The courses on Western philosophy that were offered in those days included
Wittgenstein's logical analysis and the Vienna Circle, Edmund Husserl's Ideen on pure
phenomenology and Heidegger's Being and Time. With a hermeneutic approach,
Heidegger traces the concept of being to its Greek origin. The professor who taught the
class in English was from Italy with a heavy accent! I often sat in his class and tried to
imagine the meaning of those strange key words he frequently uttered like Wesen,
Dasein (German), aletheia (Greek)...and Husserl's Noesis and Noema; they were
repeated like chants that put me to sleep.
As students we studied meditation with Nan Huai-Jin 南懷謹, a respected scholar of
the classics and meditation, sought after by foreign students as well. We flocked to his
living room after classes eager to learn "sitting". In order to put theory into practice,
some of the philosophy students also spent time in Buddhist monastery in the
mountains outside Taipei during school breaks.
Once I wrote an article on Existentialism that was published in the student journal. To
my surprise my writing had aroused suspicion of the college administration. They
claimed that my ideas had a certain connection with Communism. Some of the leftist
political dissidents found monasteries to be a safe hide out. While the monks were
chanting in the Buddha hall, we were discussing politics anywhere from "What is
Justice" to Communism, Socialism and Anarchism in a nearby pagoda with roomful of
ceramic jars containing ashes of the dead. The last year of my college I met Steve, a
graduate from Harvard, who later returned to the US and was ordained as a Buddhist
monk. He introduced me to the poetry of Gary Snyder. Both Steve and I shared the
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same intent to find a meditation teacher in the remote mountainous region where a
few Buddhist hermits lived in caves. Eventually, we met the abbot 廣欽法師 in the
Monastery 承天襌寺. He meditated outside the temple all year round in complete
silence. The locals called him the "Fruit Monk" 水果和尚 because he ate nothing but
fruit and never lay down to sleep at night.
承天襌寺 At the temple's moon gate
One evening, the abbot invited us to join him for an all night sitting. By midnight the
temperature dropped sharply (though we were provided with monk’s robes to keep
warm), so I went inside to the abbot's room, ate some of his fruit (I was starving),
curled up like a cat and fell asleep on a lotus-shaped cushion (specially made by his
devotees!) In the temple each morning we got up at 3 am just before dawn to join the
monks for meditation in the main Buddha hall. The Zendo was built against the hillside
with its three sides open to the mountains all around. In great silence, we sat and
meditated under the roof of a starry night amidst the cool mountain air.
Our studies also included courses on Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, the Upanishads.
The graduate students had a weekly meditation group in an elegant Japanese house
with a lotus pond in the garden. There I experienced a kind of Haiku Zen: Sitting and
listening to the sound of a frog as it plops into the water…the tropical air was filled with
the aroma of plumeria and jasmine.
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Back in the city, an underground cafe "The Barbarian 野人咖啡屋" in downtown Taipei
near the theater district was a favorite gathering place for western hippies and local
artists and writers. On weekends we hung out in this smoke-filled cafe with blasting
music of the Doors and Rolling Stones... That was the time I started to write
experimental poetry 新詩. The poems of Rilke and Tagore were my favorites.
In Taipei, during the late 60s
After graduation, I came to the US on a student visa in 1969. Then the independent
cinema was an emerging art that assimilates philosophy, literature and social issues. Its
subject matter was mainly concerned with the contemporary cultural phenomenon,
political conditions and fractured human emotions. Influenced by the counter culture
in the US and the UK, the film industry also went through a reformation including the
breakdown of film censorship, thus, allowing the art house cinema to flourish. Students
often gathered in cafes after movies for discussion. Naturally, I took up film study after
philosophy. I was deeply drawn to the movies of the Swedish film director Ingmar
Bergman, whose visual presentation on existentialism, I thought, was equal to the work
of Sartre. Bergman's work, through his haunting contrast of black and white images,
explores the full aspects of existential themes, such as man's search for meaning (The
Seventh Seal), for self-identity (Persona), the crisis of faith (Winter Light), on
alienation (The Silence), questioning of god's existence (Through a Glass Darkly) , on
mortality (Wild Strawberries) and mostly, on troubled human intimacy (Cries and
Whispers).
While studying film making, I wrote and directed a film in college about a love relation
between a man and a woman. The film is a dialogue of the two. Each represents a
different world. The man, a poet, is blind (as an outsider) but has visions like animals.
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The woman, who represents the "normal and functional", feels sorry for the man of
disability and needs to console him to keep him in her collective reality. So love is
difficult. My point is that the man's seeing is not borrowed. It's the woman who cannot
see that truth is often a reversal. My teacher, who was a screenplay writer, liked it. The
conversation was set on a stormy night in a half lit room with special sound effects to
create the mood. Towards the 1980s, I discovered the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, a poet
and visionary, and was highly respected by Bergman. Tarkovsky's camera work often
attempts to stop time with slow panning and pulses evoking dream like images. I have
yet to find a movie that matches his hypnotic and poetic expression in creating a
spiritual language.
At the college film lab-working on film editing
Besides Bergman, I was also interested in the work of Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Alain
Resnais and Bresson (who coined the word Cinematography). After three years of
hands on practices and studying, I decided to make a documentary film about
Buddhist's monastic life as my graduate thesis. I rented some basic filming equipment
including a 16mm Bolex, a movie camera was commonly used in early days in films
schools. With the help of my partner, David, we drove from Los Angeles to the Gold
Mountain Temple 金山寺 located in San Francisco's China Town where I worked on the
film project. A year later I went back to the temple for a month to join their monastic
practice under the Guidance of Master Shuan Hua 宣化上人 . The monks and the nuns
were mostly Caucasians and college graduates. The temple held public meditation and
lecture every evening. Occasionally, one or two seagulls flew in through the open porch
to join the sitting. The appreciation of a monastic life style has since followed me to
this day except that I now have found my sangha in the open wilderness.
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Monks in meditation
From the early 60s to early 70s, San Francisco was the center of counter culture, a
movement of anti-establishment. Alan Watts was one of the spiritual gurus; his
Berkeley radio show (which I listened regularly with great interest) and his book The
Way of Zen had a huge influence on young Americans as they were exploring Eastern
paths through reading Taoism, Zen, Jung and Vedanta. Naturally, the temple of my
film project became one of the attractions for the seekers. Those who were not in the
temple were dancing and chanting Hari Krishna on the streets. Another writer of the
60s was John Blofeld, his tales of old Taoist sages that lived in the mythical mountains
of China had fascinated many.
In the same period the protests of 1968 were spreading around the world marked by
social conflicts against repressive governments. There were revolutions and youth
protest movements for political and social changes such as the civil rights movement in
the U.S, anti-fascism in Spain and Portugal, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the
May 1969 protests in France that nearly overthrew the government. The students in
Paris were influenced by the French leftists thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and
Louis Althusser. Marcuse's book One Dimensional Man (that I kept till this day)
advocates individual freedom in opposition to the militarism and the
industrial/consumer society that created false needs for the masses. The book was
considered as one of the essential texts for the revolutionary. Several French film
directors including Goddard, Truffaut and Louis Malle had also joined the strike in the
spirit of solidarity. Here in the US anti-war demonstrators clashed with police forces in
major cities. There were more students protesting on the streets than studying in
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classrooms. Furthermore, the publication of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac
(1949) that advocates land ethics, the preservation of the integrity, stability and beauty
of the natural world, along with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) which
documented the environmental destruction from chemical pollutions and human
impacts on the natural world had a huge influence on the grass root environmental
movement which marked the beginning of an ecological revolution.
The idea of a family and community centered life style in a natural environment was
integral of the counter culture and has its root in early Romanticism, particularly the
idea of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He advocates a natural education for children so as not
to be shackled by civilization. His image of a noble savage is a free individual living
outside of social constraint. I had met such a free individual; he was my philosophy
teacher, Lao Moon 孟祥森 (孟東籬).
Lao Moon 老孟
As a lecturer at the university, he taught us a course on Kierkegaard's Fear and
Trembling and the Sickness unto Death. Inspired by Thoreau's Walden, Lao Moon
later gave up his teaching career and moved to a small village by the Pacific with his
family, where he built a house made of local materials. In the early 80s I spent a week
at his seaside hermitage with his family. Lao Moon translated Walden Pond along with
dozens of other western classics. I later met him again in 1996 at the "March for the
Animals Conference" in Washington, DC. He had just finished translating Peter
Singer's most influential book, Animal Liberation 動物解放. What a contribution!
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Lao Moon and his bamboo hut by the Pacific Ocean
After completing my film project, I married to David and moved to Ojai, California, a
small town surrounded by mountains with a focus on the arts, music and organic
agriculture. With some of David's friends we started a communal practice. My married
life was rather stoic. The goal of living an ascetic style was to develop a higher
consciousness. We slept on the floor and spent most of our time in meditation and
reading in order to explore various esoteric teachings such as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and
Madam Blavatsky's theosophy, Zuzuki's Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and Vedantic
philosophy. The book we relied on for interpreting oracles was I-Ching by Richard
Wilhelm. At night I often heard them practicing Kriya Yoga, a technique taught by
Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi. I was also fascinated by Castaneda’s
Journey to Ixtlan. While hiking in the Ojai mountains I thought the wind that was
circling around me and the low flying hawks were allies to guide me into another
dimension. Another place we lived in Ojai was the "Live Oak Ranch", a huge orange
grove with several thousand of orange trees. The ranch, at that time, was a gathering
place for Krishnamurti’s inner circle. Every year in the spring K. would return to Ojai
and give talks at the Oak Grove. I was impressed by his quiet and unassuming
presence, far different from most other gurus that relied on ritualistic performance. K 's
teaching is a pathless path. Any form of belief and identity, according to him, is
divisive, such as religions, traditions, or political ideologies. His way is close to Zen,
grounded in the living experience itself. The answer we are so eager to posses is just
another diversion.
After Ojai we decided to move to Mendocino County in northern California, a small
town situated among vineyards and rolling hills with a Mediterranean climate.
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Overlooking the Mendocino vineyard
The ideas of "Rural Zen" and "Back to Nature" during the seventies were quite
appealing to the young generation. The counter culture idealists were against
materialistic value, eager to explore the anarchist version of a free society. Stephen
Gaskin, the American counter culture icon, held the famous "Monday Class" in the
Haight-Ashbury district in the late 60s. He was able to draw huge numbers of hippies
to listen to his radical speech. In align with the consciousness of ecological correctness,
Gaskin promoted collective communes as the model of right livelihood (Zen, tofu and
organic farming). He inspired many to leave the big cities and settle in the backcountry
such as Mendocino, an ideal setting for the new utopia.
Picking wild edible mustards in the field
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The hippies also ran their own transportation. For long distance travel, instead of
riding the Grey Hound Bus, they offered "Grey Rabbit Bus". Once I rode in one of those
rabbits with a bus-full of smiling faces. It had no seats but only mats scattered on the
bus floor for people to either meditate or take naps. Passengers were free to pass
around joints and chat with one another. In the middle of that trip the driver stopped
by a creek and let these flower children go for a dip!
One other contribution of the counter culture was the Holistic Movement and the
setting up of low cost health care clinics in cities and rural areas. The clinic in which I
worked, "Patchwork, North-side Health Center", was one such place (patchwork refers
to a coalition of health care systems). As a medical assistant, I worked for a young
Jewish doctor who had curly hair and preferred to wear a flowery shirt and shorts
instead of a white coat. Another doctor in the same clinic was more interested in being
a theater actor than in medicine!
Working at the clinic
David and I lived in a small cabin on Buddhist ground near the redwood forest. I was
warmly received by the nuns and we sometimes hiked in nearby hills. They even let me
drive a tractor to plough the field and grow snow peas in winter. A group of our local
friends that belonged to the "I've been to India club" were able to buy a portion of a
mountain near Potter Valley where they could raise their children in the wild. It was a
time when many decided to join the "Back to the Land Movement" led by the poet Gary
Snyder. This was the best thing that came out of the youthful and anti-authoritarian
movement of the sixties along with the spirit of fraternity and a love filled vision.
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Our vegetable garden in Mendocino
During the cold winter in northern California we made fires by the creek to bake sweet
potatoes for the day's meal. There were plenty of wild mushrooms to pick in the giant
redwood forest after the rain. In autumn one could see the cornfields bathed in the
golden light and bees drunk from eating grapes that were left on the vines after
harvesting. Our small cabin often filled with the aroma of baked bread and the wooded
scents of wild mushrooms just picked from the woods. Such was our simple living.
One New Year's eve several of us were invited to a friend's mountain cabin by the Eel
river. As we circled around a huge bon fire, I was offered some strange mushrooms and
soon I was initiated into a psychedelic rite. That night I felt like sleeping on a giant
cosmic bubble bed floating among the galaxies. The stars were like crystals radiating
bands of rainbow colors... and time seemed frozen in air. It was an amazing trip.
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By the 1970', the anti-nuclear movement which grew out of the environmental
movement, had reached its peak in the US. One day a friend gave me a book to read; it
was Gandhi’s Non-Violence. While we enjoyed the calm and simple living such as
tending the vegetable garden, baking bread, canning fruits and picking medicinal
herbs, the local folks with their muddy boots and old blue jeans (from thrift shops)
were already active in the anti-nuclear protests. While the Green Peace's Rainbow
Warrior made voyages to the South Pacific to intervene the nuclear weapon testing
conducted by the French government, the country folks in Mendocino travelled to
Washington, DC and met with the congressmen to voice their opposition. Couple
neighbors invited me to take part in the civil disobedience training as preparation prior
to the demonstration. One morning I got up at 3am before dawn and joined several
others for a three hour drive to San Francisco to participate in one of the largest antiNuclear demonstrations against the Lawrence Livermore National Lab where they
conduct research on nuclear weapons. Thousands of protesters converged for the "sit
in" and "blockade". By the time we had arrived there were loads of buses carrying
policemen and dogs heading in the same direction. Daniel Ellsberg, who has been
named 'the most dangerous man in America', was one of the keynote speakers. Many
were arrested on that day and unable to go home till a week later. They sang songs the
whole time while locked away in jail.
It was the spirit of solidarity, to fight for a just cause that marked the character of the
sixties. It set in motion many other social reforms such as the civil rights, the feminist's
and the environmental movement followed by the world wide animal rights movement
which has been the focus of my social activism since the mid 1980s.
Protest against the circus, Santa Fe, NM
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The two most influential and definitive books of the 70s, in my view, were Peter
Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and Christopher D. Stone's Should Trees Have
Standing (1972). Singer is now recognized as one of the most influential philosophers
in the world today. Stone offers compelling arguments that nature, meaning trees,
rivers, oceans, animals and their habitats as a whole should be granted legal rights and
protected by law. His book launched a worldwide debate during the burgeoning
environmental movement.
The mood of quiet desperation and my own adolescent crisis could be regarded as a
representation of that generation. In retrospect, one could say that the entire
philosophical system, East or West, from early on has been battling against nihilism.
While most philosophers seek shelters in false optimism, Emil Cioran, author of On the
Heights of Despair (1934), defies empty consolation. As a fearless assassin of idealism,
Cioran wandered like a night beast outside of clock time, outside of humanity. His
confession, as I see it, far more honest than Camus'. The mind, Cioran warns, must
have courage to face its own insanity without escaping into noble ideas or mysticism.
Existentially, each moment, each breath one takes would require a kind of heroic act.
After reading a book on Nazi's genocide, I ran up to the hilltop and screamed to a
universe that is supposed to be benevolent. When Paul Celan (also a friend of Cioran)
was invited by Heidegger for a walk in the black forest, he wanted to hear an apology
from the philosopher who once supported the Nazi; instead, Celan heard nothing. This
occasion gave rise to the poem Todtnauberg (The Mountain of Death), one of Celan's
best. Another German author, Hermann Hesse, a favorite writer of mine, whose novels
gave a genuine voice to the lost generation. Between 1960 and 1970 his books sold in
the millions and was described as "The Hesse Phenomenon". The counter culture
found its voice in Hesse's books as the theme dealt with existential anguish in
connection to the spiritual, emotional and political crisis in time when the Western
rational tradition was crumbling.
The crisis we are facing today is the systematic destruction of the planet. It has largely
to do with the corporate consumerism. There is dire need for change from the way we
think and live. I often wonder what happened to the revolutionary spirit of the 60s, a
vitality we need today to fight greed and technological narcissism? This is the sorrow of
Marcuse who laments that the new bourgeoisie have killed the spirit of revolution. A
new paradigm for the spiritual seekers is a shift from the pursuit of super
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consciousness to one's own conscience. Living kindly and responsibly is the real
practice.
The Northern part of New Mexico was one of the attractions for the hippies in the
1960s. There was the New Buffalo Commune and the Hog Farm Commune located near
the mountain town-Taos. Hippies with their families from other states converged there
and set up teepees, tents and simple structures in order to build a self-sufficient
community. They cultivated farms and orchards, living in harmony with nature, they
shared the open sky and the vast desert with wild inhabitants such as mountain lions,
bears, coyotes, deer, prairie dogs, hawks and rattle snakes...
Monsoon Clouds over Santa Fe
In 1983, we moved from California to Santa Fe, the highest city in the US (over 7000
feet above sea level), and an arts and healing center surrounded by national forest. It is
here, under the vast southwest sky with swirling clouds, I found my bliss, not in a grand
manner of religious or mystical exaltation, but a quiet appreciation and somatic
connection with the mountains and the high desert. A place where one could tune in to
the beauty of nature and fellow creatures, their non-dual perception, I think, surpasses
that of the Yogi's.
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A day on the Sangre de Christo Mountain
What I have been searching for all along was the wild trails hidden from view. When I
read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild about a young man, Christopher McCandless, and
his journey to the Alaskan wild, it awakens my own forgotten instinct. I lay the book
over my chest and listened to his words: "Oh how one wishes sometimes to escape
from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to
take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long,
grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered
speechless by emotion."
Like a wild beast, Chris must return to his primal habit
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Chris was not willing to put up with social convention, he wanted complete freedom:
"Not love, not money, not faith, not fame". The odyssey he took was pre-destined.
Chris couldn't live in any other way because he was the will of nature. Every bone and
every muscle in his body was tuned into a primal desire, to track, smell and hunt like a
wild creature of the great white north.
In college Chris majored in history and anthropology. He had no interest in social
activities, romance or a degree. Influenced by Tolstoy, Chris gave away all his money to
charities. Living in the city Chris felt like a caged animal desperate to get out. He
abandoned his car, gave away all his possessions before entering the sacred temple of
wilderness. Each day when the sun lit up a new world in the eyes of the wolves, the
caribous, rabbits and snow fox, death also sits quietly on their shoulders. Chris knew
death is "a fierce meadowlark" (a phrase by Robinson Jeffers) and he was not afraid of
such encounter all alone. He was, after all, his own experiment.
The winter animal
Although this Christmas was one of the coldest, I woke up that morning with only one
desire, to stand on top of a mountain with my two canine buddies. After an hour drive
and trotted through the deep snow, we climbed up to the top of the mesa, and viola,
there it was, a splendid vista opened to our eyes! Then I knew, I was one of the winter
animals.
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Man's interior wilderness can only be resurrected by untamed nature, not manipulated
by technologies nor by transcendental baggages. Beauty is everywhere, the humility of
the animal world (take only what's needed for survival), and nature's quiet meditation
all around... a moon over the snowcapped mountains, animal tracks in the woods, the
deep silence of winter night, joyful sounds of birds returning in early spring. These are
life's mysteries grounded in a corporeal world, visible and palpable, not beyond.
房曼琪
December 31, 2009
Night of the Blue Moon
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