Sansaku: Finding Chuang Tzu
10/25/17
I pulled out two books this morning; they were both from my graduate class in eastern philosophy and I didn’t realize until that moment, they’re the only books I’ve saved from my first sojourn through college. I was looking for Chuang Tzu. He’s my favorite.
While Chuang Tzu transcends the mundane world, he’s always in the midst and depth of daily life. He’s not like Lao Tzu, who wanted to do something, Chuang Tzu didn’t want to do anything at all. He knew what to do, he just didn’t want to do it. He’s a master of being.
While his doctrines have never been taken all that seriously by the scholars, Zen invited him in and I have a book on chaos theory that uses Chuang Tzu for the epigrams. He absolutely defies conventional scales and standards. He’s a mystic and a very good thinker.
I’m astounded at the depth of his creative imagination and the degree of inwardness he’s achieved. It’s a return to the roots.
I’ve gone around the world many times in books. Chuang Tzu is one of those places I keep returning to. I carried the Burton Watson translation with me in Mexico, taught him at Timberline, and just encountered the mystic coyote in that border-town-dream-brain of mine.
Durango is one of those places where two great highways intersect. The Navajo Trail, crossing east to west over the Great Divide at Wolf Creek, ends when it comes to the Grand Canyon. The Million Dollar Highway goes north through the Switzerland of Colorado and south towards the land of enchantment and Mexico. The southwest corner of the state borders mountains, canyons, and deserts. And the Animas, that river of lost souls, was once the headwaters for one of great glaciers in Colorado during the last ice age.
Durango is built on the edge of the terminal moraine, where the glacier pushed the rocks to a stop. It’s a crossroads and a center. A happening place. No wonder it’s an attractor.
Good teachers have the capacity for making connections and Durango is one of those towns where connections come quick. While it wired me up, I’ve watched it burn out others.
I’ve gone looking for better places, but this is the one I chose. It’s like the way I write. I look for a border, a boundary, and do my best, not to cross, but to live there. It’s where the two opposites meet.
If Colorado is a quadrant, I was born in the northeast. I went to school on the border near Wyoming and lived on the edge of the prairie. The southwest was the never-never land of our childhood and the place of mystery on the far divide. Chyako crossed an ocean to arrive.
It’s an ancient place of culture, the four corners, and there’s something young at heart that’s stayed true to the old dreams. People have come and gone, but the stories survive in the wind and rocks and trees. The elders live down deep in the root of things.
We don’t have a train you can jump, like the ones in Yuma. Ours is a narrow gauge that runs on a schedule. Freight trains aren’t like that. They leave when they’re loaded, so time doesn’t count. Our tramps don’t ride their rails, but they hang out in the park by the river.
When Chuang Tzu crossed the border and found Coyote, he was one of many elders who’d recently emerged into the modern world. In the mother tongue he asked, “What the hell happened? What is that?”
If Chuang Tzu watched the news and saw a warbird jet raining down fire and destruction from the sky, he’d have called it a dragon. He’d be right. What would he say about hurricanes, fires, and pollution?
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