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Woo! You know what woo means in Chinese?" '
"What?"
"Fog. These woods are great here in Marin, I'll show you Muir Woods today, but up
north is all that real old Pacific Coast mountain and ocean land, the future home of
the Dharma-body. Know what I'm gonna do? I'll do a new long poem called 'Rivers and
Mountains Without End' and just write it on and on on a scroll and unfold on and on with
new surprises and always what went before forgotten, see, like a river, or like one of
them real long Chinese silk paintings that show two little men hiking in an endless
landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with the fog in the
upper silk void. I'll spend three thousand years writing it, it'll be packed full of
information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, astronomy, geology,
Hsuan Tsung's travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation, Oceanic ecology and food
chains."
"Go to it, boy." As ever I strode on behind him and when we began to climb, with our
packs feeling good on our backs as though we were pack animals and didn't feel right
without a burden, it was that same old lonesome old good old thwap thwap up the trail,
slowly, a mile an hour. We came to the
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end of the steep road where we had to go through a few houses built near steep bushy
cliffs with waterfalls trickling down, then up to a high steep meadow, full of butterflies
and hay and a little seven a.m. dew, and down to a dirt road, then to the end of the dirt
road, which rose higher and higher till we could see vistas of Corte Madera and Mill Valley
far away and even the red top of Golden Gate Bridge.
"Tomorrow afternoon on our run to Stimson Beach," said Japhy, "you'll see the whole
white city of San Francisco miles away in the blue bay. Ray, by God, later on in our future
life we can have a fine free-wheeling tribe in these California hills, get girls and have dozens
of radiant enlightened brats, live like Indians in hogans and eat berries and buds."
"No beans?"
"We'll write poems, we'll get a printing press and print our own poems, the Dharma
Press, we'll poetize the lot and make a fat book of icy bombs for the booby public."
"Ah the public ain't so bad, they suffer too. You always read about some tarpaper
shack burning somewhere in the Middlewest with three little children perishing and you
see a picture of the parents crying. Even the kitty was burned. Japhy, do you think God
made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be
mean."
"Ho, who would you mean by God?"
"Just Tathagata, if you will."
"Well it says in the sutra that God, or Tathagata, doesn't himself emanate a world
from his womb but it just appears due to the ignorance of sentient beings."
"But he emanated the sentient beings and their ignorance too. It's all too pitiful. I
ain't gonna rest till I find out why, Japhy, why."
tion why and not even any significance attached to it."
"Well, then nothing's really happening, then."
He threw a stick at me and hit me on the foot.
"Well, that didn't happen," I said.
"I really don't know, Ray, but I appreciate your sadness about the world. 'Tis indeed.
Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried
real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate. What do you
think about death, Ray?"
"I think death is our reward. When we die we go straight to nirvana Heaven and that's
that."
"But supposing you're reborn in the lower hells and have hot redhot balls of iron
shoved down your throat by devils."
"Life's already shoved an iron foot down my mouth. But I don't think that's anything
but a dream cooked up by some hysterical monks who didn't understand Buddha's
peace under the Bo Tree or for that matter Christ's peace looking down on the heads
of his tormentors and forgiving them."
"You really like Christ, don't you?"
"Of course I do. And after all, a lot of people say he is Maitreya, the Buddha
prophesied to appear after Sakyamuni, you know, Maitreya means 'Love' in Sanskrit
and that's all Christ talked about was love."
"Oh, don't start preaching Christianity to me, I can just see you on your deathbed
kissing the cross like some old Karamazov or like our old friend Dwight Goddard who
spent his life as a Buddhist and suddenly returned to Christianity in his last days. Ah
that's not for me, I want to spend hours every day in a lonely temple meditating in
front of a sealed statue of
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Kwannon which no one is ever allowed to see because it's too powerful. Strike hard, old
diamond!" "It'll all come out in the wash."
"You remember Rol Sturlason my buddy who went to Japan to study those rocks of
Ryoanji. He went over on a freighter named Sea Serpent so he painted a big mural of
a sea serpent and mermaids on a bulkhead in the messhall to the delight of the crew
who dug him like crazy and all wanted to become Dharma Bums right there. Now he's
climbing up holy Mount Hiei in Kyoto through a foot of snow probably, straight up
where there are no trails, steep steep, through bamboo thickets and twisty pine like in
brush drawings. Feet wet and lunch forgot, that's the way to climb." "What are you
going to wear in the monastery, anyway?" "Oh man, the works, old T'ang Dynasty
style things long black floppy with huge droopy sleeves and funny pleats, make you feel
real Oriental."
"Alvah says that while guys like us are all excited about being real Orientals and
wearing robes, actual Orientals over there are reading surrealism and Charles Darwin
and mad about Western business suits."
"East'11 meet West anyway. Think what a great world revolution will take place when
East meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of
millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the
back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody."
"That's a lot like the early days of the Crusades, Walter the Penniless and Peter the
Hermit leading ragged bands of believers to the Holy Land." "Yeah but that was all
such European gloom and crap, I
see anywhere in the world, a beautiful shape to it, I really love Tamalpais. We'll sleep
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