Tag: rocks

Baikal and Back 6: Rocks

August 28, 2018 / John D. / 3 Comments

Hawk rock

My guide in Busan, Ryu Dong-il, was warm and sensitive to a tourist’s viewpoint. By the end of the day I’d got to know about his family, hobbies and a whole lot about Korean culture. The son of an illiterate dock worker, he had got his first job at twelve, paid for his own schooling and left to become an engine driver.

For years he’d combined driving trains with his pastime of rock-climbing, and the pictures he showed me was the stuff of nightmares. What on earth would move a human to even want to do such a thing? ‘It makes me feel alive,‘ he told me. ‘It makes me comfortable.’ Comfortable?! Short of being tortured, clinging to a cliff was as far from comfort as I could imagine.

Ryu told me of a close friend with whom he used to go climbing. Halfway up a rock face, his friend had suddenly frozen motionless. Asked what was wrong, he did not reply but started to descend. His eyes were ablaze, and the very next day he applied to be a monk. It had been twenty years ago, and though Ryu had often visited the small temple where his friend lived, he had never learnt what exactly happened that day. Clearly it had something to do with the power of the rocks. ‘Now he lives a simple life. He’s poor, but he has a purity in his eyes. You feel that he has a detachment from life,’ said Ryu. ‘He’s free.’

‘And how about you?’ I asked. It turned out Ryu too had had an unusual experience. ‘It was very special,‘ he said. ‘I was lying on a giant rock, taking a rest after a difficult climb, when I felt as if I was floating. I lost control of my body, couldn’t move, yet there was something pleasant about it as if I’d entered a realm of weightlessness. Since then I never had a feeling like that again. Even though I tried sometimes lying down on rocks, but never that same feeling. I think it was something to do with that particular rock. Each rock is different.’

Rocks are known to have different physical properties. Some have a powerful magnetic field, granite gives off radiation, and the blue stones of Stonehenge may well have been dragged all the way from Wales because they had special healing properties. There are rocks of worship, rocks of transcendence, rocks that convey authority and rocks conducive to contemplation. They were seen by the ancients as manifestations of a living Earth, and they served as vessels for otherworldly spirits. With their rockhard solidity, they represented the eternal and the permanent. This stood in contrast to the temporary world of vegetative matter to which humans belong.

Rocks and roots. As a land of mountains, I couldn’t help feeling Korea had a lot to teach.

Rock of ages

June 22, 2018 / John D. / 3 Comments

Opening Amaterasu’s rock cave to let out the light, symbolic of rock’s numinous power

The Shinto shrines I love best are those that originated with sacred rocks. Some are kept out of view, hidden from public gaze as their numinous power might be eroded by human contact. Sometimes the rock is a ‘spirit-body’, visible but fenced off. Some rocks are associated with ancient legends, and some have the ability to heal. Some are given special names, and some are known as ‘mirror rocks’ which reflect the sacred spirit of the sun. Some are distinguished by their striking shape or size. There are rocks too of great physical presence.

Kamikura Jinja with the sacred Gotobiki rock onto which the Kumano kami descended

At Tarobu-gu in Shiga Prefecture a narrow passage leads between two sheer rockfaces, walking through which is said to bring good luck. Kamikura Jinja in Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture, is tucked beneath a huge overhanging rock. At Iwafune Jinja near Osaka there is a whole outcrop of tumbled rocks around which a trail leads to an opening inside which, in yin-yang fashion, stands a sacred phallus.

Opening in the rocks at Okinawa’s most sacred spot, Sefa Utaki

Worship of rocks predates even the most ancient of shrines, yet nowadays they are often overlooked for the formal trappings of imperial Shinto. Worshippers are expected to head for the Haiden (Worship Hall), make a monetary offering, then go to the shrine office and buy an amulet or keepsake. Myself, I head for the sacred rock. Invariably it exudes a sense of spirituality greater than the man-made places of worship. Power spots in Japan resonate with earth energy and are subversive of the established order.

All around the world rock has had the power to move people. Stone circles, pyramids, Easter Island statues, the Black Stone at Mecca, sacred rocks – it seems that ancient people found spiritual power in the apparently inanimate. Something other than synchronicity was clearly at work.

In hippie days it was fashionable in the UK to embrace stone circles such as the magnificent standing stones at Avebury and feel the energy that emanates from them. To those immersed in earth mysteries, they represented geological acupuncture needles which had been carefully placed on ley lines. They radiated with the pulse of a living earth, as if the very vibrations of existence could be felt through their touch. The Druid rites at Stonehenge were similarly concocted in terms of megalithic magic. Clearly the generations who in the past devoted whole lifetimes to putting up such monuments had been inspired by something special, something unseen, and it was only through the solidity of rock that they could express it.

Dowsing for electro-magnetic energy emanating from Avebury rocks

Alan Watts in one of his talks speaks of visitors from outer space revisiting Earth after an interval of millions of years and being astonished to find that the little rock rolling about in space had ‘peopled’. Just as a tree bears fruit and a plant produces flowers, so Earth had given birth to humans – indeed, to all life as we know it. It’s a striking thought, but perhaps it explains why people so often find a spiritual home in rock. We are after all lost little creatures propelled through space in a universe beyond our comprehension, and for comfort we cling for all we’re worth to the rock which is our home.

Mother Earth.

Hawk rock on Shiraishi Island, keeping an eye on the living world

Something about rocks speaks to the eternal and is suggestive of primal origins

Zen rocks (Book review)

January 3, 2018 / John D. / 2 Comments

The famous garden at Ryoanji shows how Zen Buddhism absorbed the native tradition of reverence for rocks

Reading Zen in the Rocks by Francois Bertbier (translated with a philosophical essay by Graham Parkes) Uni of Chicago Press, 2000

Understanding the role of rocks in Japanese culture, and specifically in Shinto, has been something of a quest for Green Shinto. Here is a book which does much to throw light on matters that have long intrigued us. Though the focus is on the dry landscape gardens (karesansui) so beloved of Zen, the book has much to say about the wider subject and its background.

Whereas Green Shinto has previously asserted that the cult of rocks came over with Korean shamanism (the result of southern migration from Altaic shamanism), this book makes no mention of that but looks instead to the Chinese tradition of litholatry. And in the philosophical essay by Graham Parkes, there is the assertion of origins too in the ancient cosmology of China.

For early Chinese, humans lived in a giant cave of which the sky formed the ceiling. That the sky should be made of rock can be seen as a logical conclusion from the way meteorites fell to earth, for they were presumed to be bits of the celestial covering that had fallen off. In similar manner mountains were seen as huge blocks or stalactites that had descended to earth. Their heavenly provenance was not their only distinguishing feature, for in the precipitous fall they had accumulated huge amounts of energy (known as chi or qi). It helps explain why rocks that fell to earth are traditionally treated as divine in Japan.

Another vital point the book makes is that whereas the West has an established dichotomy between animate and inanimate, for the Chinese there was a continuum of existence with chi energy running throughout. The dichotomy such as there was rather between yin and yang. The earth was yin, mountains thrusting upwards were yang. The landscape was thus pulsing with energy, seen graphically in the Japanese word for landscape sansui (mountain – water).

Since rocks constitute the very material of a mountain, they came to be seen as a microcosm of it. They were thus held to possess the same properties and energy as the original mountain. Though the book does not go into this, as it is concerned with Zen, the notion sheds light on Shinto practice. Kami in ancient times descend from heaven into mountains, the nearest point on earth, and Amaterasu’s offspring famously descended on Mt Takachiho in Kyushu. If kami could descend into mountains, they could also descend into the representation of a mountain, i.e. rocks. And here we can understand the possible evolution of iwakura, or sacred rocks.

In this way we can see that in ancient Chinese thought the rock was of a mountain, and the mountain was of heaven. Small wonder that Daoists liked to retreat into caves to seek the ultimate reality. Small wonder too that Bodhidharma spent nine years meditating in front of a rock face. The result was that Buddhists came to incorporate the nature of sacred rock into their philosophy. Zhanran of the Tiantai School for example claimed that even non-sentient beings have Buddhist nature.’ And in Japan Saicho, founder of Tendai, spoke of ‘the Buddha-nature of trees and rocks’.

Garden development
In Shinto it is usual for the area to the south of the main shrine building to be flat and covered with white sand or gravel. It is a place of purity where the kami will be honoured and entertained. Much of Zen in the Rocks is concerned with decoding the famous garden of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, and it is pointed out that the dry landscape there lies to the south of the main building in Shinto fashion and is on a piece of level land covered with gravel. The Shinto preference for purity, simplicity and naturalness was woven into the Zen tradition.

Sand cones at Kamigamo Jinja. The Zen temple of Daisen-in has a similar pair in its front dry landscape garden.

Buddhism incorporated other aspects of Shinto too. One example is the use of sand cones at Kyoto’s Daisen-in, which is located in the Zen monastery of Daitoku-ji. Its rock garden contains two sand cones which mirror those at Kamigamo Shrine. These may have originally served a purpose similar to the use of red carpets today, in other words prior to the visit of an important dignitary or to the holding of a ritual event the sand from the cones would be spread over the forecourt as a form of purification and renewal. In other words, the cones were a means of storing spare sand, and over time they came to be seen as agents of purification in themselves. Something similar happened at the Zen temple of Ginkaku-ji, where the famous tall cone of sand, said to represent Mt Fuji, was originally just a garden device to keep extra sand when needed.

Zen in the Rocks is relatively short and though it focusses on the rock garden, it offers a range of unexpected insights in the role of rock in Japanese culture. It shows for instance how the Heian garden of pond and vegetation transmuted into the bare rocks and pebbles of Muromachi times. This was part of the Zen concern with pointing to the root of things and stripping away the inessential. In this way the Buddhist emphasis on perpetual change and the transience of life, given emphasis in the Heian garden, was replaced in the Zen garden with symbols of permanence and the eternal.

‘Brother rock’ may seem an odd concept to Westerners, but if you think in terms of the Big Bang, we all share common origins. In considering the changing attitudes to nature in the Sino-Japanese tradition, this book helps us to look at rock anew. Not as something dead, sterile or alien. But as fundamental to our place in the universe. Fundamental to ourselves. As Alan Watts pointed out, the giant rock on which we travel through space is ultimately the source of our existence. The spirit in the rock is ourselves.

For more on rocks, please see the list of categories in the righthand column and browse through the relevant section. For Alan Watts on rock, see this entry here.

Rocks rock

August 6, 2016 / John D. / 4 Comments

The Shaman’s Rock at Lake Baikal has a cave in which a monster was said to live. It’s one of the oldest shaman sites in the world.

The awesomeness of rocks
Green Shinto has written several times of the spiritual significance of rocks in Shinto (see the righthand column for previous postings). It’s a much overlooked subject. Why? Partly because it is associated with the kind of primitive superstition that Meiji era Japan sought to put behind it. But also partly, I suspect, because rock worship leads back to Korean shamanism and shows that far from being unique, Shinto is inextricably linked with continental nature worship. Just how this conflicts with the insularity of mainstream Japan will become evident in the remarks below.

It was with some delight that I recently came across a video entitled “Okayama: the profound spirit of the rocks” (28 mins). 70% of Japan is covered in mountains and forests, so it’s not surprising that ancient Japanese felt some kind of kinship with them. They even named tribes after the protective mountain beneath which they settled.

‘Since ancient times,’ runs the commentary, ‘people in Japan have felt a deep sense of awe towards particularly impressive rocks.’ It’s not limited to Japan, of course. The same could be said for ancient cultures around the world – you only have to think of Stonehenge, the pyramids and Machu Picchu for example.

Rock power
The commentary goes to feature a cave and group of rocks in Okayama, where according to local folklore a demon is said to live – reminiscent for me of the ‘demon’ said to have lived in the Shaman’s Rock on Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal. Rocks as an abode of spirits was part of the Ural-Altaic culture that spread down into the Korean peninsula. In Japan’s syncretic tradition, it is a Buddhist temple rather than Shinto shrine that guards the area, though in times gone by there would have been no such artificial division.

Rocks can provide boundaries and guidelines

‘In Japan we believe that massive rocks such as these are occupied by divine spirits,’ says the guide, typically emphasising the singularity of Japan rather than its continental heritage. It is in such beliefs, deliberately furthered by Japan’s education system, that the roots of Shinto nationalism lie.

‘In the face of this massive power of nature, we can only put our hands together in awe,’ continues the guide, perfectly expressing the animistic roots of the religious impulse in cultures throughout the world. The belief that Japanese are somehow unique in this stems from a binary opposition of ‘we Japanese’ versus ‘Christian Westerners’, so deeply ingrained in Japanese education. Is it too much to hope that one day school textbooks will talk of ‘we East Asians’ and of Shinto as part of ‘shamanistic cultures worldwide’.

Rock of ages
Kitagi Island in the Inland Sea is famous for its granite rock (which was used for building Osaka Castle). One of the quarrymen there says, ‘My father would always tell me the rock is alive,’ and the discussion goes to suggest that newly cut rock is like a baby, freshly brought to life. After hundreds of thousands of years, the pieces of rock are liberated from their deep seclusion by being severed from the base of the parent mountain.

The programme notes that the grandeur of rocks gives humans a sense of their insignificance in the grander scheme of things. Perhaps it is from this that their spiritual power emanates. As in Zen, the effect induces a diminishing of the ego in face of the sheer immensity and longevity of the rocks. And in the end all we are left with is ‘Gratitude’, as an ink-stone grinder puts it.

Rocks are thus shown to be a true object of worship, and it is to the larger rock on which we live that we owe our very existence. As the programme shows, rocks truly rock. We can only live in awe.
(For more of Green Shinto on the mystique of rocks, click here.)

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Christian Storms, climber and video maker

Christian Storms, climber, actor and tv producer

Christian Storms, the American featured in the NHK programme, writes:

‘Climbers like me tend to view history via geology, a primordial time before man. Each type of rock tells a different story about the history of the earth. Much like the people I have shared special moments with, rocks come in all kinds of forms, compositions and hardness: just like the characters I have met.

On this trip, I learned to appreciate rocks that I can’t climb, which was a first for me. I met Sugita-san, an old-school climber who has put up over 150 routes in the world-class limestone Bichu climbing area, which now has 400 routes. Climbing his first ascents was a real pleasure because he designed the routes. It felt like picking his brain or dating his ex-girlfriend.

Formed underwater in ancient coral reefs and from shells and skeletal fragments of living organisms, those limestone cliffs I climbed were once underwater, before Japan was ever Japan. I promised Sugita I’d return to develop some of my own routes – and I will.

There is nothing like a ferry ride, and Kitagi Island [out of Kasaoka port] is a real gem. Tsuruta-san was all smiles as he showed me an old quarry for limestone and marble, that s now filled with crystal clear water. Watching limestone being quarried using the old fashioned method was quite something. And the death-defying ladders I had to climb down were scarier than any mountain I’ve climbed.

Finally, finding an inkstone was special. But more than that, I got to make one, together with the master, Nakashima-san. To create something from rock, and to make something that has been used for over 700 years – it felt so primitive. Without this rock, there would have been no written world, no literature, no history.

As the musician Bob Dylan said, “How does it feel? To be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.” Okayama felt like home.’

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Places spotlighted in the NHK programme (see here):

Takahashi City in Okayama Prefecture is a popular destination for sports climbers. Rock climbing courses were first set up here in the late 1980s, and the area is now known by the name Bichu. TV producer Christian Storms is an avid sports climber. On this edition of Journeys in Japan, he scales one of the rock walls of Bichu. He visits an island that has a long history of producing high quality granite and inspects an existing quarry. He meets a traditional craftsman who uses the local slate to carve calligraphy inkstones by hand. And he discovers the profound connection that people here have long felt for their rocks.

Mt. Yoze-dake in Takahashi City is one of the most popular areas for sport climbing. The main climbing area, known as Bichu, is equipped with a parking lot, a rest house and a car camping ground.

Mt. Kinojo Visitor Center

On the summit of Mt. Kinojo you can visit the site of an ancient castle. The beautiful landscape is dotted with places associated with a legendary demon who is said to have ruled this area. Inside the precincts of Iwaya-ji Temple is an impressive rock formation that is believed to have been the demon’s residence. The Mt. Kinojo Visitor Center is 20 minutes by car or taxi from Soja Station on the JR Hakubi Line.

The most famous rocks in the world? The Zen garden at Ryoanji shows how Buddhism absorbed the native tradition of rock worship

A triad of sacred rock deities. This and the following pictures are from a remarkable collection of outstanding rocks by power spotter, Kara Yamaguchi (see https://www.greenshinto.com/2013/12/05/power-spotter/)

DH000059 地蔵岩　御在所　三重県

舞台石　飛鳥

DH000050 石の配例　唐人駄馬遺跡　高知県

Zen and Shinto 7: The Dao of Rock

February 27, 2016 / John D. / 1 Comment

Shinto garden by Shigemori Mirei at Matsuo Taisha

In my investigations into Zen this morning, I had something of an epiphany – or perhaps I should say, an awakening. Both Zen and Shinto share roots in Daoism (Taoism). Zen it has been said is the result of Indian Buddhism colliding with Chinese thought. And Shinto was conceived linguistically as shendao – the Way of the Gods. In other words, the thinking behind the Way of the Tao is fundamental to both. As Alan Watts explained in his very last book (1975), Tao is the Watercourse Way, flowing through the universe like an animating force.

Rock worship at Kamigamo Jinja

So, you may ask, if Zen and Shinto both share this in common, why are they so very different in form and belief? Why is one kami-oriented and particularist, while the other is self-oriented and universal? Why does Shinto look to this life, while Zen dwells on another?

Well, the thought struck me that they may not be as different as they seem. Both are after all based on intuitive understanding and repudiate logic and words. Zen prides itself on a transmission outside the scriptures. Shinto has no scriptures. Both in short treasure non-verbal understanding. ‘He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know,’ said Lao-Tzu.

In the Tao Te Ching, it is said the Way can never be known or defined. It can, however, be sensed or experienced, and its principles are observable in Nature. In Zen this is internalised as people seek their true inner nature. In Shinto there is the concept of kannagara, which in effect means following the laws of nature. Both seek the Way, but whereas Zen looks inside, Shinto looks outside. The former goes to the mountains to get closer to self, the latter goes to the mountains for closeness to the kami. And here perhaps is the vital difference between them, for whereas the former is deeply personal, the latter is community oriented. Zen tells you to sit in silence. Shinto encourages communal celebration.

Living rocks at Togakushi Jinja

It may be no coincidence then that both religions treasure rocks. (Landscape architect Shigemori Mirei has done rock gardens for both.) Zen temples are full of rocks in their beloved dry landscape gardens. Shinto shrines are full of sacred rocks, bedecked with shimenawa straw rope or shide paper strips. Rocks in Zen may trigger enlightenment. Rocks in Shinto are sacred vessels into which kami descend. Both religions see them as something more than mere stone – they’re representational, mini-mountains, spirit-bodies. On another level, they’re symbols of silence, of the non-verbal, of the eternal.

Here again Daoism lies at the root. Daoist practitioners went into caves to meditate, and what are caves but hollowed out rock? Significantly, in the Zen garden rocks stand for Mt Horai, the Blessed Isles of the Immortals where Daoist sages live. They may also symbolise moments of time in a vast ocean of raked gravel. And beyond that they symbolise the biggest rock of all, the one on which we’re spinning round the solar system. In this way they’re symbolic of Mother Earth, which, to quote Alan Watts, produced humans in the same way that trees produce apples. We are then the children of rock, because the earth-rock has ‘peopled’ us into existence. When Shinto followers worship rocks, they’re worshipping their ancestors in a very real sense.

It turns out then that in both Zen and Shinto rock is a means to salvation. Don McLean was on the right lines all those years ago. Rock truly will save your mortal soul!

Zen garden by Shigemori Mirei at Zuiho-in, Daitoku-ji with Mt Horai at the far end, from which a peninsula stretches out towards an individual rock, marooned and all at sea.