The continual gentle breathing of the mountain.ĭōgen, returning from China, set about the teaching that still forms the foundations for the school of Sōtō zen. Ripples emerge, spread, disappear again into the emptiness of the mirror calm of the lake. Looking down, from this distance, the fish is invisible, just the track of its movement is marked. Now and then, here and there, the solid appearance of the lake shows a circle of ripples - a trout has risen to a fly. This is not ownership, but a mutual belonging, monk and mountain both engaged in their own practice, respecting each other. Dōgen walked those mountains and, step by step, they entered his bloodstream.įor Dōgen the mountains belonged to the sages who inhabited them, and many would have swapped the precarious life of court privilege for the different hardship of a realm where the Emperor's remit did not reach. Our own word landscape, in its evolution from the land we belong in, to the picture that we observe from the outside, does little justice to the richness of the original Taoist concept. Traditionally in Chinese thought mountains and waters denoted the whole of the natural physical world. If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking. Llyn y Fan Fach beckons up the track. The surface of the lake is perfectly still, mirroring the mountains and the sky. If a fish gets past that lot to spawn, the decline in the insect population may not provide enough sustenance for the growing fry. The sewin that do make it up the main river, heading for the gravel beds of feeder streams, find their route can be blocked by dams of rubbish - a fallen tree, debris brought down in a spate, yards of discarded baling plastic. A river may look healthy but ask the fish - they see the result of sewage spills and agricultural run-off. A wonderful story, except that the choice - to stay or to go - no longer seems to work.Ī combination of events, a collection of theories - changing water temperature, dredging, drift-netting, disease - few trout that head for the sea now return. The trout that prefer to stay in the brackish waters, weighing the odds of food supply and risk, stay brown. If fortunate, it returns after a few years as a silver god, powering back upstream to spawn. The Towy is famous for its sewin - sea trout - a fish that somehow knows that it's worth leaving behind the meagre food supplies of the pools of an upland stream to chance the journey to the rich feeding grounds of the estuary waters and the wider sea. A warm April day and we are clambering up down around boulders tumbled as giant misshaped marbles, marking the course of a series of pools and waterfalls that is the Sawdde, its beginnings in the waters of Llyn y Fan Fach a few hundred yards further uphill.
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