[5 mins reading time]

[San Hi San: Mountains Hidden in Mountains]

There was once a sacred mountain called Kezhege, it was where children were promised for the people.

It is right there, at the centre of Asia. By the south Siberian River Tes, rising high above the steppe and stone kurgan circles.

Kezhege was quiet that day under the high-plain light. At the mouth of the sandstone canyon, the Tuvan man squatted, piled kindling wood and laid out types of cheese, sweet pastry and wrapped snack.

He was a shaman, he tied prayer flags to a pole, all bright blue and green, red and yellow and white. He lit the fire. The people stood in a semi-circle, watched as the libation burned, the smoke itself twisting gently in the mountain air.

The group had travelled for three days, an old plane with heat belting out from plates in the fuselage, another that set them down in the wrong city, several cars, then horse and cart. They had crossed by the migration route of sayan steppe antelope, and there was the band of khöömei throat-singers standing by a white minibus.

The leader of this group of singers said, “We are grateful for our isolation.”

These were people with a wide stride, the freedom of the steppe.

Together they skirted the clear blue lentic lake of Tore-khol, the place of pike and strange fishes stranded in these Altai mountains, the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush far away to south. Not far from the yurts at the lake shore was the high desert market of Erzin. There were stalls for clothes and bright plastic goods, solar panels for their yurts, goods travelling this way and that way across the porous borders.

By night they climbed the stairs in the cold concrete block, the space dimly lit by strip lights. By day, there were lace tablecloths laid with cheese and potato soup, pickled tomato and beets, chunks of rough bread. There was warm broth and hot tea.

It had been another winter of deep snow yet sudden melts and refreezing, preventing animals from digging for the grass below. There had been, those years, fast spring flood, more parasite disease of sheep, furious grassland fire, shifting vegetation patterns. It was harder work for all the healers, the shamans and the lamas.

The forecast remained troubling. The better course, far and wide, might have been to keep all of nature sacred.

Now the sun beat in the wide steppe sky, and they waited till the fire had turned the offerings to ashes.

The throat-singer Sayan Papa had sung an ancient song of purification, the under and over tones emerging from the land itself, the centuries of life on windblown grassland and beside taiga forest, alongside river and mewing lambs, all a sonic mirror of the steppe:

“Let all the people live well, let their work go well,

Let children live well, let life be without obstruction.”

For this was the place where wishes would come true.

The centre of the mountain was an enclosed amphitheatre, a deep pan filled with coloured prayer flags tied to bushes and high above on the rock face were petroglyphs whose stories came from a distant age. There were singing caves, when the wind blew in and out and all around. There were plastic models, house and cow, every kind of baby doll, placed on ledges looking inward. From this calm underworld, an icy crevasse split the rock, and they climbed upwards, slipping often, and wondering how they safely could come back down.

The hidden mountains always know more than we do.

The songs of bee and grasshopper were loud upon the upper meadow. An arctic halo had formed around the sun, ice crystals in the altostratus, a falcon circled over the quivering grass.

At this point, you may sit, on the canyon edge.

And lift your face to the sun, shut your eyes and let the rich red colour form. Sounds will fade. Soon there will be silence. Indeed that day all was hushed. Each insect and bird became suddenly silent, and even the wind this high ceased all movement.

At this place, there was a kind of overview effect. The whole planet in all its beauty and connections was spread out below, the bend of the river and the mountains sprinkled white on the far horizon. There was a wealth of warmth inside, the birth of hope again.

The world had come to a halt, once again.

You might think of those not yet born, their faces rising from the very ground.

Raisa from the singers came to the ledge, her boy child in her arms. This was the lullaby called Opei Yry, she said, it comes from blessed nature. She sang:

“I’m rocking you, my sweet little jumper, My son, the jumper that I’m rocking, Let your mother and her lullaby, Be a gift for your peace and rest.”

In each such holy places of old, a song deeper than silence still was calling from the land.

It was the wisdom of time without end in the landscape. It came from inside the mountains hidden in mountains.

 

Jules Pretty

[San Hi San: Mountains Hidden in Mountains]

 

Commentary on San Hi San

This koan says there are mountains hidden in mountains, in their sacred mists and clouds. We may climb up, on winding grassy paths or straight steps cut from rock a thousand years ago. At the top, we hope to find we can break through to blue sky and brilliant sunshine.

Mountains are themselves too great not to be hidden. They cannot be known in full. We may learn from mountains to be comfortable with mystery, with the unknowable.

Mountains are so great you cannot miss them. Yet they are hidden.

The world is full of unknowables. Sometimes we break through, sometimes not. What does it take to keep climbing?

In the shodo kanji “Hi” for hidden, there are steps upward.

Bashō wrote this famed haiku:

“How fun it was, Not to see, Mount Fuji in foggy rain.”