The Sacred Mountains of Asia
John Einarsen
Shambhala
The sacred mountain is a symbol revered by people in every ethnic and religious tradition of Asia, from India to Japan—whether seen as the abode of the ancestors, a destination of pilgrimage, a pillar holding up the sky, a personification of the god Shiva, or a model of the entire cosmos. The twenty-nine pieces presented here celebrate the sacred peaks through prose, poetry, travelogue, historical and spiritual texts, art, and photographs.
To see the greatness of a mountain, one must keep one’s distance; to understand its form, one must move around it; to experience its moods, one must see it at sunrise and sunset, at noon and at midnight, in sun and in rain, in snow and in storm, in summer and in winter and in all the other seasons. He who can see the mountain like this comes near to the life of the mountain, a life that is as intense and varied as that of a human being. Mountains grow and decay, they breathe and pulsate with life. They attract and collect invisible energies from their surroundings; the forces of the air, of the water, of electricity and magnetism; they create winds, clouds, thunder storms, rains, waterfalls, and rivers. They fill their surroundings with active life and give shelter and food to innumerable beings. Such is the greatness of mighty mountains”
—Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds
Contributors
OHKI AKIRA • ROBERT BRADY • JOHN BRANDI • BRUCE C. CARON • LINDA CONNOR LAUREN W. DEUTSCH • DÖGEN • RICHARD EVANOFF • ALLAN G. GRAPARD • MARILYN GRIDLEY TONY HENDERSON • RALPH JOHNSTONE • UMAGAMI K1YOHIKO • STEPHAN KÖHLER BETH LISCHERON • F. J. LOGAN • ARNE NAESS • GÜNTER NITSCHKE • BILL PORTER WILLIAM POWELL • JAMES ROBSON • GARY SNYDER • JOHN STEVENS WANG WU-SHENG • RICHARD WILHELM • TAKEDA YOSHIFUMI HEINRICH ZIMMER