The Other Side of the Mountain

by Thomas Merton

  Several times during the long silent ride in the Land Rover to the Mim Tea Estate today I wondered, “Why am I going there?” But I am glad to be here in this utterly quiet bungalow. The owners are out and won’t be back until late. I have already refused dinner and asked for tea only, tea to be sent to the bungalow. A fire is lit in the bungalow grate, and it is good. Hah! It is good. Fog hides the mountains. Fog gets in the sore throat. No matter. Fire and a variety of remedies and a big bed, with covers and fresh sheets turned back, awaits the tired penseur [thinker].

  “Dear Father Merriton,” said the note, “Please make yourself at home the moment you arrive and just ask the bearer for anything you may require.” Without my having to ask, the generator went on, the lights began to work, tea was provided in the big comfortable drawing room. I escaped quickly to the bungalow, aside, apart, alone, silent. Fire lit. Books unpacked, including one on Japan by Ruth Benedict and also Anaïs Nin’s Under the Glass Bell, which I hope to finish. Along with the Buddhist books I have to return to Harold Talbott, who remains in the Windamere where he reads wrapped in a blanket.

  I’m glad I came here. All morning alone on the mountainside, in the warm sun, now overclouded. Plenty of time to think. Reassessment of this whole Indian experience in more critical terms. Too much movement. Too much “looking for” something: an answer, a vision, “something other.” And this breeds illusion. Illusion that there is something else. Differentiation—the old splitting-up process that leads to mindlessness, instead of the mindfulness of seeing all-in-emptiness and not having to break it up against itself. Four legs good; two legs bad.

  Hence the annoyance with Kanchenjunga, its big crude blush in the sunrise, outside my bungalow window at 5:45. What do I care for a 28,000-foot postcard when I have this bloody cold? All morning Kanchenjunga has been clouded over. Only rarely do you see the peak through the clouds, or one of the other surrounding peaks. Better that way. More modest. Really, Kanchenjunga, you are not to blame for all these Darjeeling hotels. But I think you know what I mean!

  I am still not able fully to appreciate what this exposure to Asia has meant. There has been so much—and yet also so little. I have only been here a month! It seems a long time since Bangkok and even since Delhi and Dharamsala. Meeting the Dalai Lama and the various Tibetans, lamas or “enlightened” laymen, has been the most significant thing of all, especially in the way we were able to communicate with one another and share an essentially spiritual experience of “Buddhism” which is also somehow in harmony with Christianity.

  On the other hand, though the Jesuits at St. Joseph’s have repeatedly dropped hints about the need for contemplative Catholic foundations in India, I do not get any impression of being called to come here and settle down. Certainly not in this “sensitive” border area where there would be constant problems with the government.

  If I were to be a hermit in India it would have to mean something other than this comfortable bungalow! Something more like what Dom Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) is doing.

  Though I fully appreciate the many advantages of the hermitage at Gethsemani, I still have the feeling that the lack of quiet and the general turbulence there, external and internal, last summer are indications that I ought to move. And so far the best indications seem to point to Alaska or to the area around the Redwoods.

  Another question: would this move be temporary or permanent? I do not think I ought to separate myself completely from Gethsemani, even while maintaining an official residence there, legally only. I suppose I ought eventually to end my days there. I do in many ways miss it. There is no problem of my wanting simply to “leave Gethsemani.” It is my monastery and being away has helped me see it in perspective and love it more.

  Now suppose some loon comes up to me and says, “Have you found the real Asia?” I am at a loss to know what one means by “the real Asia.” It is all real as far as I can see. Though certainly a lot if it has been corrupted by the West. Neither Victorian Darjeeling nor the Kennedy-era Oberoi can be called ideal Asia. I remember Deki Lhalungpa laughing at the phony American minarets in the Taj dining room at the Oberoi. Still, that is Asia too.

  Darjeeling is a quaintly fraudulent relic of something incredible. And the Indians, or the Nepalese, Sikkimese, and others around here, are still trying to believe in it, and maintain it. English hats, tweeds, walking sticks, old school ties (St. Joseph’s)—for the rich ones at least. Shivering in the Windamere over Madhyamika dialectic—is that the “real Asia”? I have a definite feeling it is a waste of time—something I didn’t need to do. However, if I have discovered I didn’t need to do it, it has not been a waste of time.

  This deep valley, the Mim Tea Estate, above Darjeeling: it is beautiful and quiet and it is right for Martin Hall, the manager, and his wife, who are in their own way hermits and appreciate my need for a couple of days of silence. Yet it has nothing I could not, essentially, have found at Needle Rock or Bear Harbor—nothing I did not find there last May. Or did I find an illusion of Asia that needed to be dissolved by experience? Here?

  What does this valley have? Landslides. Hundreds of them. The mountains are terribly gashed, except where the forest is thick. Whole sections of tea plantations were carried away six weeks ago. And it is obviously going to be worse the next time there are really heavy rains. The place is a frightening example of annica—“impermanence.” A good place, therefore, to adjust one’s perspectives. I find my mind rebelling against the landslides. I am distracted by reforestation projects and the other devices to deny them, forbid them. I want this all to be permanent. A permanent postcard for meditation, daydreams. The landslides are ironic and silent comments on the apparent permanence, the “eternal snows” of solid Kanchenjunga. And political instability. Over there, only a couple of hundred miles as the crow flies, is the Tibetan border where the Chinese armies are!

  The sun is high, at the zenith. Clear soft sound of a temple bell far down in the valley. Voices of children near the cottages above me on the mountainside. The sun is warm. Everything falls into place. Nothing is to be decided; nor is “Asia” to be put in some category or other. There is nothing to be judged. But it must be cold for the lamas, at night, in their high, draughty little gompas!

  “…The roving gaze of the mariner who never attaches himself to what he sees, whose very glance is roving, floating, sailing on, who looks at every person and object with a sense of the enormous space around them, with a sense of the distance one can put between oneself and one’s desires, the sense of the enormousness of the world and of the tides and currents that carry us onward.”67

  As the generator turns off and the lights go out at Mim Tea Estate the bearer brought me two candles and an ancient matchbox marked “Deer and Tiger Safety matches.” A tiger is sneaking up on an unsuspecting stag as it drinks from a pool. On the back it says:

  Price 6 P

  Price 6 P

  Price 6 P.

  In it there are three ancient matches.

  Mrs. Hall, solicitous about my cold, said I must have a fire in the bungalow after lunch because of the cold wind that starts punctually at 11 each morning and brings clouds of icy mist down over the plantation and valley. So I spent the afternoon in the bungalow. I finished Murti on Madhyamika, meditated, sometimes sleepily, and was entirely content. But the bungalow could have been anywhere. It could have been, just as well, my own hermitage at Gethsemani—only much quieter. Mrs. Hall saw to it that the bearer came in with “a proper tea.” I only take lunch in the dining room. The rest in the bungalow, and have disconcerted them by wanting only soup for supper.

  November 19, 1968. Mim Tea Estate

  Last night I had a curious dream about Kanchenjunga. I was looking at the mountain and it was pure white, absolutely pure, especially the peaks that lie to the west. And I saw the pure beauty of their shape and outline, all in white. And I heard a voice saying—or got the clear idea of: “There is another side to the mountain.” I realized that it was turned around and ev
erything was lined up differently; I was seeing from the Tibetan side. This morning my quarrel with the mountain is ended. Not that it is a big love affair—but why get mad at a mountain? It is beautiful, chastely white in the morning sun—and right in view of the bungalow window.

  There is another side of Kanchenjunga and of every mountain—the side that has never been photographed and turned into postcards. That is the only side worth seeing.

  Out on the mountainside in the warm sun there is the sound of an ax where someone splits wood for fuel at the tea factory. Some children are playing in the same place high up on the edge of the woods. Far below, the lovely blue veil of a woman walking with children along a winding path through a tea garden. Reading the Commemorations of St. Elizabeth [Feast] in the Office made me want to read her life, study her holiness, her miracles. Will do this when I next have a chance. Thought of Sister Helen Elizabeth and St. Joseph’s Infirmary in Louisville: the time I was there in 1950, already eighteen years ago! How everything has changed—anicca!

  Later: I took three more photos of the mountain. An act of reconciliation? No, a camera cannot reconcile one with anything. Nor can it see a real mountain. The camera does not know what it takes: it captures materials with which you reconstruct not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it—especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not normally admitted on the scene.

  Nonviolent Himalayan bees: after one had lit on me quietly three times without stinging, I let it crawl on my head a while, picking up sweat for some eclectic and gentle honeycomb, or just picking up sweat for no reason. Another crawled on my hand and I studied it. Certainly a bee. I could not determine whether it was stingless, or just well behaved.

  The three doors (they are one door).

  1. The door of emptiness. Of no-where. Of no place for a self, which cannot be entered by a self. And therefore is of no use to someone who is going somewhere. Is it a door at all? The door of no-door.

  2. The door without sign, without indicator, without information. Not particularized. Hence no one can say of it “This is it! This is the door.” It is not recognizahle as a door. It is not led up to by other things pointing to it: “We are not it, but that is it—the door.” No signs saying “Exit.” No use looking for indications. Any door with a sign on it, any door that proclaims itself to he a door, is not the door. But do not look for a sign saying “Not-door.” Or even “No Exit.”

  3. The door without wish. The undesired. The unplanned door. The door never expected. Never wanted. Not desirable as door. Not a joke, not a trap door. Not select. Not exclusive. Not for a few. Not for many. Not for. Door without aim. Door without end. Does not respond to a key—so do not imagine you have a key. Do not have your hopes on possession of the key.

  There is no use asking for it. Yet you must ask. Who? For what? When you have asked for a list of all the doors, this one is not on the list. When you have asked the numbers of all the doors, this one is without a number. Do not he deceived into thinking this door is merely hard to find and difficult to open. When sought it fades. Recedes. Diminishes. Is nothing. There is no threshold. No footing. It is not empty space. It is neither this world nor another. It is not hased on anything. Because it has no foundation, it is the end of sorrow. Nothing remains to be done. Therefore there is no threshold, no step, no advance, no recession, no entry, no nonentry. Such is the door that ends all doors; the unbuilt, the impossible, the undestroyed, through which all the fires go when they have “gone out.”

  Christ said, “I am the door.” The nailed door. The cross, they nail the door shut with death. The resurrection: “You see, I am not a door.” “Why do you look up to heaven?” Attolite portas principes vestras. [Lift up your gates, princes. (Psalm 23[24]:9)] For what? The King of Glory. Ego sum ostium [I am the door. John 10:7)] I am the opening, the “shewing,” the revelation, the door of light, the Light itself. “I am the Light,” and the light is in the world from the beginning. (It seemed to be darkness.)

  Lucernarium. [The time when the lamps are lighted.] The value of expecting the moment to light up the evening lamps. Here at the Tea Estate the generator goes on at 5 and off at 9. There is a period of about twenty minutes in which it is not easy to read in the bungalow, except right next to the window. But in the meantime a fire has been lighted. It flowers and speaks in the silent room. Prayer of fire! Agni [the god of fire]. Worshipful patterns of flame. Each fire is different. Each has its own particular shape. Then suddenly the porch light is on and so I switch on my own light, to write more. To write, among other things, a letter to Brother Patrick, to be mailed in Darjeeling when I return there tomorrow. I haven’t heard from J. Laughlin since I got to Asia and he has three books I am wondering about. Apparently the book of poems, Sensation Time at the Home,68 is being considered for publication next and I hear it has passed the censor. I must also send a card to Czeslaw Milosz. During tea I was thinking of the evening in San Francisco with him and his wife and Paul Jacobs and wife and the Ferrys. After dinner at a Chinese restaurant, when the Jacobs had left and “Ping” Ferry had got lost trying to find us after taking Mrs. Jacobs home, we sat for a couple of hours at a sidewalk cafe drinking wine, while an interminable line of Dixie tourists—Alabama, Tennessee—filed slowly by into a topless joint upstairs.

  Kanchenjunga this afternoon. The clouds of the morning parted slightly and the mountain, the massif of attendant peaks, put on a great, slow, silent dorje dance of snow and mist, light and shadow, surface and sinew, sudden cloud towers spiraling up out of icy holes, blue expanses of half-revealed rock, peaks appearing and disappearing with the top of Kanchenjunga remaining the visible and constant president over the whole slow show. It went on for hours. Very stately and beautiful. Then toward evening the clouds cleared some more, except for a long apron of mist and shadow below the main peaks. There were a few discreet showings of whorehouse pink but most of it was shape and line and shadow and form. O Tantric Mother Mountain! Yin-yang palace of opposites in unity! Palace of anicca, impermanence and patience, solidity and nonbeing, existence and wisdom. A great consent to be and not-be, a compact to delude no one who does not first want to be deluded. The full beauty of the mountain is not seen until you too consent to the impossible paradox: it is and is not. When nothing more needs to be said, the smoke of ideas clears, the mountain is SEEN.

  Testament of Kanchenjunga. Testament of fatherless old Melchizedek. Testament from before the time of oxen and sacrifice. Testament without Law. NEW Testament. Full circle! The sun sets in the East! The nuns at Loreto kept asking me, “Have you seen the snows?” Could they have been serious?

  Conze says: “By atomizing society, modern civilization has thrown the mutual relations of people into a profound disorder from which it can be rescued only by conscious and sustained effort, and at the same time technical progress and the prestige of science have dimmed the immediate awareness of the spiritual world: Traditional religion saw these things quite differently. There the soul of man was regarded as essentially solitary, the true struggle took place in a condition of withdrawal from society, and the decisive victories were won in solitude, face to face with the deepest forces of reality itself….”

  (Conze, p. 81)

  “True love requires contact with the truth, and the truth must be found in solitude. The ability to bear solitude, and to spend long stretches of time alone by oneself in quiet meditation, is therefore one of the more elementary qualifications for those who aspire towards selfless love.”

  (Conze, p. 85)

  This is the chapter on Buddhist social virtues.69 Maitri—friendly love—is not exclusive, it is rooted in truth rather than in passionate need. Compassion is proportionate to detachment; otherwise we use others for our own ends under the pretext of “love.” Actually, we are dominated by illusion. Love that perpetuates the illusion does no good to others or to ourselves. Ultimately the illusion h
as to be destroyed by prajna, which is also one with perfect compassion (karuna).

  My cold is still quite bad but I think that staying indoors with a fire this afternoon has helped it. Whatever may be the answer, or nonanswer, to my question, this is a good retreat and I appreciate the quiet more than I can say. This quiet, with time to read, study, meditate, and not talk to anyone, is something essential in my life.

  Darjeeling.

  And to dissolve the heaps. Afternoon lumber water filling can full

  Taxi call kids. Sharp cries spread rev motor whisper pony feet Hoo! Hoo!

  Motor going gone (hill)

  Looking back her long hair shining pattern of crosses unionjacks

  shadows on the walk (Hoo! Hoo! Ponyfeet)

  Ponysaddle afternoon all rich god Ganesha fills his waterpot.

  All to dissolve the lagers (layers) spreads of sounds—waters, boards, planks, plankfall fur, voice near, man holds basket of green leaves. Going. Gone.

  Sensations neutral low degree bum (sun) warmskin. Hears a little water,

  Again fills watercan the poor one—not rich Ganesha, he is gone in scarf and glasses.

  All come worship fun in the sun.

  And to dissolve the fun. Worker basket empty and gone. Ganesha

  gone in an

  Oxblood muffler though not cold after good hot dinner

  All come have fun dissolve values. Tibetan boss explains garden.