The Snow Leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

This is closer to my own idea of freedom, the possibility and prospect of “free life,” traveling light, without clinging or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes; free because without defenses, free not in an adolescent way, with no restraints, but in the sense of the Tibetan Buddhist’s “crazy wisdom,” of Camus’s “leap into the absurd” that occurs within a life of limitations. The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty (to that self which is inseparable from others) to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible.

I feel great gratitude for being here, for being, rather, for there is no need to hide oneself to the snow mountains in order to feel free. I am not here to seek the “crazy wisdom”; if I am, I shall never find it. I am here to be here, like these rocks and sky and snow, like this hail that is falling down out of the sun.

It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us, and know most poignantly what Milarepa meant: “All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. . . .”

The turn in my mood occurred this morning, when the brave Dawa, attempting to catch Jang-bu’s pack, hurled across a stream, dropped it ineptly into the water. Wonderfully, Jang-bu laughed aloud, as did Dawa and Phu-Tsering, although it meant wet clothes and a wet sleeping bag for the head Sherpa. That happy-go-lucky spirit, that acceptance which is not fatalism but a deep trust in life, made me ashamed.

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky. . . . This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. “Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light—full of light!” In recent dreams, I have twice seen light so brilliant, so intense, that it “woke me up,” but the light did not continue into wakefulness. Which was more real, the waking or the dream? The last Japanese character written in this life by Soen Roshi’s venerable teacher, and the last word spoken, was the word for “dream.”

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is “to paint eyeballs on chaos.”20 When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present—even while I think of it—is gone.

Walking through the silent streets, I remembered D’s beloved Zen expression: “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.” Even in this grim winter dawn, everything was as it should be, the snowflakes were falling without effort, all was calm and clear. In her book, she says: The flower fulfills its immanence, intelligence implicit in its unfolding. There is a discipline. The flower grows without mistakes. A man must grow himself, until he understands the intelligence of the flower.