Notes
Notes 201 Chapter 1. Introduction 1. “Medical Problems of High Altitude,” cited in Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions (New York: Poseidon, 1993), 73. 2. “The Polymorphous Space of the Southern Marchmount,” 222. 3. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (Compact Edition; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1123.3. 4. One recent example of this practice is evident in the title of Kiyohiko Munakata’s book Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 5. “Marchmount,” as a translation for the Chinese word yue 岳 (or 嶽), was devised by Edward H. Schafer. See his Pacing the Void: T’ang Approaches to the Stars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 6. 6. The closest Chinese equivalents to the English word “sacred” are sheng 聖 and ling 靈. Originally, sheng meant “to hear” or “to listen” (readers who know Chinese will note that sheng has an “ear” classifier), referring specifically to someone whose sense of hearing and, by extension, ability to comprehend and gain wisdom, exceeds that of ordinary people. Later, sheng was used to denote superior persons (“sages”) whose talent, wisdom, and moral attributes exceeded all others. Hence, Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), 250a, defines sheng as “tong” 通, or “all knowing.” The character ling originally referred in a generic sense to gods, spirits, or deities (shen 神 or shenling 神靈), and thus came to be associated with words related to “spirit,” “spiritual,” “the soul,” and even deceased persons. Later its meaning expanded to include various human traits originally associated with shen, such as clever, sharp, keen, sensitive, wondrous, and so on. The term lingshan 靈山 does appear often in Chinese letters, referring to 202 Notes to Chapter 1 mountains (shan) where spirits (ling) dwell. See also the comments on “sacred” in n. 8 below. 7. Eliade sees the “sacred” and the “profane” as the “two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.” Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty, eds. (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 1:143. See also Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). 8. Cf. the following observation from Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü: “While we use the term sacred, we are keenly aware of its associated meaning of transcendent and its implied opposition to profane, terms derived from Western religious traditions. Such implications are natural in the three related religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) that affirm the existence of a transcendent god, but they cannot be extended to other cultures, including those of East Asia, where the religious object is not separated from but located within nature (italics mine).” Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, 2. The following comment, once made to me by a monk who lives on Mount Emei, punctuates the main point here very succinctly: “For me, Mount Emei is the Buddha, and the Buddha is Mount Emei. I do not distinguish between the two.” It might also be mentioned that, as far as I have been able to determine , the original meaning of yue (the most often-mentioned “sacred Chinese mountain” in Western scholarship) had nothing to do with things “sacred” or “transcendent.” As used in the Classic of History (Shujing), yue is an office title, referring to leaders who “counseled the Four Yue” (zi siyue 咨四岳); that is to say, officials who managed the feudal lords (zhuhou) stationed by the emperor in the “four yue” or “four directions.” See Shangshu zhengyi 尚書正議 (SSJZS ed), 1:122a. The places in the four directions where these hereditary feudal lords resided and performed sacrifices to assist the emperor in maintaining control over the empire were called yue. The sage-emperor Shun is reported to have traveled once every five years to the yue and performed sacrifices for the purpose of delimiting the boundaries of his rule. See SSJZS, 1:127c. It was the responsibility of the four yue officials to protect the four quarters and accept the homage of other feudal lords who lived therein. Some scholars believe that since the zhuhou resided in mountainous areas for protection, the word yue eventually came to denote “mountain.” See, for instance, the comments on this in Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛, “Siyue yu Wuyue” 四嶽與五嶽, in Shilin zashi, chubian 史林雜識, 初編 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), esp. 34. 9. These various functions of monasteries are discussed in Kenneth K...
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