Soul Mountain（靈山）

A few days ago I decided to start reading Gao Xingjian（高行健）”Soul Mountain” （“靈山“）from the very beginning again. Not because I couldn’t remember what happened in the book, but because somehow I could never get very far and eventually just have to give it up for something else. And this had happened quite a few times in the past few years (6 years? 7 years?) for reasons that I couldn’t  figure out. Anyway, since I was unable to read any Buddhist books these days (yeah, this was not the first time that it happened), somehow “Soul Mountain” just felt like a perfect replacement.

I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just drop this book for good; the book seemed to cast some kind of spell on me and made me keep on coming back to it. I didn’t have the answer until I reached Chapter 8. The main character was following an old botanist into a primitive forest, and the conversation between him and the old man reminded me of Hayao Miyazaki’s（宮崎駿）”Spirited Away“（神隱少女）. The old man was describing how the human destroyed the mother nature and at the same time did some stuff that seemed nice on the surface to minimize its- guilty feelings:

…”Don’t commit action which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed.”

“Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?” I ask.

“It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance — people need to deceive themselves. We’re preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet in the other hand we’re charging ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself. Look at the Min River you came along on your way in here, the forests on both sides have been stripped bare. The Min River has turned into a black muddy river but the Yangtze is much worse yet they are going to block off the river and construct a dam in the Three Gorges! Of course it’s romantic to indulge in wild fantasy but the place lies on a geological fault and has many documented records of landslides throughout its history. Needless to say, blocking off the river and putting up a dam will destroy the entire ecology of the Yangtze River basin but if it leads to earthquakes the population of hundreds of millions living in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze will become fish and turtles! Of course no-one will listen to an old man like me, but when people assault nature like this nature inevitably takes revenge!”

I was shocked when I read this! He wrote the above before 1990, and this was exactly how this year’s Sichuan earthquake（四川大地震）happened! It wasn’t that the botanist could predict the future, but it was that a lot of time even though we knew the consequences of our actions, we still covered our eyes and charged ahead…

Some of you might disagree and argue that we are nobody and have no power to change the big course. Well, how about we start from ourselves and little things around us? If everyone can be a little more responsible of our own behavior and our environment, the world will be a much better place. Never belittle yourselves!

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高行健在1990年由聯經出版的 “靈山“ 原文，已經點出了今年五月中的四川大地震的問題所在:

… “不要去做違反自然本性的事情，不要去做那不可為的事情。“

“那麼這搶救熊貓有什麼科學上的價值？“ 我問。

“不過是個象徵，ㄧ種安慰，人需要自己欺騙自己，一方面去搶救一個已經失去生存能力的物種，一方面卻在加緊破壞人類生存的環境。就這岷江兩岸，你沿途進來，森林都砍光了，連岷江都成一條烏泥江了，更別說長江。還要在三峽上攔壩修水庫！異想天開，當然很浪漫。這地質上的斷層，歷史上就有過許多崩塌的紀錄，攔江修壩且不說破壞長江流域的整個生態，一旦誘發大地震，這中上游的億萬人口都將成為魚鱉！當然，沒有人會聽我這個老頭子的，人這樣掠奪自然，自然總要報復的！“