The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

A lyrical, generous sharing of a journey to the heart of being … Many books speak of wisdom. Joan Halifax is wisdom. —Daniel Goleman

Halifax experiences and sees life with remarkable vividness through a fabric of Christianity, anthropology, shamanism, and Buddhism. Her extensive profound experience and suffering illuminate the night sky—from which hope is renewed and love restored.—Laurance S. Rockefeller

Halifax has found her life. This is the travelogue. Seeking it in the small fires, soft eyes, and vast hearts of Asia, Europe, and the Americas, in stories told, and in the explicable adventures of the spirit, she has taken incarnation as woman-heart-shaman.—Stephen Levine

Here, the Primordial Wisdom Traditions come to us with majesty and power.… [From them] come the guidance and energies we need for the profound renewal of our western world. This is the masterwork of an authentic spirit person.—Thomas Berry

The wisdom of cultures that live harmoniously with nature spoken through the heart and mind of a true gnostic intermediary.—Ram Dass

Notes on the extraordinary life of anthropologist, ecologist, educator, and author Joan Halifax—a woman who speaks from her heart, a traveler embarked upon a spiritual journey, a healer devoted to her work. —Common Boundary

A warm and potent testament to the author’s beliefs and to a life lived vigorously for the sake of the spirit.—Kirkus Reviews

Halifax, a Zen Buddhist, anthropologist, and author, writes of her experience of psychomental crisis and of her need to reconnect with the earth. She recounts how she found transformation through the virtues of silence, story, and nonduality, among others, with a reverence for ecology, Buddhism, and shamanism playing the largest roles in her transformation. She discovers that generosity is the root ‘perfection’ out of which grow wholesomeness, patience, energy, natural concentration, and wisdom.—Library Journal

ALSO BY JOAN HALIFAX

The Human Encounter with Death

(with Stanislav Grof)

Shamanic Voices :

A Survey of Visionary Narratives

Shaman: The Wounded Healer

A Buddhist Life in America:

Simplicity in the Complex

JOAN HALIFAX Roshi, Ph.D., is a Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, and social activist. She is the abbot and head teacher of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Roshi studied for a decade with zen teacher Seung Sahn and was a teacher in the Kwan Um Zen School. She received the Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh, and was later given Inka by Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Roshi. A founding teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on engaged Buddhism. She travels and lectures extensively in the United States and Europe.

The Fruitful Darkness

A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

Joan Halifax

Copyright © 1993 by Joan Halifax

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

First published in 1993 by HarperSanFrancisco,

a division of HarperCollinsPublishers

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright credits begin on page 237.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Halifax, Joan.

The fruitful darkness : a journey through Buddhist practice and

tribal wisdom / Joan Halifax.

        p. cm.

Originally published: The fruitful darkness : reconnecting with the body of the earth. San Francisco : Harper Collins, 1993.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9963-8

1. Spiritual life. 2. Spiritual life—Buddhism. 3. Deep ecology—Religious aspects. 4. Shamanism. 5. Indian philosophy. I. Title.

BL624.H659 2004

204′.2—dc22

2004042482

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATHERINE TILLOTSON

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked,

winding, lonesome,

dangerous, leading to the most amazing

view.

May your rivers flow without end,

meandering through pastoral valleys

tinkling with bells,

past temples and castles and poets’ towers

into a dark primeval forest where tigers

belch and monkeys howl,

through miasmal and mysterious swamps

and down into a desert of red rock,

blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and

grottos of endless stone,

and down again into a deep vast ancient

unknown chasm

where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled

cliffs,

where deer walk across the white sand

beaches,

where storms come and go

as lightning clangs upon the high crags,

where something strange and more beautiful

and more full of wonder than your deepest

dreams

waits for you—

beyond the next turning of the canyon

walls.

—Edward Abbey

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Thich Nhat Hanh

Preface

1 The World Wound

2 The Way of Silence

3 The Way of Traditions

4 The Way of the Mountain

5 The Way of Language

6 The Way of Story

7 The Way of Nonduality

8 The Way of Protectors

9 The Way of the Ancestors

10 The Way of Compassion

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Credits

Acknowledgments

This writing is an expression of gratitude to those men and women who helped me weave my way back into the fabric of Earth. As I write, I want to remember Dolo Ogobara, Don José Ríos (Matsuwa), Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos, Maria Sabina, Chan K’in Viejo, Jorge K’in, Don Tomas, Grandfather Telles Goodmorning, Grandfather Semu Huaute, Grandfather Wallace Black Elk, Grandmother Grace Spotted Eagle, Grandmother Caroline Tawangyawma, James Kootshongsie, Grandfather Leon Shenandoah, Gray Whiskers, Joe David, John Goodwin (Nytom), Nico Dzib, and other native peoples who have tried patiently to help me see how we live intimately with and within each other.

I also want to remember the Buddhist teachers who showed me the truth of interconnectedness and compassion, including Dae Soen sa Nim, Chakdud Tulku Rinpoche, Richard Baker Roshi, Cao Ngoc Phuong, and my root teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. And I want to confirm the gifts from the many friends who traveled with me to wild lands of person and place, people who have entered the fruitful darkness with me. This darkness and gold is the heart of the teaching of all these companions and teachers of the way.

I am also writing both to and from the spirit of the wilderness. It used to be that human beings and the wilderness could not be separated. For tens of thousands of years, one has been a context for the other. Today, in North America anyway, wilderness is not the homeland and place of renewal for primal peoples but a place where people of industrial cultures go for recreation. Yes, there is still wilderness in America—both big and small, and its survival is our survival.

Like many of you, I have traveled a long way to find a bit of true nature. Yet it exists in intimate forms all around us—in the mushroom that pushes its white head through a crack in the asphalt, in the rich collection of so-called weeds that find their way to water along the roads of New Mexico. Wilderness can be seen from the top floor of Rockefeller Plaza as the peregrine falcon flies by Wilderness lives in the hedges around Miami’s shopping malls, which are a commons for bird and bee. Wilderness is the wood rat whose big old nest is tucked into sage in the oak groves in Ojai, in the coyote who finds a den in the brush of Beverly Hills, in the chipmunk who steals seed from the bird feeder for her winter supply in the Appalachian fall of North Carolina. We look quietly to see these expressions of the wilds all around us.

Wilderness lives within us as well—in the beating of our blood, in the wild root of our imagination. As I write, I remember this skin wrapping around my animal body as it shook uncontrollably when I found myself hanging to a thin lip of granite on a rock face in Baja. This body that exhausted and exalted itself on the Dolma Pass of Mount Kailas. This body that was covered with friendly bruises after swimming with rough, playful dolphins. This body whose lungs strained for a little more oxygen as I walked to Dudh Kund. I remember hair standing on end in rain forests and temperate forests and in northern waters when I encountered creatures, like jaguar and orca, who were higher on the food chain. This, all of it, is Earth’s true nature, including the mind that lives through this body and Earth.

I bow in gratitude to:

Traveling companions Paul Adams, Steve Brown, Diane Bunting and Loren White, Gigi Coyle, Daku Tenzing Norgay, Barrett Eagle Bear, Dana Fonte, Verona Halifax Fonte, Brother John, Cynthia Jurs, John Madison, Jim Nollman, Joan and Barry Norris, Robert Ott, Lola Rae, Ted Joans, Hans Van de Bovenkamp, the late John Watts, Andy and Sabina Weil, and Nina Wise;

Teachers and colleagues Mary Catherine Bateson, the late Joseph Campbell, Bill Devall, Steven Foster and Meredith Little, Peter Furst, Stanislav Grof, Alan Lomax, James Lovelock, Joanna Macy, the late Margaret Mead, the late Barbara Myerhoff, John Weir Perry, Richard Evans Schultes, William Irwin Thompson, Francisco Varela, the late Gordon Wasson, and Johannes Wilbert;

Valued editorial advisers Tom Grady, Katinka Matson, Caroline Pincus, Marilyn Preston, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Miriam Bobkoff, and most especially Michael Gruber and Frances Harwood;

And source of great inspiration and support: Laurance S. Rockefeller, and my beloved parents, John Halifax and the late Eunice Halifax.

Foreword

Out of suffering, compassion may be born. Compassion is the balm that refreshes and heals us and brings back our smile. The Fruitful Darkness is a journey of suffering and compassion. Joan Halifax, our friend, guide, and teacher, leads us on this important adventure. With her guidance, we are able to see more deeply into ourselves—into our true nature and the true nature of the mountains, rivers, skies, Earth, and all living beings. And we can see the beauty of all that is—the beauty in us, the beauty of an autumn leaf floating to the ground, the beauty of a snail crossing our path. Beauty can be found in birth and also in dying. If we know how to live, we will also know how to die. Living in beauty means dying in beauty. The deepest way to be alive and the deepest way to die are the same—doing so in harmony with everyone and everything, in the true spirit of interbeing. The moment we do this, ideas of self and nonself, life and death, vanish, and we experience joy, equanimity, and nonfear.

Suffering is sometimes unavoidable, and when we must suffer, we can accept it, with compassion. Eighty-four thousand doors open to the truth of interbeing, and suffering is one of them. But there are also other doors, including joy and loving-kindness. Joan opens so many doors for us. I am grateful to her for writing this book.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Plum Village, Duras, France

July 1992

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-tzu, translated by

        Stephen Mitchell

Preface

I take refuge in Buddha’s body

Christ’s body

Earth’s body

Sky’s body

I take refuge in the truth of abiding and changing

I take refuge in the four worlds

of combining elements

of giving plants

of creatures

and two-leggeds—

all companions in awakening

Writing in landscapes, landscapes write in you. Sending a voice to the Juarez Mountains of Baja, the Sangre de Cristos of Colorado, the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the Himalayas; sending a voice to Death Valley, Ojai Valley, and the hills and valleys of France’s Dordogne; sending a voice to the changeable waters of the Virgin Islands and the cold, radiant waters of Tibet’s Lake Manasaraovar; sending a voice to Mexico’s wet lowland forests and Canada’s dark stands of cedar; sending a voice to Abiquiu and the Chama, to Yaxchilán and the Usumacinta. Sending a voice. Yes, it is true; each place has its own voice. Sending a voice, a voice responds.

Thus it is with Earth. From the silence, from the space and place empty of society, in the land, in the sea, and the beings that abide within these living forms, and in the great atmosphere that holds the Earth’s body can be heard the voices of ancestors, elements and elementals, plants and creatures, the roar of water and ice, the whisper and whistle of pine, the swoosh of the hawk, the song of the eagle. The voice of nature can be heard.

Nature’s voice can be also heard in the city, on the highway, in airports and in slums, in hospitals and schools, in Disneyland and shopping malls. The weave of nature excludes nothing from its fabric, not even the crazy and destructive, creative and inspiring ideas of human beings.

I have known this since I was a child, first discovering this truth during a period of blindness and paralysis at the age of four when I fell ill with a grave virus—a time of darkness, a time to dream. As I matured, I went into outer and inner wilderness to remember the continuum of which I am a part. I could not know it with my conceptual mind. Learning came through my body, with my flesh—my eyes, ears,.nose, tongue, and body—touching the body of Earth. Dualism is so strongly embedded in industrial culture that I had to leave this culture to reaffirm the truth of nonduality, that we are all on this great distributive lattice together.

Over years of travel, study, and practice, I have seen the destruction of wild environments, the suffering of indigenous peoples at the hands of industrialized peoples, and the loss of a view of life as sacred. All this has turned me and many others to non-Western traditions as a way of understanding the nature of our own aggression toward and alienation from Earth. Some have sought understanding in Eastern traditions; others, the way of the Sufi or Celtic mysteries. Many have explored the world of primal peoples who form part of the Paleolithic continuity. Others have expanded the view of their root religions. Still others have used psychology, anthropology, physics, biology, ecology, feminism, and wilderness as ways to see themselves in the nature of the world. I myself entered the stream of Buddhist practice and shamanism as a basis for exploring mind and Earth, suffering and compassion.

I, like many others, sought fresh answers in ancient fields, not only in the old Ways of elder cultures, East and West, but in old forests and old river bodies. I looked for root-truth in language, in food, in social institutions, and in mind itself, what one Lakota elder calls the root that has no end. This self that is coextensive with all of creation holds within it the sense of a continuum as vast as the oceans flowing around Earth. Where is the end? Where is the beginning? And so it is with the story of Earth, or the stories recounted in this book, or even the story of one’s own life. The thread of cause and effect can be followed endlessly as it weaves a whole cloth.

Although the cloth of this book reflects the years I spent studying anthropology, psychology, and mythology as well as practicing Buddhism and shamanism and living with wilderness and with tribal peoples, my part in this story begins not in the wild mountains of Asia or the rain forests of Mexico but in the concrete canyons of New York in the mid-1960s. Like many young people of that era, I worked for the civil rights of black people in the United States and was active against the tragic war in Vietnam. In that world of protesting physicists and playwrights, academicians and students, I met the anthropologist Alan Lomax, who was doing a cross-cultural analysis of song and dance style. I joined his research project at Columbia University and for four years listened to music from all over the world.

Sitting in the tape archives at Columbia, I was convinced that the planet still held many secrets, many refuges. Although I was aware that indigenous peoples across the Earth had suffered profoundly and that many elder cultures were no longer viable, I was, like most North Americans, naive; I did not realize the extent to which the natural environments and lifeways of tribal people had been eroded and, in many instances, extinguished by the fear and greed of peoples in dominating nations. Yes, the tenacity of these old traditions has protected some of them from complete extinction. They live on in trailer parks, in urban slums, or in corners of remote wilderness. Others are enjoying a revival, like the renaissance of traditional life among some peoples of the Northwest Coast. But still, the Earth that all of us live on today is vastly changed from the Earth of the recent ancestors of tribal peoples.

The planet seems much smaller, more interconnected, and more vulnerable to me these days. Human economies and environmental systems, from the World Bank to Brazilian rain forests, are intimately related. We can see clearly now how human actions affect all life on Earth. In two days we can travel from Los Angeles, New York, or London to the heart of what is left of the Lacandon rain forest in southern Mexico. We can visit with the old Lacandon shaman Chan K’in Viejo and listen to him speak about the body of our world:

What the people of the city do not realize is that the roots of all