Zen and the Art of Watching

By R.Z.Sheppard

THE SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen; Viking; 400 pages; $12.95

Till now Peter Matthiessen's readers have known him primarily as a novelist, a naturalist and a travel writer. The Snow Leopard reveals a more private Matthiessen, a 51-year-old widower searching for peace of mind and, of course, material for a book.

In his factual The Cloud Forest (1961) and the fictional At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), Matthiessen and his characters successfully, and at times beautifully, conveyed the dilemma of the Western mind: a need to worship wilderness and a desire to tame it in the name of progress and profit.

He has explored and written about the Amazon, North America and Africa. The Caribbean was the stage for his 1975 poetic narrative of turtle fishermen, Far Tortuga. His latest work, The Snow Leopard, springs from a 250-mile hike that he and Field Biologist George Schaller made five years ago in the Himalayas. Schaller (The Mountain Gorilla, The Serengeti Lion) pushed tirelessly through icy passes and over the Tibetan plateau to observe the rutting habits of the bharal, a wild goatlike animal better known as the blue sheep. He also hoped for a glimpse of the snow leopard, a creature so rare that sightings may soon become as problematic as those of the yeti--the Abominable Snowman.

Why did Matthiessen make the trip? "To say I was interested in blue sheep or snow leopards, or even in remote lamaseries, was no answer," he writes. "To say I was making a pilgrimage seemed fatuous and vague, though in some sense, that was true as well . . . I only knew that I was drawn toward the snow mountains, in search of a secret that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching."

As a Zen student, he knows that the danger in any quest is having great expectations. Watching passively and eliminating the distinctions between the observer and the observed are Zen basics that have been familiar to Western readers since Eugen Herrigel told us how the bow and arrow became an extension of his body in Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). Matthiessen has a full quiver and considerable patience; his problem seems to be an overabundance of targets.

The Snow Leopard has a number of overlapping parts. There are the geographic, social and natural histories of the Himalayas, along with the day-by-day accounts of the journey: trekking in sun, rain, wind and snow; sleeping night after night in a leaky one-man tent; existing on a crude, monotonous diet; dealing with reluctant porters; avoiding the snarling village mastiffs; living with the long silences and terse exchanges on the trail; and the flora, fauna and overwhelming vistas of peaks and valleys at the top of the world. There are frequent outcroppings of autobiography as Matthiessen, scion of a wealthy New York family, graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale and a founder in the 1950s of the Paris Review, writes with painful openness of his wife's death from cancer the year before: "It is not hard to live with a saint, for a saint makes no judgments, but saintlike aspiration presents problems. I found her goodness maddening, and behaved badly."

The author also explores the dark division of his Western heart. He invokes Kierkegaard's "sickness of infinitude" and looks back wistfully to a presumed time when ancient mystics and so-called children of nature were said to view existence as whole, seamless cloth. Matthiessen skillfully condenses philosophies, religions and ideas, but pays for stylistic niceties with oversimplifications. To write, as he does, that "the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West" says nothing about the old barbarians who existed in those fabled holistic ages. Was there ever really a time when mankind did not "industrialize"--make tools and weapons, use them for both good and evil, and organize restricting authorities when survival or fear demanded?

Matthiessen's excursions into intellectual history and "one's true nature" distract from his sensuous descriptions of nature, and his discourses on Zen often get in the way of his personal reflections. He bears his pilgrim's burden with melancholy dignity, but, ironically, his book lacks an essential Zen element: wit, the lightness of touch that is absolutely necessary when jiggling the web of paradoxes nature has stretched across its secrets.

--R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"The trail meets the Suli Gad high up the valley in grottoes of bronze-lichened boulders and a shady riverside of pine and walnut and warm banks of fern. Where morning sun lights the red leaves and the dark still conifers, the river sparkles in the forest shad ow; turquoise and white, it thunders past spray-shined boulders, foaming pools, in a long rocky chute of broken rapids. In the cold breath of the torrent, the dry air is softened by mist; this water trickled through the snow under last night's stars. At the head of the waterfall, downstream, its sparkle leaps into the air, leaps at the sun, and sunrays are tumbled in the luminescent waves that dance against the snows of southern mountains. Upstream, in the inner canyon, dark silences are deepened by the roar of stones. Something is listening, and I listen, too: who is it that intrudes here? Who is breathing? I pick a fern to see its spores, cast it away, and am filled in that instant with misgiving: the great sins, so the Sherpas say, are to pick wildflowers and to threaten children. My voice murmurs its regret, a strange sound that deepens the intrusion. I look about me -- who is it that spoke? And who is listening? Who is this 'I' that is not always me? The voice of a solitary bird asks the same question."

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