All the Views in the World

 alltheviews.world

Apres Ski

 

8:32 a.m. May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens erupts

8:32 a.m. May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens erupts and becomes the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in U.S. history.

This hiker witnessed the eruption from neighboring Mount Adams, a moment captured by photographer John V. Christiansen. pic.twitter.com/M5LvRHAJL5

— Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources (@waDNR) May 18, 2023

Catching Sight of South Mountain: Tao Yuanming, Mount Lu, and the Iconographies of Escape

 

Journal of a tour through part of the snowy range of the Himala Mountains, and to the sources of the rivers Jumna and Ganges

Mount Yari (槍ヶ岳, Yari-ga-take)

Mount Rainier from High Rock Lookout

The 100 Famous Mountains of Japan

 https://www.peakbagger.com/list.aspx?lid=5651

Mount Kaimondake from Japan Rail's most southerly train station

What Living on Japan's Most Active Volcano is Like

WEN-SHING CHOU, Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain.

Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain is a richly detailed and beautifully illustrated study of mid- and late Qing representations of Wutai shan 五台山, a sacred mountain range in present-day Shanxi province, that has been venerated as the earthly abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī since around the fifth century CE. Key for the transferral of Buddhism from India to China, and visited by pilgrims from all of East and Central Asia, Wutai shan has always been a meeting place for different cultures on Chinese soil. Yet it was not until the Qing dynasty that the mountain became “China’s Tibet” (p. 7). The lavish patronage of the Qing emperors, Tibetan religious dignitaries, and countless Inner Asian Buddhists not only transformed the mountain into a flourishing center of Tibetan Buddhism, but also spurred the production of countless culturally hybrid artistic and literary reinventions of the site.


Chou’s study focuses squarely on these reinventions of Wutai shan. She argues that they are best understood as objects of translation. By this she means that they render Chinese accounts of Mañjuśrī’s miraculous emanations at the mountain in the visual, literary, and religious languages of Mongolia and Tibet; they reimagine Wutai shan in terms of the tantric cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism; and they transfer the presence of Mañjuśrī from the mountain to artfully constructed simulacra in the capital of Beijing and the persona of the emperor himself. They are, in Chou’s words, “permeable conception[s] of the mountain” (p. 10)—objects that simultaneously speak in many visual idioms, and incorporate multiple perspectives and vantage points. Mount Wutai is not, strictly speaking, a book “about” a mountain, but rather about a set of objects that refer to and “translate” it.

In the first chapter, “Imperial Replicas,” Chou traces the translations of multiple replicas of Wutai monasteries and copies of a famous statue of Mañjuśrī housed in Wutai’s Shuxiang temple 殊像寺. The Qianlong Emperor 乾隆帝 (1711–1799) commissioned these in order to transfer the presence of Mañjuśrī from the mountain to the imperial summer residence and the capital. During the process, an important court artist, Ding Guanpeng 丁觀鵬 (fl. 18th century), created a replica of the Mañjuśrī statue as a painting, and a second, “perfected” copy of the replica. This perfected copy seems to depict Qianlong as an emanation of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, adding another genre of Qianlong-as-Mañjuśrī images to the famous series of thangkas that David Farquhar introduced to us in 1978.1 [End Page 145] Chou’s discussion clearly builds on Patricia Berger’s prior analysis of Ding’s painting, and indeed on her interpretation of Qianlong’s obsession with copying as his quest for “perfection.”2 She expands Berger’s discussion by tracing the various stages of transformation of the replicas through carefully surveying surviving pictorial evidence.

In the second chapter, “Miracles in Translation,” Chou examines the connection between a Tibetan pilgrimage guide to Wutai shan and its Chinese antecedent. The guidebook was initiated by the imperial state preceptor and religious teacher of Qian-long, Rölpé Dorjé (1717–1786), in 1767, and completed posthumously by Rölpé Dorjé’s disciples in 1831. While previous scholarship was certainly aware of the close relationship between this Tibetan guide and the Chinese-language gazetteers of the mountain, Chou is the first to establish, through a line-by-line comparison of the Tibetan and the Chinese, that the Tibetan guide represents in fact a full-fledged translation of one of the gazetteers. On the basis of her comparison, Chou argues that Rölpé Dorjé reframed the miracle stories and biographies of eminent Chinese masters from the gazetteer into an Indo-Tibetan worldview, rendering the Chinese records of the mountain accessible to an Inner Asian audience. As Tibetan translation activity has historically centered on India, Chou’s chapter...

Clouds over Mount Tai

 

Armenian Pantheon of Gods on Mount Nemrut

 

Mount Tsurugi (剱岳)

The episode has passed into Japanese mountaineering lore. On the 13th of July 1907 (Meiji 40), a government survey party reached the summit of Tsurugi, a mountain as sharp-edged and rugged as its name suggests. It turned out that they were not the first to visit what they had assumed to be an untrodden peak. They discovered a weathered spear tip and priest's staff—evidence that they were not, after all, the first to ascend the peak.


These relics can today be viewed at the Tateyama Museum in Toyama. Initial assessments dated the bronze alloy to the late Nara/early Heian period (~800AD).

Guilin

Mountain Songs

http://mountainsongs.net

Mountain Songs, 山之歌 Shānzhigē, is a bilingual, database website, fully searchable, which connects ancient (and some modern) Chinese poetry to the sites where the poems were written by means of digital images and GIS coordinates. The sites and poems and can be located on Google Earth as well as by the MIT Timeline and TimeMap.

Mount Tai

望岳

岱宗夫如何
齊魯青未了

造化鍾神秀
陰陽割昏曉

盪胸生層雲
決眥入歸鳥

會當凌絕頂
一覽眾山小


Wang Yue

Dai zong fu ru he?
Qi lu qing wei liao
Zao hua zhong shen xiu
Yin yang ge hun xiao.

Dang xiong sheng ceng yun
Jue zi ru gui niao
Hui dang ling jue ding
Yi lan zhong shan xiao

Gaze Mountain

Tai-tsung then like what?

Chi Lu green never ends

Creator conentrated divine beauty

Northside southside cleave dark brown

Heaving breast are born layered clouds

Bursting eye-sockets enter returning birds

Really must surmount extreme summit

Single glance many mountains little.

Gazing at the Marchmount*

What is it like then, Mount Tai
Over Qi and Lu, endlessly green

Creation gathered divine beauty
North and south dividing dusk and daybreak

Chest heaves at heaped clouds rising
Eye-sockets burst – enter birds returning

Someday I’ll climb to the highest peak
See in one glance all other mountains small.

- Tien Tran 2016

 * Edward H. Schafer's translation of the term yue 嶽 as 'Marchmount,' explained in his Pacing the Void: T'ang Approaches to the Stars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977: 'My version is based on the ancient belief that these numinous mountains stood at the four extremities of the habitable world, the marches of man's proper domain, the limits of the ritual tour of the Son of Heaven. There was, of course, a fifth—a kind of axial mount in the center of the world' (p.6).

Gazing at Mount Tai

How to describe a peak

that has produced such reverence?

there's the greenness that surrounds it-

two provinces, Qi and Lu

all creation is contained

on those dark slopes, that sunny side

layers of clouds refresh

climber and climbed alike

the birds fly up and up

beyond our straining eyes

someday I want to stand

right there on the summit

the other mountains dwarfed

spreading in all directions

- David Young 2015

Gazing on the Peak

And what then is Daizong like? - 

over Qi and Lu, green unending,

Creation compacted spirit splendors here,

Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn.

Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud;

splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering, 

Someday may I climb up to its highest summit,

with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are.

- Stephen Owen 2015

On a Prospect of T'ai-shan

How is one to describe this king of mountains?

Throughout the whole of Ch-i and Lu one never loses sight of its greenness.

In it the Creator has concentrated all that is numinous and beautiful.

Its northern and southern slopes divide the dawn from the dark.

The layered clouds begin at the climber's heaving chest,

and homing birds fly suddenly within range of his straining eyes.

One day I must stand on top of its highest peak

and at a a single glance see all the other mountains grown tiny beneath me.

- David Hawkes 1965

Gazing at the Marchmount

[the Sacred Peak, Taishan]

Successor Alp - now what is it like?
Over Qi and Lu - greening interminate,
The Creator of CHanges converged divine glory;
Sun- and shadow slopes cleave dusk from dawn.
Heaving the breast, to arouse layered clouds;
Popping the pupils, to send in homing birds,
My time will come to surmount its pinnacle
And, in one view, survey all alps so wee,

- David McCraw 1992

Viewing Mt. Tai


How about old Mt. Tai?
Holding apart Qi and Lu.
Natures bounty elegant,
Slicing YinYang
begetting day and night.
Rocking my bosom
spawning thunderheads,
Scowling
at returning birds.
Approaching the summit
One glance below
Only puny hills!

- Dongbo 東波

Looking at Mount Tai

How is Mountain Tai?
Its green is seen beyond State Qi and State Lu,
a distillation of creation's spirit and beauty.
Its slopes split day into Yin and Yang.
Its rising clouds billow in my chest.
Homecoming birds fly through my wide-open eyes.
I should climb to the summit
and in one glance see all other mountains dwarfed.


- Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping



Gaze Into the Distance at the Five Sacred Mountains

What does one think of the eternal Mt. Tai?
From Qi to Lu green colors without limits
Only deities and Nature can create such elegance
At daybreak one mountainside bright and sunny, the other side in dark shadows, at dusk they trade light and dark like the yin and yang.

Mind-heart emerges, clearing away the overlapping clouds
Out of the corner of my eye, birds come together to enter the mountains
Later I will tower aloft from the highest peak
With one look, numerous small mountains down below.

Kamchatka

Mt. Aconcagua

Summit of Mt Nimba - Tallest peak in Côte d'Ivoire