Is sawa-nobori, the Japanese art of river-climbing, just an offshoot of modern alpinism - or is it something entirely different? After pondering that question in a previous post, I came across this quotation from Mishima Yukio's novel, The Sea of Fertility:
Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Yuishiki school, interpreted the world as a torrential and swift rapids or a great white cascade which never pauses. Since the world presented the form of a waterfall, both the basic cause of that world and the basis of man's perception of it were waterfalls. It is a world that lives and dies at every moment. There is no definite proof of existence in either past or future, and only the present instant which one can touch with one's hand and see with one's eye is real.
Related post: The ahistoricity of sawa
