"Increasingly in this world of ours, there is no longer any geographical forest for us practitioners to retire to. It is not just that the places frequented by lonely meditators have been overrun by modern civilization — forests sold off to multinational corporations and quickly cut down, roads built through retreat areas, social, political, and economic policies that effectively destroy the possibility of forest renunciation. It is also that even the idea of the 'forest' has become largely marginalized in modern Buddhism. Every manifestation of Buddhism, it now seems, must immediately demonstrate 'social engagement' and 'ethical impact.' It is not, as we shall see below, that these are unimportant values. But now, more and more, they have become a litmus test to determine what forms of Buddhism are acceptable and which are not. Thus, the true forest is quickly disappearing, perhaps forever, from our world.
"But there is a new wilderness, a new trackless waste, a new unknown and limitless territory, a new terrain of chaos, that calls us. It is a territory — I do believe — that has not been, and cannot be, colonized and domesticated by human ambition and greed, that in its true extent cannot be mapped by human logic at all. This is the 'forest' of the human body. The body is now, I believe, our forest, our jungle, the 'outlandish' expanse in which we are invited to let go of everything we think, allow ourselves to be stripped down to our most irreducible person, to die in every experiential sense possible and see what, if anything, remains.
"In this, I am speaking not of the body we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of our 'me' or self-image. Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it, to surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness. As we shall see, this true, limitless body cannot even be entered until we are willing to leave our own thinking process behind — on the surface, so to speak. It is similar to the deep-sea diver: while floating on the surface of the sea, he knows little of what lies below. But when he descends into its depths, the limitless worlds of the ocean open to him. It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great siddha Saraha spoke when he said, 'There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and as open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring.' "
