The Sacred Soundscapes of Mountain Wilderness

Abstract

Sound and silence in nature intensify our perception of the non-anthropogenic world, of that which seems unaffected by humans and has been considered transcendent, eternal, and sacred. This is especially true in mountain settings. Mountain wilderness manifests a reality beyond anthropocentrism, and this reality becomes perceivable, in part, through sound. When described in the language of soundscape ecology, mountain soundscapes can be characterized by a lack or reduction of anthrophonic sounds and the presence or increase of geophonic and biophonic sounds. When described in the language of philosophy and religion, these soundscapes have been said to offer an ideal space beyond impermanence and rational explanation and contain that which is unchanging and inexplicable. The search for personal contact with that which is unchanging and inexplicable, and the attendant belief that these qualities reveal a higher form of reality, is a search for the sacred, and mountain soundscapes have played a significant but as yet unexamined role in this search. Across different religions and secular practices, in different cultures and historical periods, mountain soundscapes have acted as catalysts for sacred experience. This article uses the combined perspectives of philosophy, religion, and soundscape ecology to map some of the physical and intellectual terrain in which such experience has taken place.

1. Introduction

When we lose ourselves in the contemplation of vast mountain landscapes, the writer and wilderness advocate John Muir proffered, “our bodies disappear […] and we blend into the rest of Nature, utterly blind to the boundaries that measure human quantities into separate individuals” (Muir 1924). As extraordinary as such an experience must be, it is not unique; rather, it represents the goal of self-transcendence found in different religious traditions throughout the world (Bernbaum 2022). It should therefore be attainable by people in different times, different cultures, and different places. For Muir, the Sierra Nevada of California were the ideal mountains for such an experience. He described the range as “the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen”, and he proposed to call it the “Range of Light” rather than “the Nevada, or Snowy Range” (Muir 1894). Its divine beauty fashioned his church, where he “communed with nature and spoke with God” (Bernbaum 2022), and he was instrumental in protecting that church for future generations. He scaled many summits in his Range of Light, including the aptly named Cathedral Peak above Tuolumne Meadows, which he wanted to climb, he said, “to say my prayers and hear the stone sermons” (Muir 1916).

What was the content of the stone sermons that Muir heard on Cathedral Peak? In what language were they spoken? Half a world away, and before Muir’s first visit to the Sierra Nevada, the writer and art critic John Ruskin seems to have heard the same sermons in an entirely different mountain range, in the European Alps. Like Muir, Ruskin considered mountains to be his church: he praised them as “great cathedrals of the earth”, which housed “choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars” (Ruskin 1894). The choirs of stream and stone that Ruskin heard in the Alps used the same language as the stone sermons of Cathedral Peak in the Sierra Nevada: in both places, and in many others discussed below, the sounds (and silence) of nature are said to speak in a language that intensifies the perception of the non-anthropogenic world—of that which seems free of human influence and could be considered transcendent, sacred, and eternal.

The eternal dimension was stressed by, among others, the poet William Wordsworth. Inspired by his journey across the Simplon Pass in the Alps, he later memorialized what he saw and heard there in The Prelude (Bernbaum 2022 makes the connection between the journey and the poem). He was overwhelmed by the paradox of irreconcilable forces existing in congruence: the “woods decaying, never to be decayed”; the stationary movement of waterfalls; the torrential downpours shooting from clear blue sky; the “tumult and peace, the darkness and the light”. The assembled powers were like “blossoms on one tree […] The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end”. And the mountains spoke to Wordsworth in that moment as they would later to Ruskin and Muir: in the same passage of The Prelude, the poet recorded “The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, / Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside / As if a voice were in them” (Wordsworth 1851).

The voice of mountain wilderness—speaking in sermons, singing in choirs, or only muttering by the wayside—was audible to all three authors, and it persuaded them of the sanctity of their experience. And while some used metaphors linked to human religious institutions (the prayers and sermons of Muir’s Sierra Nevada, or the choirs, altars, and vaults of Ruskin’s Alps), they all hinted at something beyond the human: they heard “the types and symbols of Eternity”, which were not bound by the finitude of human mortality. Muir said that his body disappeared and blended into the rest of Nature; in so doing, it became a part of Wordsworth’s eternal woods decaying, never to be decayed. The former’s self-transcendence paralleled the latter’s Eternity. Both pointed beyond the human reality of finitude, and they point toward a greater reality against which finitude is measured.

As the pre-eminent scholar of sacred mountains Edwin Bernbaum has argued, mountains can stimulate our awareness of that greater reality. They offer a vision of something eternal, beyond the corruptions of time, and their untrodden heights and innumerable recesses can evoke the sacred as “not merely the unknown, but the unknown that people regard as ultimately real” (Bernbaum 2022). Because this reality existed before us and will continue to exist after us, it seems to transcend any other finite and knowable realities we might create in its midst. It has been called Brahman in Hinduism: that from which all beings are born, upon which they live, and into which they pass upon death (Bhriguvalli, Taittiriya Upanishad 2007). Buddhist and Daoist traditions use different terms to describe it, but they also point to this ultimate reality. And, more relevant to this article, some Buddhist and Daoist authors specifically mentioned mountain soundscapes as a source that could communicate the ideals of their religious beliefs. Other accounts of mountain soundscapes may not be connected to any religious tradition, but they all connect with a reality that lies beyond anthropocentrism.

2. Sound and Silence

In most cases the mountain soundscape is not the immediate object of contemplation, but it is a conspicuous presence that is mentioned explicitly in relation to a moment of heightened awareness or sacred experience. To better understand that conspicuous presence, we must understand what constitutes a soundscape. The term “soundscape” has been used in many different disciplines and refers most generally to the composite of all sounds in a landscape or environment (Pijanowski et al. 2011). It first appeared in relation to urban design studies in the late 1960s, but it was expanded to include non-urban environments soon thereafter by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. Schafer’s research group, the World Soundscape Project, transformed soundscape studies by turning away from the objective, quantitative work of urban design to a more subjective and qualitative, listener-centered approach. Schafer himself began his research in an urban environment, in Vancouver, and he was initially interested in noise abatement. But he found that he could not simply draw attention to the negative effects of noise without proposing an alternative, and his research then expanded to include the positive effects of sound in a wide variety of settings (Truax 2020). His work was pioneering not only in recognizing the positive effects of sound, but also in recognizing sound as part of the ecological properties of landscapes: Schafer understood a soundscape, in part, as “the acoustical characteristics of an area that reflect natural processes” (Schafer [1977] 1994; Pijanowski et al. 2011). The awareness of natural processes is essential here—not only for Schafer, but also for the accounts of mountain soundscapes presented in this article.

Examining the sonic dimension of natural processes is a field of study in its own right, called soundscape ecology, which was first proposed quite recently as a branch of ecology (Pijanowski et al. 2011). The soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, who spent decades recording and analyzing the complex soundscapes of wilderness areas throughout the world, introduced the terms “biophony”, a general description of sounds produced by organisms, and “geophony”, a general description of non-biological sounds such as wind and rain, to the discipline (Pijanowski et al. 2011; Krause 1987). Krause and others subsequently added a further concept, “anthrophony”, to describe sounds caused by humans. Thus, the field of soundscape ecology has been defined in a foundational article as the study of “all sounds, those of biophony, geophony, and anthrophony, emanating from a given landscape” (Pijanowski et al. 2011). This terminology is useful for analyzing and understanding the different components of mountain soundscapes, but it is not complete: it does not include the category of silence. And silence, I would argue, is essential to the perception of these soundscapes. Silence and geophony (the geophonic sounds of wind and water, in particular) are the most frequently mentioned characteristics of mountain soundscapes in descriptions that make connections to the sacred.

Silence, like sound, conditions our experience of the world: it factors into our perception of moments that can seem meaningful, at times even transcendentally meaningful, to us. Silence is therefore much more than simply the lack of sound. Indeed, others have argued that there is never truly a lack of sound in any environment. The American composer John Cage famously claimed that sound is always present, even in the artificially deadened space of an anechoic chamber. When Cage spent time in such a chamber, he was surprised to hear sounds in what should have been a completely silent space. What he heard came from his own body: the sounding movement of his circulating blood and the operation of his nervous system. He concluded, following this experience, that silence is not a lack of sound. For, so long as we live, we unintentionally produce sound. Silence he defined, therefore, as the lack of intended sound (Cage 1961). But I would argue, contra Cage, that silence is much more than the lack of intended sound. Silence, as I define it, is a psychological state triggered by an intimation of something beyond the silence and beyond any unintended sound (Zagorski 2019).

3. Beyond Anthropocentrism

My definition of silence can help explain the experience others describe in their accounts of mountain wilderness, even where those experiences are clothed in different language. Before turning to those accounts, let me elaborate upon my definition. Silence, as I understand it, is a simultaneous awareness, whether conscious or subconscious, of the presence of the actively moving universe and the absence of anthrophonic sound. It is an awareness that the familiar and explainable sounds of the human world seem to cease while the natural world continues in its revolutions. It may occur when one perceives the non-anthropogenic movements of the physical world, while the seeming absence of human sounds makes the mystery of this world all the more present. This absence of human sounds can become acute in mountain wilderness, for such environments are often wholly devoid of human activity. (Another account of silence in relation to the lack of human presence can be found in Schafer [1977] 1994.).

Silence seems to bring forth the presence of something that is beyond human, something older, of greater scale, and independent of us. Although one may consider oneself as part of this greater reality, its independence results from the recognition that it will continue on its own course, regardless of any human action or relation to it. Its presence is palpable, but its difference is caused by the limitations of our ability to perceive it fully and to grasp and comprehend it. This paradoxical feeling of being separate from that of which we are a part allows for the experience of silence even in the presence of physical sound produced by geophonic or biophonic sources, for silence is, again, a psychological state prompted by stimuli from the natural world. As I have written elsewhere, silence obscures the familiar stage of human activity and allows us to glimpse the incomprehensible theatre in which that activity occurs. One is confronted with the motion of life, but this motion resides in an independent sphere of transcendence (Zagorski 2019).

Accounts by those who have spent time in the mountains, and were moved to write about it, bear this out. A diversity of authors—climbers, explorers, hermits, monks, poets, and artists—mention sound and silence as the medium through which they experienced something beyond the human and connected to some greater reality. Horace Bénédict de Saussure, generally considered to be the founding father of mountaineering, was overwhelmed by the effects of silence while climbing down from his first successful summit of the highest peak in the Alps, Mont Blanc. He was struck by the beauty of the moonlight upon the snow and rocks at night and felt rewarded for his great effort. “What pains and hardships are not paid in full by moments such as these”, he wrote, “the soul of a man is lifted up, a wider, nobler horizon is offered to his view; surrounded by such silent majesty he seems to hear the very voice of Nature, and to become her confidant, to whom she tells the most secret of her operations” (Irving 1935). For Saussure, the silence of mountain wilderness carried the very voice of Nature and revealed a kind of ultimate truth. More than a century later, Freda Du Faur was drawn to New Zealand’s Southern Alps for the same reason. From the moment she first saw those mountains, she said that she “worshipped their beauty and was filled with a passionate yearning to touch these shining snows, to climb to their heights of silence and solitude, and feel myself one with the mighty forces around me” (Du Faur 1915). For Du Faur, silence in the midst of the mountains’ mighty forces transcended human finitude and connected it with something greater.

The great scale of mountains, in contrast with their perceived silence, formed the perfect subject for the American photographer Ansel Adams. “A large granite mountain”, he wrote, “cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being”. He did not say explicitly here what may lie at the core of our being, but he did say that “a great Presence hovers over the ranges” (Adams and Street Alinder 1985). Presumably, it is this great Presence which connects with the core of our being. The Presence and the core will be different for each individual, depending upon one’s beliefs: they may reaffirm a religious belief; or they may inspire a secular feeling that one is fully alive and a part of nature; or they may awaken one to new values. For the German author Thomas Mann, the silence of the mountains triggered an awakening of humane duty following the brutality of the First World War (and, it might be guessed, Mann was probably eager to rehabilitate his own reputation given his zealous support for that war). His awakening was allegorized in his novel The Magic Mountain, in which the main character loses himself in a mountain wilderness, pushing “deeper into the wild silence”, and has a vision which symbolizes love as greater than death (Mann 1992; Bernbaum 2022 makes the connection to awakening). For others, the silent Presence hovering in the ranges can transcend any human category such as love or death. The explorer Isabella Bird said that in the mountains, she was “uplifted above a world of love, hate, and storms of passion, for I was calm amidst the eternal silences” (Bird quoted in Bernbaum 2022).

But mountain soundscapes are not only silent. Anyone who has spent time at higher elevations will know that the wind can be just as powerful as the silence. Indeed, a mountain wind can be so powerful as to literally sweep you off your feet—something that silence can do only metaphorically. Accounts of the wind in mountain soundscapes are more common to Buddhist and Daoist authors and are presented in a separate section below. Among European authors, the French mountaineer Maurice Herzog gave an exceptional account of the wind speaking just as profoundly as the silence. Herzog and his party made the first successful summit of Annapurna in the Himalayas in 1950, which was also the first successful summit above 8000 m in history. But Herzog nearly died while descending, and severe frostbite claimed his fingers and toes, which required amputation. As he fought against death, he thought the mountain spoke to him and reassured him that even in death, he would remain—as a part of the mountain for eternity. “There is a supernatural power in those close to death”, he wrote. “Strange intuitions identify one with the whole world. The mountain spoke with the wind as it whistled over the ridges or ruffled the foliage. All would end well. I should remain there, forever, beneath a few stones and a cross”. In his vision, he then watched his companions leave him and return to civilization: “They would regain the plains and wide horizons. For me, silence” (Herzog 1952). Herzog believed that the mountain spoke through wind and silence, and what it told him was a “strange intuition” of a truth, something that lay beyond rational explanation and enabled him to identify with the whole world.

4. Beyond Rationalization

Descending in darkness after reaching one of the highest peaks of Mount Kenya in Africa, the mountaineer Eric Shipton also had an experience that defied reason or logic. In a state of fatigue, he was nevertheless sensitive to “the phantom moonlight, the shadowy forms of ridge and pinnacle, the wisps of silvered mist, the radiant expanse of the Lewis glacier plunging into soundless depths below”, all of which, he said, “induced a sense of exquisite fantasy”. In that exquisite fantasy, he had the feeling that he and his climbing partner had been joined somehow at that height by a third person (Shipton 2010). The expanse of glacier “plunging into soundless depths” beneath him seems to refer to the mountain soundscape at that fantastic moment, but it contains two meanings: the soundless depths were not only soundless because they made no sound; they were also soundless because they could not be sounded, or measured. The depths were both physical and metaphorical, and so great that they could not be fathomed and comprehended rationally.

The lack of rational comprehension that characterizes much of the experience of mountain wilderness seems to defy reason in ways that illustrate those soundless and unfathomable depths. Some authors felt that their very selves dissolved into infinity, and they sought neither explanation nor the security of quantifiable measure. Muir became “utterly blind to the boundaries that measure human quantities into separate individuals”, and his self dissolved into something akin to Wordsworth’s “woods decaying, never to be decayed”, into the “types and symbols of Eternity”. Saussure’s soul was lifted up to a higher plane, where he heard the very voice of Nature. Du Faur became one with nature’s forces, and Adams sensed a Presence that spoke to the core of his being. All these individuals lived in cultures that were significantly influenced by the European Enlightenment, and yet their experiences seem inconsistent with a suite of ideas essential to that movement, including rational explanation, quantifiable measure, and a distinction between humans and nature.

That suite of ideas can be found as components of Max Weber’s theory of the progressive rationalization of Western culture. Weber, a highly influential sociologist, first presented his theory about increasing rationalization in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The theory remained an important part of all his subsequent writing (Schöllgen 1998). In a later essay he wrote that:

“the process of increasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean an increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else: the knowledge or belief that, whenever one desired, one could find that there are fundamentally no mysterious, incalculable forces involved [in the conditions under which one lives], but rather, that all things—in principle—can be controlled by means of calculation. But this means: the demystification [Entzauberung] of the world”.

(Weber 1995, my translation)

Rationalization, as presented in this passage, is not about knowledge; it is about explanation. It is a process by which explanations are created for things that had been seen as mysterious or without explanation. At the most fundamental level, rationalization entails a process of “demystification”: Entzauberung in the original German, which means literally “the process of removing the magic from something”.

Since the time of the Renaissance, according to Weber, Western culture has been characterized by the process of removing the mystery of things. This contrasts markedly with the experience of mountain wilderness found in the writings quoted above: whereas those authors experienced and praised nature as a mystical sphere that transcends the human, rationalization reduces nature to something that can be explained, quantified, and, ultimately, controlled by humans. As nature is controlled by means of calculation, increasing rationalization brings about the progressive domination of nature: ever more aspects of the natural world become subject to human control as the process advances over time. This implies a unidirectional, progress-oriented philosophy of history and not the timeless Eternity celebrated by Wordsworth and others. It is a philosophy of history conditioned by the progressive domination of nature, where mysteries are replaced with rational explanations. All work together to further rationalization: explanation (or demystification), calculation (or quantification), the domination of nature, and the belief in progress.

Weber’s theory about rationalization and the progressive domination of nature influenced later thinkers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who extended these ideas in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment. The book is not about the Enlightenment—the philosophical and scientific movement that flourished in Europe in the 18th century—as the title might suggest; rather, it addresses a more general concept of enlightenment that the authors argued was rooted in a human tendency to control nature for the purpose of survival, prosperity, and, ultimately, greater freedom from necessity. The book was shaped also by the political realities of the period in which it was written: the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s forced the authors to leave Germany, and this inspired them to try to understand “why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). They argued that the cause lay in the very thing that had been used to improve the human condition: the control of nature through reason to effect freedom from necessity—the tradition of enlightenment.

But Dialectic of Enlightenment is neither a critique of reason nor a pessimistic indictment of Western culture, though it often has been seen as such (Bowie 1997). The authors’ argument rests upon a distinction between reason and instrumental rationality, and it is the latter, instrumental rationality, that brings about the “self-destruction” of enlightenment by creating a rationalized world that extinguishes freedom (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). As increasing rationalization expands to control all forms of nature, it expands to control humans themselves, and they become subject to manipulation, or murdered in the most efficient way possible, by those with more power. Horkheimer and Adorno wanted to preserve individual freedom, which they believed was inseparable from enlightened thought. Enlightened reason, and the freedom it generated, they argued, were worth saving. But these could only be saved by reflecting upon the dialectical turn from reason to instrumental rationality, and their book was an attempt to do that (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). At the root of the turn toward instrumental rationality, as noted above, is the drive for humans to control nature and use it for their own advantage.

According to Horkheimer, this relationship between humans and nature underlies the entire spectrum of Western thought and can be “traced back to the first chapters of Genesis” (Jay 1996). (For an alternative study of the domination of nature also broad in its historical scope, see Leiss 1972). The Book of Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 26 and 28, could be interpreted in a way that supports Horkheimer’s argument: therein, God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth”. And further, after creating man and woman, God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis n.d.). The order to subdue the earth and have dominion over all other forms of life is, in one reading, an invitation to control nature for human purpose, and it certainly seems anthropocentric. Other readings have argued that this same passage may grant humans dominion over the earth, but it does not give them a free hand to destroy God’s creation, whether animals, plants, or fellow humans (see, for example, Naess 1989). Suffice to say that the Book of Genesis has had different interpretations, and I am not the person, nor is an article on mountain soundscapes the place, to weigh the merits of those interpretations. What can be said is that the Book of Genesis, enlightenment thinking, and progressive rationalization advance a distinction between humans and nature. And because this distinction is called into question in many accounts of mountain soundscapes, we might ask if there are other philosophical or religious traditions in which the distinction does not exist.

5. Beyond Distinctions

As readers of this journal likely know, there are countless philosophical and religious traditions in which such a distinction does not exist, or in which anthropocentrism is not favored, or in which rational explanations of the mysteries of life are not sought. Among the authors quoted above, Muir is noteworthy for his links to American Transcendentalism and his desire, evident in his writings, to challenge the conceit of anthropocentrism (Wilkins 1995). But there are other examples that stand completely outside the tradition of European enlightenment and its distinction between humans and nature. Most relevant to this article are Buddhism and Daoism, for authors in these traditions gave accounts of mountain soundscapes that harmonize with non-anthropocentric worldviews and that value sound and silence as expressions of something transcendent, eternal, and sacred.

The founder of Shingon Buddhism in Japan, Kukai, spent the early years of his adult life wandering and meditating in mountain wilderness. After travel to China and further study, he returned to Japan and was eventually granted permission to build a monastery at a remote site he had come to know and appreciate in his early years as a wandering monk: Mount Koya, then hardly frequented by others (Bernbaum 2022). In a letter addressed to the emperor of Japan in 816 CE, in which Kukai asked for permission to build the monastery, he noted the soundscape of this location and the absence of human influences. Prefacing his request with the observation that meditation, according to the sutras, “should be practiced on a flat area deep in the mountains”, he continued: “When young, I, Kukai, often walked through mountainous areas and crossed many rivers. There is a quiet, open place called Koya […] High peaks surround Koya in all four directions; no human tracks, still less trails, are to be seen there. I should like to […] build a monastery there for the practice of meditation, for the benefit of the nation and of those who desire to discipline themselves” (Bernbaum 2022; Hakeda 1972).

The quiet of Mount Koya, far away from human influence, became “one of the most important centers of esoteric Buddhism in Japan”, the site of many temples and the largest cemetery in the nation (Bernbaum 2022). Its quiet was celebrated in The Tales of the Heike, a 13th-century epic compiled from an oral tradition of stories probably first recorded by Buddhist priests (Tales of the Heike 2006). Of Mount Koya, it told, “the only sound that breaks its stillness is the mountain wind that now and again rustles the branches of the trees” (Bernbaum 2022). The geophonic sound of the wind on Koya is said here to heighten the perception of its quiet calm. It does this by pointing to what is not there: anthrophonic sounds and the human activity that causes them. Undisturbed by such activity, the mountain soundscape provided an ideal setting for meditation and the contemplation of a larger reality beyond the human world. The extent to which this larger reality, communicated through a soundscape, is equivalent to the ultimate reality represented by the Buddhist concept of sunyata, or the dissolution of the self represented by anatman, is a subject that merits further study.

The ability to hear a larger reality, perhaps even the ultimate reality, is available to all who know how to listen. It can be especially precious to those who want or need to escape the turmoil of a community or political life. As the 5th-century Chinese poet Xie Lingyun wrote:

• In the mountains all is pure, all is calm;
• All complication is cut off.
• Rare are they who know how to listen;
• Happy they who possess wisdom.
• […]
• Here is the realm of harmony and joy,
• Where the past and the present become eternal.

The poem suggests that knowing how to listen is a form of wisdom—perhaps because when we know how to listen, we may hear a greater reality that transcends the complicated noise of society and politics and thereby touch something eternal. Xie was an acclaimed nature poet who combined ideas from Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in his religious writings. He was also a court official who suffered from the political upheavals of the time and was eventually executed, unfortunately, away from the mountains he loved most (Bernbaum 2022; s.v. Xie 2023).

For others who could not escape to the mountains, there was landscape painting, which the 11th-century Chinese painter and author of “the most influential treatise” on the topic (Bernbaum 2022), Guo Xi, claimed was a worthy substitute for time in the mountains. “The din of the dusty world and the confines of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors”, he wrote, while “haze, mist, and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks, and yet can rarely find”. The only recourse for someone unable to be in the mountains in person, aside from dreaming, was to view a landscape painting: “without leaving the room, at once he finds himself among the streams and ravines; the cries of birds and monkeys are faintly audible to his senses; light on the hills and reflection on the water, glittering, dazzle his eyes […] This is why the world values the true significance of the painting of mountains” (Bernbaum 2022). I find it remarkable that Guo Xi, a visual artist, esteemed sound as no less essential to experience than image: he suggested that a painting is only successful to the extent that it evokes the soundscape as compellingly as the landscape. The imagined biophonic cries of birds and monkeys, and the geophonic trickle of moving water, could transport the viewer to a place beyond “the din of the dusty world”.

The sounds of birds and monkeys, or other animals and insects, together with wind, rain, streams, and silence, are some of the elements that make up the complex tapestry of mountain soundscapes. The sonic profile of such spaces is vastly different from those dominated by the din of anthrophony: urban environments, in particular, may be full of anthrophonic sounds, but these sounds cover a relatively limited spectral range that conveys little information and may mask other, non-anthrophonic sounds (Pijanowski et al. 2011; Schafer [1977] 1994). The non-urban natural world, by contrast, has been described as the most information-rich environment that humans can experience (Wilson 1992; Pijanowski et al. 2011), and soundscape ecologists have shown how some of that information is conveyed through complex webs of sound (Pijanowski et al. 2011; Krause 1987). This may be why a mountain soundscape could be thought to provide insight into the ten thousand things said to be produced by the Dao: its diversity and richness more accurately show the complexity of the universe. Or, if the wordless sounds and silence of mountain wilderness can better communicate the eternal, it may be because “the Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao”, and “the name that can be named is not the eternal name”: they are beyond words, but not beyond sound and silence (Tao Te Ching 1972). The key to the eternal—here, and in all the many examples given throughout this article, regardless of their religious affiliation—is to hear beyond the anthropogenic world. Hearing beyond the anthropogenic world is difficult, but less difficult in mountain wilderness. In the most remote mountains, such as the Kunlun of Central Asia, it has been said that “no one lives but the wind” (Bernbaum 2022). For many who have visited such places, it is there that the mystery of the universe becomes articulate.

6. Conclusions

My conclusions have been reached by others before me—if not in relation to the nature of mountain soundscapes, the exposition of which I hope is my unique contribution, then in relation to ideas about the nature of a greater reality, which is mentioned in philosophy and religious traditions, and in the writings of those who have spent time in mountain wilderness. When viewed together, these sources suggest that mountains have been seen to possess a power that can move us beyond anthropocentric views to a greater reality; and if we know how to listen, we can hear this power vibrating throughout the mountains’ soundscapes.

Mountains “do not need to be useful to humankind to justify their existence”, Arne Naess wrote, for they are “full of intrinsic meaning and value” (Naess 2005a). This insight, and the many years he spent in mountain wilderness, inspired Naess to develop the principles of deep ecology, the first and second of which assert that (1) the flourishing of all life, human and non-human, has value in itself, independent of its usefulness to human beings, and (2) the richness and diversity of life are also values in themselves (Naess 2005b). Because Naess explicitly included non-biological forces, such as rivers, in his definition of “life”, we might say that mountain soundscapes (with their biophony and geophony) give voice to a great diversity and richness of life, which has a right to flourish. But the sound of this life has already been dampened, and it may be extinguished by the climate crisis and expanding development. The foundation of mountain soundscapes—the mountain environments that generate them—are among the environments most threatened by anthropogenic climate change (Palomo 2017; Egarter Vigl et al. 2021); they are also subject to changes caused by development and tourism (see Tölderer 2021 for a well-researched and deeply moving account of the damage caused to high mountain regions by the expansion of ski resorts). As these environments change, their soundscapes will be transformed: some sounds will fade away forever, the anthrophonic din will grow louder, and the power to communicate a greater reality will wane.

Listening to soundscapes might be one path to preservation—preservation of the soundscape, the environment, and the individual who listens. For the more people think that mountain soundscapes may have the power to reveal a greater reality, the more people may listen for that greater reality and want to preserve it. They will do so regardless of the name they believe it should be given: whether Brahman, sunyata, the Dao, the voice of Nature, Eternity, the truth, or simply the sacred. The experience of the sacred, by any name, is among the most transformative and inspiring experiences we may be granted, and it has motivated countless others to communicate and preserve the truth they have heard. It led Muir, for example, to work for the protection of millions of acres of wilderness, and it informed the spirit of his writing, which convinced countless others of the importance of preservation. If the stone sermons of Cathedral Peak could create only a few more converts like Muir, we might better safeguard the mountain soundscapes that have been heard as divine in different places, at different times, and across different beliefs.