Naming mountains

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Japan and New Zealand, though located on the opposite sides of the Equator, share many geographical and geological features such as long coastlines, volcanoes, and hot springs. The two countries are also known around the world for their beautiful mountains. However, the commonality between the two countries vanishes when it comes to naming their mountains.

Most mountains in Japan are named after their geographical locations such as Tokachi-dake, Iwate-san, and Tsukuba-yama, where dake, san, and yama are variations in Japanese for the word “mountain”. There are also many mountains whose names literally capture their visual images such as Tsurugi-dake (Mt. Sword), Yariga-dake (Mt. Spear), and Hakuba (Mt. White Horse). What is most striking about the choice of names for Japanese mountains is the fact that not a single mountain of the so-called “one hundred famous Japanese mountains” is named after a real person. The sole exception, if it can be called that, is Sobo-san, which would be Mt. Grandmother in English as the Japanese word “sobo” means “grandmother”. The name of Sobo-san was given to this mountain in the southern island of Kyushu because on its top is a shrine in honor of Toyotamahime, not a historical figure but a mythological figure who was the grandmother of Emperor Jinmu, the legendary first emperor of Japan.

In New Zealand, in sharp contrast to Japan, most mountains are named after historical figures such as Mt. Cook, Mt. Tasman, Mt. Vancouver, Mt. Hicks, Mt. Hamilton, Mt. Graham, Mt. Dixon, and Mt. Darwin. It goes without saying that Mt. Cook is named after the British explorer Captain James Cook (1728-1779), and Mt. Tasman after the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (1603-1659). In fact, the names of Cook and Tasman also appear in the names of a strait, Cook Strait, and a sea, Tasman Sea, the former for the strait between the North and the South Island and the latter for the sea between New Zealand and Australia. Other mountains listed above are also named after real persons whose lives are connected with the history of New Zealand in one way or another. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is credited with one mountain named after him because he was in New Zealand in 1835 during his trip around the world on the HMS Beagle.

Crossing the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Australia, we come across an interesting example of a mountain—or a rock formation—named after mythical figures in the region called the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. Known for the dramatic scenery with rugged mountains, steep cliffs, deep canyons, underground rivers, and cascading waterfalls, the Blue Mountains is one of the places Charles Darwin visited during his stay in Australia in 1836. The sandstone rock formation called “Three Sisters” is one of the most spectacular landscapes in the Blue Mountains, attracting millions of visitors every year. Of the three rocks that comprise it, Meehri is the tallest at 922 meters, followed by Wimlah at 918 meters, and Gunnedoo at 906 meters. It is not difficult to infer that these are Aboriginal female names. According to an Aboriginal legend, the three sisters, who lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe, fell in love with three brothers from the rival Nepean tribe. Since inter-tribal marriage was forbidden, the three brothers decided to capture the three sisters by force, inciting a battle between the two tribes. A witchdoctor of the Katoomba tribe turned the three sisters into rocks in order to protect them from being captured. When the witchdoctor was killed in the battle, no one was left to turn the three sisters back into humans. Thus, they still stand as rocks to this day, overlooking the beautiful valley, and will continue to stand there until rain and wind gradually erode their gracious figures into a pile of sands.

There is another mountain with the name of “Three Sisters” in the Canadian Rockies near Canmore, Alberta, which lies to the east of the Banff National Park. This is a massive mountain with three peaks, much bigger than “Three Sisters” in the Land Down Under.

The three peaks are named: Big Sister (also called Faith), which is highest at 2,936 meters, Middle Sister (Charity), which is 2,769 meters high, and Little Sister (Hope), which is 2,694 meters high. The three peaks were once called “Three Nuns” because they were said to resemble, when covered with snow, the figures of three nuns praying. The current name, “Three Sisters”, was given by George M. Dawson (1849-1901), who did an extensive survey of Western Canada, as this name appears in a map he created in 1886 of the area covering the Canadian Rockies. Calling them Faith, Charity and Hope after martyred saints, some have argued, would not sit well with Canada’s Protestants. But for all Canadians—and for all visitors from around the world—these majestic peaks stand high into the sky as a reminder of three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

The way in which mountains are named thus varies from country to country. But does it matter how mountains are named? After all, is not a mountain a mountain no matter in which country it is located? It certainly does, for by giving the name of “Three Sisters” we feel more affinity to a rock formation than just calling it “Three Rocks”, leading us to develop an awareness about the importance of living in harmony with the natural environment. As for “Three Sisters” in the Great White North, calling “Middle Sister” Charity reminds us the importance of observing the universal virtue of agape in our relationship with our fellow human beings, for as Paul the Apostle writes in his First Epistle to Corinthians, “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

That which we call a planet

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

July 14, 2015 will probably go down in the history of space exploration as the “encounter day”, the day a man-made spacecraft came closest to Pluto. At 7:50 am EDT, the New Horizons spacecraft launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on January 19, 2006 came within 7,800 miles of Pluto’s surface as it flew past at the speed exceeding 30,000 mph. The day is a triumphant day for Alan Stern (1967- ), a planetary scientist and an aeronautic engineer, who has been pushing for a NASA mission to Pluto for nearly 25 years, recruiting scientists, senators, and even children to lobby the Congress for funding the mission.1

At three billion miles from the Sun, Pluto is invisible to the naked eye, and was not discovered until 1930. The honor of naming Pluto, for the Roman god of underworld, goes to Venetia Burney, an 11-year old British girl, who suggested this name while she was discussing the discovery with her grandfather. The name was unanimously adopted by the staff at the Lowell Observatory, named after Percival Lowell (1855-1916) who had started searching for what he called “Planet X” as early as 1905 whose existence was finally confirmed by Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997) in February 1930.

Planetary scientists now know that Pluto is but one of many small frozen bodies at the far edge of the solar system circling around the Sun. With the discovery of so many similar objects in the Kuiper Belt—Quaoar, Haumea, Eris, and others—where Pluto is located, it became increasingly problematic to maintain that Pluto is a planet. With the size of only 1,430 miles across (found to be 1,473 miles across by the New Horizons spacecraft), it is clear that Pluto does not come close to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune whose status as planets is well recognized. At a meeting held in Prague in August 2006, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for naming and classifying celestial objects, decided to adopt the name of “dwarf planets” for a class of objects similar in size as Pluto. The decision to demote Pluto’s status from a planet to a dwarf planet was a bitterly disappointing one for Alan Stern, for dwarf planets are a different category of celestial objects from planets. One of the arguments IAU scientists used against calling Pluto a planet was that increasing the number of planets in the solar system to 20 or more beyond the eight universally recognized ones would be inconvenient. Indeed, we are tempted to paraphrase Juliet’s words to infer what Alan Stern must have felt: “What’s in a name? that which we call a planet by any other name would look as planetary”.2

The controversy surrounding the naming and categorizing of a celestial object like Pluto reminds us of the importance we humans attach to our activity of naming and categorizing things in the world around us. To give a thing a name is important because having a name already suggests that we know something about that thing, for a name captures some property of a thing, be it its color, shape, or constituent substances. For scientists, naming a thing comes with the honor of having his/her name attached to it, as in Halley’s comet, Comet Hale-Bopp, and the Doppler effect. In some cases, it takes the poet’s imagination to give a name to a thing, as Shakespeare writes in his Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/ Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;/ And, as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/ Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name.”

The world where a thing has “a local habitation and a name” is, according to Buddhist thought, the world of conventional reality, or the world of “name and form”. A thing, which always appears as a composite entity called sankhara, or “that which has been put together”, is given a name for its form to distinguish it from other things. But a form, being subject to the laws of impermanence and non-self, comes and goes without any entity that can be called its own self. “Form is nothing other than emptiness, emptiness is nothing other than form. Form is but emptiness, emptiness is but form.” These lines are well known to Buddhist practitioners as they appear in the short yet profound sutra known as the Prajnaparamita, or the Heart Sutra. It reminds us of the illusionary nature of things in the world of conventional reality, behind which lies the world of ultimate reality, or the world of “airy nothing” in Shakespeare’s words, accessible only to the insight of an enlightened Buddha or a poet like Shakespeare. Since the world of conventional reality is the observable world for the rest of us, the debate about what name to give to a distant celestial object will continue as scientists keep pushing out the boundary of the observable universe we inhabit. As for Pluto, it will continue to have “a local habitation and a name” until a sankhara in the universe, that which we call the solar system, is reduced to “airy nothing”, when the Sun runs out of its energy and collapses itself to a dwarf. By that time, no scientists will be around to debate whether a dwarf planet is a planet or not.

  1. For details about Stern’s involvement in the New Horizon mission and his passion for Pluto, see Lemonick, Michael, “Plutonic Love”, Smithsonian, June 2015.
  2. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II.