Ry Sn r Gary Snyder (1930) was born in San Francisco and raised in Oregon. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. In 1958 he spent seven years practising Zen meditation at Daitokuji monastery. His work and his poetry have remained committed to the exploration of Buddhist, especially Zen, practice and to the protection of the environment.
Ry Sn r Gary Snyder (1930) was born in San Francisco and raised in Oregon. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. In 1958 he spent seven years practising Zen meditation at Daitokuji monastery. His work and his poetry have remained committed to the exploration of Buddhist, especially Zen, practice and to the protection of the environment.
Ry Sn r Gary Snyder (1930) was born in San Francisco and raised in Oregon. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. In 1958 he spent seven years practising Zen meditation at Daitokuji monastery. His work and his poetry have remained committed to the exploration of Buddhist, especially Zen, practice and to the protection of the environment.
Gary Snyder (1930- ) in San Francisco and raised on a farm
outside attended in Oregon, where he studied literature and anthropology. Inspired by D. T. Suzuki's Essays in Zen Bud dhism, he taught himself to meditate and devoted himself to the practice of Zen meditation while working as a in Washington state. In 1952 he enrolled in the Departmen't of Oriental languages at the University of California at Berkeley to study Chinese and Japanese. He met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in San Francisco and participated in the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, where Ginsberg First recited 'Howl'. The poets gathered there " were to become known as the Beats. They read together R. H. Blyth's four volume translation of Japanese haiku, but much of the Zen flavour of their work came from Snyder, portrayed as Japhy Rider by Kerouac in The Dharma Bums (see the chapter on Kerouac, above). Snyder visited Japan in 1956, ftravelling there again in 1958 to spend seven years practising Zen meditation . at Daitokuji monastery. Returning to San Francisco in 1966, he participated , i in the first 'Be-In' in Golden Gate Park and became involved in the anti-war movement. His work and his poetry have remained committed both to the exploration of Buddhist, especially Zen, practice and to the protection of the environment. He continues to work actively at the local level, serving on <the California Arts Council from 1974-80. He currently lives on a mountain farm in the northern Sierra Nevada range in California, where he founded the Ring of Bone zendo (meditation centre). He teaches at the University of California, Davis, where he helped found the 'Nature and Culture' curriculum. The extracts below, from his 1974 work Turtle Island, illustrate the impor tance of Buddhism for Snyder, both in his poetry and in his social activism. 207 A MODERN BUDDHIST BIBLE AVOCADO The Dharma is like an Avocado! Some parts so ripe you can't believe it, But it's good. And other places hard and green Without much flavor, Pleasing those who like their eggs well-cooked. And the skin is thin, The great big round seed In the middle, Is your own Original Nature Pure and smooth, Almost nobody ever splits it open Or ever tries to see If it will grow. Hard and slippery, It looks like You should plant it - but then it shoots out thru the fmgers gets away. 'ENERGY IS ETERNAL DELIGHT' A young woman at Sir George Williams University in Montreal asked me, 'What do you fear most?' I found myself answering 'that the diversity and richness of the gene pool will be destroyed -' and most people there understood what was meant. The treasure of life is the richness of stored information in the diverse genes ofall living beings. If the human race, following on some set of catastrophes, were to survive at the expense of many plant and G ~ r y Snyder animal species, it would be no victory. Diversity provides life with the capacity for a multitude of adaptations and responses to long-range changes on the planet. The possibility remains that at some future time another evolutionary line might carry the development of conscious ness to clearer levels than our family of upright primates. The United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan have a habit. They are addicted to heavy energy use, great gulps and injections of fossil fuel. As fossil-fuel reserves go down, they will take dangerous gambles with the future health of the biosphere (through nuclear power) to keep up their habit. For several centuries Western civilization has had a priapic drive for material accumulation, continual extensions of political and economic power, termed 'progress'. In the Judaeo-Christian worldview men are seen as working out their ultimate destinies (paradise? perdition?) with planet earth as the stage for the drama - trees and animals mere props, nature a vast supply depot. Fed by fossil fuel, this religio-economic view has become a cancer: uncontrollable growth. It may finally choke itself, and drag much else down with it. The longing for growthis not wrong. The nub ofthe problem now is how to flip over, as injujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy ofmodern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature. Self-nature. Mother nature. If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth - of the highest and most fascinating order- it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation. I spent a few years, some time back, in and around a training place. It was a school for monks of the Rinzai branch of Zen Buddhism, in Japan. The whole aim of the community was personal and univer sal liberation. In this quest for spiritual freedom every man marched strictly to the same drum in matters of hours of work and meditation. In the teacher's room one was pushed across sticky barriers into vast new spaces. The training was traditional and had been handed down for centuries - but the insights are forever fresh and new. The beauty, refinement and truly civilized quality of that life has no match in modern America. It is supported by hand labor in small fields, gather ing brushwood to heat the bath, well-water and barrels of homemade 208 209 A MODERN BUDDHIST BIBLE pickles. The unspoken motto is 'Grow With Less.' In the training place I lost my remaining doubts about China. The Buddhists teach respect for all life, and for wild systems. Man's life is totally dependent on an interpenetrating network ofwild systems. Eugene Odum, in his useful paper 'The Strategy ofEcosystem Devel opment', points out how the United States has the characteristics ofa young ecosystem. Some American Indian cultures have 'mature' char acteristics: protection as against production, stability as against growth, quality as against quantity. In Pueblo societies a kind of ultimate democracy is practiced. Plants and animals are also people, and, through certain rituals and dances, are given a place and a voice in the politi cal disCllssions of the humans. They are 'represented: 'Power to all the people' must be the slogan. On Hopi and Navajo land, at Black Mesa, the whole issue is revolving at this moment. The cancer is eating away at the breast ofMother Earth in the form ofstrip-mining. This to provide electricity for Los Angeles. The defense of Black Mesa is being sllstained by traditional Indians, young Indian militants, and longhairs. Black Mesa speaks to us through an ancient, complex web of myth. She is sacred territory. To hear her voice is to give up the European word 'America' and accept the new old name for the continent, 'Turtle Island.' The return to marginal farmland on the part of longhairs is not some nostalgic replay of the nineteenth century. Here is a generation of white people finally ready to learn from the Elders. How to live on the continent as though our children, and on down, for many ages, will still be here (not on the moon). Loving and protecting this soil, these trees, these wolves. Natives of Turtle Island. A scaled-down, balanced technology is possible, if cut loose from the cancer of' exploitation-heavy-industry-perpetual growth. Those who have already sensed these necessities and have begun, whether in the country or the city, to 'grow with less; are the only counterculture that counts. Electricity for Los Angeles is not energy. As Blake said: 'Energy Is Eternal Delight.' Gary Snyder, Turtle island (New York: New Directions Books, 1974), pp.6r, 103-5 210