The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

by Gary Snyder

he enlarges one's delight in existence and amplifies the elan vital, the life force,

as Freeman House put it, "gives you the permission to use your senses and offers tools to take on the more destructive aspects of Western Civilization," all the better.

a typically flat, fatal Western humor that serves to confirm acceptance.

Clarity, especially in poetry, requires conceiving of your work as a collaborative act of imagination with the audience, thus affording them the deepest respect.

his well-founded sense that poetry is traditionally an oral /aural community art-form meant for a live audience. If poets /singers can't move their friends and neighbors, tribe and kin, art truly becomes academic.

That sense of work centered in place, of addressing a community that includes plants and animals as well as people, is one of the r...

he cuts cleanly to the center of common concerns and voices them with uncommon eloquence. He possesses that knack for making the simple luminous without reducing it to the...

Gary is that he's a Warrior of the Imagination in a time of what pundits on both sides have called the Cultural Wars, but which Diane di Prima was among the first to identify more accurately as The War Against Imagination.

Kenneth Rexroth called human imagination "the organ of communion," and that seems right to me. I've come to think of imagination as the psychic nexus of the physical body, emotion, intellect, and spirit, but who knows? Artists and shamans have variously described it as a mode or state of participatory consciousness, extended identity, psychic simultaneity, voluntary incarnation. By any description, it denotes a realized connection between the Self and Other, an empathetic merging (however brief), a sense of shared immanence-basically, the predication for love, or at least a deep and true regard for someone or something beyond the self.

The nature of imagination tends toward integration, inclusion, and intimacy, and as such is inimical to the alienation and homogeneity of corporate global capitalism, centralized government, and the other forces of darkness that regard the pla...

the bio- centric ("life-centered") view over the egocentric ("se...

he understood purity was the end of possibility.

Four Changes: "Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move."

memory-that Nature bats last, is eminently capable of caring for herself against destructive human foolishness, and no doubt will remain long after our demise. Nature doesn't need us to save her.

the

Strange how unmoved this place leaves one; neither articulate nor worshipful; rather the pressing need to look within and adjust the mechanism of perception.

A

Almost had it last night: no identity. One thinks, "I emerged from some general, nondifferentiated thing, I return to it." One has in reality never left it; there is no return. my language fades. Images of erosion. "That which includes all change never changes; without change time is meaningless; without time, space is destroyed. Thus we arrive at the void."

To survive a winter here learn to browse and live in holes in the rocks under snow.

Is chemical reaction a type of perception??-Running through all things motion and reacting, object against object / there is more than enough time for all things to happen: swallowing its own tail.

Forest equals crop / Scenery equals recreation / Public equals money. The shopkeeper's view of nature.

"because there are no calendars in the mountains" -shifting of light & cloud, perfection of chaos, magnificent jiji mu-ge / interlacing interaction.

For man has closed himself up, 'til all he sees is through narrow chinks of his caverns.

In a culture where the aesthetic experience is denied and atrophied, genuine religious ecstasy rare, intellectual pleasure scorned-it is only natural that sex should become the only personal epiphany of most people & the culture's interest in romantic love take on staggering size.

(an empty water glass is no less empty than a universe full of nothing)-the de...

Don't

you'd think Zen was just a roundabout way for the rich to live like the workingman

to simplify the mind: like a blade which sharpens to nothing.

Key to evolution adaptability: the organism alters itself rather than continue fruitless competition.

"wisdom and berries grow on the same bush, but only one could ever be plucked at one time"-Emerson's journals

fall-what crazy communion of the birds wheeling and circling back and forth in calling flock, above the pine and against sunset cold white-and-blue clouds-a

(Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenment-traps for eager and clever fools-a

nose-every creature in a cave can justify himself. Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.)

Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foun- dationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing.

Thick frost and a few flakes of dry cold snow; ice thick in the stone hole water bowl boulder where the doves drink, frost keen lines on all the twigs of the naked plum and each small leaf of a tree.

Buddhism holds that the universe and all creatures in it are intrinsically in a state of complete wisdom, love, and compassion, acting in natural response and mutual interdependence. The personal realization of this from-the-beginning state cannot be had for and by one-"self," because it is not fully realized unless one has given the self up and away.

In the Buddhist view, what obstructs the effortless manifestation of this realization is ignorance, which projects into fear and needless craving.

Although Mahayana Buddhism has a grand vision of universal salvation, the actual achievement of Buddhism has been the development of practical systems of meditation toward the end of liberating a few dedicated individuals from psychological hang-ups and cultural conditionings. Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death...

The "free world" has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed that cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire that cannot be satiated, and hatred that has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revo...

vicious distorters of true huma...

The soil, the forests, and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of th...

The joyous and voluntary poverty of Buddhism becomes a positive force. The traditional harmlessness and avoidance of taking life in any...

mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and sup...

The belief in a serene and generous fulfillment of natural loving desires destroys ideologies that blind, maim, and repress-and points the way to a kind of community which would amaze "moralists" and transform armi...

Avatamsaka (Kegon or Hua-yen) Buddhist philosophy sees the world as a vast, interrelated network in which all objects and crea...

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. They are both contained in the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: ...

Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one's ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself-over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example a...

It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one's own responsibility, but willing to work with a group. "Forming t...

The state is greed made legal, with a monopoly on violence; a natural society is familial and cautionary. A natural society is one that "follows the way," imperfectly but authentically.

profound respect and love for the mind and nature of the universe.