The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

by Gary Snyder

When I was eleven or twelve, I went into the Chinese room at the Seattle art museum and saw Chinese landscape paintings; they blew my mind. My shock of recognition was very simple: "It looks just like the Cascades."

The Chinese had an eye for the world that I saw as real. In the next room were the English and European landscapes, and they meant nothing.

When I went into college I was bedeviled already by the question of these contradictions of living in and supposedly being a member of a soci...

maybe it was all of Western culture that was off the track and not just capitalism-that there were certain self-destructive t...

The convergence that I found really exciting was the Mahayana Buddhist wisdom-oriented line as it developed in China and assimilated the older Taoist tradition. It was that very precise cultural meeting that also coincided with the highest period of Chinese poetry-the early and middle Tang Dynasty Zen masters and the poets who were their contemporaries and in many cases friends-that was fascinating.