China and the West

The 'East West' interview. In : Narachan ; no 1 (1978). [Peter Barry Chowka interviewed Gary Snyder in New York in April 1977].
Chowka
This interest was mainly self-taught ?
Snyder
Very much self-taught. As soon as I was permitted, from the time I was thirteen, I went into the Cascade Mountains, the high country, and got into real wilderness. At that age I found very little in the civilized human realm that interested me. 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 waterfalls, the pines, the clouds, the mist looked a lot like the northwest United States. 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. It was no great lesson except for an instantaneous, deep respect for something in Chinese culture that always stuck in my mind and that I would come back to again years later…
By this time I was also studying Far Eastern culture at Reed College. I read Ezra Pound's and Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry, a translation of the Tao te ching, and some texts of Confucius. Within a year or so I went through the Upanishads, Vedas, Bhagavad-Gita, and most of the classics of Chinese and Indian Buddhist literature. 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 T'ang Dynasty Zen masters and the poets who were their contemporaries and in many cases friends – that was fascinating. Then I learned that this tradition is still alive and well in Japan. That convinced me that I should go and study in Japan.
Chowka
… Has the coming of the Buddhadharma to the West altered your view about its complicity with the degenerate, oppressive political systems ?
Snyder
Not particularly. It has to be understood that in Asia – India, China, and Japan – the overwhelming fact of life for three millennia has been the existence of large, centralized, powerful states… The organizations of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism made the essential compromises they had to make to be tolerated by something that was far more powerful than themselves, especially in the imperial state of China. One of those compromises was to not criticize the state. You can't blame them for it, because they had no sense of there being an alternative. Even so, an interesting set of historical moves occurred in Chinese Buddhism. During the early period of Zen an essay was written that said Buddhist monks to not have to bow to the emperor since they are outside the concerns of the state. Later, in the thirteenth century, in Zen monasteries, sutras were chanted on behalf of the long life of the emperor ; the monasteries supported and aided the regime…
Chowka
Would you like to comment on those few places where people are provided with teaching which requires work, too ?
Snyder
The San Francisco Zen Center is a good example. In both the mountain and city centers they are striving conscientiously to find meaningful work for everybody – work that, in the city center, is not foppish or artificial but is relevant to the immediate need of that neighborhood, which is predominantly black, with lots of crime. Zen Center opened a grocery store and a bakery ; they sell vegetables from their garden in Green Gulch in the grocery store. It's an effort in the right direction – that which is 'spiritual' and that which is sweeping the floor are not so separated. This is one of the legacies of Zen, Soto or Rinzai – to steadily pursue the unity of daily life and spiritual practice.
Chowka
Does that relate to a difference between the Chinese and Indian legacies as they've been applied to North American spiritual disciplines ?
Snyder
The spiritual legacy of Chinese culture is essentially Zen (or Ch'an) Buddhism. The secondary spiritual legacy of China is in the aesthetics – the poetry and painting (Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Chuang-tzu are included in that ; also Mencius, whose work will be appreciated more in time for its great human sanity, although it's deliberately modest in its spiritual claims). Ch'an Buddhism added to Indian Buddhism the requirement that everybody work : 'a day without work, a day without food'. The cultural attitude toward begging in China was totally different from that in India ; the Chinese public wouldn't stand for beggars… So although Buddhism starts out with no caste, with the concept of bhikkhu, nonetheless, the bhikkhu becomes rated so highly socially that, in a certain way, he's like a Brahmin - he's 'pure' and shouldn't become defiled in any way. This lays the groundwork for the later extraordinary hierarchization of the Buddhist orders of India and Tibet. The Chinese culture wouldn't tolerate that. Po-chang, in his monastic rules written during the T'ang Dynasty, makes clear that begging is not a main part of our way of self-support. Our way of self-support is to grow our own food, build our own buildings, and make everybody, including the teacher, work… There are other things within the Ch'an administrative structures, within the monasteries, that are quite amazingly democratic when is comes to certain kinds of choices. All of the monks – whether novices or elders – have an equal vote. That is a Chinese quality in that spiritual legacy. Another development that is Chinese, as far as I can tell, is group mediation. In India and Tibet, meditation is practiced primarily in a solitary form. The Chinese and Japanese made group sitting a major part of their practice. There is a communalization of practice in China, a deemphasis of individual, goofy, yogic wanderings around. For the Chinese monk there is a phase of wandering, but it's after many years of group practice/labor. I love both India and China ; I love the contradictions. I can identify with both – see the beauty of both ways of going at it.
…
Chowka
You mentioned China positively in Turtle Island ('I lost my remaining doubts about China') and in a letter about Suwa-no-se Island ('People's China has many inspiring examples'). You also published a poem in The Black Country titled 'To the Chinese comrades'. What are your feelings about China now ?
Snyder
I guess I probably spoke too soon in saying I've lost my remaining doubts ; I still have doubts about China – certainly doubts about China as a model for the rest of the industrial world. Many lessons, though, can be learned but they cannot be applied wholesake – people wouldn't stand for it. But, yes, China is filled with inspiring examples of cooperation, reforestation, and less inspiring examples like the campaign to kill sparrows some years ago.
Chowka
What about their disaffiliation with their spiritual lineage ?
Snyder
That doesn't trouble me too much. I believe the Chinese had been pretty well disaffiliated from that already for some time. But, in a sense, the primary values already had sunk in so deeply that they didn't have to articulate them much anymore. Also, as a student of Chinese history, I perceive a little about the cycles that it moves in. If the rest of the world hold together, I would bet that a century and a half from now China again will be deeply back into meditation, as part of the pendulum swing of things. In a way, People's China is a manifestation of wonderful qualities of cooperation and selfless endeavor toward a common goal that were there all along. The negative side, though, is that China has been the most centralized, bureaucratic, civilized culture on earth for the longest time ; unquestionably because of that, much was lost within and without. Much diversity was lost. The Chinese in the past, and probably still, don't have an appreciation for the ethnic or the primitive. For centuries, they have been looking down on their own border people or on the small aboriginal enclaves – tiny cultures in the hills of which there are still hundreds within China. So I feel ambivalent about China. Without doubt one can recognize the greatness of its achievement on all levels and think of it as a model of what a civilization can be ; but then I can just as soon say. 'But I wish there weren't any civilization !'
Sir Joseph Needham is very impressed by the Chinese revolution ; in his book Science and civilization in China he says that Taoism foreshadows the Revolution, and that's true. Taoism is a Neolithic world view and a matrilineal, if not matriarchal, Chinese world view that somehow went through the sound barrier of early civilization and came out the other side halfway intact, and continued to be the underlying theme of Chinese culture all through history up until modern times – antifeudalistic ; appreciative of the female principle, women's powers, intuition, nature, spontaneity, and freedom. So Needham says that Taoism through history has been a 2,000-year-long holding action for China to arrive at socialism. That's how positively 'he' looks at it. The contemporary Chinese look back on Taoism as a heritage in their past that as socialists they can respond to. Buddhism is a foreign religion – it came from India ! But the Taoist component in Chinese culture will surely return again to the surface.
[Peter Orlovsky enters the conversation]
Orlovsky
Are there any tribes in China still that have been left alone?
Snyder: There are some. You can't communalize certain kinds of pro¬duction in certain areas—you can't improve on what they're doing already. If a group has a good communal village agriculture—a hill situation not susceptible to use of tractors—it might as well be left alone.
The present Chinese regime, like every regime in the world, has been guilty of some very harsh and ethnocentric treatment of people, especially the Tibetans, which is inexcusable. At the same time they hold out a certain measure of hope, especially to people of the Third World underdeveloped countries, who are offered only two models of what to do. One model is to plug into the nearest fossil fuel source and become a satellite country of the United States or some other industrial nation; the other option is the Chinese: get the landlords off your back, straighten out the tax structure, and then do better agriculture with the tools you have available. The Chinese are perhaps on the verge of becoming more industrialized, and this good opinion of them may soon evaporate; as a strategy for what they consider to be their own survival, they may go the same route we have. The other point I want to make is that although it's true that China is the world's most centralized and bureaucratic, the oldest, and in some ways the most autocratic civilization, at the same time it has been filled with a rich mix of humanity from north to south, east to west: dialects, subcultures, of all sorts, of great vigor—many of them in one way or another amazingly still around. But it isn't something we would want to be, we would never want to be as populated as China.
Chowka
One of the more interesting points to arise during the 'Chinese Poetry and the American Imagination' conference this week is a question that you raised. We had assumed that there was a tone of intimacy, of cooperation, of communality in a lot of the Chinese poetry that was discussed. You wondered if the new, wider, Occidental interest in classical Chinese poetry presaged the development of similar qualities here.
Snyder
I think it's inevitable that American society move farther and farther away from certain kinds of extreme individualism, for no reason other than that the frontier is gone and the population has grown; partially, it may be the social dynamics of crowding…