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…

About 70 articles discussing Mark Twain and his works appeared in magazines, academic journals, collections of literary criticism and histories of foreign literature : general introductory articles, including some pertinent chapters on Twain's creative artistry and style of humor, articles on his works, biographical articles and articles describing Twain's role as an author of children's literature, his sympathy and support for the Chinese people and his letters and unpublished manuscripts.
Zhou, Weiyu. Lun Make Tuwen zuo pin de ren ming xing [ID D30621]..
Zhou concretely analysed Twain's affection for the laboring people, his sympathy for blacks and his support of all the oppressed peoples of the world,, including the Chinese people.
Gan, Yunjie. [A brief discurssion of the ideological implications of Mark Twain's fiction].
Gan discussed Twain's exposure and satire of American politics, his criticism of racism and his satirical indictment of avarice and imperialism.
Zhang, Tingcheng. Make Tuwen Zhongguo ren ren min de peng you [ID D30622].
The article completely and systematically discusses Twain's sympathy and support for the Chinese people.

Letter from Harold Acton to Ling Shuhua. 1977.
Ah Peking ! It was there that I spent the happiest year of my life. Consequently, I would be afraid of returning though one is told it is all for the best.

Ooi, Vicki Cheng Har. Pinter in Cantonese [ID D32024].
In my production of The caretaker by Harold Pinter I did use different varieties of Cantonese to simulate the different registers and idioms used in the original. Many of the technical terms for tools and furnishing materials have no exact equivalent in the Chinese vocabulary. In some cases a verbal translation can be achieved, but to little purpose as the whole significance is lost in translation.
The treatment of Davies shocked the Chinese audience when I produced the play in Hong Kong. It set up a very strong conflict of sympathies and one which I feel is probably more intense than was originally intended. Many of the obscenities and expletives have, to remain effective, to be changed to contexts of sex, or of incest, and even into such wholesale curses as would involve the total extinction of a family of clan before they can achieve the intended effect of shock.
Pinter is especially difficult to translate not only because he uses words meticulously and with amazing virtuosity, but because he uses words as a dramatic strategy, constantly reminding his audience of the presence of sub-textual meaning, by weaving an intricate arabesque with what would seem to be otherwise unremarkable words.
Pinter's plays take on the quality of the surreal. Fully to appreciate this surrealistic quality one has to be willing to acknowledge the parts that are overt, and to accept the tentative. And it is this demand on the audience which makes Pinter particularly difficult to put across to a Chinese audience. Even in a western context, Pinter isn't an easy playwright to accept. But a Chinese audience is probably more stubbornly insistent on fact and rationality, and is less prepared to play a teasing game with the merely possible and the tentative. This was a problem I faced when I first suggested producing The caretaker in Cantonese. The way I chose to do it was faithfully to reproduce the rhythm of the speeches : I found that when the tones, rhythm, and pauses of the original were reproduced faithfully, much of the pressure, tactics and moments of tension and decision could be communicated.

Miller, Henry. Mother, China and the world beyond [ID D34784].
China.
Even as a boy the name China evoked strange sensations in me. It spelled everything that was vast, marvelous, magical, and incomprehensible. To say China was to stand things upside down.
How marvelous that this same China should stir in the old man who is writing these words the same strange, unbelievable thoughts and feelings.
One of the special remembrances I have of China is that it led the world in everything. Whether it be cuisine, pottery, painting, acting, architecture or literaure, China was always foremost.
A rather striking and absurd illustration of this is the fact, so I am told, that in Japan today the best restaurants are Chinese.
There is only one art which to me the Chinese have never developed and that is music. To my Western ear Chinese musk sounds horrendous. (Yet when I was living in Paris I had quite a collection of Chinese records left me by a returned traveler. Alter a time I became somewhat accustomed to this weird music but never infatuated with it.) I may be wrong but I doubt if China ever produced a Beethoven, a Bach, a Mozart, a Debussy or a Schumann.
Recently reading a biography of Genghis Khan I was surprised to discover that his army had penetrated the Chinese Wall (hack in the 1200's) just as the Germans circumvented the Maginot Line.
What may sound incredible to the Chinese of today is that, according to some scholars, the great Wall was built in two or three days! Every man, woman and child had been put to work, according to the account.
I heard a similarly astonishing story one day in the Egyptian room of the Louvre, The Frenchman who took me there to sec the ceiling of the Temple of Denderah pointed to the zodiac over oar heads which, he said, indicated that Egyptian history went back 40,000 years, not five thousand, as we are usually told.
We of the Western world are so very, very young, mete babes compared to the Hindus, the Chinese, the Egyptians, to mention only a few peoples. And, with our youth goes our ignorance, stupidity and arrogance. Worse, our intolerance, our failure to even try to understand other peoples' ways. We in America are perhaps the worst sinners.
Think, fas instance, that it was not out statesmen who succeeded in opening the door to China, but a handful of young, enthusiastic ping pong players!
When I was first told that I might write a piece for a Chinese magazine—on any subject I chose—I was virtually speechless. Then I became terrified. But finally what brought me back to my senses was the recollection that what I most loved about the Chinese was their humanness. The Roman saying applies to the Chinese even more than to the Romans—"nothing human is beneath me."
This human quality combined with a fine sense of humor are the saving attributes of a great people. 1 should also add the ability to stick it out, to hold out through thick and thin. In Hermann Hesse's famous book SiMaitka, he has his hero say—"I can think, I can wait, and I can do without." To me these qualities make a man invincible. Especially "to wait and to do without/' America knows neither the one nor the other. Perhaps that is why at the early age of 200 years she shows signs of tailing apart.
When I lived in Paris (1930-1940) I was dubbed by my friend Lawrence Durrell "a Chinese rock-bottom man." I have never received a greater compliment.
I always think it possible I have Oriental blood in my veins. And by that I mean either Mongolian or Chinese. Many people, on meeting me for the first time, ask if I do not have Asiatic blood. This always plea«« me immensely. I never want to be taken as a descendant of the Germans, which I am.
Eves in my writing I notice that I have an affinity with the Chinese. I tell what is, what was, what's happening, I do not go in for lengthy psychological analyses. I think the character's behavior should speak for itself. And yet the writer 1 most admire is the Russian Dostoievsky, Certainly no one could be further from the Chinese than Dostoievsky,
I wonder how the Chinese take to his work. Is he loved or shunned? To me without Dostoievsky's work there would be a deep, black hole in world literature. The loss of Shakespeare, who must seem like a wild man to the Chinese, would not be as great as losing Dostoievsky.
It is strange that the countries I most wanted to visit I have never seen—'India, Tibet, China, Japan, Iceland. But I have lived with them in my mind. Once I tried to persuade a British magazine editor to let me make a trip to Lhassa, Timbuetoo and Mecca without any stops in between. But I had no luck. All three cities seem like mysterious places, and live in my imagination.
I am aware that throughout this piece I have made no distinction between Communist China and the Republic of China. I have done so deliberately, as I am not interested in ideologies or politics, I find that people are people everywhere, even in darkest Africa. When I think of China I think of the Chinese as a whole, not of the things which divide them.
America tries to give to the world an image of a unified nation, "one and indivisible." Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are a people torn with strife, divided in many ways, not only regionally. Our population contains some of the poorest and most neglected people in the world. It probably also contains the most rich people of any country in the world. There is race prejudice to a great degree and inhumanity to man even among the dominant Caucasians. As I hinted earlier, America is rapidly going down the drain. The old countries, poor for the most part, I expect will take over in a very few years. And the people who invented the firecracker will outlive those who invented the deadly atom bomb. We Americans may one day reach all the planets and bring back from each small quantities of soil, but, we will .never reach the heart of the universe, which resides in the soul of even the poorest, the lowliest of human creatures.
I am afraid that the old adage., "Brothers under the skin," is no longer true, if ever it were. The Western nations are not to be trusted; no matter how democratic their governments may become. As long as the rich rule there will be chaos, wars, revolutions. The
leaden to look to are not in evidence. One has to hunt them out. One should remember, as Swainl Vivekananda once put it, that "before Gautama there were twenty-four other Buddhas."
Today we can no longer look for saviours. Every man must look to himself. As some great sage once said: "Don't look for miracles, you are the miracle."

Maurizio Scarpari ist Professore di Lingua cinese classica all’Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia.Ab 1994 Professore ordinario.

Giovanni Stary erhält ein Stipendium der Alexander von Humboldt Foundation und DAAD der Universität Bonn.

Maurizio Scarpari reist in China.

Ellen B. Widmer ist Instructor in Chinese des Connecticut College.

Exhibition of archaeological finds of the PRC in Melbourne.

Harvey J. Feldman ist Country director for Republic of China affairs.

Patrick J.L. Popplewell ist Political Counsellor der britischen Botschaft in China (Beijing ?).

Thomas P. Shoesmith ist Generalkonsul des amerikanischen Generalkonsulats Hong Kong und Macao.

Werner Sigg ist Botschafter der schweizerischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Treffen von Max Petitpierre mit Zhou Enlai in Beijing.

Eine Delegation der schweizerischen Bundesversammlung unter Leitung von Rudolf Suter trifft Ngapoi Ngawang Jigmê in Beijing.

Zhang Tong (2) ist Botschafter der chinesischen Botschaft in Berlin.

Han Kehua ist Botschafter der chinesischen Botschaft in Frankreich.

Wang Guoquan ist Botschafter der chinesischen Botschaft in Rom, Italien.

Richard Wolf (2) ist Generalkonsul des schweizerischen Generalkonsulats in Hong Kong.