Snyder, Gary
(San Francisco, Calif. 1930-) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Professor of English, University of California Davis
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
/
Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (51)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1950- |
Gary Snyder and China : general Quellen [Chinese and Buddhist literature]. Chang, Kwang-chih. The archaeology of ancient China [ID D13609]. Confucius. [Texts]. Elvin, Mark. The pattern of the Chinese past [ID D12822]. Fenollosa, Ernest. Epoch of Chinese and Japanese art [ID D5101]. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry [ID D22141]. Frodsham, John D. The murmuring stream [ID D19382]. Gernet, Jacques. Daily life in China on the eve of the Mongol invasion. (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1962). Grousset, René. The empire of the steppes. (New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 1970). Kahn, Paul. The secret history of the Mongols : the origin of Chinghis Khan : an adaptation of the Yuan ch'ao pi shih. (Berkeley, Calif. : North Point Press, 1984). Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516]. Laozi. Dao de jing. Marco Polo. The travels. (New York, N.Y. : Penguin, 1958). Needham, Joseph. Science and civilisation in China. Payne, Robert. The white pony [ID D32201]. Pound, Ezra. [Translations of Chinese poetry]. Fairbank, John K. ; Reischauer, Edwin O. East Asia [ID D8482]. Hawkes, David. Chu ci : the songs of the South [ID D14573]. Sherman, E. Lee ; Wen, Fong. Streams and mountains without end. In : Artibus Asiae (1976). Siréen, Osvald. The Chinese on the art of painting [ID D29304]. Sowerby, Arthur de Carle. Nature in Chinese art. (New York, N.Y. : John Day, 1940). Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Records of the grand historian [ID D10059]. Su, Tung-p'o [Su, Shi]. Su Tung-p'o : selections from a Sung dynasty poet [ID D10954]. Sullivan, Michael. On the origins of landscape representation in Chinese art. In : Archives of the Chinese Art society of America ; vol. 7 (1953). Sze, Mai Mai. The way of Chinese landscape painting. (New York, N.Y. : Vintage, 1959). Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. [Texts]. Tang shi san bai shou du ben. [300 Tang poems]. 唐詩三百首讀本 Tuan, Yi-fu. China. (Chicago, Ill. : Aldine, 1970). Waley, Arthur. [Translations of Chinese poetry]. Watson, Burton. Chinese lyricism [ID D10951]. Yoshikawa, Kôjirô. An introduction to Song poetry [ID D10945]. Zhuangzi. [Works]. Sekundärliteratur 1972 Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael] : Gary Snyder found in classical Chinese poetry in translation a sense of the harmony of man and nature 'better and to me more accurate than anything in English or Western poetry tradition'. Being a mountain-climber, Snyder finds a spiritual affinity with the Chinese landscape poet Xie Lingyun. He also admires Wang Wei and Yuan Zhen. Snyder finds no simple rule or rules for translating Chinese poetry. Being a Buddhist like Wang Wei and Wei Yinwu and being steeped in the tradition of China, whose culture he has studied, he is adequately trained to be their interpreter. Believing fully that 'whatever is or ever was in any other culture can reconstructed from the unconscious through [Zen] meditation. Snyder subscribes to the theory that a poet is a medium through whom other voices or spirits would distill and speak. Being thoroughly immersed in the translation and explication of Chinese poets as Han Shan, Wang Wei and Wei Yingwu, he penetrated into the essence of these classical Chinese poets and emerges as their twentieth-century American medium. Totally identified with them in his Zen outlook and sensibility, he not only lends the Chinese poets his voice but also fuses with them so skillfully as to make us wonder if he were their poetic reincarnation. With his Taoist-Zen orientation, Snyder believes only in the constancy of flux. Just as the Taoists believe that water is the highest good, because it is characterized by eternal fluidity, Snyder subscribes to no fixed principle about prosody, but tacitly agrees that organicity and spontaneity are the bases of satisfactory rhythm in poetry. As the rhythm of the Chinese poems is totally incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the sound pattern and tonal variations of the Chinese language, a knowledge of Chinese prosody might have contributed to Snyder's use of syllabic count and stress patterns in some of his short poems. Snyder has learned a lesson from classical Chinese poets. And this lesson can by summarized as : make the poem as compressed as possible and omit all words that do not absolutely contribute to the image. 1986 Yip Wai-lim : It is no accident that Snyders early Amerindian studies, his love for Taoism and Chinese landscape poetry and his Ch'an Buddhist training all converge into one center of awareness where man becomes truly 'moral' by trusting his natural being and by 'following the grain'. The primitive mode of perception of nature was concrete, viewing things as holistically self-complete ; it was a state of total harmony between man and nature before polarization. The Taoist philosophy and esthetic at work in Chinese landscape poetry seeks the restoration of the original mode of perception, giving back to things their own status and their natural endowment and function, allowing them to emerge from their silent world as self-generating, self-conditioning, self-complete beings. In Snyder's paraphrase, this is 'the non-human, non-verbal world, which is the world of nature as nature is itself, before language, before custom, before culture. Ch'an Buddhism, which also give primacy to this world, attempts to teach man, through intuition and poetic flashes in the form of 'kung-an (koan), to live and function within nature's way ; to do this by a process of dispossessing the partial and reduced forms that intellectualization has imposed upon him and which has thus distorted his original commerce with nature's potentials. For Snyder, the underlying principle is the complete awareness of all the beings in Nature as 'self-so-complete' or 'tzu-jan' as the Taoists and the Chan Buddhists would say. It is upon this ground that a new humanism is to be built or rebuilt. 2007 Robin Chen-hsing Tsai : Snyder claims that Christianity desacralizes nature. His knowledge of nature, along with his life experience and proclivity toward direct action, leads to his dual vision of verse-making : 'A poet faces two directions : one is to the world of people and language and man and society, and the other is to the nonhuman, nonverbal world, which is nature as nature is itself, and the world of human nature – the inner world – as it is itself, before language, before custom, before culture'. From a Zen-Buddhist perspective, the poet is strongly convinced that 'the notion of emptiness engenders compassion. Snyder's idealization of the other stems from his deep involvement with the cultural other in/of Eastern thinking, including (Tibetan) Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism (in China and Japan). He writes poetry so as to arouse our 'ecological consciousness' in response to the call of the other. Generall speaking, Snyder's notions of the other are threefold : 1) the human other ; 2) the nonhuman other ; 3) the 'other in the self' or ecological unconscious, 'the wild'. Snyder is both romantic and anti-romantic in his attitude toward 'freedom' in nature, in part because the art of the wild, being 'abyssal', 'disorderly', and 'chaotic'. He looks to the East for religious and cultural inspiration, hoping that the Zen Buddhist's conception of compassion will help achieve and East-West fusion. 2009 Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : Gary Snyder was much influenced by the Beat generation and countercultural movement of the fifties and sixties, which closely linked anti-establisment politics with non-Western (especially Asian) religions and modes of thought. He attempts to sensitize us to the constant disruptions of our environment by rationalized, capitalist and essentially Western technology. Poet and translator as well as radical ecologist, anarchist-pacifist and Native American mythographer, Snyder was also a disciple of Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism. These cross-fertilizing influences form the basis of his eco-poetics. Snyder's translation of Chinese literature, in particular poetry and Buddhist scriptures, has been instrumental in (re)shaping his imagination of the local and the global. His interest in Asian texts and philosophies has been a crucial element in his expression of a transcultural, post-civilizational, post-human 'culture of wildness'. In Snyder's view, Western discourse of the human and social sciences has been uncritical of the centrality it has historically accorded to culture, civilization and man. A very important 'Other-culture' for Snyder is ancient China. In addition to its Daoist-Buddhist spiritual values, which recognize the vital importance and centrality of the earth in a way that the Western or Middle Eastern monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) do not. Chinese civilization has a very old writing system that includes historical, religious-philosophical and literary texts. This means that the rich ancient culture of China is readily 'translatable'. Snyder's literary and cultural translation of traditional Chinese literature, mostly classical poetry and Zen-Buddhist texts, helps Western readers to see that their horizon of expectations is too narrow and that they need a much wider and more encompassing cultural-environmental imagination. Snyder readily admits the enduring creative influence of Chinese landscape paintings on his imagination that began with the visit to the Seattle Art Museum. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : Snyder developed his ecopoetic way by absorbing a variety of influences from global subcultures : American Indian culture, Hinduism, Japanese haiku, Japanese Nô plays, Chinese classical poetry, Chinese landscape painting, and different branches of Buddhism. His works cover Indian Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Huayan Buddhism, Chan Buddhism and Rinzai Zen, whereas his daily practice is 'zazen' ('sitting in meditation') as a Zen practitioner. What he adopted in his poetry is consistent with his belief that 'poetry also exists as part of a tradition'. In his eyes, 'the collective unconscious' and 'cultural history' are embedded in 'the language' of a tradition. Snyder's 'cultural unconscious' refers to the active interaction in translation he created between his mountain experiences on the coast of western America and Han Shan's seclusion in the costal mountain ranges of eastern China. Chinese landscape paintings, Ezra Pound's ideogrammic method and Zen practice gave Snyder an impetus to study Chinese culture and Buddhism. As a teenager Snyder was greatly influence by his first viewing of Chinese landscape paintings at the Seattle Art Museum. He was surprised to find en echo in his soul when confronted by the Chinese depiction of the world in the painting. The same empathy for nature in his own aesthetic sensibilities prefigures his later choice of the Chinese tradition in his poetry. Snyder's interest in Chinese poetry is inseparable from his belief in Mahayana Buddhism. His enthusiasm for Mahayana Buddhism reflects his respect for primitivism and priorities he expressed in his poetry. He found that Chan and Chan poetry suited him because they express the ineffable 'dao in 'koans' and transparent images. Snyder articulates his own unique manifesto of ecopoetry in the hope of legitimating right understanding, right speech and right action. The idea is publicly expressed from the angle of Buddhist environmentalism with an imperative voice through the poem. As a poet in contemporary times, Snyder believes that one should have a right understanding of the relationship between man and nature. In this place, plants, animals, land and planets are in a harmonious and ecological balance. |
|
| 2 | 1951 |
Gary Snyder graduated from Reed College in Portland in Anthropology and Literature. He studied Far Eastern culture at Reed College and read Ezra Pound's and Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry and classics, was amazed at the convergence of Mahayana Buddhism, Daoism and Chinese poetry in the Tang Dynasty. He ceased his graduate study of linguistics at Indiana University. |
|
| 3 | 1953 | Gary Snyder studied Oriental culture and languages (Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French) at the University of California, Berkeley under Peter A. Boodberg and Chen Shixiang. He studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Chen Shixiang. |
|
| 4 | 1954-1955 |
Wang, Wei. At deer hedge. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Phi Theta annual ; vol. 5 (1954-1955). Empty, the mountain – Not a man, Yet sounds, echoes, as of men talking. Shadows swing into the forest. Swift light Flashes On dark moss, above. |
|
| 5 | 1954-1955 |
Wei, Yingwu. To a friend on autumn night. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Phi Theta annual ; vol. 5 (1954-1955). Good friend, The autumn night is yours, and I I walk singing under a cold sky. On empty peaks the pine trees shed And you, old man, not yet in bed. |
|
| 6 | 1955 | Gary Snyder began to translate Han Shan. |
|
| 7 | 1955 |
Snyder, Gary. Endless streams and moutains. In : Orion ; vol. 14, no 3 (1955). Commenting on a line from Kanglikui's colophon to the scroll, Snyder observes : "The remark leads a viewer to turn the handscroll slowly and to journey through the streams and mountains and into the mists and clouds. The scroll is read from right to left and one is affected by the nature as if actually there. The journey a viewer makes through the canvas is marked clearly : There is a path that can followed even if, at times, there are alternate paths to create variety, and always along a passage, a reader experiences a harmony with nature." |
|
| 8 | 1955-1956 |
San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation. The San Francisco Renaissance poets tended to be characterized by an 'outdoor ethic', an interest in hiking, cycling and working as woodsmen to fund their studies. Natural meditation techniques tend to be preferred to synthesized drug use of the city Beats. Jack Kerouac appears to point towards the greater sobriety of the San Francisco scene when he noted that his contact with it helped to turn him from a 'hot' to a 'cool' hipster, in particular after he was engaged in Buddhist meditation. For the early Beats, the significance of 'the 1955 Gallery Six Poetry Reading' lies in their discovery of Buddhism as a means of spiritual training and new poetic excitement. This discovers is, more or less, connected with Snyder's Zen Buddhist practice, his reading of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese classics and poetry, and his mountaineering life. Allen Ginsbergs first meeting with Snyder in 1955 helped to expand his poetic vision to Eastern religions – Buddhism and Hinduism. Kerouac's close contact with Snyder pushed him to study Buddhist sutras systematically and he even planned to adopt a celibate, meditative life like a Chinese monk. The Gallery reading encouraged the early Beats to accept Buddhism as a valid alternative spirituality and to take the Chinese hermit-poet lifestyle as a valid mode of countercultural expression. For the early Beats, the significance of 'the 1955 Gallery Six Poetry Reading' lies in their discovery of Buddhism as a means of spiritual training and new poetic excitement. This discovers is, more or less, connected with Snyder's Zen Buddhist practice, his reading of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese classics and poetry, and his mountaineering life. Allen Ginsbergs first meeting with Snyder in 1955 helped to expand his poetic vision to Eastern religions – Buddhism and Hinduism. Kerouac's close contact with Snyder pushed him to study Buddhist sutras systematically and he even planned to adopt a celibate, meditative life like a Chinese monk. The Gallery reading encouraged the early Beats to accept Buddhism as a valid alternative spirituality and to take the Chinese hermit-poet lifestyle as a valid mode of countercultural expression. Encouraged by Snyder, Kerouac wrote an original Buddhist-cum-Beat sutra The scripture of the golden eternity (1956), which was 'one of the most successful attempts yet to catch emptiness, nonattainment and egolessness in the net of American poetic language. His friendship with Snyder and others was portrayed in his novel The dharma bums, which merged Hand Shan and Snyder into one : an American Han Shan and a Beat hero. Kerouac's interest and belief in Buddhism came to his great spiritual and intellectual passions. Though a casual Buddhist practitioner, he was very serious and enthusiastic. Kerouac's popularizing of Buddhism had a strong impact upon other Beats, among Ginsberg acknowledged his first knowledge about Buddhism. Not until the 1955 poetry reading, when Ginsberg met with Snyder and Philip Whalen he understand that Zen could be seen as part of a global cultural context with a deep resonance in relation to art and the human condition. Ginsberg started to attend D.T. Suzuki and Allan Watts's lectures on Zen Buddhism and was deeply impressed by 'satori' after he read Suzuki's writing. Whalen was much influenced by Snyder in almost every aspect. Whalen, Snyder and Lew Welch began their poetic careers as the Reed campus trio and soon became influential figures within the San Francisco Renaissance. The were influence by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Watts and Suzuki. After the 1955 poetry reading, Whalen, Snyder, Ginsberg and Kerouac became the main members of the San Francisco Beat scene. |
|
| 9 | 1956 | One month before Gary Snyder left for Japan, he was impressed by a talk on 'East Asian landscape painting as a meditative exercise' given by Saburo Hasegawa, a Japanese artist. |
|
| 10 | 1958 |
Han, Shan. The cold mountain poems. Transl. by Gary Snyder. [ID D29190]. Preface to the Poems of Han-shan by Lu Ch'iu-yin, Governor of T'ai Prefecture No one knows what sort of man Han-shan was. There are old people who knew him: they say he was a poor man, a crazy character. He lived alone seventy Li (23 miles) west of the T'ang-hsing district of T'ien-t'ai at a place called Cold Mountain. He often went down to the Kuo-ch'ing Temple. At the temple lived Shih'te, who ran the dining hall. He sometimes saved leftovers for Han-shan, hiding them in a bamboo tube. Han-shan would come and carry it away; walking the long veranda, calling and shouting happily, talking and laughing to himself. Once the monks followed him, caught him, and made fun of him. He stopped, clapped his hands, and laughed greatly - Ha Ha! - for a spell, then left. He looked like a tramp. His body and face were old and beat. Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if only you thought of it deeply. Everything he said had a feeling of Tao in it, profound and arcane secrets. His hat was made of birch bark, his clothes were ragged and worn out, and his shoes were wood. Thus men who have made it hide their tracks: unifying categories and interpenetrating things. On that long veranda calling and singing, in his words of reply Ha Ha! - the three worlds revolve. Sometimes at the villages and farms he laughed and sang with cowherds. Sometimes intractable, sometimes agreeable, his nature was happy of itself. But how could a person without wisdom recognize him? I once received a position as a petty official at Tan-ch'iu. The day I was to depart, I had a bad headache. I called a doctor, but he couldn't cure me and it turned worse. Then I met a Buddhist Master named Feng-kan, who said he came from the Kuo-ch'ing Temple of T'ien-t'ai especially to visit me. I asked him to rescue me from my illness. He smiled and said, "The four realms are within the body; sickness comes from illusion. If you want to do away with it, you need pure water." Someone brought water to the Master, who spat it on me. In a moment the disease was rooted out. He then said, "There are miasmas in T'ai prefecture, when you get there take care of yourself." I asked him, "Are there any wise men in your area I could look on as Master?" He replied, "When you see him you don't recognize him, when you recognize him you don't see him. If you want to see him, you can't rely on appearances. Then you can see him. Han-shan is a Manjusri (one who has attained enlightenment and, in a future incarnation, will become Buddha) hiding at Kuo-sh'ing. Shih-te is a Samantabbhadra (Bodhisattva of love). They look like poor fellows and act like madmen. Sometimes they go and sometimes they come. They work in the kitchen of the Kuo-ch'ing dining hall, tending the fire." When he was done talking he left. I proceeded on my journey to my job at T'ai-chou, not forgetting this affair. I arrived three days later, immediately went to a temple, and questioned an old monk. It seemed the Master had been truthful, so I gave orders to see if T'ang-hsing really contained a Han-shan and Shih-te. The District Magistrate reported to me: "In this district, seventy li west, is a mountain. People used to see a poor man heading from the cliffs to stay awhile at Kuo-ch'ing. At the temple dining hall is a similar man named Shih-te." I made a bow, and went to Kuo-ch'ing. I asked some people around the temple, "There used to be a Master named Feng-kan here, Where is his place? And where can Han-shan and Shih-te be seen?" A monk named T'ao-ch'iao spoke up: "Feng-kan the Master lived in back of the library. Nowadays nobody lives there; a tiger often comes and roars. Han-shan and Shih-te are in the kitchen." The monk led me to Feng-kan's yard. Then he opened the gate: all we saw was tiger tracks. I asked the monks Tao-ch'iao and Pao-te, "When Feng-kan was here, what was his job?" The monks said, :He pounded and hulled rice. At night he sang songs to amuse himself." Then we went to the kitchen, before the stoves. Two men were facing the fire, laughing loudly. I made a bow. The two shouted Ho! at me. They struck their hands together -Ha Ha! - great laughter. They shouted. Then they said, "Feng-kan - loose-tounged, loose-tounged. You don't recognize Amitabha, (the Bodhisattva of mercy) why be courteous to us?" The monks gathered round, surprise going through them. ""Why has a big official bowed to a pair of clowns?" The two men grabbed hands and ran out of the temple. I cried, "Catch them" - but they quickly ran away. Han-shan returned to Cold Mountain. I asked the monks, "Would those two men be willing to settle down at this temple?" I ordered them to find a house, and to ask Han-shan and Shih-te to return and live at the temple. I returned to my district and had two sets of clean clothes made, got some incense and such, and sent it to the temple - but the two men didn't return. So I had it carried up to Cold Mountain. The packer saw Han-shan, who called in a loud voice, "Thief! Thief!" and retreated into a mountain cave. He shouted, "I tell you man, strive hard" - entered the cave and was gone. The cave closed of itself and they weren't able to follow. Shih-te's tracks disappeared completely.. I ordered Tao-ch'iao and the other monks to find out how they had lived, to hunt up the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs - and also to collect those written on the walls of people's houses. There were more than three hundred. On the wall of the Earth-shrine Shih-te had written some gatha (Buddhist verse or song). It was all brought together and made into a book. I hold to the principle of the Buddha-mind. It is fortunate to meet with men of Tao, so I have made this eulogy. The cold mountain poems 1 The path to Han-shan's place is laughable, A path, but no sign of cart or horse. Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged. A thousand grasses bend with dew, A hill of pines hums in the wind. And now I've lost the shortcut home, Body asking shadow, how do you keep up? 2 In a tangle of cliffs, I chose a place - Bird paths, but no trails for me. What's beyond the yard? White clouds clinging to vague rocks. Now I've lived here - how many years - Again and again, spring and winter pass. Go tell families with silverware and cars "What's the use of all that noise and money?" 3 In the mountains it's cold. Always been cold, not just this year. Jagged scarps forever snowed in Woods in the dark ravines spitting mist. Grass is still sprouting at the end of June, Leaves begin to fall in early August. And here I am, high on mountains, Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky. 4 I spur my horse through the wrecked town, The wrecked town sinks my spirit. High, low, old parapet walls Big, small, the aging tombs. I waggle my shadow, all alone; Not even the crack of a shrinking coffin is heard. I pity all those ordinary bones, In the books of the Immortals they are nameless. 5 I wanted a good place to settle: Cold Mountain would be safe. Light wind in a hidden pine - Listen close - the sound gets better. Under it a gray haired man Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao. For ten years I havn't gone back home I've even forgotten the way by which I came. 6 Men ask the way to Cold Mountain Cold Mountain: there's no through trail. In summer, ice doesn't melt The rising sun blurs in swirling fog. How did I make it? My heart's not the same as yours. If your heart was like mine You'd get it and be right here. 7 I settled at Cold Mountain long ago, Already it seems like years and years. Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams And linger watching things themselves. Men don't get this far into the mountains, White clouds gather and billow. Thin grass does for a mattress, The blue sky makes a good quilt. Happy with a stone under head Let heaven and earth go about their changes. 8 Clambering up the Cold Mountain path, The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on: The long gorge choked with scree and boulders, The wide creek, the mist blurred grass. The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain The pine sings, but there's no wind. Who can leap the word's ties And sit with me among the white clouds? 9 Rough and dark - the Cold Mountain trail, Sharp cobbles - the icy creek bank. Yammering, chirping - always birds Bleak, alone, not even a lone hiker. Whip, whip - the wind slaps my face Whirled and tumbled - snow piles on my back. Morning after morning I don't see the sun Year after year, not a sign of spring. 10 I have lived at Cold Mountain These thirty long years. Yesterday I called on friends and family: More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs. Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle; Forever flowing, like a passing river. Now, morning, I face my lone shadow: Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears. 11 Spring water in the green creek is clear Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness. 12 In my first thirty years of life I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles. Walked by rivers through deep green grass Entered cities of boiling red dust. Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal; Read books and wrote poems on history. Today I'm back at Cold Mountain: I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears. 13 I can't stand these bird songs Now I'll go rest in my straw shack. The cherry flowers are scarlet The willow shoots up feathery. Morning sun drives over blue peaks Bright clouds wash green ponds. Who knows that I'm out of the dusty world Climbing the southern slope of Cold Mountain? 14 Cold Mountain has many hidden wonders, People who climb here are always getting scared. When the moon shines, water sparkles clear When the wind blows, grass swishes and rattles. On the bare plum, flowers of snow On the dead stump, leaves of mist. At the touch of rain it all turns fresh and live At the wrong season you can't ford the creeks. 15 There's a naked bug at Cold Mountain With a white body and a black head. His hand holds two book scrolls, One the Way and one its Power. His shack's got no pots or oven, He goes for a long walk with his shirt and pants askew. But he always carries the sword of wisdom: He means to cut down sensless craving. 16 Cold Mountain is a house Without beans or walls. The six doors left and right are open The hall is sky blue. The rooms all vacant and vague The east wall beats on the west wall At the center nothing. Borrowers don't bother me In the cold I build a little fire When I'm hungry I boil up some greens. I've got no use for the kulak With his big barn and pasture - He just sets up a prison for himself. Once in he can't get out. Think it over - You know it might happen to you. 17 If I hide out at Cold Mountain Living off mountain plants and berries - All my lifetime, why worry? One follows his karma through. Days and months slip by like water, Time is like sparks knocked off flint. Go ahead and let the world change - I'm happy to sit among these cliffs. 18 Most T'ien-t'ai men Don't know Han-shan Don't know his real thought And call it silly talk. 19 Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease - No more tangled, hung up mind. I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff, Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat. 20 Some critic tried to put me down - "Your poems lack the Basic Truth of Tao." And I recall the old timers Who were poor and didn't care. I have to laugh at him, He misses the point entirely, Men like that Ought to stick to making money. 21 I've lived at Cold Mountain - how many autumns. Alone, I hum a song - utterly without regret. Hungry, I eat one grain of Immortal medicine Mind solid and sharp; leaning on a stone. 22 On top of Cold Mountain the lone round moon Lights the whole clear cloudless sky. Honor this priceless natural treasure Concealed in five shadows, sunk deep in the flesh. 23 My home was at Cold Mountain from the start, Rambling among the hills, far from trouble. Gone, and a million things leave no trace Loosed, and it flows through galaxies A fountain of light, into the very mind - Not a thing, and yet it appears before me: Now I know the pearl of the Buddha nature Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere. 24 When men see Han-shan They all say he's crazy And not much to look at - Dressed in rags and hides. They don't get what I say And I don't talk their language. All I can say to those I meet: "Try and make it to Cold Mountain." Sekundärliteratur 2007 Robin Chen-hsing Tsai : Han Shan inspired Snyder primarily through his economy of form and spiritual-ecological theme. Snyder attempts, in translating 'Cold mountain' and more generally Eastern thought, not to superimpose a hierarchical relationship between the original and the simulacrum : his translation project is note purely a textual operation based on cross-referencing. He makes clear that Han Shan is the very embodiment of a cranky and eccentric poet-hermit who traverses the boundary between the sacred and the profane. This hermit's poems not only treat of the poet himself but of his relation to the physical environment of Cold Mountain and his state of mind. The second theme is that of Han Shan the man's relationship to the environment and the third theme contains the tripartite concept of Han Shan the man, his relationship with the environment and his state of mind. Like Han Shan, Snyder is looking for 'one mind' embedded 'in the flesh' in its true nature, as represented by the moon, the central image in the poem. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tang : Han Shan's Cold mountain poems may be heralded as condensed collection of Chinese philosophical ideas drawn from Confucianism, Daoism and Chinese Buddhism (including different branches of Chan Buddhism). Han Shan's spiritual journey to Cold Mountain is often seen as a reflection of the ancient Chinese literati's pilgrimage to Chan enlightenment. Han Shan's poems seem more colloquial, laconic and direct, but they still follow some of the main characteristics of Chinese classical poetry. The nature-Chan images used in his Chan poems not only make the ineffable Chan or 'dao' explicable, but also endow the poems with a high degree of literary virtuosity. Through translation, the legend of Han Shan and his poems were brought to such countries as Japan, Korea and the United States of America. The hermit-poet's name, Han Shan, has become synonymous with the recluse-rebel against the mainstream culture, and also with the 'dao'-Chan mountain spirit, whilst the place name, Cold Mountain, is often used to symbolize a nature-Chan world of peace, transcendence and enlightenment. In China, Han Shan is idolized as an incarnation of Manjusri ('keen awareness', 'the bodhisattva of wisdom') with the sword of wisdom. Arthur Waley translated twenty-seven of Han Shan's poems in 1954, Gary Snyder twenty-four translations in 1958 and Burton Watson one hundred poems in 1962. But neither has proved as influential as Snyders translation. Waley and Watson looked at the poems only as translators, whereas Snyder responded to them also as a poet, as a Mahayana Buddhist and as a mountain hiker. He adopted a principle of selection and a visualization process in his translation to invent his own mentor in the person of Han Shan. His translations are all related to Han Shan, to Cold Mountain, and to a spiritual quest for Chan enlightenment. Through his translation, he discovered that Han Shan had fascinated him from childhood. Han Shan's life on Cold Mountain seemed to have overlapped with Snyder's early life in the American western mountains. As a Mahayana Buddhist, he was attracted by Chan enlightenment in Han Shan's Chan poems, Han Shan secluded life and Han Shan's meditative practice on Cold Mountain. He melded Han Shan harmoniously into his translation and later into some of his works, even into his life. Many years later, he still admitted that 'a bit of a Han Shan spirit' was present in him and others. The eccentric life of the hermit-poet Han Shan, the vernacular style of Hans Shan's poems and the nature-Chan world of enlightenment on Cold Mountain accord with Snyder's interests, personality, and aims as a poet. His successful translation encouraged him to start his own spiritual quest for Cold Mountain, which symbolizes the literary mountain of ecopoetry for him. The comparative study of Snyder and Han Shan has been confined mainly to Snyder's translation techniques, or to the Chinese grammatical influence on Snyder's early works. Both Han Shan and Snyder are not purists in pursuit of Chan enlightenment in their poetics. Han Shan's spiritual quest underwent a rather complicated process, the workings of which were enmeshed with a wide range of Chinese religious or philosophical ideas. He started from Confucianism, but resorted to Daoism after his failure in the Civil Service Examination. He soon accepted Indian Buddhism, and then absorbed the essence of Daoism and Chinese Buddhism, finally turning to Chan Buddhism. Snyder's eclecticism is quite different, for Snyder considers all Buddhist doctrines as 'one teaching'. Although he is a Zen practitioner in his daily life and claims himself as a Mahayana Buddhist, he never refutes other religious teachings in his work, such as Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism. Snyder's principle is to interweave these teachings with archaic values in an eclectic way to rebuild his sense of 'wholeness'. This principle encourages him not to exclude alternative and even opposing Buddhist sects from inclusion within his system of thought. It was the mountain spirit of the poets that linked Han Shan and Snyder so tightly together that Snyder became an exemplary representative of an American Han Shan. Snyder's poetic journey to Cold Mountain can be divided into three stages : pre-turning, turning and returning. This division is mainly based on his acceptance of Han Shan and Chan. It also assumes that Snyder as a poet has achieved a state of enlightenment after his self-cultivation, a 'kensho' in Japanese Zen terminology. 2011 Cong Zihang : One reason that Snyder chose to translate Han-Shan's poems is that these poems evoke memories of his childhood. The other reason is that the harmony and concord in Taoism echo with his ecological view, Snyder established 'depth ecology', which 'contains the concept of energy transformation, of that being a link in the food chain, human beings should be thankful for their food, and of that animals, plants, and minerals are equal to human beings'. Furthermore, concepts of 'impermanence, no-self, the inevitability of suffering, connectedness, emptiness, the vastness of mind, and a way to realization' propagated by Buddhism have too much effect on Snyder. Some of his researches show that it is Buddhism that further strengthens his aspiration for equality among humans and harmony between human and environment. Similar to ancient Chinese officials who served the society, or Taoists who withdraw from society to live leisurely in nature, Snyder combines 'meditation, morality and wisdom' and he himself is the perfect embodiment of the Confucian concept of 'self-cultivating, family-regulating, state-ordering and then nation governing'. |
|
| 11 | 1958 |
Snyder, Gary. After the Chinese. In : Combustion ; no 7 (Aug. 1958). She looked like a fairy All dressed in shaky cheesecloth, And ran off with a fairy poet Back to town. Her hair Was black as a mud-snail's bowels Her skin was like chilled grease. My sleeves are sopping wet From crying. My white hair scraggly And my eyes all red. Pour another Cup of wine for this poor Bureaucrat stuck out in the sticks. |
|
| 12 | 1959 |
Snyder, Gary. Riprap [ID D29318]. Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way, straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles— and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things. Sekundärliteratur Joan Qinglin Tan : Snyder refers to his work 'Riprap' as a labourer in the mountains and at sea, dedicating his firs lyrical book to those who worked 'in the woods & at sea'. This work also signifies what was occurring within his mind, as he became a practitioner of meditation on Chan, landscape and ecology. The latter is closer to the Chinese tradition. Though there is no unified style in 'Riprap', some poems are obviously successful imitation of Chinese Chan poetry. With nature-Chan images, the reader can detect the basic Chan teachings. Snyder's great innovation lies in his own unique ideogrammic method – riprapping, a result of his turning to Chan, Han Shan and Chinese landscape poetry. 'Riprap' can be seen as Snyder's formal aesthetic statement in poetic form. The poem itself is a good example of presenting the reader with 'the complexity far beneath the surface texture'. To create visual effects, Snyder mimics Chinese landscape paintings o give appropriate blank space. He often deals with this through his use of indented lines, that is, through a visual and spatial dismemberment of the line into small units. The arrangement of lines, when seen from the bottom, like solid rocky steps up a mountain. To express ineffable nonduality, emptiness and 'satori', Snyder likes to employ phrases as compositional units and small nature-Chan images. The image of burning rocks alludes to sudden 'satori' after the Buddhist fire. Through burning, all things are changed. People achieve transcendence in a similar way to the transformation of rocks into granite, crystal and sediment. To illustrate the nature of nature, he often borrows features of Chinese classical poetry. Riprapping, as a method in Snyder's ecopoetry, is a response to the wilderness and to nature. To express his ecological concerns, he chose Chan, not Christianity as one of the riprapping ways. He explained that Chan is 'a way of using your mind and practicing your life and doing it with other people', which inevitably involves 'responsibility and commitment'. |
|
| 13 | 1959-1960 |
Snyder, Gary. The back country. In : Galley sail review ; vol. 2, no 1 (Winter 1959-60). [Li Po issue]. Kyoto footnote She said she lived in Shanghai as a child And moved to Kobe, then Kyoto, in the war ; While putting on her one thin white brassiere, She walked me to the stair and all the girls Gravely and politely said take care, out of the whorehouse into cool night air. (BC 81) |
|
| 14 | 1960 |
Snyder, Gary. Statement of poetics. In : Allen, Donald. The new American poetry, 1945-1960 [ID D29319]. "Walking, climbing, placing with the hands, I tried writing poems of tough, simple, short words, with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. In part the line was influenced by the five- and seven-character line Chinese poems I'd been reading, which work like sharp blows on the mind." "I've just recently come to realize that the rhythms of my poems follow the rhythm of the physical work I'm going and life I'm leading at any given time – which makes the music in my head which creates the line." |
|
| 15 | 1960 |
Snyder, Gary. Myths & texts [ID D29322]. [Auszüge und Sekundärliteratur]. 1972 David Rafael Wang : Myths and texts is a long poem in three sections – a poem which has no precedent or equivalent in classical Chinese poetry. The first section entitled 'Logging' consists of fifteen individual poems ; the second section 'Hunting' of sixteen poems ; and the third section 'Burning' of seventeen poems. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : From a Chan point of view, the three fragments 'Logging', 'Hunting' and 'Burning' complete a spiritual quest for enlightenment on a mythopoetic level uniting Chan and ecology. Logging Tan : The fragment 'Logging' contemplates destruction. In basic Chan teachings greed, anger and ignorance are the three poisons, the origin of suffering. These can be turned into 'sila' (morality), 'samadhi' (meditation) and 'prajna (wisdom). 1 "The morning star is not a star Two seedling fir, one died Io, Io." Tan : Begins with the statement 'The morning star is not a star'. There is a subtle relationship between two parallel traditions. Venus is a planet, one of the brightest celestial objects in the sky. It is not a star, but is called the morning star and the evening star as well, because it is nearer the sun than the earth. Wang : It is the Taoist 'self-transformation'. 2 "The ancient forests of China logged and the hills slipped into the Yellow Sea. Squared beams, log dogs, on a tamped-earth sill. San Francisco 2x4's were the woods around Seattle." Wang : The forests of China merge with 'the wood around Seattle. Tan : Logging 2 uses the image of Chinese landscape as a comparison. In ancient China, the large scale of logging resulted in the vanishing of the forests and the erosion of the landscape. This historical disaster plays an apocalyptic role, for Snyder always tries to 'hold both history and wilderness in mind'. When juxtaposed with the present logging site in Seattle, the astonishing similarity between ancient china and present day Seattle deforestation is designed to move the reader to greater awareness. To address the destruction of American forests, the poet refers to the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism and the natural process of rebirth in physical world and hopes that these may give some consolation. 3 Tan : In Logging 3, the nature-Chan image of 'lodgepole pine' is used to exemplify the regenerative power of nature, for lodgepole seed can withstand fire. The possibility of renewal expresses the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism. In Snyder's mind, spiritual fire in Buddhism, as one of the mythical forms of healing, helps to eradicate the three poisons (greed, anger and ignorance) in humans. Hsü Fang's simple life is deftly compared to life in modern American society. Hsü Fang was a mythic figure in ancient China, who, like Han Shan, lived on mountain plants and vegetables. This image is juxtaposed with the apparently unrelated image of the American grown-up kids, which virtually shows some automatic connections. If the kids are well-educated, they will realize the importance of environmental protection. 10 "Man is the heart of the universe The upshot of the five elements, Born to enjoy food and color and noise. Get off my back Confucius There's enough noise now." Shu Yunzong : In this passage Snyder first turns Confucius into an epicurean who advocates that men should enjoy themselves at the expense of the rest of the world. Then Snyder pits himself against Confucius from an exological perspective rather than from the one held by Chuang Tzu. 12 " At the high and lonely center of the earth: Where Crazy Horse Went to watch the Morning Star, & the four-legged people, the creeping people. The standing people and the flying people Know how to talk… In a long south flight, the land of Sea and fir tree with the pine-dry Sage-flat country to the east. Han Shan could have lived here, & no scissorbill stooge of the Emperor would have come trying to steal his last poor shred of sense. On the wooded coast, eating oysters Looking off toward China and Japan…" Tan : Han Shan is treated as a mythical Chan Buddhist sage. The 'scissorbill stooge' was an allusion to Lü Qiuyin, an official of Taizhou appointed by the Emperor in the Tang dynasty. 15 "Pine sleeps, cedar splits straight Flowers crack the pavement. Pa-ta Shan-jen (A painter who watched Ming fall) Lived in a tree : 'The brush May paint the mountains and streams Though the territory is lost." Wang : The 'Ming' referred to the Ming Dynasty whose downfall was brought about the invasion of the Manchus. Pa-ta Shan-jen lived on to paint the mountains and streams of his homeland, even when his homeland was lost. Tan : The last poem is a summation of the first fragment 'Logging'. Unlike Logging 1, this poem manifests two traditions and two worlds, including the Oriental and the Occidental, the Buddhist and the Romantic, the physical and the spiritual, and the human and the non-human. Through juxtaposing different images, Snyder attempts to create a harmonious scene within the poem. In the opening stanza, the void where a lodgepole cone is waiting for fire is the right place where enlightenment will be attained through transcendence and reincarnation in the Chan tradition. The poet invokes the Chinese tradition in the form of the painter Pa-ta Shan-jen's (Bada Shanren) powerful brush, which the artist used both literally and metaphorically to keep the landscape intact. Hunting Tan : The subtitle 'Hunting' hints in a primeval forest, where animals and plants will be seen to possess a supernatural power in shaman songs. This fragment is mainly concerned with native American lore, which dedicates some poems to the animals, birds, bears, and deer. Throughout 'Hunting' humanity's life will be intimately tied to the life cycles of animals and the myths surrounding them. Three main aspects are involved in the process of hunting. First, there must be pure divination before hunting, for hunting in the proper time and place is seen as a spiritual encounter, in which the hunted will sacrifice themselves to the hunter. Second, mindfulness is needs for such a spiritual encounter. 2 "Atok: creeping Maupok: waiting to hunt seals. The sea hunter watching the whirling seabirds on the rocks The mountain hunter horn-tipped shaft on a snowslope edging across cliffs for a short at goat 'Upon the lower slopes of the mountain, on the cover, we find the sculptured forms of animals apparently lying dead in the wilderness' thus Fenollosa On the pottery of Shang It's a shem I didn't kill you, Yang Keui Fei, Cut down in the old apartment Left to bleed between the bookcase and the wall, I'd hunt you still, trail you from town to town. But you change shape, death's a new shape, Maybe flayed you'd be true But it would't be through. 'You who live with your grandmother I'll trail you with dogs And crush you in my mouth. ' - Not that we're cruel – But a man's got to eat." Wang : Legend of Yang Guifei, the favorite concubine of Ming Huang of the Tang Dynasty, who was forced to hang herself from a beam when the Tang soldiers revolted in protest against her nepotism and the usurpation of power by her relatives. What starts out to be Eskimos hunting becomes Fenollosa's commentary on the art of the Shang Dynasty, then becomes Yang Guifei of Tang China bleeding to death in an apartment and finally becomes contemporary America. Going through the three stanzas of the poem, we find that the first one deals with hunting for food (Eskimo hunters), the second one with hunting for revenge (Wang Guifei), and the third one with a rationalization for hunting. Whereas the Eskimos may have a legitimate reason for hunting since they need food for survival, whereas the Tang soldiers may have an adequate excuse for demanding the death of Yang Guifei (who was indirectly responsible for the An Lu-shan rebellion in 755), there is neither a legitimate reason or an adequate excuse for trailing someone who lived with his grandmother with a pack of dogs in order to crush him 'in my mouth'. Reading Snyder's poem in the light of the different justifications for hunting, we find that the Eskimos can be exonerate of their guilt because they need food, that the Tang soldiers can be pardoned because they demanded the restoration of order in the empire, but that the thrill-hunters are accountable for their guilt. The poem seems to suggest a progressive degeneration of values, with 'primitive' Eskimos hunting for food, 'sophisticated' Chinese hunting for revenge, and the 'civilized' modern hunting for thrills. By a cyclical reference to man's eating habit, we mean that the poem starts with showing us the activity of hunting to acquire food and ends with giving us the reason for hunting. In each case, 'eating' is man's justification for his acts of violence. In this light, Snyders's poem can be interpreted as a Buddhist's plea for mercy, or universal compassion, for according to the Buddha, man perpetuates his sin in the killing of any sentient being, human or animal. Snyder's Myths and texts can be viewed as a demonstration of the Buddhist belief that all appearance is illusory or deceptive, because the poem in the beginning, turns out to be carfully designed in the end. The unity of the poem lies in Snyder's use of metamorphosis as the leitmotiv. This metamorphosis illustrates the Buddhist principle that nothing is permanent or real in this world as well as the Taoist principle that the only permanence is change. Snyder's selection of primordial images from the myths of diverse cultures serves to demonstrate that, despite the barriers of languages and cultures, all mankind shares a collective unconscious. The poem illustrates the Taoist concept of endless self-transformation. And, as the Taoist transformation is cyclical, we feel the inevitability of the end when 'The morning star is not a star' is transformed into 'The sun is but a morning star'. Tan : Snyder borrowed tow Inuit verbs, 'atok' and 'maupok', literally 'creeping' and 'waiting', to describe the Inuit's hunting habit with a harpoon, which 'was central to all sea mammal hunting'. For the Inuit, this harpoon hunting is called 'maupok', because it depends upon timing, patience and co-ordination as well as hunters' extensive knowledge of the habits of sea mammals. 5 Tan : Hunting 5 is a good example of embodying the third aspect of hunting. Snyder depicts how Native American people used 'the head of the mountain-goat' for 'the making of the horn spoon'. The sacredness is manifested in the last line. 10 "Flung from demonic wombs Off the some new birth A million shapes – just look in any biology book. Wang : Snyder is referring to the popular Buddhist belief that on can cat reborn in different shapes. 14 "Buddha fed himself to tigers & donated mountains of eyes (through the years) To the blind." Wang : Buddha must be reborn in order to feed himself to tigers and he must have 'mountains of eyes' to donate them continually to the blind. 16 "Meanging: compassion. Agents: man and beast, beasts Got the Buddha-nature." All but Coyote. Tan : 'Hunting' comes to its end with an image from the Chinese tradition. The Chan master Zhao Zhou tried to instruct the novice that all sentient beings possess the Buddha nature. Hunting 16 is about Zhao Zhou's famous 'koan' concerning the Chan concept of 'wu/no'. The last lines not only reveal the theme of the second fragment 'Hunt8ing', but also suggest that the spiritual quest should go ahead. Burning Tan : The whole fragment 'Burning' concentrates on nonduality, emptiness and sudden 'satori' using some nature-Chan images. 2 One glance, miles below Bones & flesh knit in the rock 'have no regret – Chip chip (sparrows) & not a word about the void To which one hand diddling Cling. Tan : At the end of Burning 2, Snyder chooses the bird to depict the moment before enlightenment. 3 Tan : The fragment is about enlightenment. To keep Chan in the foreground, Snyder changed the direction of his exploration into the Oriental tradition. He left his 'western American wilderness' as a logger and a hunter in the tradition of American Indian lore. 6 Tan : Snyder himself wears the mask of Han Shan on Cold Mountain. This is the early image of Han Shan's self-portrait, who was ready to cut down delusion with the sword of wisdom. 7 "Face in the crook of her neck felt throb of vein Smooth skin, her cool breasts All naked in the dawn 'byrdes sing forth from every bough' where are they now And dreamt I saw the Duke of Chou." Wang : Snyder is reminiscing about a former girlfriend who appears as prominently in a dream to him as the Duke of Chou supposedly appeared in a dream of Confucius. 9 "Bodhidharma sailing the Yangtze on a reed Lenin in a sealed train shrough Germany Hsüan Tseng, crossing the Pamirs Joseph, Crazy Horse, living the last free starving high-country winter of their tribes." Wang : Transition from China, where the Yangzi river flows, to Germany where the Soviet leader rode 'in a sealed train', to the border of China, India, and Afghanistan, and finally to the North American continent, the tribal home of Crazy Horse. 11 Snyder, with the mask of Han Shan, became 'a pure but' waiting for sudden enlightenment. 17 "The storms of the Milky Way Buddha incense in an empty world Black pit cold and light-year Flame tongue of the dragon Licks the sun The sun is but a morning star." Wang : The transformation of the morning star which is 'not a star' into the sun is brought about by the dragon's tongue. The dragon is 'the symbol of the infinite in Chinese art and literature. |
|
| 16 | 1961 |
Snyder, Gary. Li Sao, A poem on relieving sorrows, by Ch'ü Yüan [Qu Yuan]. [ID D29204]. There are only three readable translations of the Li Sao in English, and Mr. Johnson's is one of them. Although it is over a hundred years since August Pfizmaier's German translation, none of the half-dozen or so later versions into French, English, and German have done the poem justice. This is quite understandable: the Ch'u Kingdom collection (Ch'u-tz'u) which contains the Li Sao is the most difficult and exotic group of poems in the Chinese language. They are difficult, in part, because the Ch'u Kingdom, which existed in southern and eastern China from the eighth century B.C. until it was conquered in 221 B.C. by Ch'in, was quite different culturally from the central and northern states, home of the "Poetry Classic" and Confucian philosophy. It is this difference that makes the Li Sao of interest to the folklorist and anthropologist. In brief, it seems the Ch'u culture was shamanism-oriented; and the language, imagery, and mythological references of the Li Sao suggest the god-intoxication, spirit-journeying, supernatural flying, and hypersensitive states of awareness of shaman trance-dancers and singers. It is a far cry from the sober tranquillity of T'ang dynasty poetry. Ch'ü Yuan (332-296 B.C.), the putative author of the Li Sao, survives in a biography by Ssu-ma Ch'ien. He was a minister in the service of King Huai of Ch'u, and was banished from court through some intrigue. Wang I, the Confucian commentor on the Li Sao, saw the poem as an elaborate allegorical complaint about the difficulties of an honest man in government, and certainly this is a valid level of the poem. In fact, the juxtaposition of the poet’s intense concern for virtue and honesty in a corrupt society, with a long, free-swinging, and imaginative style of poetry, makes it into a sort of ancient Chinese counterpart of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". The Chinese Communists have made Ch'ü Yuan into a culture hero. The difficulty for the translator lies particularly in the wild imagery, historical allusions, and multiple obscure references to plants and flowers. The poet is seeking a kind of supernatural lover; he would arrange a marriage with her; he journeys to mythological realms in search of her, flying through the air; consults fortunetellers; recalls the trials of ancient honest worthies; but ultimately fails in his quest and resolves on suicide. The tradition is that Ch'ü Yuan did indeeid commit suicide, in the Mi-lo river. The Dragon-boat festival (5:V) is supposed to be in honor—and in search, on the waters—of the spirit of Ch'ü Yuan. To say that Mr. Johnson's translation is readable leaves a lot unsaid. It is readable because it tries to be direct and simple, and in doing so it avoids some of the problems a more scholarly translator would feel compelled to confront. Furthermore, by a curious kind of double-talk, he tries to save himself from any criticism of the translation as poetry by saying that "Although the present translation of the Li Sao poem is intended as prose, it is printed in a typographic form suggestive of its original poetic arrangement." In other words, it looks like poetry on the page, and reads like poetry—for any irregular line arrangement creates a manner of reading and a rhythm, which is poetical—but Mr. Johnson doesn't want to call it that. It follows the Li Sao translation in Robert Payne's White Pony anthology rather closely, and at some points the English is more felicitous. David Hawkes' Ch'u Tz'u, the Songs of the South (Oxford, 1959) is a real sinologist's job. His scrupulous and considered translation shows up Johnson's work as that of an amateur—but being scrupulous, Hawkes' translation is rougher reading. None of the three above-mentioned translations show the hand of a poet, but at least one can be sure that Hawkes knows what the Chinese means. The most unique thing about Mr. Johnson's translation is the vehicle he rides in interpreting die meaning of the Li Sao. Largely ignoring the historical and anthropological questions regarding the Ch'u poems (which are splendidly handled in Arthur Waley's book The Nine Songs, a Study of Shamanism in Ancient China) Mr. Johnson sees the Li Sao as most significantly "an account of the poet's personal struggle for individuation or self-completion (author's italics)." He offers the Li Sao as a poem in which the author is going through a kind of Jungian self- analysis, and suggests that poets and prophets "In terms of their own personal lives... tell the story of a universal experience of man that we, as a society, are just beginning to feel in this century." This may be, but to say: "Such a man was Ch'ü Yuan in third century B.C. China, and such was his problem. He had come to realize that his life was a false, fruitless and wrong thing, and he began to look for a new truth and meaning that would satisfy his needs."—is reading more of modem psychological concerns into the Li Sao than the text, and the fragility of our knowledge about Ch'ü Yuan and his times, will bear. Mr. Johnson's translation is neither first-rate literature nor good scholarship. For two shillings more, you can buy David Hawkes' scholarly translation of the whole Ch'u collection. |
|
| 17 | 1961-1962 | Gary Snyder travels with Allen Ginsberg six months in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. They visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. | |
| 18 | 1965 |
Snyder, Gary. To the Chinese comrades [ID D29209]. The armies of China and Russia Stand facing across a wide plain. Krushchev on one side and Mao on the other, Krushchev calls out "Pay me the money you owe me!" Mao laughs and laughs, long hair flops. His face round and smooth. The armies start marching—they meet— Without clashing, they march through, each other, Lines between lines. All the time Mao Tse-tung laughing. He takes heaps of money. He laughs and he gives it to Krushchev. Chairman Mao's belongings on the March: "Two cotton and wool mixture blankets, A sheet, two pants and jackets, A sweater A patched umbrella, An enamel mug for a rice bowl A gray brief-case with nine pockets.” Like Han-shan standing there —a rubbing off some cliff Hair sticking out smiling maybe rolling a homegrown Yenen cigarette Took a crack at politics. The world is all one. Crawling out that hillside cave dirt house (whatever happened to Wong— quit Chinese school, slugged his dad left the laundry, went to sea— out of the golden gate—did he make A.B. ?—) black eggshell-thin pots of Lung-shan maybe three thousand years B C You have killed. I saw the Tibetans just down from the passes Limping in high felt boots Sweating in furs Flatland heat, and from Almora gazing at Trisul the new maps from Peking call it all China clear down to here, & the Gangetic plain— From Hongkong N. T, on a pine rise See the other side: stub fields. Geese, ducks, and children far off cries. Down the river, tiny men Walk a plank—maybe loading little river boat. Is that China Flat, brown, and wide? The ancestors what did they leave us. Confucius, a few old buildings remain. —tons of soil gone. Mountains turn desert. Stone croppd flood, strippd hills, The useless wandering river mouths, Salt swamps Silt on the floor of the sea. Wind borne glacial flour Ice age of Europe Dust storms from Ordos to Finland The loess of Yenen. glaciers "shrink and vanish like summer clouds..." CROSS THE SNOWY MOUNTAIN! WE SHALL SEE CHAIRMAN MAO! The year the long march started I was four. How long has this gone on. Rivers to wade, mountains to cross— Chas. Leong showed me how to hold my chopsticks like the brush— Upstairs a vhinese restaurant catty-corner from the police Portland, oregon, nineteen fifty-one, Yakima Indian horseman, hair black as crows, shovel shaped incisors, epicanthic fold. Misty cliffs and peaks of the Columbia: Old loggers vanish in the rocks. They wouldn't tote me rice and soy-sauce cross the dam "Snyder you gettin just like A damned Chinaman." Gambling with the Wasco and the Wishram By the river under Hee Hee Butte & bought a hard round loaf of weird bread From a bakery in a tent In a camp of Tibetans At Bodh-Gaya Where Gautama used to stay. On hearing Joan Baez singing "East Virginia" THOSE were the days, we strolled under blossoming cherries ten acres of orchard holding hands, kissing, in the evening talked Lenin, and Marx. YOU had just started out for Peking. I slipped my hand under her blouse and undid her brassiere. I passed my hand over her breasts her sweet breath, it was too warm for May. I thought how the whole world my love, could love like this; blossoms, the books, revolution more trees, sweet girls, clear springs. You took Peking. Chairman Mao, you should quit smoking, dont bother those philosophers Build dams, plant trees, dont kill flys by hand. Marx was another westerner, it's all in the head. You dont need the Bomb, stick to farming. Write some poems. Swim the river, those blue overalls are great. Dont shoot me, let's go drinking, Just Wait. Sekundärliteratur David Rafael Wang : This poem has no Chinese precedent, it achieves a distinct Zen humor. Snyder chides Mao for trying too hard to emulate Marx and all the Westerners. He suggests that progress is only an illusion and that Mao should be content with writing his poems and swimming in the Yangzi river, two activities for which Mao is renowened in China. Snyder further suggests that Mao should 'go drinking' with Snyder himself and not shoot him, since drinking was an activity which united all the leading Tang poets and shooting was an invention of the West. The poem not only warns Mao against progress, but also suggests simple living as an alternative. Joan Qinglin Tan : In the poem we can certainly take Snyder's view of Mao as heavily romanticized but it would seem to be a mistake to read this poem as naïve. Snyder appears to be quite consciously generating a mythical Mao, a Mao who can stand for the aspects of both ancient and modern Chinese culture that he admires, yet a Mao and a new China that he also has an ambivalent attitude towards. It is the mythical Mao who reveals the continued Han Shanian theme in Snyder's poetry. In the first three stanzas we can see Mao wearing the face and attitudes of the countercultural Chan master. In the final stanza, after a heavily nostalgic passage, Snyder gives direct advice to both the real Mao and the new China pleading with them to return to the simplicity of his Han Shanian, Chan Buddhist and ecological agenda. The criticism and disappointment with the political realities of the Chinese régime in the 1960s is sharply contrasted with a romanticism for the revolutionary Mao that finds its roots in the Beat attitudes of the 1950s. |
|
| 19 | 1966-1968 |
Snyder, Gary. August on Sourdough : a visit from Dick Brewer. In : Holiday ; vol. 40, no 2 (1966). Snyder, Gary. Four poems for Robin. In : Snyder, Gary. Poems of our moment. (New York, N.Y. : Pegasus, 1968). David Rafael Wang : The two poems are strikingly Chinese in feeling and sensibility. |
|
| 20 | 1967 |
Snyder, Gary. Regarding wave. (San Francisco : Printed for Don Allen by Grabhorn-Hoyem, 1967). David Rafael Wang : Snyder uses many titles in Regarding wave, that remind us of the 'yin' symbol. Some of these titles include : Sand, Running water music, Beating wings, All the spirit power went to their dancing place, Long hair, Pleasure boats, Willow, and The good earth. In all these titles we find the common denominator of fluidity, for sand, music, outspread wings, dancing, long hair, boats undulating, swaying willow trees, and the soil of the earth all share a natural rhythm and flow. And this rhythm and flow in nature, according to Snyder, is precisely the rhythm and flow of poetry as well. |
|
| 21 | 1967 |
Letter from Gary Snyder to Herbert Fackler. "My method of translation is – first, to understand the poem thoroughly on a linguistic level. Second, by an effort of concentration to project the 'picture' of the poem inside my mind, like a movie – to see what's happening. Third, to write down, in my own language, what I see happening. Fourth, to check that back against the original language and be sure they line up." |
|
| 22 | 1968 |
Snyder, Gary. Passage to more than India. In : Fire ; no 2 (March 1968). This subculture of illuminati has been a powerful undercurrent in all higher civilization. In China it manifested as Taoism – not only Lao-tzu but the later Yellow Turban revolt and medieval Taoist secret societies – and the Zen Buddhists up till early Sung. |
|
| 23 | 1969 |
Snyder, Gary. Earth house hold [ID D29212]. Were it not for Kuang Chung, we should be wearing our hair unbound and our clothes buttoning on the left side. A man should stir himself with poetry Stand firm in ritual Complete himself in music Lun yü The sravaka disciplined in Tao, enlightened, but on the wrong path. If a Bodhisattva retains the thought of an ego, a person, a being, or a soul, he is no more a Bodhisattva. Fretting with the Huang Po doctrine of Universal Mind. What a thorny one. Government Confucianism, as in the Hsiao-ching / Filial Piety – a devilish sort of liberalism. Allowing you should give enough justice and food to prevent a revolution, yet surely keeping the people under the thumb. 'If you keep the taxes just low enough, the people will not revolt, and you'll get rich.' Movements against this psychology – the Legalistic rule of Ch'in ; Wang An-shih perhaps ? This is Chinese ; plus Blake's collected, Walden and sumi painting, pass the time. Poetry is to give access to persons – cutting away the fear and reserve and camping of social life : thus for Chinese poetry. Eroticism of China and Japan a dark shadowy thing – a perfumed cunt in a cave of brocades Usui. The term is literally 'cloud, water' – taken from a line of an old Chinese poem, To drift like clouds and flow like water. It is strictly a Zen term. The Japanese word for Buddhist monks and priest of all sects is bozu (bonze). One takes no formal vows upon becoming an Unsui, although the head is shaved and a long Chinese-style robe called koromo is worn within Sodo walls. Koans are usually short anecdotes concerning the incomprehensible and illogical behavior and language of certain key Chinese Zen Masters of the T'ang Dynasty… Roshi. Literally, 'old master' – Chinese Lao-shi. A Roshi is not simply a person who 'understands' Zen, but specifically a person who has received the seal of approval from his own Zen Master and is his 'Dharma heir'. The Jikijitsu sits at the head of the hall, marking the half-hour periods with wood clackers and bell. He keeps a stick of incense burning beside him, atop a small wood box that says 'not yet' on it in Chinese. Only the great wall of China could be seen from the moon. A higher sense of responsibility to holy ghosts and foolishness and mess. (The Chinese shot : A young man's love for a girl ; an old man viewing nature. All the different figures one becomes- old Japanese woodcutter ; exiled traveler in a Chinese scroll. In China it manifested as Taoism, not only Lao-tzu but the later Yellow Turban revolt and medieval Taoist secret societies ; and the Zen Buddhists up till early Sung. Russia and China today are among the world's staunchest supporters of monogamous, sexually turned-off families. The suspicion grew that perhaps the whole Western Tradition, of which Marxism is but a (Millennial Protestant) part, is off the truck. This led many people to study other major civilizations – India and China – to see what they could learn. It's an easy step from the dialectic of Marx and Hegel to an interest in the dialectic of early Taoism, the I ching, and the yin-yang theories. From Taoism, it is another easy step to philosophies and mythologies of India… It became evident that the 'truth' in Buddhism and Hinduism is not dependent in any sense on Indian or Chinese culture ; and that 'India' and 'China' – as societies – are as burdensome to human beings as any others ; perhaps more so. Peasant witchcraft in Europe, Tantrism in Bengal, Quakers in England, Tachikawa-ryû in Japan, Ch'an in China. These are all outcroppings of the Great Subculture which runs underground all through history. By civilized times, hunting was a sport of kings. The early Chinese mperors had vast fenced hunting reservies ; peasants were not allowed to shoot deer… One finds evidence in T'ang and Sung poetry that the barren hills of central and northern China were once richly forested. The Far Eastern love of nature has become fear of nature : gardens and pine trees are tormented and controlled. Chinese nature poets were too often retired bureaucrats living on two or three acres of trees trimmed by hired gardeners… 'Wild' in the Far East means uncontrollable, objectionable, crude, sexually unrestrained, violent ; actually ritually polluting. China cast off mythology, which means its own dreams, with hairy cocks and gaping pudenda, millennia ago… Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, temper the power of hunger of states and castles ; with emphasis on individual responsibility and liberation. Record of the life of the Ch'an master Po-chang Huai-hai [Bojang Whyhigh]. Transl. from the Ching-tê Chuan-têng Lu, 'Transmission of the Lamp' Ch. VI. Taisho Tripitaka 51.249b ff. Ma-tsu (Ta-chi) (?-788 AD) Po-chang Huai-hai (720-814) Huang Po (?-850) Lin-chi (?-867) (Rinzai) background and youth The Ch'an Master Huai-hai of Po-chang mountain in Hung-chou was from Chang-lo in Fu-chou. When he still had his hair tied in knots, he split from society. He was well-drilled in the 'Three Studies' (morality, meditation and wisdom). While Ma-tsu was teaching in Nan-k'ang, Huai-hai whole-heartedly became his disciple. Po-chang and His-t'ang Chih-ts'ang were called 'room-entering' disciples. At that time these two fine yogins were rivals in their Ch'an study. One evening the two were with Ma-tsu at the harvest moon-watching. Ma-tsu said "When it's just like this, what about it ?" His-t'ang replied, "A fine time to make an offering". Po-chang said, "A fine time to practice". Ma-tsu commented - "The sutras went into Ts'ang /'Tripitika'; meditation returned into Hai/'Sea'." he rolls up his mat Ma-tsu was to give a lecture ; people had gathered like clouds. He ascended to his place and sat a while. Then Po-chang rolled up his bowing mat. Thereupon Ma-tsu left the hall. One day Po-chang went to visit the Master Ma-tsu in the lecture hall. Ma-tsu took a flywhisk from the corner of his chair and fooled with it. Po-chang asked "Just this, or is there another way ?" Ma-tsu put it back saying "After this what will yu use to help men ?" Po-chang himself took the flywhisk and displayed it. Ma-tsu said "Just this, or is there another way ?" Po-chang hung the flywhisk up, and waited. Ma-tsu shouted "K'AAA !" he begins teaching From that time on, his thunder reverberated. Sure enough, some believers invited him to the Hsing-wu district in Hung- chou, to live at Mt. Ta-hsiung. Since he lived in a dangerously steep, mountainous place, they called him 'Po-chang' (Hundred Fathoms). Before he had been there a full year, students of the profound treasure had gathered like clouds from the four directions. Among them, Kuei-shan and Huang-po became the leaders. Po-chang and Huang-po One day the master addressed the group : "The Buddha-Dharma is not a small affair. I twice met with the Greater Master Ma's 'K'AAA! ' It deafened and blinded me three days." Huang-po hearing this, unconsciously stuck out his tongue* saying "I don't know Ma-tsu, and after all I never met him." I won't be Ma-tsu's heir" Huang-po replied. "Why ?" "– Afterwards I'd have no descendants". The Master said "That's so, that's so". (* From here to the end of this anecdote the Ming version is as follows : The Master said, "Aren't you going to become the heir of Ma-tsu? " Huang-po said "Indeed not. Today, because of your exposition, I have been able to see Ma-tsu's power in action. But I never knew him. If I were to be Ma-tsu's heir, afterwards I'd have no descendants." The Master said, "That's so, that's so. If your understanding is equal to your teacher's, you diminish his power by half. Only if you surpass your teacher, will you be competent to transmit. You are very well equipped to surpass your teacher.") the crying comrade One day a comrade came into the lecture hall weeping. The Master said "What's up ?" He replied "My father and mother have both died. Will the Master please set a date for their funeral service ?" The Master said "Come tomorrow and we'll bury them both at once". speak without using your mouth At lecture the Master said "Choke your throat, shut your mouth, now quickly speak" ! Kuei-shan said "I won't, you speak !" The Master said "I don't refuse to talk with you, but afterwards I'd have no heirs." Wu-feng said "The Master also should shut up". The Master said to him "If we were here alone, I'd be shading my eyes looking up at you". Yun-yen said "I also have something to say. Please ask the question again". "- Choke your throat, shut you mouth, speak quickly !" "- Now the Master has it !" Po-chang said : "I'll have no heirs". who'll go to Hsi-t'ang ? The Master said to the group "I need someone to carry a message to Hsi-t'ang, who'll go?” Wu-feng said "Me." "—How are you going to transmit the message?" Wu-feng said "When I see Hsi-t'ang I'll tell him." "—What will you say?" "—When I come back, I'll tell you." is there fire or not The Master and Kuei-shan were out working, and the Master asked "Is there fire?" "—There is". "Where?" Kuei-shan took a stick, blew on it two or three times and passed it to Po-chang. "This worm-eaten stick!" what is the Buddha like? Someone asked "What's the Buddha?" and Po-chang said "Who are you?" The Wayfarer said "Me". The Master said "Do you know 'me'?" "Clearly." The Master lifted his flywhisk, "Do you see?" "—I see." Po-chang said nothing more. the dinner drum Once when everyone was working together hoeing, a comrade heard the dinner drum and suddenly putting up his mattock with a big laugh he left. Po-chang said "Brilliant! This is the gate where Avalokitesvara enters the Principle." The Master returned to his quarters and sent for that comrade, asking, "What truth did you perceive just now to act thus?" "—I just heard the dinner drum pounding and went back to eat." The Master laughed. depending on the sutras Someone asked, "If we interpret in accordance with the sutras, the Buddhas of the Three Worlds hate sutras, every word, as though they were the chatter of demons. What about this?" Po-chang said "If we hang on tight to circumstances the Buddhas of the Three Worlds hate it; if we seek anywhere else outside this, it’s the chatter of demons." a comrade and Hsi-t'ang A comrade asked Hsi-t'ang, "There is a question and there is an answer. What about it when there's no question or answer?" Hsi-t'ang said "You mean to say you're afraid of rotting?" The Master heard about this and said "I've always wondered about that fellow Hsi-t'ang." The comrade asked the Master to comment on it. He said "The world of phenomena is not to be perceived." the hungry man and the full The Master said to the community "There's a man who doesn't eat for a long time—but doesn't say he’s starving; there's a man who eats every day but doesn't say he's full." No one could answer this. the needy man Yun-yen asked "For whom are you bustling about like this every day?" Po-chang replied “There's a man needs me.” Yen said "Why don't you let him do it himself?" "—He can't even make his own living." Bojang's Big Lecture A comrade asked "What about the Dharma-gate of Mahayana Sudden Enlightenment?" The Master said: "All of you: first stop all causal relationships, and bring the ten thousand affairs to rest. Good or not good, out of the world or in the world—don't keep any of these dharmas in mind. Don't have causally conditioned thoughts. Relinquish both body and mind and make yourself free, with a mind like wood or stone—making no discriminations. Then the mind is without action, and the mind-ground is like the empty sky. Then the sun of wisdom will appear by itself, like clouds opening and the sun coming out. Completely stop all involving causes: greed, anger, lust, attachment. Feelings of purity or impurity should be extinguished. As for the five desires and the eight lusts, one need not be bound by seeing, hearing, perceiving or knowing; or be deluded under any circumstance. Then you will be endowed with supernatural and mysterious power. Thus is the liberated man. As for all kinds of circumstances, the mind of such a man is without either tranquillity or disorder—neither concentrated or scattered. Then there is no obstruction to the complete comprehension of Sound and Form. Such may be called a man of Tao. He is bound in no way by good or bad, purity or impurity, or the uses of worldly happiness and wisdom. This is what we call Buddha-Wisdom. Right and wrong, pretty and ugly, reasonable and unreasonable—all intellectual discriminations are completely exhausted. Being unbound, his mental condition is free. Such a man may be called a Bodhisattva whose Bodhi-mind arrives the instant it sets out. Such can ascend directly to the Buddha lands. All the dharmas, basically, are not of themselves empty. They do not, themselves, speak of form; also they say nothing of right and wrong or purity and impurity; and they have no intention of binding men. The fact is that men themselves deludedly speculate and make several kinds of understanding and bring forth several kinds of intellectual discrimination. If feelings of purity and impurity could be exhausted, if one didn't dwell in attachments and didn't dwell in liberation— if there were absolutely no drawing-of-lines between conditioned and unconditioned—if the mind analyzed without making choices—THEN THAT MIND WOULD BE FREE. One would not be tangled up with illusion, suffering, the skandhas, samsara or the twelve links of the chain. Remote, unattached, completely without clinging. Going or staying without obstruction; entering into or coming out of Birth-and-Death is like going through opening gates. Even when that mind meets with various sorts of suffering and things that go wrong, that mind does not retreat groveling. Such a one is not concerned with fame, clothing or food. He doesn't covet merit or profit; he is not obstructed by social things. Though he may be brought up against pleasure or pain, he doesn't get involved. Coarse food sustains his life, patched clothes resist the weather. He is vacant, like a complete idiot or deaf man. If one has the least inclination toward broadly studying Understanding within samsara—seeking fortune and wisdom— it will add nothing to the Principle. Instead one will be hung up by the circumstances of understanding; and return to the sea of samsara. Buddha is an unseekable One: if you seek it you go astray. The Principle is an unseekable Principle; if you seek it you lose it. And if you manage not to seek, it turns to seeking. This Dharma has neither substance or emptiness. If you are able to flow through life with a mind as open and complete as wood or stone— then you will not be swept away and drowned by the skandhas, the five desires and the eight lusts. Then the source of Birth-and-Death will be cut off, and you will go and come freely. You will not in the least be bound by the conditions of karma. With an unfettered body you can share your benefits with all things. With an unfettered mind you can respond to all minds. With an unfettered wisdom you can loosen all bonds. You are able to give the medicine according to the disease. the comrade who had received precepts A comrade asked, "Now that I have taken these precepts my body and mouth are pure—I have already possessed only the good—have I not achieved liberation?" Po-chang said "To some degree you are liberated. But you are not yet mentally liberated. You don't yet have complete liberation." The comrade asked "What’s mental liberation?" "—Don't seek Buddha or understanding; exhaust feelings of pure and impure. Also don't hold on to this non-seeking as right. Don't dwell where you exhaust feelings, either. Don't dread the chains of Hell and don't love the pleasures of Paradise. Don't cling to any dharma whatsoever. Then you may begin to be called liberated without hindrance; then body and mind and all may be called liberated. You shouldn't say you have a small part of the good of the precepts, and take it to be enough. Though you may have mastered the countless-as-river-sands purities of the gates of Morality, Meditation and Wisdom, you have not yet touched on a fraction of an atom of it. Strive courageously and get down to work. Don't wait until your ears are blocked, your eyes clouded, your hair white and your face wrinkled; your body aged and suffering and your eyes filled with water; your mind filled with anxiety, and no place to go. When you get to that point you won't be able to even set your hands and feet in order. Even though you have fortune, wisdom and much information, it won't help you. Since the eye of your mind is not opened, and your thinking is connected with circumstances, you will not know how to reflect inwardly, and will be unable to see the Buddha-way. Then all the karma of your whole life will appear before you—whether it is pleasing or whether it is terrifying— the Six Roads and the five skandhas all appear visible before you. Because you have given reign to your own greediness what you see will all be transformed into the highly desirable: ornamenting houses, boats and carriages in glittering display. Attaching importance to what you see, your rebirths will not be free. Dragon, beast, freeman, slave—it's still all undecided." The comrade asked "How do you get freedom?" The Master answered "Now in regard to the five desires and eight lusts, have no feelings of either acceptance or rejection. Let 'purity' and 'impurity' be completely exhausted. Like the sun and the moon in the sky—shining without causal relationships. Have a mind like wood or stone; or like the mind of Gandhahasti—who cut the flow and went beyond, without obstruction. Such a man cannot be gathered in by either Heaven or Hell. Also, he doesn't read the sutras and scan teachings; language should pliably return into oneself. All verbal teachings merely illuminate his present understanding of his own nature. He is in no way being revolved by the dharmas of existence or non-existence. Such is a guiding master; able to see though all the dharmas of existence and non-existence. Such is the VAJRA. Then he has his portion of freedom and independence. If he cannot obtain it in this way, although he may be able to chant the twelve Vedas he only becomes arrogant, and this is slandering the Buddha, not a spiritual practice. From a worldly standpoint, reading sutras and observing the teachings is a good thing; but from the standpoint of an illumined person it obstructs men. Even a man who has mastered the Ten Stages (Dasabhumi) cannot avoid flowing along in samsara's river. There is no need to seek understanding via speech, values in words. Understanding belongs to greed, and greed turns into illness. If you can separate—right now—from all the dharmas of being and non-being—and pass straight through the “Three Phrases” then you will naturally be no different from the Buddha. If you yourself are Buddha, why worry that Buddha cannot speak? My only fear is that you are not Buddha, and that you will be revolved by the dharmas of being and non-being, and not be free. That is why, before Principle has been established, you will be carried about by happiness and wisdom. It's like the slave employing the master. Better to establish Principle first, and later have happiness and wisdom. At the proper time you'll get powers—you'll be able to take dirt and make gold, to turn seawater into buttermilk, to break Mount Sumeru down into dust; to take one meaning and make countless meanings; to take countless meanings and make one meaning." The Master had finished his talk, and the community was leaving the hall. Then he called after them, and they all turned their heads. He called "What is this?" Po-chang's death In the ninth year of Yuan Ho, T'ang dynasty, on the seventeenth day of the first month, the Master returned to the silence.. He was ninety-five. In the first year of the Ch'ang-ch'ing era (821 AD) he was given the Imperially-conferred posthumous title of "Ta-chih Ch'an Master." His stupa was titled "Great Precious Excelling Wheel." The Regulations of the Ch'an Line The Ch'an line, from the time of its founding by Bodhidharma, to the Sixth Patriarch, and on up to the time of Po-chang, usually made its quarters in the temples of the Vinaya sect. Although it had separate buildings, there was yet no agreement on rules concerning teaching and administration. The Ch'an Master Po-chang Ta-chih, constantly concerned about this, said: "The Way of the Patriarchs should be one of expanding and transforming mankind. We hope that it will not die out in the future. Why should we accord our practices with every detail of the Agamas (Theravada Vinaya rules)?" Someone said, "The 'Yoga-sastra' and the 'Ying-lo Ching' contain the Mahayana regulations. Why not follow them!" Po-chang said "What I follow isn't bound by the Great or Small Vehicles, and doesn't differentiate between them. We must strike a balance between the broad and the narrow, and establish rules that are suitable." Thereupon, beginning a new idea, he established entirely different meditation dwellings. In the community, everyone whose Dharma-eye is respectably powerful is called "Chang-lao" just as in India men of age and understanding were called "Subhuti", etc. After they have become "Transformers" or "Refiners" they live in the fang-chang room. Like Vimalakirti's room, it is without individual bedrooms. The reason that we build lecture halls, but no Buddha-halls, is to show that the Buddhas and Patriarchs personally appoint the Masters even today, and it is they who become the "Buddha". Students enter the Comrades' Hall, without distinction of many or few, high or low. In order of how many seasons they've spent, they arrange and set up long connected benches and put up clothes racks to hang their equipment on. They sleep with their pillows leaned against the edge of the bench, on the auspicious right side of the body, because they do zazen for long hours, and need a little rest. Thus they have all the Four Dignities (standing, sitting, walking and lying down). Aside from entering the Master's room to receive the teaching, students are permitted to be diligent or idle; the high and the low are not bound to a common rule. This whole group has study in the morning and an assembly in the evening. When the old chief ascends his high seat and gives a lecture, the leaders and the group stand in rows listening. The "Guest" and the "Host" trade questions and answers to display the principles of the Dharma—to display how they follow and live by the Dharma. Meals are held twice a day at suitable times, because it is necessary to be frugal, and to show that Dharma and food go together. When working outside, those of high and those of low rank work equally hard. Po-chang established ten offices and called them "liao-she" ("huts"). Each office has one man as chief, who is in charge of a number of men who each look after the affairs of their own department. Item: the man in charge of cooking is called "The rice head". The man in charge of vegetables is called "The greens head". The others all follow this pattern. If there is someone who has falsely taken the name and stolen the form of a comrade, muddying the pure community and obstructing its affairs, then the welfare worker (Wei-na) investigates, removes his nameplate and clothes rack, and has him leave the grounds. The reason for this is to preserve the peace of the community. If that person has actually transgressed in some serious way then he should be beaten with a staff; assemble the group and burn his robe, bowls and equipment, and chase him out by a side gate. This shows his disgrace. Being particular about this one custom has four advantages: First, not muddying the pure community will give birth to reverence and faith. Item: if the three inheritances (word, deed and thought) are not good, men cannot live together. In accordance with the customs it is sometimes appropri¬ate to use the “Brahma Altar” method to regulate someone [ostracizing an offender with total silence]. Some persons must be thrown out of the community— when the community is tranquil, reverence and faith will grow. Secondly, the forms of the comrades are not destroyed, and the Buddhist precepts are complied with. Item: punish offenders properly, if they were allowed to keep their robes you'd regret it later. Third, this way you don't trouble the law courts, and you keep out of criminal litigation. Fourth, it doesn't leak to outsiders—this protects the harmony of the tradition. Item: when people come from all over to live together, what distinguishes the common man and the sage? Even when the Tathagata was in the world there were six classes of common monks; how much more today, in the decline of the Dharma, we cannot hope to have absolutely none. If one comrade com¬mits an error, and all the other comrades make accusations, they surely don't realize that they are demeaning the community and destroying the Dharma; how great this destruction is. If the Ch'an group of these days wishes to move without hindrance, we must rely on Po-chang's Thick Grove regulations to manage affairs. Furthermore, it is not on account of the worthy ones that we set up a law guarding against transgressions. It is better to have rules and no faults, than it is to have faults and no rules. With Master Po-chang's protection, the Dharma has flourished and grown! That the Ch’an Line is nowadays standing foremost can be traced to Po-chang. We have related the essentials and displayed them for comrades of future generations, that they forget not their roots. The complete rules are provided at all "Mountain Gates". (I am indebted to Dr. Yoshitaka IRIYA, Head of the Chinese Department of Nagoya University, and Fellow of the Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyusho, Kyoto, for valuable help in this translation.) |
|
| 24 | 1969 | Gary Snyder returned to the United States. |
|
| 25 | 1969 |
Gary Snyder. 'Ecological calendar'. Snyder has read all the poets in the anthology Tang shi san bei shou du ben and he stated that his favorite Tang poets are Du Fu, Yuan Zhen and Wang Wei. |
|
| 26 | 1971 | Gary Snyder builds his own house Kitkitdizze in foothills of Sierra Nevada, on the South Fork of the Yuba River. |
|
| 27 | 1972 |
Snyder, Gary. Poetry and the primitive. In : Co Tinneh (1972). By civilized times, hunting was a sport of kings. The early Chinese emperors had vast fenced hunting reserves ; peasants were not allowed to shoot deer. Millennia of experience, the pour knowledges of hunting magic – animal habits – and the skills of wild plants and herb gathering were all but scrubbed away… One finds evidence in T'ang and Sung poetry that the barren hills of central and northern China were once richly forested. The Far Eastern love of nature has become fear of nature : gardens and pine trees are tormented and controlled. Chinese nature poets were too often retired bureaucrats living on two or three acres of trees trimmed by hired gardeners… 'Wild' in the Far East means uncontrollable, objectionable, crude, sexually unrestrained, violent ; actually ritually polluting. China cast off mythology, which means its own dreams, with hair cocks and gaping pudenda, millennia ago… |
|
| 28 | 1974 |
Snyder, Gary. Turtle island [ID D29320]. Snyder, Gary. Mother earth. [Auszug]. Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure, Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River Two thousand years ago -- and lost its home to rice - The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt & Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD - Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang, what we call "China" On flyways they have used a million years. Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars, the monkeys, like the snows of yesteryear Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks. IS man most precious of all things? - then let us love him, and his brothers, all those Fading living beings - … Fire is an old story. I would like, with a sense of helpful order, with respect for laws Of nature, to help my land with a burn, a hot clean Burn. Sekundärliteratur Joan Qionglin Tan : The image of China in the poem hints at the impending great ecological crisis on earth, because China represents the old root of civilization, the once-great Buddhist nation, and the land of mountains and rivers and yet this great cultural root is eroding. The heavy sigh 'Ah China' from the mouth of the poet indicates that an ecological revolution will be needed urgently to allow the re-inhabitation of the land as opposed to its destruction. For the benefit of the real land, Snyder pleads for people to descend following transcendence. Descending from the heights of enlightenment, he suggests, might be the best way to heal the land. The first prescription he offers his readers is to descend with healing fire. The effect of such burning is rebirth in China. |
|
| 29 | 1975 | Gary Snyder awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island. |
|
| 30 | 1977 |
Rexroth, Kenneth ; Snyder, Gary. Chinese poetry and the American imagination. [Statements from a symposium, April 1977]. In : Ironwood ; no 17 (1981). Kenneth Rexroth: Chinese poetry began to influence writers in English with the translations into French of Hervey St. Denis and others in the mid-19th century who translated Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang into French free verse. If American and English poets did not read French, the translations of Herbert Giles and other Sinologists like him were practically worthless, because of the doggerel verse in which they were rendered. Probably the most influential was Judith Gautier's Le livre de Jade, which was translated by E. Powys Mathers in Colored Stars and A Garden of Bright Waters. Neither Gautier nor Mathers read Chinese and, in fact, her informant was a Thai who didn't read Chinese either. Nevertheless, these prose poems (which first appeared in Stuart Merrill's Pastels in Prose) came across as deeply moving poetry in English. Approximately contemporarily appeared the first translations by Arthur Waley and, not long after, Ezra Pounds Cathay. Pound and Waley taught the West a kind of irregular iambic pentameter or free verse, in both cases as dependent on quantitative rhythms as on accentual. Chinese poetry, in fact, bears no resemblance to this kind of verse. It is rhymed with considerable emphasis, usually, on the rhymed words, and at first was in four monosyllable lines, or five, or seven, and in addition the tones which distinguished the mean-ings of homonymous Chinese monosyllables came to follow regular patterns. Later in the T'ang, and reaching its flower in the Sung Dynasty, poems were patterned on the irregular lines of songs, as well as being written in the five or seven syllable classic patterns. Learned and industrious people have tried to reproduce in English the original rhythms, but have managed to produce only absurdities. So Chinese poetry has come to influence the West as a special form of Chinese verse— which annoys some more pedantic Sinologists of Chinese ancestry. It is a special kind of free verse and its appearance happened to converge with the movement toward Objectivism, Imagism, and even the Cubist poetry of Gertrude Stein and Pierre Reverdy—"no ideas but in things", as Williams says rather naively. There is almost no rhetorical verse of the kind we find in Augustan Latin and later in Renaissance poetry throughout Europe, nor is there the luxuriously foliate poetry of India (with the possible exception of the Li Sao). There are no true poetic epics in Chinese poetry. The heroic epic of China is an historical novel, The Romance of Three Kingdoms. And, until recent years, the verse of Chinese drama was considered beneath serious literary consideration, although, for instance, "The Flower Burying Song" from the play taken from The Dream of the Red Chamber is quite impressive poetry. There are verse treatises in Chinese comparable to Virgil's Georgies or Horace's Art of Poetry, but even they follow the tendency toward direct presentation of concrete images. Most Chinese poetry, whether elegiac or love poetry, situates die reader in a definite 'mise-en-scene'. "The driving wind and rain tear the banana leaves" we are in the South. "The swallows huddle in their nest under the gilded rafters"—a palace. "I am too weary to pick up my jade inlaid lute"—probably a concubine. "Soon the wild geese will be returning from the North, but they will bring me no message"—he is away fighting the Northern Barbarians. This can become a facile formula, especially when, in the later dynasties, the lines were arranged in strictly parallel couplets, but it is certainly a way to produce effective—affective—poetry, if you are a poet. In fact, it differs little from the poetry envisaged by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads and often realized in their best poems. But so true is it also of Horace's "Under Soracte" or the best poems of Hafiz or the rare poignant imagistic moments in Tennyson's "In Memoriam". Chinese poetry entered the American and, to a much lesser degree, English poetic consciousness at exactly the right moment to purge the rhetoric and moralizing of 19th century Romantic poetry and the even more moralistic, preachy poetry of the '90s. Much of the poetry of Ernest Dowson is little sermons of disappointed Epicureanism. Japanese poetry, which after all is an extremely compressed expression of Chinese aesthetics, became popular among American poets at about the same time and through the same people—Pound, Waley, and Mathers. Today, for a very large sector of American poets, the poetry of the Far East is more influential than 19th and 20th century French poetry, which has dominated the international idiom for so long, and certainly incomparably more influential than American or English poetry of the 19th century. The only rival is the slowly dying influence of "metaphysical" verse of the English Renaissance. It would be possible to name over a hundred American poets deeply influenced by the poetry of the Far East and some who have difficulty in thinking about poetry in any other idiom than Chinese or Japanese. Now, of course, there are a number of poets, by no means uninfluential, who read Chinese and Japanese and who are philosophically Buddhist or Taoist or both. Gary Snyder The fact is that although first and foremost the translations of Ezra Pound Arthur Waley, a little later Witter Bynner, have had a distinctive impact 01 people's thinking and people's poetics, there was another thing that has been very important, running parallel to that right through, and that has been the idea of the Chinese poet, the image that the Chinese poet as a poet, as role model, presented to us. In a simple way, I think, our first Anglo-American received view of the Chinese poets was that they were civil servants. And in a simplified way, then is some truth in this. There were extremes as great perhaps as Han Yu on the one side as a rigorous, benevolent, socially-minded poet, Confucianist all his life; and at the other end, perhaps a poet like Han Shan, who speaks entirely from the hermit's habitat. Yet in actual fact, these two kinds of poetry, which am artificially separating for the moment, were generally produced by the same people. Now to add to the complexity, we have no real models in Occidental poetry of poets who either were staunch, quiet, solid civil servants involved in responsible positions in society for a whole lifetime as a regular type of poet nor do we have on the other hand a real tradition of hermit's poetry in the Occident. So it's all the more interesting to see that these two types of roles o poetry were both in China coming from the same individuals, often at differ¬ent stages within one lifetime, or in some cases, it was just a matter of literally changing hats—Confucian hat to Taoist hat while on a trip to the country. I first responded, in 1949, living in Oregon, to my contact with Chinese poetry on the level of nature; that was what I was interested in. As a student of anthropology beginning to read on Far Eastern matters but really focusing or American Indian studies, I was deeply concerned with the almost abstract questions of philosophy of nature and problems involved when high civilizations impact on nature and impact on natural peoples. As a mountaineer and backpacker, when I read Chinese poetry, I was struck in some of the translations by qualities hard to describe . . . clarity, limpidity, space, and at the same time, a fine, specialized and precise attention and observation of natural detail—natural detail existing and functioning within a very large, 10,000 li, moonlit territory. That was my first interest in it. Later, of course, reading more widely, and still only in translations, I realized that the extent was quite a bit broader, that it went from the Shih Ching (known variously as The Book of Odes, The Book of Songs, and The Confucian Odes) to, say, Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Shih Ching to Mao Tse-tung, and that it included a vast range of possibilities of content. I also see now how different American poets came to Chinese poetry and received different things. As I looked initially only to the hermit poet/nature poet for inspiration and for a while took that to be what Chinese poetry really was, so a man whose work I valued highly as a teacher in poetic technology, namely Ezra Pound, found in Chinese poetry something else entirely. Pound was delighted with the possibility of poets having political power in a strong bureaucracy. Those perhaps are the two extremes—myself or someone like myself, and Pound or someone like Pound—in their reactions to the role possibilities implied in Chinese poetry. Then we begin to notice something else there, lurking slightly below the surface, slightly further back in time—we see a glimmering in Li Ho, it's there very clearly in the Ch'-u T'zu (The Songs of the South), and we can discern it in certain features in the Shih Ching—and that is the poet as shaman. The shaman-poet role has been explicated for us by Edward Schafer's recent work, The Divine Woman, that brings out a whole range of images and symbols and underlying energies that are in that poetry, that you might not see there at first glance. And yet, to go one more step, finally, for myself, what I go back to Chinese poetry for is its humaneness. I'm going to go back for a second to the introduction to the Shih Ching (compiled circa 600 B.C.), the original classic collection/anthology. "Poetry is to regulate the married couple, establish the principle of filial piety, intensify human relationships, elevate civilization, and improve public morals ". That's Confucius' estimate, or somebody like Confucius, of what poetry should do; and it must have had great influence because that man was highly respected in later centuries. Thinking this one through again, I thought: well, there's a lot of truth in what he says, and actually poetry in a healthy, stable society (in which poets are not forced willy-nilly to all be alienated revolutionaries) does influence the behavior of lovers, and it does make one think of one's parents, and put importance on friendship, and give meaning to history and culture, and improve public manners. So then I thought, yes, poetry should do that. Actually, in a visionary way, what we want poetry to do is guide lovers toward ecstasy, give witness to the dignity of old people, intensify human bonds, elevate the community, and improve public spirit. And so, it is in just that humaneness, that delicate—I'm almost tempted to use the word sweet—appreciation of the details of human life, families, the frustrations of employment with the government, and the frustrations of being a hermit, that we perhaps respond to most deeply in Chinese poetry, having a poetry ourselves which is so different in a way, so mythological, so political and so elevated, that it can't deal with ordinary human affairs often. |
|
| 31 | 1977 |
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… |
|
| 32 | 1978 |
Snyder, Gary. Wild in China [ID D29194]. Hsie's shoes. The people of mainstream China call themselves "Han" people, even today. The term is contrasted with any and all "ethnic" groupings—such as the people of the south known as the Yiieh (modern Viet of Vietnam), who "cut their hair short and tattooed themselves". (These days, cadres organizing and educating in Tibet who are too grossly contemptuous of local customs might be sent back labeled "Han chauvinists".) Even in the fourth century A.D. we can assume that the forests and agriculturally marginal areas of greater China were inhabited, even if thinly, by either backwoods Han people or tribal people. The post-Han "Six Dynasties" period witnessed a flourishing back-to- nature movement from within die ruling gentry class, a "nature" that extended from the fields and gardens of the suburbs to the really deep hills. Many people who might in less turbulent times have exercised their class prerogative of administrative employment turned instead toward an idea of purity and simplicity. Not all were wealthy or self-indulgent. The poet Tao Yuan-ming (Tao Ch'ien) (365-427) was a minor official whose early retirement to a small farm was his own choice. His poems are still the standard of a certain quietness, openness, emptiness, and also human frankness and frailty in the confusions of farm, family, and wine, that much later Chinese poetry aspires to. The Taoist idea of being nobody in the world, "behind instead of in front", gave strength to those who often must have missed the social life of their urban literati friends as they sat up late reading and drinking alone in their estates or homesteads out amongst the peasants. Some of the Han Dynasty poems portray the wild mountain world as horrible and scary. As Burton Watson points out, a gradual shift in the mode of seeing nature took place. In the songs of die Classic of Songs, which reflect so much of the life of the people, plants were named specifically; die scene was the ground and brush right before one—where one danced or harvested. By the Six Dynasties, the view moved back and became more panoramic. A case in point in the work of the poet Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433)—who has only a few rare poetic ancestors in earlier China. His aristocratic family had moved south, and he grew up in a biome that would have been considered exotic and barbarous by Confucius. Hsieh was a lover of mountains. His fascination with the densely wooded, steep hills of South China (peaking between 4,000 and 6,000 feet) took him on long climbs and rambles, including one month-long trail-cutting exploration. He combined in himself would-be Taoist recluse and vigorous wilderness adventurer. An early follower of Buddhism (a new thing at that time, limited to upper-class circles), he wrote an essay expounding "instant enlightenment". Hsieh's ambivalent pursuit of success in politics ended when he was ban-ished to a minor position in a remote south coast town; he soon resigned totally from the administration and moved to a run-down family estate in the hills southeast of present-day Hangchow. The place and life there is detailed in his long fu ("prose poem") called Living in the Mountains. The farther and nearer landscapes are described in detail. The fish, birds, plants, and mammals are listed. The whole is seen as an ideal place for pursuing Taoist and Buddhist meditations. Thus, I cast no lines for fish. I spread no nets for hare. I have no use for barbed shafts. Who would set out rabbit snares or fish traps? And he says he "awoke to the complete propriety of loving what lives". Later in the poetical essay he describes his workers, "felling trees; they clear the thorns and cut bamboo", and sundry bark and reed and rush gathering activities; and charcoal-making. This faint contradiction, intensified later in history, can become a major problem: individual animals' lives are carefully spared, while the habitat that sustains them is heedlessly destroyed. Hsieh is a puzzle. Arrogant and overbearing at court, he made enemies there. Intensely intellectual as a Buddhist, and careless of the needs or feelings of local people, he managed to get intrigued into a charge of rebellion, and was beheaded in the marketplace. Hsieh was probably already out of place in China—he should have joined the Rock Mountain Fur Company and gone out to be a trapper. He was "wild", and as an aristocrat that took some contradictory and nasty turns. But he opened up the landscape—"mountains and waters"—to the poetic consciousness for all time, and he was a fine poet. Mountains were always foci of spirit power in China, beginning perhaps as habitat for the hsien, a shaman who gained "power" in the hills. Later they became a place of retreat for the Taoist practitioner of "harmonizing with the Way" and again as sites for Buddhist monasteries. Hsieh Ling-yün plunged into the watercourses and thickets, camped in the heights alone, walked all night in the moonlight. These years and energies lie behind what we now take to be the Chinese sense of nature as reflected in art. Hsieh is also remembered as the inventor of a unique mountaineering shoe or clog—no one is quite sure how it looked. Oxchead Mountain Buddhism began and remains (at center) a set of ethical observances and meditation disciplines by means of which hard-working human beings can win through to self-realization and understanding of the way of existence. This effort is instructed by the content of Shakyamuni's enlightenment experience: a realization that all things are co-arising, mutually causing and being caused, 'empty' and without 'self'. In the time of the historical Buddha Gautama Shakyamuni, the community or Sangha of Buddhists was an order of monks and nuns who had renounced the world. It was held that one could not really achieve enlightenment as a householder. Laypersons might build up a store of good merit by helping the Buddhist Order, and living virtuous lives, but the deeper experiences were not for them. The expansion of the concept of Sangha, or Community, is a key theme in the history of Buddhism. In the Mahayana, or 'Great Vehicle' branch, lay¬men and women are also considered worthy aspirants and almost equal practicers with monks, or, at the very least, theoretically capable of achieving enlightenment while living the householder's life. The inherent capacity to achieve enlightenment is called 'Buddha-nature'. At one stage in Buddhist thought (second century AD India roughly), it was held that not quite all human beings had the capacity. Those excluded, called 'icchantikas', were (to judge by description) tribal and aboriginal people who live by hunting. Some early Chinese Buddhist thinkers were troubled by this. In another century or so, other Indian Buddhist texts were brought to China that taught that salvation was accessible not only to all human beings but to all sentient beings, vindicating the Chinese thinkers. This was commonly understood to mean that animals and even plants are part of the Mahayana drama, working out their karma through countless existences, up to the point of being born into a human body. It was popularly assumed that a human body was a pre-requisite to Buddhist practise. The eighth century monk Chan-jan, of the T'ien T'ai sect, was one of the first to argue the final step. He concluded that non-sentient beings also have the Buddha-nature. 'Therefore we may know that the single mind of a single particle of dust comprises the mind-nature of all sentient beings and Buddhas' and 'The man who is of all-round perfection, knows from beginning to end that Truth is not dual and that no objects exist apart from Mind. Who then, is 'animate' and who 'inanimate'? Within the Assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division'. The Chinese philosophical appreciation of the natural world as the visible manifestation of the Tao made a happy match with Indian Mahayana eschatology, Chinese Buddhists could say, these beautiful rivers and mountains are Nirvana in the here and now. Buddhists located themselves on famous old numinous mountains, or opened up wilderness for new monasteries. In Ch'an (Zen) the masters were commonly known by the name of the mountain they lived and taught on. An early line of Ch'an, which died out in the eighth century, was called the 'Oxhead mountain' sect. These monks did more than just admire the scenery — they were on intimate terms with the local wildlife, including tigers. The Oxhead Master Tao Lin built a nest in a tree for his meditation. Sitting up in it, he once had a conversation with the poet Po Chü-i : 'Isn't it dangerous up there ?' Po asked, in his Government Official's robes. 'Where you are is far more dangersou' was Tao-Lin's response. In this branch of Ch'an (and no other ever) when monks died, their bodies were left out in the forest for the animals to consume. It's also said, they had a great sense of humour. The Chase in the Park By Shang dynasty times hunting had already become an upper-class sport. The old hunters' gratitude for the food received, or concern for the spirits of the dead game, had evaporated. Hunting had become 'the chase'—an expensive group activity requiring beaters who drove the game toward the waiting aristocrats who pursued and shot it with bows from chariots or horseback. Large-scale exercises of this sort were considered good training for warfare. They were followed by feasts with musicians, and slender dancers wearing diaphanous gowns. Warfare and hunting are popularly thought to be similar in spirit, and in post-civilized times this has often been the case. In hunting and gathering cultures the delicacy of preparation, and the care surrounding the act of taking life, puts hunting on a different level. Chinese culture is strikingly free from food taboos, and the upper-class cuisine is the most adventurous in the world. Even so, from Shang times on, meat was a luxury that the common people could seldom afford. Furs and feathers of animals were vastly used in the costuming of officials. Idealized instructions can be found in the Li Chi or 'Collected Rituals', which was put together in the Han dynasty. When a ruler wore the robe of white fox fur, he wore one of embroidered silk over it to display it. When the guards on the right of the ruler wore tigers' fur, those on the left wore wolves' fur. An ordinary officer did not wear the fur of the white fox. Great officers wore the fur of the blue fox, with sleeves of leopard fur, and over it a jacket of dark-colored silk to display it; with fawn’s fur they used cuffs of the black wild dog, with a jacket of bluish yellow silk, to display it. . . Han dynasty ritualism has an oddly alienated quality. The nature phi losophy and the plant and mineral experimentation of the Taoists, or the direct knowledge of the natural world necessary to the life of working people, is far from the highly ordered ceremoniousness that surrounded government bureaus and the court. The Han upper class did admire those who were skilled and bold in gambling for power, but always against a background of strict propriety. Taking animal lives is easier for those accustomed to taking human life. Respect for nature comes with knowledge and contact, but attention to the observable order of nature is rarely practiced by those who think that wealth is purely a creation of human organization, labor, or ingenuity. Still, all through history, the emperor continued to offer sacrifices to the Earth, to Heaven, and to the great mountains and rivers of the land. Calamitous floods, or prolonged drought, would bring the state up short, and the emperor himself would have to ask if he had somehow offended heaven. Whatever these offenses might be, it doesn’t seem that destruction of wildlife habitat or waste of animal or human lives, or deforestation, was perceived as a possible offense against the unearthly power of T'ien (sky or heaven). The wealthy governors and emperors thus maintained large hunting parks. Edward Schafer’s study of 'Hunting Parks in China' (the source for all this information) suggests that they evolved from Bronze Age preserves established originally to continue supplying certain wild species for the periodic state sacrifices; species whose use had been established when their numbers were far greater. By the Chou dynasty such preserves were a place for sport and recreation that might contain exotic species as well as native animals, with artificial lakes and ponds, stables, hunting lodges, and pleasure pavilions. They were an ideal 'Beheading, or being boiled alive, was the fate of those who lost in the game of power. place to lodge and entertain visiting heads of state. The park of the Han emperor Wu Ti, 'The Supreme Forest', was about forty by twenty miles in size and contained thirty-six detached palaces and lodges. Within its varied terrain it contained both native and exotic species of fish, birds, amphibians, and mammals. Rivers were stocked with giant softshell turtle and alligator as well as sturgeon and other fish. Caribous, sambars, rhinoceroses, and elephants were symbolically (and perhaps practically) located in the 'south' of the preserve, and wild horses and yaks in the 'north'. 'The ground of the Supreme Forest was prepared for the great winter hunt by the royal foresters. They burned clear a large open space and cut away brambles. Beaters, hunters, and athletes readied themselves for the onslaughts of wild beasts and forest demons with spells and peri¬apts. When the royal party arrived, the birds and beasts were driven into the cleared areas, and the slaughter began: A wind of feathers, a rain of blood, Sprinkled the countryside, covered the sky. Some advisors openly criticized parks as wasteful and politically inexpedient. In Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju's fu on 'The Supreme Forest' the Emperor is urged to terminate the park and open it to the people for cultivation and firewood and fishing. It's interesting to note that no middle course is considered, such as keeping a wildlife preserve for its own natural, nou-menal, or scientific interest. The virtuous alternative is to turn it over entirely to human use. (No comparison could be made between Chinese hunting park wantonness and the destruction of animal, not to mention human, life that took place in the Roman Arena. There thousands of animals might be destroyed in a few days. The constant supplying of animals to the Arena made extinct numerous species throughout the Mediterranean basin.) Hunting parks survived into T'ang times and later, but new ideas from Buddhism or old ideas revived from Taoism stressing compassion for all creatures enveloped them in a mist of moral doubt. T'ang was the high point of much poetry, and of Ch'an Buddhist creativity, but it must be remembered that it was not peopled by effete scholars in flowing robes who detested violence. It was a time of hardy Northern-derived gentry who were skilled horsepersons and archers and falconers, hard drinkers and fighters. Women were much freer then, and the custom of bound feet was yet to come. These aristocrats backed Buddhism, in part from a cos¬mopolitan interest in the cultural and trade exchanges possible with the little nations of Central Asia, but they kept their robust habits. An aristocratic maiden was once sought out by a suitor who was told by her parents she'd gone out hunting on horseback. That probably never happened again after T'ang. Empty mountain. China is wide. Travel was mostly on foot, maybe with a packhorse, sometimes also a riding horse. In the lowlands a network of canals provided channels for slow-moving passenger boats as well as freight barges. Travelers moved by boat on the big rivers, slowly and laboriously upstream, pulled by men on shore, and swiftly and boisterously back down. Boats sailed across the lakes and slow-moving lower river reaches. Horse and ox carts moved men and materials in the alluvial plains and rolling hills. In the mountains and deserts, long caravans of pack animals moved the goods of empire. Government officials were accustomed to traveling weeks or even months to a new appointment, with their whole family. Buddhist monks and Taoist wanderers had a tradition of freely walking for months or years on end. In times of turmoil whole populations of provinces, and contending armies, might be tangled in frenzied travel on the paths and waterways. It was said, "If a man has his heart set on great things 10,000 li are his front yard". So the people of the watersheds of the Yang and Huang rivers came to know the shape of their territory. The officials and monks (and most poets were one or the other) were an especially mobile group of literate people. Travelers' prose or rhymed-prose descriptions of landscapes were ingenious in evoking the complexity of gorges and mountains. Regional geographies with detailed accounts of local biomes were encouraged. Hsieh Ling-yün’s fu on his mountain place is descriptive and didactic—but his poems in the shih (lyric) form already manifest the quiet intensity that becomes the definitive quality of Chinese shih poetry in its greatest creative T'ang and Sung Dynasty phases. The Chinese and Japanese traditions carry within them the most sensitive, mind-deepening poetry of the natural world ever written by civilized people. Because these poets were men and women who dealt with budgets, taxes, penal systems, and the overthrow of governments, they had a heart-wrenching grasp of the contradictions that confront those who love the natural world and are yet tied to die civilized. This must be one reason why Chinese poetry is so widely appreciated by contemporary Occidentals. Yet it's hard to pin down what a "Chinese nature poem" might be, and why it is so effective. They are not really about landscapes or scenery. Space of distant hills becomes space in life; a condition the poet-critic Lu Chi called "calm transparency". Mountains and rivers were seen to be the visible expression of cosmic principles; the cosmic principles go back into silence, non-being, emptiness; a Nothing that can produce the ten thousand things, and the ten thousand things will have that marvelous emptiness still at the center. So the poems are also "silent". Much is left unsaid, and the reverberation or mirroring—a flight of birds across the mind of the sky—leaves an afterimage to be savored, and finally leaves no trace. The Chinese poetic tradition is also where human emotions are revealed; where a still official can be vulnerable and frail. Lu Chi [Lu Ji] says poetry starts with a lament for fleeting life, and regard for the myriad growing things—taking thought of the great virtuous deeds of people past, and the necessity of making "maps" for the future. Chinese poetry steps out of narrow human-centered affairs into a big-spirited world of long time, long views, and natural processes; and comes back to a brief moment in a small house by a fence. The strain of nostalgia for the self-contained hard-working but satisfying life of the farmer goes along somehow with delight in jumbled gorges. Nature is finally not a "wilderness" but a habitat, the best of habitats, a place where you not only practice meditation or strive for a vision, but grow vegetables, play games with the children, and drink wine with friends. In this there is a politics of a special order—the Chinese nature poet is harking back to the Neolithic village, never forgotten and constantly returned to mind by the Taoist classics—as a model for a better way of life. Sectarian Taoism and its secret societies fermented a number of armed peasant uprisings through history that unwittingly had "Neolithic" on their standards. "Playing with your grandchildren"—"growing chrysanthemums"—"watching the white clouds"—are phrases from a dream of pre-feudal or post-revolutionary society. Chinese poets of these centuries were not biologists or primitive hunters, though, and their poetics did not lead them to certain precisions. What they found were landscapes to match inner moods—and a deep sense of reverence for this mystery of a real world. In Burton Watson's analysis of nature imagery in T'ang poems he finds more references to non-living phenomena than living, and more than half of those looking upward to sky, weather, wind, clouds, and moon. Downward, rivers, waters, and mountains predominate. Among living things willow and pine are the most-mentioned trees, but the specific names of herbaceous plants and flowers are few—with "flowers" usually meaning the blossoms of trees like cherry or peach. Wild goose is the most common bird associated with being separated from a friend; and monkey the most common mammal—because of its mournful cry. Cicada and moth are the most common insects. Many natural references, then, are used for their symbolic or customary human associations, and not for intrinsic natural qualities. No doubt the oral poetry of a pre-literate people will have more acquaintance with the actual living creatures as numinous intelligences in furry or scaly bodies. But this does not detract from what the Chinese poems are, highly disciplined and formal poems that open us to the dilemma of having "regard for the myriad growing things" while being literate monks or administrators or wives of officials in the world's first "great society". The reign of the Emperor HsuanTsung [Xuanzong] (712-756) is considered one of the high points of Chinese cultural history: the poets Wang Wei, Li Po [Li Bo], and Tu Fu [Du Fu] were at the height of their powers during those years, and so were the brilliant and influential Ch'an Masters Shen-hui, Nan-yüeh, Ma-tsu, and Po-chang. The national population may have been as high as 60 million. I first came onto Chinese poems in translation at 19, when my ideal of nature was a 45-degree ice slope on a volcano, or an absolutely virgin rain forest. They helped me to "see" fields, farms, tangles of brush, the azaleas in the back of an old brick apartment. They freed me from excessive attachment to wild mountains, with their way of suggesting that even the wildest hills are places where people, also, live. Empty mountains: no one to be seen, Yet—hear— human sounds and echoes. Returning sunlight enters the dark woods; Again shining on green moss, above. Wang Wei |
|
| 33 | 1978 |
Snyder, Gary. Working on the '58 Willys pickup. In : Snyder, Gary. Axe handles : poems. (Port Townsend, Wash. : Cooper Canyon Press, 1978). For Lu Yu [Lu You]. The year this truck was made I sat in early morning darkness Chanting sutra in Kyoto, And spent the days studying Chinese. Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French – Joy of Dharma-scholarship And the splendid old temples – But learned nothing of trucks. Now to bring sawdust Rotten and rich From a sawmill abandoned when I was just born Lost in the young fir and cedar At Bloody Run Creek So that clay in the garden Can be broken and tempered And growing plants mulched to save water – And to also haul gravel From the old placer diggings, To screen it and mix in the sand with the clay Putting pebbles aside to strew on the paths So muddy in winter – I lie in the dusty and broken bush Under the pickup Already thought to be old – Admiring its solidness, square lines, Thinking a truck like this would please Chariman Mao. The rear and rebuilt and put back With new spider gears, Brake cylinders cleaned, the brake drums New-turned and new brake shoes, Taught how to do this By friends who themselves spent Youth with the Classics – The garden gets better, I Laugh in the evening To pick up Chinese And read about farming. I fix truck and lock eyebrows With tough-handed men of the past. |
|
| 34 | 1982-1987 |
Ginsberg, Allen ; Snyder, Gary. The selected letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder [ID D29191]. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Aug. 25 (1982). I'm due for Chinese UCLA Conference Sept 21-23… I'll be in N.Y. till September 15. Aren't you due to attend this Mainland Chinese Lit. Conference also ? Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Sept. 10 (1982). Probably see you next week in L.A. at mainland Chinese writers' meeting. Robert Rees the UCLA organizer said you were invited. Letter from Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg ; Oct. 13 (1982) How was Chinese Disneyland ? [Ginsberg had gone to Disneyland with a group of visiting Chinese writers]… China writers conference : I'm very glad I went, will be corresponding with Lin Bin-yan. Do hope there's a chance to visit there next year. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Nov. 8 (1982). Chinese spent all day at Disneyland – me too – Wu Qiang got lost, we found him 4:30 P.M. at exit gate where he waited. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; [ca. Febr. 24, 1983] When China ? I'm committed now to fall '83 but will maybe maybe have five weeks free August 15-September 23, 1983. Tho that may be too short a time. Orvill Schell says he'd like to come along on the poets' trip to China. Have you written Peking yet ? Any plans formulated ? Maybe could do it after December '83 anytime – spring '84 ? I'll be free from then on. Letter from Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg ; Nov. 22 (1983). Charles Leong wrote me and said you were coming but his emphysema would keep him from attending the meeting. He is old and frail now, but still writes a beautiful calligraphy, and very witty sharp letters on the evolution of Chinese communist culture and politics. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Nov. 13 (1984). Airplane Wuhan to Beijing Successful trip Canton to Chungking. Poets there took me to cat at last in market shops, all different dishes, sweet and pork dumplings. Boat three days two nites comfortable two person cabin (charming basic lounge-windows at boat bow to see) (OK food too) and fourth and fifth class passengers sleeping on stairway landings, passageways, steerage and eight- and sixteen-person dorms. Yangtze Gorges vaster than Li River trip, and one magnificent hairpin bend of river around mountain – village hill-cliff – sharp mountain, a complete U-turn walled by immense peaks with grotesque mythic rock formations atop. River brown – then widened out on plains the last day. Inexpensive hotels, but was met and accompanied everywhere except for three days on river. Wuhan – fantastic hall of 500 life-size arhats intact. Your camera a blessing, thanks. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyer ; Dec. 2 (1984) [Baoding] I'm packing to leave Baoding and take trains to Shanghai (overnite sleeper). Enclosed 'Dagoba Brand' emblem for toilet paper – maybe that indicates industrial Marxist view of stupa. Baoding is 'real' China – non tourist town, no active temples open in all the 50,000,000 population of Hebei Province. Talked to some intelligent Christians and Allah followers who said they were all decimated during anti-rightist campaign beginning 1958. The later Cultural Revolution was deeper extension of that, like Ai Quing the poet was sent off in 1957-8 with a million others. Official figure for persecutions now. I heard, is 27,000,000 people plus their children's disgrace – other elder says twice that. Enclose some random papers – the 35 years gives account of present views. Apparently the Great Leap Forward was also a fiasco that ruined industry by decentralizing it into the hands of loudmouth hippie patty hacks. Production of iron went up but quality down so unusable. During Cultural Revolution 80 % of machine tool industry was crippled – and other industry and professions – so said Chinese man I met on Yangtze River Gorge boat, who'd written history of machine tool industry in Modern China - 'O' [opium] production, all imports, in 1880-1890. Students are terrifically affectionate and eager and shy. The cadre at 'Foreign Relations' branch of this university whom I paranoically thought a sour spy cop turned out tipsy at last nite's farewell banquet and revealed he was an old vaudeville trooper from Chinese opera, read a scene of old sage with beard, Li Po (Li Bai) poems about Yangtze Gorges and monkeys chattering, and ended with song of Mao. 'Show Covers all North China'… I spent another afternoon leisurely at the temple - here's more info on it – Sixth Patriarch's place you photo'd. Tho Buddhism seems stamped out, in talking with students and old Chinamen, the breath activity practice which seems officially OK is 'Ch'i Kung (Qigong) involving something parallel to 'Tso Chan' or belly-sitting- also involving the chakras. Do you know anything about the relationship between the 'Chan' and 'Ch'i Kung' styles of practice ? Maybe they got some kind of Zen here without anyone knowing it. Students do practice wushu and varieties of exquisite tai chi chuan so there is some awareness practice, very sophisticated, without the dharma except as theoretic Marxism provides bodhisattva turnabout of energy. Approaching Yangtze Gorges Two hours down river from Yichang / The rooster in the gallery / Crows dawn. Yangtze stopover at 7 P.M., boat waits till 3 A.M. and starts down the gorges to pass them in daylight. We ate the chicken that day I guess. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyer ; Shanghai Dec. 10 (1984). Our Writer's Association tour translator, Xu Ben, who met us in Süchow, came to listen to my lectures and brought me two copies of newspaper with your 'Maple Bridge' poem he'd translated, and a verse of mine I'd written for him but not kept copy. Enclosed the Süchow News. I'm slowly recovering from bronchitis by now, and getting active – visit Nanking this weekend, next weekend, Kunming I hope. Lecturing on Whitman is fun. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyer ; Nov. 8 (1987). Our Chinese project has been set for fall 1988 and I've been in touch with Wang Meng and the Writer's Union in Beijing, they've ok'd it – now for the final selection of poets. Any last months' suggestions ? Letter from Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg ; Nov. 24 (1987). Am going from Lhasa to Kashgar across Tibet next fall, as co-leader on a trip. David Padwa coming too. Letter from Allen Gisberg to Gary Snyder ; Dec. 21 (1987). Lhasa-Kashgar trip ! I don't know if I've physical stamina! My left knee healing tho weak, lost some thigh muscle, taking physiotherapy. |
|
| 35 | 1983 |
Snyder, Gary. Passage through India [ID D29195]. Hong Kong: we first off headed for the Japanese Consul and presented our papers, applying for a new visa to Japan. Then walked around on the hillside back of town—Joanne went shopping for a raincoat, and Neale and I went into an old-style wineshop and talked to the old men in broken Chinese, sampling from various crocks and getting a little drunk— wandered up and down through the crowded alleys, people hanging all their laundry out the apartment balcony windows, old stained concrete and plaster. New buildings don’t seem to last long. Hong Kong so crowded—and barbed wire machine-gun emplacements set up all around. Lively, shopping is a major activity, stores are filled with every conceiv¬able thing, especially luxury. Joanne got a French raincoat—we met back at the ship. The next day Joanne, Neale, and I took a bus out to the border—about a thirty-mile ride. This is on the mainland side. We got up on a hill and gazed out through pine trees at the Chinese Peoples' Republic— spread out before us, a watery plain with houses here and there—a barbed-wire fence along a river at the foot of the hill showing where the actual line is. We could see men far off in China loading a little boat on the river, and hear the geese and chickens and water buffaloes from far away. It was warmish, gray cloudy, soft. Went back on the train to Kowloon (nine dragons) where our ship was—the seamen out handling rigging, sheaves, and cables. Joanne is wearing her fine yellow raincoat. The villages in mainland Hong Kong have a very different feeling from those in Japan. The rows in the gardens aren't so straight, the buildings not so neat—and the building material is brick instead of wood (though roofs are thatch); the people all wear the wide trousers and jackets, men and women alike, and the coolie hats in the field. But Hong Kong has food in a way no Japanese town could. The Japanese simply don't have the Chinese sense for cooking and eating (and a Japanese meal out, dinner party, say, is always a drag until people are finally drunk enough on sake to loosen up; whereas the Chinese have glorious multicourse banquets as a matter of course). In Hong Kong it Hong Kong: we first off headed for the Japanese Consul and presented our papers, applying for a new visa to Japan. Then walked around on the hillside back of town—Joanne went shopping for a raincoat, and Neale and 1 went into an old-style wineshop and talked to the old men in broken Chinese, sampling from various crocks and getting a little drunk— wandered up and down through the crowded alleys, people hanging all their laundry out the apartment balcony windows, old stained concrete and plaster. New buildings don't seem to last long. Hong Kong so crowded—and barbed wire machine-gun emplacements set up all around. Lively, shopping is a major activity, stores are filled with every conceivable thing, especially luxury. Joanne got a French raincoat—we met back at the ship. The next day Joanne, Neale, and I took a bus out to the bor¬der—about a thirty-mile ride. This is on the mainland side. We got up on a hill and gazed out through pine trees at the Chinese Peoples' Republic— spread out before us, a watery plain with houses here and there—a barbed-wire fence along a river at the foot of the hill showing where the actual line is. We could see men far off in China loading a little boat on the river, and hear the geese and chickens and water buffaloes from far away. It was warmish, gray cloudy, soft. Went back on the train to Kowloon (nine dragons) where our ship was—the seamen out handling rigging, sheaves, and cables. Joanne is wearing her fine yellow raincoat. The villages in mainland Hong Kong have a very different feeling from those in Japan. The rows in the gardens aren't so straight, the buildings not so neat—and the building material is brick instead of wood (though roofs are thatch); the people all wear the wide trousers and jackets, men and women alike, and the coolie hats in the field. But Hong Kong has food in a way no Japanese town could. The Japanese simply don't have the Chinese sense for cooking and eating (and a Japanese meal out, dinner party, say, is always a drag until people are finally drunk enough on sake to loosen up; whereas the Chinese have glorious multicourse banquets as a matter of course). In Hong Kong it's like walking along the market sections of Grant Avenue, Chinatown, only better, the wineshops and herb shops in between, That evening to an Australian-run bar for a while, then back to the end of the pier, looking across to the Victoria (Island) side, the celebrated lights going up the steep hill, drinking beer in the dark—a freighter comes in, blotting out the neon, the bridge decks alight, and a junk in full sail, batwing taut membrane over bones—goes out darkly and silent, a single yellow kerosene lamp dim in the stern. The houses on the New Territory are all thatched, dry brown colors as the parched winter brown of the long plain stretching north-fallow paddies, with water buffalo, cows, pigs, and flocks of geese here and there browsing. The dried out winter ricefields men far off loading junks in the river bales of rice on their shoulders a little boat poles out roosters and geese – looking at China Bought $ 347 worth of rupees in Hong Kong at 7 RS to $1 US, where official rate in India is 4.75 to $ 1. Ship sailed at midnight and we were bound for Saigon. Out of Hong Kong they moved Joanne and me from our cabin-class cabins and put us together in one tiny two-man cabin in the tourist-class section. Food was still to be taken deck-class, but our living quarters had been altered. I never understood why except they did get a large number of additional cabin-class passengers, Indians and Chinese, and perhaps were overcrowded. So now in the messhall, besides our previous friends, there were women in saris and pigtailed old Chinese women in silk trousers – and the waters were warm, we were sunbathing on deck. At night took up the star map and a flashlight, and identified the southern stars, Canopus and Achernanr, and the Southern Cross, until one of the seamen came down from the bridge and said our little flashing of the flash-light was hard on the bridge lookout, so we stopped. Always in motion… Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama's ashram has fences around it, and a few armed Indian army guards. Between the tops of the deodars are strung long ribbons of prayer flags. After getting cleared through the guardhouse (and washing up at a pump, right in front of the guards) we were led to a group of low wooden buildings and given a waiting room to wait in. I guess the Indians are afraid the Chinese might come and kidnap the Dalai if they're not careful. A few minutes later the Dalai Lama's interpreter came in, a neatly Western-dressed man in his thirties with a Tibetan cast, who spoke perfect English. His name is Sonam Topgay. He immediately started to ask me about Zen Buddhism. It seems he had found a book on Zen (if I understood him right) in a public toilet in Calcutta, and was immediately struck by its resemblance to the school of Tibetan Buddhism he followed. After that we didn't talk about Zen much, but he told me about the Zok-chen branch of Rnin ma-pa (Red Hat), which is a Tantric meditation school. He said it was by far the highest and greatest of all schools of Buddhism, including the Yellow Hat (which happens to be the sect his employer, the Dalai Lama, is head of). (Don't tell the Dalai Lama I said this.) He is originally from Sikkim, went to college in Delhi majoring in psychology. Got fits of depression and figured out a method of 'introspection' to see what was the mind that felt depressed. Then he went to Lhasa and met a saintly old woman age 122 who told him to go see Dudjon Rimpoche of the Rnin ma-pa, which he did, becoming that man's disciple. He also married a girl in Lhasa. He said that one of the good things about his school of Buddhism was that you could marry, and you and your wife could meditate together while making love. Then they came out, when the Chinese moved in, with their baby girl. (A book by Evans-Wentz called The Tibetan Book of Liberation, I believe, is of this sect. Book of the Dead, also.) They also say, perfect total enlightenment can come: 1) at the moment of dying, 2) by eating proper sacramental food, 3) through dance and drama, and 4) at the moment of orgasm. Then he told us the Dalai Lama was busy talking to the Maharajah of Sikkim, who had just dropped in, and that's why it had been such a long wait. So we went into the Dalai Lama's chamber. It has colorful 'tankas' hanging all around and some big couches in a semicircle. We shake hands with him except that I do a proper Buddhist deep bow. The Dalai Lama is big and rather handsome. He looks like he needs more exercise. Although he understands a lot of English, always keeps an interpreter by when talking to guests. Allen and Peter asked him at some length about drugs and drug experiences, and their relationship to the spiritual states of meditation. The Dalai Lama gave the same answer everyone else did: drug states are real psychic states, but they aren't ultimately useful to you because you didn't get them on your own will and effort. For a few glimpses into the unconscious mind and other realms, they may be of use in loosening you up. After that, you can too easily come to rely on them, rather than under-taking such a discipline as will actually alter the structure of the personality in line with these insights. It isn't much help to just glimpse them with no ultimate basic alteration in the ego that is the source of lots of the psychic-spiritual ignorance that troubles one. But he said he'd be interested in trying psilocybin, the mushroom derivative, just to see what Westerners are so excited about. Allen promised to try and put Harvard onto it, and have this professor Dr. Tim Leary send him some. Then the Dalai Lama and I talked about Zen sect meditation, him asking 'how do you sit? how do you put your hands? how do you put your tongue? where do you look? '—as I told or showed him. Then he said, yes, that's just how we do it. Joanne asked him if there couldn't be another posture of meditation for Westerners, rather than crosslegged. He said, 'It's not a matter of national custom', which I think is about as good an answer as you could get. The Dalai doesn't spend all his time in his ashram; in fact he had just returned from a tour of south India, Mysore, where a few Tibetan refugee resettlements are. And last thing I've heard (since I got back to Japan) is at he's going to set out and do some real Buddhist preaching over India, maybe Europe and America eventually, spinning the wheel of the Dharma. He is at the least a very keen-minded well-read man, and probably lots more than that. Also, he himself is still in training—there are 'Senior Gurus of the Dalai Lama', the most learned of Tibetans, who keep him on a hard study schedule and are constantly testing and debat¬es with him. Walked back down the hill, two miles in the dark, illuminated by occasional lightning flash, to our bungalow. To sleep late, some Englishman shouting under our windows. |
|
| 36 | 1983 |
Snyder, Gary. The Brush The elites of premodern China's high civilization were urbane, bookish, secular, arty, and supremely confident. The Imperial Government rested in a ritualized relationship with Great Nature, and the seasonal exchanges between Heaven and Earth—sun, rains, and soils—were national sacraments conducted at elaborate Earth and Heaven shrines. (The most powerful of rituals were conducted in solitude by the Emperor himself.) Nature and its landscapes were seen as realms of purity and selfless beauty and order, in vivid contrast to the corrupt and often brutal entanglements of politics that no active Chinese official could avoid. The price an intellectual paid for the prestige and affluence that came with being a member of the elite was the sure knowledge of the gap between humane Confucian theory and the actual practices of administering a county or a province—with multiple levels of graft, well-cooked books, and subtle techniques of coercion. And the higher one rose in the ranks, the more one’s neck was exposed to the deadly intrigues of enemies. The mountain horizons were a reminder of the vivid world of clear water, patient rocks, intensely focused trees, lively coiling clouds and mists—all the spontaneous processes that seemed to soar above human fickleness. The fu poet Sun Ch'o said of these processes, "When the Dao dissolves, it becomes rivers, when it coagulates it becomes mountains". Tsung Ping, an early fifth-century painter whose work does not survive, is described as having done mountain landscapes when ill and no longer able to ramble the hills he loved. He wrote the perfect program for a recluse: Thus by living leisurely, by controlling the vital breath, by wiping the goblet, by playing the ch'in, by contemplating pictures in silence, by meditating on the four quarters of space, by never resist-ing the influence of Heaven and by responding to the call of the wilderness where the cliffs and peaks rise to dazzling heights and the cloudy forests are dense and vast, the wise and virtuous men of ancient times found innumerable pleasures which they assimilated by their souls and minds. He also stated a philosophy of landscape painting that stood for centuries to come: "Landscapes exist in the material world yet soar in the realms of the spirit... The Saint interprets the Way as Law through his spiritual insight, and so the wise man comes to an understanding of it. Landscape pays homage to the Way through Form, and so the virtuous man comes to delight in it." Half a century later Hsieh Ho declared the first principle of landscape painting to be "spirit resonance and living moment"—meaning, a good painting is one in which the very rocks come alive, and one yearns to go walking in it. The basic aesthetics of the tradition had been articulated, but it was almost a thousand years before the implications of these statements were fully realized in painterly terms. The art of painting "mountains and waters" slowly unfolded through the centuries. The concept of ch'i—a rich term that translates as indwelling energy, breath, and spirit—is a rich sophistication of archaic East Asian animism. Joseph Needham calls it "matter-energy" and treats it as a proto-scientific term. Contemporary people everywhere tend to see matter as lifeless. The notion of a rock participating in life and spirit—even as metaphor—is beneath adult consideration. Yet for those who work for long amid the forms of nature, the resonating presence of a river-system or prairie expanse or range of hills becomes faintly perceptible. It's odd but true that if too much human impact has hit the scene, this presence doesn't easily rise. Archaic art worldwide is often abstract and geometrical. The spiral motif is widely found—from tattoos on the cheek to petroglyphs on a canyon wall. This representation of the ch'i of things becomes a design of volutes in early Chinese decorative art. Artists started tracing the lines of energy flow as observed in the clouds, running water, mist and rising smoke, plant growth—tendrils, rock formations, and various effects of light, in their patterns. They went on, according to Michael Sullivan, to draw images of fantastically formed animal/energy-bodied nature spirits, and this provided a main bridge from archetypal being to archetypal land- form. The lines finally twisted themselves into ranges of mountains. The word for civilization in Chinese is wen-ming, literally, “understanding writing." In the time of Confucius people wrote on slats of bamboo with a stylus. When paper and the soft-haired brush came into use, the fluidity of calligraphy became possible. In China calligraphy is considered the highest of the graphic arts. The painter uses the same equipment as a writer—the "four treasures" of brush, ink, inkstone, and paper. The brush usually has a bamboo handle with rabbit, badger, goat, deer, wolf, sable, fox, and other hairs for the tip. Even mouse-whiskers have been tried. Everything from a broken roof-tile to rare and unusual stones have been used for grinding the ink. Paper, which is said to have been invented in the first century A.D., is commonly made from paper mulberry, hemp, and bamboo. The paper preferred by Sung and Yuan dynasty painters was called "Pure Heart Hall" paper. It was smooth, white, and thin. Paintings were also done on silk, but paper lasts longer. Ink was made by burning dry pine logs in a kind of soot-collecting kiln. The soot was mixed with glue, one famous glue being made of donkey skin boiled in water from the Tung river. Fragrance was added, and the whole pressed into an inscribed stick. Grinding the ink with a slow steady back-and-forth stroke, softening the brush, spreading the paper, amounts to a meditation on the qualities of rock, water, trees, air, and shrubs. The earliest surviving landscape paintings (early T'ang, the seventh century) are more like perspective maps. Wang Wei's Wang Chuan Villa is a visual guide to a real place, with little labels on the notable locations. These first painted mountains are stark and centered, and the trees look stuck on. The painting might be a guidebook scene of a famous temple on a famous mountain. They are still half-tied to accounts of journeys, land- use records, or poems. Then, with the Sung dynasty, in the eleventh century, paintings open out to great space. The rock formations, plants and trees, river and stream systems, flow through magically realistic spatial transitions. The painter-essayist Kuo Hsi reminded us that the mountains change their appearance at every step you take. Paintings distinguish the wider drier mountains of the north from the tighter, wetter, mistier valleys of the south. These vast scenes, with a few small fishing boats, little huts—cottages— travellers with pack stock—become visionary timeless lands of mountain- rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas. People are small but are lovingly rendered, doing righteous tasks or reclining and enjoying their world. Painters moved between extremes of wet ink-dripping brushes and drier sparser ink on the brush. From hard-boned fine-detailed meticulous workmanship leaf by leaf and pebble by pebble they moved to wet-flung washes of lights and darks that capture a close hill, a distant range, a bank of trees with an effect that can be called impressionistic. The Sung dynasty painters ot large scale, including the horizontal handscrolls of a type sometimes called "Streams and Mountains without End," didn't always walk the hills they portrayed. With an established vocabulary of forms and the freedom of the brush they could summon up mountains that defied gravity and geomorphology, that seemed to float in mist. But these invented landscapes were somehow true to organic life and the energy cycles of the biosphere. The paintings show us the earth surface as part of a living being, on which water, cloud, rock, and plant growth all stream through each other—the rocks under water, waterfalls coming down from above clouds, trees flourishing in air. I overstate to make the point: the cycles of biosphere process to just this, stream vertically through each other. The swirls and spirals of micro- and macrocli¬mate ("the tropical heat engine" for example) are all creations of living organisms; the whole atmosphere is a breath of plants, writhing over the planet in elegant feedback coils instructed by thermodynamics and whatever it is that guides complexity. "Nature by self-entanglement," said Otto Rossler, "produces beauty." The mountains and rivers of the Sung dynasty paintings are remote. Yet they could be walked. Climbers take pleasure in gazing on ranges from a near distance and visualizing the ways to approach and ascend. Faces that seem perpendicular from afar are in fact not, and impossible-looking foreshortened spurridges or gullies have slopes, notches, ledges, that one can negotiate—a trained eye can see them. Studying Fan K’uan's "Travellers Among Streams and Mountains" (about A.D. 1000)—a hanging scroll seven feet tall—one can discern a possible climbing route up the chimneys to the left of the waterfall. The travellers and their packstock are safe below on the trail. They could be coming into the Yosemite Valley in the 1870s. Southern Sung and Yuan dynasty landscape painting (especially with the horizontal handscroll format) tends to soften the hills. In the time of the evolution of the paintings, the mountains become easier, and finally can be easily rambled from one end to the other. As Sherman Lee says, the landscapes are no longer "mountain-and-water" but "rock-and-tree-and-water." The cities of the lower Yangtze became a haven for refugee artists and scholars during the Southern Sung dynasty, in the twelfth century, when the northern half of the country fell to the Khitans, a forest-dwelling Mongol tribe from Manchuria. The long-established southern intelligentsia had always been closer to Daoism than the northerners. At that time Ch'an Buddhism and painting both were popularly divided into a northern and southern school. In both cases, the southern school was taken to be more immediate and intuitive. This large community of artists in the south launched new styles of painting. Lighter, more intimate, suggestive, swift, and also more realistic. Some of the painters—Hsia Kuei, Mu Ch'i, Liang K'ai, were much admired by the Japanese Zen monks and merchants, so many of their works were bought by the Japanese: traded for the exquisite Japanese swords that the Chinese needed to fight off the northern invaders. Many of the paintings ended up in the Zen Honzans ("Main Mountains"—headquarters temples) of Kyoto, where they are kept today. The fact that some scrolls were landscapes of the imagination should not obscure the achievement of Chinese artists in rendering actual landscapes. The most fantastic-looking peaks of the scrolls have models in the karst limestone pinnacles of Kuangsi; misty cliffs and clinging pines are characteristic of the ranges of southern Anhwei province. The painting manual Chieh-tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, "Mustard-Seed Garden Guide to Painting" (about 1679), distinguishes numerous types of mountain formations, and provides a traditional menu of appropriate brush stroke- types for evoking them. Geological identifications of the forms indicated by different brush-strokes are described in Needham: Glaciated or maturely eroded slopes, sometimes steep, are shown by the technique called "spread-out hemp fibers", and mountain slopes furrowed by water into gullies are drawn in the bo yeh ts’un manner ("veins of a lotus-leaf hung up to dry"). "Unravelled rope" indicates igneous intrusions and granite peaks; "rolling clouds" suggest fantastically contorted eroded schists. The smooth roundness of exfoliated igneous rocks is seen in the "bullock hair" method, irregularly jointed and slightly weathered granite appears in "broken nets", and extreme erosion gives "devil face" or "skull" forms... cleavages across strata, with vertical jointed upright angular rocks, looking somewhat like crystals, are depicted in the "horse teeth" (ma ya ts'un) technique. The Ta Ch'ing T'ung Chih is an eighteenth-century geographical encyclopedia with an illustrated chapter on "mountains and rivers". These woodblocks, based on the painting tradition, not only give a fair rendering of specific scenes, but do so with geological precision. Needham notes how one can identify lwater-rounded boulder deposits, the Permian basalt cliffs of Omei-shan, the dipping strata of the Hsiang mountains near Po Chii-i's tomb, U-shaped valleys and rejuvenated valleys. Huang Kung-wang (born in 1269) was raised in the south. After a short spell with the civil service he became a Daoist teacher, poet, musician, and painter. He said to have recommended that one should "carry around a sketching brush in a leather bag" and to have called out to his students "look at the clouds—they have the appearance of mountain tops!" His handscroll "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains" came to be one of the most famous paintings within China. He started it one sum¬mer afternoon in 1347, looking out from his house, and doing the whole basic composition on that one day. It took another three years to finish it. It's a clean, graceful painting that breathes a spirit of unmystified naturalness. The scene is not particularly wild or glamorous; it has the plain power of simply being its own quite recognizable place. This is in tune with the Ch'an demand for "nothing special" and its tenderness for every entity, however humble. From around the Ming dynasty (1368 on) China had more and more people living in the cities. Painting helped keep a love of wild nature alive, but gradually many paintings were done by people who had never much walked the hills, for clients who would never get a chance to see such places. At the same time, there were painters like Wang Hui, who was a master of all historical styles, but also an acute observer of nature. His "Landscape in the Style of Chii-jan and Yen Wen-Kuei" (1713) carries the hills and slopes on out to sea as the painting fades away, by a portrayal of sea-fog twisting into scrolls and curls of water vapor / wind current / energy flow that faintly reminds us of the origins of Chinese paintings, and takes us back to the mineral and water cycle sources. Chi¬nese painting never strays far from its grounding in energy, life, and process. |
|
| 37 | 1984.10.16-12.9 |
Gary Snyder travels in the Peoples' Republic of China as part of an American Academy of Arts & Letters delegation for a 4-day writers conference, as guest of the Writers' Union with Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Harrison Salisbury, William Gass, Francine du Plessix Gray. The American writers were taken to the most famous tourist destinations : Beijing, the Chinese Acrobat Theatre, the Imperial Palace, a section of the Great Wall. After a week in Beijing, the group went to Xian, to Shanghai, to see the Buddhist temples, the Tang gardens in Suzhou and Han Shan's Cold Mountain. After the other members of the mission went back to America, Allen Ginsberg stayed in China by himself for some time to have more communication with contemporary Chinese writers and a spiritual dialogue with great ancient Chinese poets. He wen to the universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Baoding and Guiling to read and instruct his own poems and other western poets. In this period he wrote more than ten poems : One morning I took a walk in China, Reading Bai Juyi, Improvisation in Beijing, I love old Whitman so, Black shroud. In these poems Ginsberg depicts his endearment of China and its profound culture. And the poems have been praised as opening a window for western readers to understand China. |
|
| 38 | 1985- | Gary Snyder is Professor of English at the University of California, David. |
|
| 39 | 1986 |
Snyder, Gary. Left out in the rain : new poems, 1947-1985. (San Francisco : North Point Press, 1986). Lao-tzu says To forget what you knew is best. That's what I want : To get these sights down, Clear, right to th4e place Where they fade Back into the mind of my times. |
|
| 40 | 1987 |
Bai, Juyi [Bo, Juyi]. Long bitter song. Transl. by Gary Snyder. The "Long Bitter Song" (Chang hen ge) of Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i) is probably the best known and most widely popular poem in the whole Chinese cultural-sphere. Bai and his friend Wang Shifu (Wang Shih-fu) were visiting the Xienfu Chan Buddhist training center in 806, and were talking one night of the events of the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (Hsiian Tsung) and the An Lushan rebellion, sixty years earlier. Xuanzong was one of China's better rulers and presided over what has since been considered the golden age of both Chan Buddhist creativity and Chinese poetry. He took power in 712 and led a strong and innovative administration up to about 745. At that time he became totally infatuated with Yang Gui Fei (Yang Kuei- fei), the wife of one of his many sons. She became his concubine, the Sogdian-Turkish general An Lushan became an intimate of the couple and perhaps also a lover of Yang, the restive Northeast revolted under An, he led his troops into the capital, Xuanzong, Yang Gui Fei and the palace guard fled the city, and outside town at Horse Cliff the troops stopped, refused to go on, and insisted on putting Yang Gui Fei to death. That was in 755. The rebellion was quelled by 762, about the same time Xuanzong died. This rebellion marked a watershed in the fortunes of the Tang dynasty, beginning a period of somewhat more decentralized power, a rise of Chinese cultural chauvinism and contempt for the "third world" bor¬der peoples, and a greater weakness in relation to the borders. The story of the Emperor and his lovely concubine had become legend. After that evening's reminiscences. Bai was inspired to write the story as a long poem. Within his own lifetime he then heard it sung on the canals and in the pleasure quarters by singing-girls and minstrels. Bai lived from a.d. 772 to 846. He was born in a poor family, passed the examina-tions partly on the strength of his literary brilliance, and became a life¬long political functionary of great integrity and compassion who wrote many stirring poems on behalf of the common people. He was a Chan Buddhist, and studied under the master Wei Kuan, who was a disciple of the outstanding Chan teacher Mazu (Ma-tsu). This poem is in the seven character line, which gives it (in Chinese) this sort of rhythm: tum tum / turm turm: turm turm turm I have tried to keep to this beat as far as possible in my translation. I did the first version of it with the aid of Ch'en Shih-hsiang who was my teacher in graduate seminars at U.C. Berkeley in Tang poetics, in the early fifties. I must take full responsibility, however, for idiosyncratic aspects of the translation—cases of both stripped-down literalism, and occasional free flights. My debt to his gracious, learned, unquenchable delight in all forms of poetry is deep indeed, and I am pleased to honor his memory with this publication of a poem that we took much pleasure in reading together. Gary Snyder 28.X.86 I Han's Emperor wanted a Beauty one to be a "Destroyer of Kingdoms" Scouring the country, many years, sought, but didn't find. The Yang family had a girl just come grown; Reared deep in the inner-apartments, men didn't know of her. Such Heaven-given elegance could not be concealed One morning she was taken to the Emperor's household. A turn of the head, one smile, —a hundred lusts were flamed The Six Palaces rouge-and-eyebrow without one beautiful face. In the Spring cold she was given a bath at the Flower-pure Pool Warm pool, smooth water, on her cold, glowing skin Servant girls helping her rise, languorous, effortless beauty— This was the beginning of her new role: glistening with Imperial favour. Hair like a floating cloud, flower-face, ripple of gold when she walked. —In the warm Hibiscus curtains they spent the Spring night. Spring night is bitterly short it was noon when they rose; From this time on the Emperor held no early court. Holding feasts and revels without a moment's rest Spring passed, Spring dalliance, all in a whirl of nights. Beautiful girls in the outer palace: three thousand women: Love enough for three thousand centered in one body. In Gold House, perfectly attired her beauty served the night; In the Jade Tower the parties ended with drunk, peaceful Spring. Her sisters and brothers all given land, Splendor and brilliance surprised her humble family. Following this, on all the earth, fathers & mothers hearts No longer valued bearing males but hoped to have girls. The high-soaring Li palace pierces blue clouds Delights of Immortals, whirled on wind were heard of everywhere. Slow song, flowing dance, music like frost-crystal sifting from the lute-strings— The Emperor could exhaust a day watching—and still not full II Then Yuyang war drums, approached, shaking the earth; Alarming, scattering, the "Rainbow Skirt" the "Feathered Robe" dances. From the nine great City-Towers, smoke, dust, rose. Thousands of chariots, ten thousand horsemen scattered Southwest— Kingfisher banner fluttering, rippling, going and then stopping; West out the city walls over a hundred li And the six armies won't go on: nothing can be done— Writhing, twisting, Moth-eyebrows dies in front of the horses. Her flower comb falls to the ground not a man will pick it up— Kingfisher feathers, "little golden birds", jade hair-pin; The Emperor hides his face no way to help Turns, looks, blood, tears, flow, quietly mingle. Yellow dust eddies and scatters. Desolate winds blow. Cloud Trail winds and twists climbing to Sword-point Peak Under Omei Shan the last few came. Flags, banners, without brightness, A meagre-coloured sun. Shu river waters blue Shu mountains green And the Emperor, days, days, nights, nights, brooding. From the temporary palace, watching the moon colour tore his heart The night-rain bell-tinkle —bowel-twisting music. III Heaven turns, earth revolves, The Dragon-Chariot returned. But he was irresolute, didn't want to go; And at the foot of Horse Cliff, in the sticky mud, Couldn't find the Jade Face at her death-place. Court officials watching him soaked their clothes with tears. Looking east to the Capital walls, they returned on horses Came back to Pond Park —all was as before. Taiye Hibiscus, Weiyang Willow. But Hibiscus flowers were like her face, the Willows like her brow: Seeing this, how could he keep tears from falling. Spring wind, peach, plum, flowers open in the sun; Autumn rain, Wutong trees, leaf-fall time. Western palace, the inner court, many autumn grasses. Falling leaves fill the stairs red: and no one sweeps. The Pear-garden players white-haired young. Pepper-court eunuchs watched beautiful girls age. Evening, palace, glow-worm flight, —his thoughts were soundless He picked his single candle-wick down, couldn't reach sleep. Slow, slow, the night bell begins the long night, Glimmering, fading, the Milky Way, and day about to dawn. Silent tile roof-ducks are heavy with frost-flowers The Kingfisher quilt is cold— who will share his bed? Far, far, the living and the dead and the light years—cut apart. Her spirit already dissolving, not even entering dreams. IV A Linqiong Daoist priest of the Hongdu school Was able to deeply concentrate and thus call up the spirits. Hearing this, the Emperor —troubled, twisting thoughts. Ordered the Daoist priest to make a thorough search. Pushing the sky, riding air, swift as a thunderbolt, Harrowing the heavens, piercing Earth, he sought everywhere Above exhausting the blue void, below, the Yellow Springs. The ends of earth—vast, vast, and nowhere did he find her. Then he heard—that out on the ocean— was a mountain of Immortals A mountain at—nowhere— a cloudy, unreal place. Palace towers, tinkling gems, where Five Clouds rise. Within—lovely, wanton, chaste, many faery people. There was there one faery called Taizhen; Snow skin, flower appearance, it had to be her. At the Gold Tower of the West Wing, he knocked on the Jade door: Announcing himself to Little Jade —and she told Shuang Cheng, That the Emperor of the people of Han had sent an envoy. In the nine-flowered canopy the faery's dreams were broken; Holding her clothes, pushing the pillow, she rose, walking unsteady. Winding, opening the pearl door, the inlaid silver screens. Her cloud-like hair, floating on one side, —just brought from sleep. Her flower-cap unadjusted she came down the hall, Wind blew her elegant sleeves floating, floating up— Seemed like the "Rainbow Skirt", the "Feathered Robe" dance. Her jade-like figure small and alone, she scattered her sad tears: As though one branch of a blossoming pear was holding the whole Spring's rain. Restraining her feeling, cooling her look, she told him to thank the Emperor; "With that parting our two forms were split by the World's vast shifting; After Zhaoyang temple, our love was cut off. Here in Raspberry-tangle Palace the days and months are long— I look down, hoping to see lands where humans dwell, I never see Chang'an but only dusty haze.” Then taking some ancient treasures rich in deep feeling, An inlaid box, a gold hairpin, to be delivered back, Keeping a leg of the hairpin, keeping half the box, Breaking the gold of the hairpin, box cut in two— "If only our hearts are strong as this gold hairpin, Above in heaven, or among men, we will somehow meet. Go back swiftly tell him this message: For it tells of one Vow that two hearts know, In the seventh month on the seventh day in Long-Life Temple. At midnight, no one about, we swore together If in heaven, to fly as the 'paired-wing' birds; If on earth, to grow as one joined branch." Heaven lasts, Earth endures, —and both will end; This sorrow stretches on forever, without limit. |
|
| 41 | 1990 |
Snyder, Gary. The practice of the world [ID D29202]. Perhaps one should not talk (or write) too much about the wild world : it may be that it embarrasses other animals to have attention called to them. A sensibility of this sort might help explain why there is so little 'landscape poetry' from the cultures of the old ways. Nature description is a kind of writing that comes with civilization and its habits of collection and classification. Chinese landscape poetry begins around the fifth century A.D. with the work of Xie Lingyun. There were fifteen hundred years of Chinese song and poetry before him (allowing as the Shi-jing - China's first collection of poems and songs, 'The Book of Songs' – might register some five centuries of folksong prior to the writing down) and there is much nature, but no broad landscapes : it is about mulberry trees, wild edible greens, threshing, the forager and farmer's world up close. By Hsieh's time the Chinese had become removed enough from their own mountains and rivers to aestheticize them. This doesn't mean that people of the old ways don't appreciate the view, but they have a different point of view. (p. 23) Some of us have learned much from traveling day after day on foot over snowfields, rockslides, passes, torrents, and valley floor forests, by 'putting ourselves out there'. Another – and most sophisticated – way is that of Vimalakirti, the legendary Buddhist layman, who taught that by directly intuiting our condition in the actually existing world we realize that we have had nothing from the beginning. A Tibetan saying has it : "The experience of emptiness engenders compassion". (p. 25) In China the management of mountain lands was left largely to the village councils – all the central government wanted was taxes. Taxes were collected in Kind, and local specialties were highly prized. The demands of the capital drew down Kingfisher feathers, Musk Deer glands, Rhinoceros hides, and other exotic products of the mountains and streams, as well as rice, timber, and silk. The village councils may have resisted overexploitation of their resources, but when the edge of spreading deforestation reached their zone (the fourteenth century seems to be a turning point for the forests of heartland China), village land management crumbled. Historically, the seizure of the commons – east or west – by either the central government or entrepreneurs from the central economy has resulted in degradation of wild lands and agricultural soils. There is sometimes good reason to kill the Golden Goose : the quick profits can be reinvested elsewhere at a higher return. (p. 36) There were questions about the civilizations of the Far East, and I loaned a copy of Lao-zi's Dao De Jing to a thoughtful woman leader who was active in both native culture and the church. Two days later over coffee she returned it saying, "Old. That book's really wise and old. I didn't know the Chinese went back so far." I asked her about her involvement with the church, because I knew her also to be very strong on Inupiaq spirit revival. "It's nice to be part of something international too", she said. "I didn't know in those days about China or India and their thought. But because I'm in the church I have friends all overs, and people I see I go to Seattle." (p. 70) In very early China diviners heated tortoise shell over flame till it cracked and then read meanings from the design of the cracks. It's a Chinese idea that writing started from copying these cracks. Every kind of writing relates to natural materials. The current form of Chinese characters with their little books and right angles came about when the Han Chinese shifted from incising signs with a stylus on shaved bamboo staves to writing with a rabbit-hair brush dipped in a pine soot ink on absorbent mulberry-fiber paper. The Chinese character forms are entirely a function of the way a brush turns when it lifts off the page. Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw. (p. 71-72) Whether Greece, Germania, or Han China, there were always nearby areas of forest, and wild animals, migratory waterfowl, seas full of fish and whales, and these were part of the experience of every active person. (p. 79) Ron and I turned our conversation then to China. He and I share this double focus : we appreciate Alaska as the most open and wildest place in the north – and one of the wildest places left on earth – and China as the most thoroughly literary of civilization. They are not so far from each other across the globe. Both look like they are each nearing the end of their own case. But China, destructive as its recent environmental history may be, is a great civilization that will perhaps stay vital by virtue of its tiny thread of surviving wildness (call it Miao songs and Chan poems)… (p. 80) To know that it takes six months to walk across Turtle Island/North America walking steadily but comfortably all day every day is to get some grasp of the distance. The Chinese spoke of the 'four dignities' – Standing, Lying, Sitting, and Walking. They are ' dignities' in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes. I think many of us would consider it quite marvelous if we could set out on foot again, with a little inn or a clean camp available every ten or so miles and no threat from traffic, to travel across a large landscape – all of China, all of Europe. That's the way to see the world : in our own bodies. Sacred mountains and pilgrimage to them is a deeply established feature of the popular religions of Asia. When Dôgen speaks of mountains he is well aware of these prior traditions. There are hundreds of famous Daoist and Buddhist peaks in China and similar Buddhist and Shinto-associated mountains in Japan. There are several sorts of sacred mountains in Asia : a 'sacred site' that is the residence of a spirit or deity is the simplest and possibly oldest. Then there are 'sacred areas' – perhaps many dozens of square miles – that are special to the mythology and practice of a sect with its own set of Daoist or Buddhist deities – miles of paths – and dozens or hundreds of little temples and shrines. Pilgrims might climb thousands of feet, sleep in the plain board guesthouses, eat rice gruel and a few pickles, and cirbumambulate set routes burning incense and bowing at site after site. .. Mountains also have mythic associations of verticality, spirit, height, transcendence, hardness, resistance, and masculinity. For the Chinese they are exemplars of the ' yang' : dry, hard, male, and bright. Waters are feminine : wet, soft, dark ' yin' with associations of fluid-but-strong, seeking (and carving) the lowest, soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting… In common usage the compound 'mountains and waters' – shan-shui in Chinese – is the straightforward term for landscape. Landscape painting is 'mountains and waters pictures'. (A mountain range is sometimes also termed 'mai', a 'pulse' or 'vein' – as a network of veins on the back of a hand. One does not need to be a specialist to observe that landforms are a play of stream-cutting and ridge-resistance and that waters and hills interpenetrate in endlessly branching rhythms. The Chinese feel for land has always incorporated this sense of a dialectic of rock and water, of downward flow and rocky uplift, and of the dynamism and 'slow flowing' of earth-forms. There are several surviving large Chinese horizontal handscrolls from pre-modern eras titled something like 'Mountains and Rivers Without End'. Some of them move through the four seasons and seems to picture the whole world… 'Mountains and waters' is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature. As such it goes well beyond dichotomies of purity and pollution, natural and artificial. The whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages, cities, and the (once comparatively small) dusty world of human affairs. (p. 105-109) Dôgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. Dôgen was probably envisioning those mountains of Asia whose trails he had walked over the years – peaks in the three to nine-thousand-foot range, hazy blue or blue-green, mostly tree-covered, maybe the steep jumbled mountains of coastal South China where he had lived and practices thirteen years earlier. (p. 110) It does not mean distancing yourself from the natural world. For some it has meant living as mountain hermits or members of religious communities. The 'house' has been set against 'mountains' or 'purity'. Enlarging the scale of the homeless world the fifth-century poet Zhiang-yan said the proper hermit should 'take the purple heavens to be his hut, the encircling sea to be his pond, roaring with laughter in his nakedness, walking along singing with his hair hanging sown'(Watson, 1971, 82). The early Tang poet Han-shan is taken as the veritable model of a recluse – his spacious home reaches to the end of the universe: I settled at Cold Mountain long ago, Already it seems like years and years. Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams And linger watching things themselves. Men don't get this far into the mountains, White clouds gather and billow. Thin grass does for a mattress, The blue sky makes a good quilt. Happy with a stone underhead Let heaven and earth go about their changes. (p. 111-112) While the Buddhist tradition of North India and Tibet made the mandala – painted or drawn charts of the positions of consciousness and cause-and-effect chains – their visual teaching aids, the Chan tradition of China (especially the Southern Song) did something similar (I will venture to suggest) with landscape painting. If a scroll is taken as a kind of Chinese mandala, then all the characters in it are our various little selves, and the cliffs, trees, waterfalls, and clouds are our own changes and stations. (p. 115) I wonder what Dôgen would have said of city walking. Hang-zhou had level broad straight streets paralleling canals. He must have seen the many-storied houses, clean cobbled streets, theaters, markets, and innumerable restaurants. It had three thousand public baths. Marco Polo (who called it Quinsai) visited it twenty-five years later and estimated that it was probably the largest (at least a million people) and most affluent city in the world at that time (Gernet, 1962). Even today the people of Hang-zhou remember the lofty eleventh-century poet Su Shi, who built the causeway across West Lake when he was governor. At the time of Dôgen's walk North China was under the control of the Mongols, and Hang-zhou would fall to the Mongols in fifty-five more years. The South China of that era sent landscape painting, calligraphy, both the Sôtô and Rinzai schools of Zen, and the vision of that great southern capital to Japan. The memory of Hang-zhou shaped both Osaka and Tokyo in their Tokugawa-era evolution. These two positions – one the austere Zen practice with its spare, clean halls, the other the possibility of a convivial urban life rich in festivals and theaters and restaurants – are two potent legacies of East Asia to the world. If Zen stands for the Fare Eastern love of nature, Hang-zhou stands for the ideal of the city. Both are brimming with energy and life. (p. 122) Daoist philosophers tell us that surprise and subtle instruction might come forth from the Useless. So it was with the wastelands of the American West – inaccessible, inhospitable, arid, and forbidding to the eyes of most early Euro-Americans. (p. 135) Forests of the type that had prevailed earlier, the hardwoods, survive today in the eastern United States and were also the original vegetation (before agriculture and early logging) of China and Japan. Visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park today might give you an idea of what the mountain forests outside the old Chinese capital of Xian, known earlier as Ch' ang-an, looked like in the ninth century. (p. 137-138) China's lowland hardwood forests gradually disappeared as agriculture spread and were mostly gone by about thirty-five hundred years ago. (The Chinese philosopher Meng-zi commented on the risks of clearcutting in the fourth century B.C.). (p. 140). With good practices North America could maintain a lumber industry and protect a halfway decent amount of wild forest for ten thousand years. That is about the same number of years as the age of the continuously settled village culture of the Wei River valley in China, a span of time which is not excessive for humans to consider and plan by. (p. 143) But let there also be really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves available to whatever the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them : they are like the Chinese Immortals, they are Han-shan and Shi-de sorts of characters – to have lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They make me almost look forward to old age. (p. 148) In the imagery of that oldest of agrarian civilizations, China, the path or the road has been given a particularly strong place. From the earliest days of Chinese civilization, natural and practical processes have been described in the language of path or way. Such connections are explicit in the cryptic Chinese text that seems to have gathered all the earlier lore and restated it for later history – the Dao De Jing. 'The Classic of the Way and the Power. ' The word 'dao' itself means way, road, trail, or the lead/follow. Philosophically it means the nature and way of truth. (The terminology of Daoism was adopted by early Chinese Buddhist translators. To be either a Buddhist or Daoist was to b3e a 'person of the way'). Another extension of the meaning of 'dao' is the practice of an art or craft. In Japanese, 'dao' is pronounced 'dô' – as in 'kadô', 'the way of flowers', 'bushidô', 'way of the warrior', or 'sadô', 'tea ceremony'. (p. 155) In the Zhuang-zi (Chuang-tzu) book, a third-century-B.C. witty radical Daoist text, perhaps a century or so after the Dao De Jing, there are a number of craft and 'knach' passages: The Cook Ting cut up an ox for Lord Wenhui with dance-like grace and ease. "I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint… I've had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I've cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there's plenty of room… That's why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone. "Excellent ! " said Lord Wenhui. "I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life !” (Watson, 1968, 50-51). (p. 157) A steady schedule of meditation and work was folded into weekly, monthly, and annual cycles of ceremonies and observations which went back to Song-dynasty China and in part back to the India of Shakyamuni's time. Sleep was short, the food was meager, the rooms spare and unheated, but this (in the sixties) was as true in the worker's or farmer's world as it was in the monastery. (p. 159) The Dao De Jing itself gives us the most subtle interpretation of what the way might mean. It starts out by saying this : "The way that can be followed ('wayed') is not the constant way." 'Dao ke dao fei chang dao'. First line, first chapter. It is saying : "A path than can be followed is not a 'spiritual' path." The actuality of things cannot be confined within so linear an image as a road. The intention of training can only be accomplished when the 'follower' has been forgotten. The way is without difficulty – it does not itself propose obstacles to us, it is open in all directions. (p. 161). In the midst of the An Lushan rebellion and the destruction of Ch'ang-an, the capital, Du Fu wrote a poem, Spring view, that grieves for Ch'ang-an and all of China. It opens : The State is destroyed, but the mountains and rivers survive. It is one of the most famous of Chinese poems, well known in Japan as well. The Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki has recently reversed this line to give it a contemporary reading : The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives. One has to travel outside North America to appreciate this. Speaking to a group of Chinese writiers and intellectuals in Beijing in 1984 about the need to include riverbanks and forest slopes in the workers-and-peasants councils, I quoted Nanao's version of the great line. They responded with a pained laugh. |
|
| 42 | 1991 |
Snyder, Gary. Introduction. In : Beneath a single moon : Buddhism in contemporary American poetry. Ed. by Kent Johnson and Craig Paulenich. (Boston : Shambhala, 1991). "My interest in writing brought me to the twentieth-century modernists and Chinese poetry ; and my thoughts on nature and wilderness brought me to Taoism and then to Zen. This growing awareness of Zen was also interwoven with the discovery of Chinese landscape painting." |
|
| 43 | 1993 |
Snyder, Gary. Sixteen T'ang poems : [translations]. [ID D29196]. Note dat. 14.1.93 In the early fifties I managed to get myself accepted into the Department of Oriental Languages at UC Berkeley as a graduate student. I took seminars in the reading of T'ang and Sung poems with Professor Ch'en Shih-hsiang, a remarkable scholar, calligrapher, poet, and critic who had a profound appreciation for good poetry and of any provenance. Ch'en Hsien-sheng introduced me to the Han-shan poems, and I published those translations back in the sixties. The poems translated here also got their start in those seminars, but I never considered them quite finished. From Berkeley I went to Japan and for the subsequent decade was working almost exclusively with Ch'an texts. Another twenty years went into developing a farmstead in the Sierra Nevada and working for the ecological movement. In the last few years I have had a chance to return to my readings in Chinese poetry and bring a few of the poems I started back then to completion. The little collection is dedicated to the memory of Ch'en Shih-hsiang. Two poems by Meng Hao-jan Meng, Hao-jan [Meng Haoran]. Spring dawn. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : The Peabody review ; winter (1989-1990). Spring sleep, not yet awake to dawn, I am full of birdsongs. Throughout the night the sounds of wind and rain Who knows what flowers fell. Meng, Hao-jan [Meng Haoran]. Mooring on Chien-te river. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : The Peabody review ; winter (1989-1990). The boat rocks at anchor by the misty island Sunset, my loneliness comes again. In these vast wilds the sky arches down to the trees. In the clear river water, the moon draws near. Five poems by Wang Wei Wang, Wei. Deer camp. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Journal for the protection of all beings ; no 4 (Fall 1978). Empty mountains : no one to be seen. Yet – hear – human sounds and echoes. Returning sunlight enters the dark woods ; Again shining on green moss, above. Sekundärliteratur : Eliot Weinberger : Surely one of the best translations, partially because of Snyder's lifelong forest experience. Like Rexroth, he can see the scene. Every word of Wang has been translated, and nothing added, yet the translation exists as an American poem. Changing the passive is heard to the imperative hear is particularly beautiful, and not incorrect: it creates an exact moment, which is now. Giving us both meanings, sounds and echoes, for the last word of line 2 is, like most sensible ideas, revolutionary. Translators always assume that only one reading of a foreign word or phrase may be presented, despite the fact that perfect correspondence is rare. The poem ends strangely. Snyder takes the last word, which everyone else has read as on, and translates it with its alternative meaning, above, isolating it from the phrase with a comma. What's going on? Moss presumably is only above if one is a rock or bug. Or are we meant to look up, after seeing the moss, back toward the sun: the vertical metaphor of enlightenment? In answer to my query, Snyder wrote: "The reason for .. moss, above'... is that the sun is entering (in its sunset sloping, hence 'again'—a final shaft) the woods, and illuminating some moss up in the trees. (NOT ON ROCKS.) This is how my teacher Ch'en Shih-hsiang saw it, and my wife (Japanese) too, the first time she looked at the poem." The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading. The same poem cannot be read twice. Snyder's explanation is only one moment, the latest, when the poem suddenly transforms before our eyes. Wang's 20 characters remain the same, but the poem continues in a state of restless change. Wang, Wei. Bamboo Lane House. Transl. by Gary Snyder. Sitting alone, hid in bamboo Plucking the lute and gravely whistling. People wouldn't know that deep woods Can be this bright in the moon. Wang, Wei. Saying farewell. Transl. by Gary Snyder. Me in the mountains and now you've left. Sunset, I close the peelpole door. Next spring when grass is green, Will you return once more ? Wang, Wei. Thinking of us. Transl. by Gary Snyder. Read beans grow in the south In spring they put out shoots. Gather a lapful for me – And doing it, think of us. Wang, Wei. Poem. Transl. by Gary Snyder. You who come from my village Ought to know its affairs The day you passed the silk window Had the chill plum bloomed ? Three poems for women in the Service of the Palace Tu, Mu [Du, Mu]. Autumn evening. Transl. by Gary Snyder. A silver candle in the autumn gloom by a lone painted screen Her small light gauze fan shivers the fireflies On the stairs of heaven, night's color cool as water : She sits watching the Herd-boy, the weaving-girl, stars. Yuan, Chen [Yuan Zhen]. The Summer Palace. Transl. by Gary Snyder. Silence settles on the old Summer Palace Palace flowers still quiet red. White-haired concubines Idly sit and gossip of the days of Hsüan Tsung. Po, Chü-i [Bo Juyi]. Palace song. Transl. by Gary Snyder. Tears soak her thin shawl dreams won't come. In the dark night, from the front palace, girls rehearsing songs. Still fresh and young, already put down, She leans across the brazier to wait the coming dawn. Tu, Fu [Du Fu]. Spring view. Transl. by Gary Snyder. The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain. This spring the city is deep in weeds and brush. Touched by the times even flowers weep tears, Fearing leaving the birds tangled hearts. Watch-tower fires have been burning for three months To get a note from home would cost ten thousand gold. Scratching my white hair thinner Seething hopes all in a trembling hairpin. (Events of the An Lushan rebellion) Liu, Ch'ang-ch'ing [Liu, Changqing]. Parting from Ling Ch'e. Transl. by Gary Snyder. Green, green bamboo-grove temple Dark, dark, the bell-sounding evening. His rainhat catches the slanting sunlight, Alone returning From the distant blue peaks. Wang Chih-huan [Wang Zhihuan]. Climbing Crane Tower. Transl. by Gary Snyder. The Whie sun has gone over the mountains The yellow river is flowing to the sea. If you wish to see a thousand li Climb one story higher in the tower. Liu, Tsung-yüan [Liu Zongyuan]. River snow. Transl. by Gary Snyder. These thousand peaks cut off the flight of birds On all the trails, human tracks are gone. A single boat—coat—hat—an old man! Alone fishing chill river snow. Wang, Ch'ang-ling [Wang Changling]. Parting with Hsin Chien at Hibiscus tavern. Transl. by Gary Snyder Cold rain on the river we enter Wu by night At dawn I leave for Ch'u-shan, alone. If friends in Lo-yang ask after me, I've "A heart like ice in a jade vase." Two poems written at Maple Bridge near Su-chou Chang, Chi [Zhang Ji ]. Maple bridge night mooring. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Cloudline : no 1 (1985/86). Moon set, a crow caws, frost fills the sky River, maple, fishing-fires cross my troubled sleep. Beyond the walls of Su-chou from Cold Mountain temple The midnight bell sounds reach my boat. Snyder, Gary. At Maple Bridge (1984) Men are mixing gravel and cement At Maple bridge, Down an alley by a tea-stall From Cold Mountain temple ; Where Chang Chi heard the bell. The stone step moorage Empty, lapping water, And the bell sound has travelled Far across the sea. |
|
| 44 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. The art of poetry No. 74. Interviewed by Eliot Weinberger. [ID D29189]. The interview took place before an audience at the Unterberg Poetry Center, New York, 1992. Eliot Weinberger : Gary Snyder is a rarity in the United States : an immensely popular poet whose work is taken seriously by other poets. He is America's primary poet-celebrant of the wilderness, poet-exponent of environmentalism and Zen Buddhism, and poet-citizen of the Pacific Rim – the first American poet to gaze almost exclusively west toward the East, rather than east toward Western civilization. … Weinberger But it is abnormal for poets not to be involved in the state. The United States remains an exception to most of the rest of the world, where poets commonly have served as diplomats or as bureaucrats in some ministry. Snyder Oh true. The whole history of Chinese poetry is full of great poets who played a role in their society. Indeed, I do too. I am on committees in my county. I have always taken on some roles that were there for me to take in local politics, and I believe deeply in civic life. But I don't think that as a writer I could move on to a state or national scale of politics and remain a writer. My choice is to remain a writer. Weinberger Let's get on to the writing and go back forty years or so. One of the amazing things about your work is that you seemed to burst on the scene fully formed with Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, which were published in 1959 and 1958 but written earlier in the fifties when you were in your twenties. The poems in both books are unmistakably Snyder poems, and apparently, unlike the rest of us, you are not embarrassed by the work of your youth, for you picked eighteen of the twenty-three poems in Riprap for your Selected Poems. Snyder Actually the poems in Riprap are not the poems of my youth. Those are the poems that I've kept because those were the ones I felt were the beginning of my life as a poet. I started writing poems when I was fifteen. I wrote ten years of poetry before Riprap. Phase one: romantic teenage poetry about girls and mountains. … Snyder … So when I wrote the first poems in Riprap it was after I had given up poetry. I went to work in the mountains in the summer of 1955 for the U.S. Park Service as a trail crew laborer and had already started classical Chinese study. I thought I had renounced poetry. Then I got out there and started writing these poems about the rocks and blue jays. I looked at them. They didn't look like any poems that I had ever written before. So I said, these must be my own poems. I date my work as a poet from the poems in Riprap. … Snyder When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I began working with Chinese and found myself being shaped by what I was learning from Chinese poetry, both in translation and in the original. And I had been reading Native American texts and studying linguistics. Weinberger What were you finding in Chinese poetry at that time? Snyder The secular quality, the engagement with history, the avoidance of theology or of elaborate symbolism or metaphor, the spirit of friendship, the openness to work, and, of course, the sensibility for nature. For me it was a very useful balancing force to set beside Sidney, The Faerie Queene, Renaissance literature, Dante. The occidental tradition is symbolic, theological, and mythological, and the Chinese is paradoxically more, shall we say, modern, in that it is secular in its focus on history or nature. That gave me a push. Weinberger Were you getting the ideogramic method from Pound or from the Chinese poetry directly? Snyder From the Chinese poetry directly. I could never make sense of that essay by Pound. I already knew enough about Chinese characters to realize that in some ways he was off, and so I never paid much attention to it. What I found in Pound were three or four dozen lines in the Cantos that are stunning—unlike anything else in English poetry—which touched me deeply and to which I am still indebted. … Weinberger Since we are talking about Chinese poetry I wanted to ask you about the Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain Poems. It is curious because Chinese poetry is so canonical, and Han Shan is not in the canon. I think at the time there were people who thought that you made him up. I wondered how you discovered him? Snyder Well, he is only noncanonical for Europeans and Americans. The Chinese and the Japanese are very fond of Han Shan, and he is widely known in the Far East as an eccentric and as possibly the only Buddhist poet that serious Far Eastern litterateurs would take seriously. They don't like the rest of Buddhist poetry—and for good reason, for the most part. To give you an example: in 1983 I was in China with a party of American writers—Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Harrison Salisbury, William Gass, Francine du Plessix Grey, and others—and we were introduced to some members of the Politburo upstairs in some huge building. The woman who was our simultaneous interpreter introduced me to these bureau members—I am embarrassed to say I don't remember who these impressive Chinese persons were—by saying, "He is the one who translated Han Shan." They instantly started loosening up, smiling and quoting lines from Han Shan in Chinese to me. He is well known. So whose canon are we talking about? Weinberger You haven't continued to translate much. Was this just something you felt you should do at the moment but that later there was too much other work to do? Snyder There is a line somewhere—is it Williams who says it?— "You do the translations. I can sing." Rightly or wrongly, I took that somehow, when I ran into it, as a kind of an instruction to myself, not to be drawn too much into doing translation. I love doing Chinese translations, and I have done more that I haven't published, including the longest shih in Chinese, the Ch'ang-hen ko, "The Long Bitter Song" of Po Chü-i. So I am not just translating these tiny things. I am working right now on finishing up the P'i-p'a hsing, the other long Po Chü-i poem about the woman who plays the lute. And I've done a few Tang poems. Maybe someday I'll get to doing more Chinese translations. … Weinberger Going back—you basically left the scene in 1956 to go to Japan. Snyder In May of 1956 I sailed away in an old ship, headed across the Pacific for Japan. Weinberger Why did you go? It seems like it was an exciting moment in America when you left. Snyder Well, exciting as the scene was looking in 1956, I was totally ready to go to Japan. I had laid plans to go to the Far East, oh, three years prior to that, and had had several setbacks. The State Department denied me a passport for some of my early political connections. Weinberger Would you have gone to China if the political situation had been different at the time? Snyder I certainly would have. Weinberger It would have completely changed the course of the rest of your life. Snyder I'm sure it would have changed my life, although I don't know just how much, because my focus in going to the Far East was the study of Buddhism, not to find out if socialism would work, and the only Buddhists I would have found in China would have been in hiding at that time and probably covered with bruises. So it wouldn't have been a good move. Weinberger I get the sense that you are much more attracted to Chinese poetry than Japanese poetry. Snyder To some extent that's true. It is a karmic empathy that is inexplicable. I love Japanese literature and Japanese poetry too, but I feel a deep resonance with Chinese poetry. … Weinberger Are you still a practicing Buddhist? Do you sit every day? Snyder Almost every day. Zazen becomes a part of your life, a very useful and beautiful part of your life—a wonderful way to start the day by sitting for at least twenty, twenty-five minutes every morning with a little bit of devotional spirit. My wife and I are raising a thirteen-year-old adopted daughter. When you have children you become a better Buddhist too, because you have to show them how to put the incense on the altar and how to make bows and how to bow to their food and so forth. That is all part of our culture, so we keep a Buddhist culture going. My grown sons say, when they are asked what they are, because they were raised that way, "Well, we are ethnic Buddhists. We don't know if we really believe it or not, but that is our culture." Weinberger What does zazen do for the poetry? Do you feel that there is a relation there that helps somehow in the writing? Snyder I was very hesitant to even think about that for many years, out of a kind of gambler's superstition not to want to talk too much or think too much about the things that might work for you or might give you luck. I'm not so superstitious anymore, and to demystify zazen Buddhist meditation, it can be said that it is a perfectly simple, ordinary activity to be silent, to pay attention to your own consciousness and your breath, and to temporarily stop listening or looking at things that are coming in from the outside. To let them just pass through you as they happen. There's no question that spending time with your own consciousness is instructive. You learn a lot. You can just watch what goes on in your own mind, and some of the beneficial effects are you get bored with some of your own tapes and quit playing them back to yourself. You also realize—I think anyone who does this comes to realize— that we have a very powerful visual imagination and that it is very easy to go totally into visual realms where you are walking around in a landscape or where any number of things can be happening with great vividness. This taught me something about the nature of thought and it led me to the conclusion—in spite of some linguists and literary theorists of the French ilk—that language is not where we start thinking. We think before language, and thought-images come into language at a certain point. We have fundamental thought processes that are prelinguistic. Some of my poetry reaches back to that. … Weinberger Just as Chinese poetry is full of empty words, deliberately empty words for the ch'i, the sort of breath, to circulate through. In 1970 you moved back to the Sierra Nevadas, and you've been there ever since. I think from that moment on, when you finally settle down, you're talking much more about a poetry rooted in place. Snyder Certainly a number of the poems written since 1970 reflect the position of being in a place, a spot in the world to which I always return. A lot of poems, however, do come out of my hunting and gathering trips to other territories. The idea of being a person of place never excludes the possibility of travel. To the contrary, it reminds people of place—everybody else in the world except Canadians, Australians, and Americans—that they know where they come from. .. … Weinberger Since we're talking about your map of the world, people have wondered about the general absence of European civilization—or at least Europe after the Paleolithic—in your work. To me it's no more shocking than the absence of Asia—not to mention Africa—from everyone else's work. But still the question comes up. Is this a deliberate criticism of Eurocentrism or merely just the track your interest followed? Snyder It's true that I haven't visited Europe much, but it isn't totally absent from my poetry, and there are some key points in my work that connect with occidental cultural insights that are classical, if not Paleolithic… … Snyder If one's real work is the writing and if one is a fiction writer, I guess one's work as a writer really holds one to the literally physical act of writing and visualizing and imagining and researching and following out the threads of one's project. However, if one is a nonfiction prose writer or a poet, one is apt to be much more closely engaged with daily life as part of one's real work, and one's real work actually becomes life. And life comes down to daily life. This is also a very powerful Buddhist point: that what we learn and even hopefully become enlightened by is a thorough acceptance of exactly who we are and exactly what it is we must do, with no evasion, no hiding from any of it, physically or psychologically. And so finding the ceremonial, the almost sacramental quality of the moves of daily life is taught in Buddhism. That's what the Japanese tea ceremony is all about. The Japanese tea ceremony is a model of sacramental tea drinking. Tea drinking is taken as a metaphor for the kitchen and for the dining room. You learn how to drink tea, and if you learn how to drink tea well, you know how to take care of the kitchen and dining room every day. If you learn how to take care of the kitchen and the dining room, you've learned about the household. If you know about the household, you know about the watershed… … |
|
| 45 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. Mountains and rivers without end [ID D29321]. Endless streams and mountains. Ch'i shan Wu Chin Clearing the mind and sliding in to that created space, a web of waters streaming over rocks, air misty but not raining, seeing this land from a boat on a lake or a board slow river, casting by. The path comes down along a lowland stream Slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods, Reappears in a pine grove, no farms around, just tidy cottages and shelters, gateways , rest stops, roofed but unwalled work space, - a warm damp climate; a trail of climbing stairsteps forks upstream. Big ranges lurk behind these rugged little outcrops – these spits of low ground rocky uplifts layered pinnacles aslant, flurries of brushy cliffs receding, far back and high above, vague peaks. A man hunched over, sitting on a log another stands above him, lifts a staff, a third, with a roll of mats or a lute, looks on; a bit offshore two people in a boat. The trail goes far inland, somewhere back around a bay, lost in distant foothill slopes & back again at a village on the beach, and someone's fishing. Rider and walker cross a bridge above a frothy braided torrent that descends from a flurry of roofs like flowers temples tucked between cliffs, a side trail goes there; a jumble of cliffs above, ridge tops edged with bushes, valley fog below a hazy canyon. A man with a shoulder load leans into the grade. Another horse and a hiker, the trail goes up along cascading streambed no bridge in sight – comes back through chinquapin or liquidambars; another group of travelers. Trail's end at the edge of an inlet below a heavy set of dark rock hills. Two moored boats with basket roofing, a boatman in the bow looks lost in thought. Hills beyond rivers, willows in a swamp, a gentle valley reaching far inland. The watching boas has floated off the page. At the end of the painting the scroll continues on with seals and Poems. It tells a further tale : '- Wang Wen-wei saw this at the mayor's house in Ho-tung Town, year 1205. Wrote at the end of it, 'The Fashioner of Things has no original intentions Mountains and rivers are spirit, condenses.' '…Who has come up with these miraculous forests and springs ? Pale ink on fine white silk.' Later that month someone named Li Hui added, '…Most people can get along with the noise of dogs and chickens; Everybody cheerful in these peaceful times. But I – why are my tastes so odd? I love the company of streams and boulders.' T'ien Hsieh of Wei-lo, no date, next wrote, '…the water holds up the mountains, The mountains go down in the water…' In 1332 Chih-shun adds, '…This is truly a painting worth careful keeping. And it has poem-colophons from the Sung and the Chin dynasties. That it survived dangers of fire and war makes it even rarer.' In the mid-seventeenth century one Wang To had a look at it: 'My brother's relative by marriage, Wên-sun, is learned and has good taste. He writes good prose and poetry. My brother brought over this painting of his to show me...' The great Ch'ing dynasty collector Liang Ch'ing-piao owned it, but didn't write on it or cover it with seals. From him it went into the Imperial collection down to the early twentieth century. Chang Ta-ch'ien sold it in 1949. Now it's at the Cleveland Art Museum, Which sits on a rise that looks out toward the waters of Lake Erie. Step back and gaze again at the land. it rises and subsides – ravines and cliffs like waves of blowing leaves – stamp the foot, walk with it, clap turn, the creeks come in, ah strained through boulders, mountains walking on the water, water ripples every hill. – I walk out of the museum – low gray clouds over the lake – Chill March breeze. Old ghost ranges, sunken rivers, come again stand by the wall and tell their tale, walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the broad white space: lead out and tip the moist black line. Walking on walking, Under foot earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. Note : A hand scroll by this name showed up in Shansi province, central China, in the thirteenth century. Even then the painter was unknown, 'a person of the Sung Dynasty.' Now it's on Turtle Island. Unroll the scroll to the left, a section at a time, as you let the right side roll back in. Place by place unfurls. ……… Hsüan Tsang went to India 629 AD returned to China 645 with 657 sûtras, images, mandalas, and fifty relics – a curved frame pak with a parasol, embroidery, carving, incense censer swinging as he walked the Pamir the Tarim Turfan the Punjab the doab of Ganga and Yamuna, he carried 'emptiness' He carried 'mind only' Vijnaptimâtra The humpbacked flute player Kokop'ele His hump is a pack. ............. The humb-backed flute player Shooting the Hundred-Pace Rapids Su Tung P'o saw, for a moment, It all stand still. "I stare at the water : It moves with unspeakable slowness". ……….. Sekundärliteratur 1999 Anthony Hunt : Gary Snyder told Katherine McNeil that "Mountains and rivers is a title for a number of Chinese landscape paintings. One is by the Yuan dynasty painter Xuben, whose work inspired me. I'm writing about the complementarity of mountains and rivers, but that's really the planet, taking that on." The Cleveland scroll is an unsigned handscroll done in ink and slight coloring on silk with nine colophons that provide information about the work's early history. Forty-eight seals of collectors, including eight belonging to Liang Qingbiao (1620-1691), give further evidence of the transmission of the scroll from the 1340s on ; but it is now thought by several eminent authorities to be more likely to date around 1150. Snyder draws attention to the scroll's anonymity in a note that concludes the first section of his poem 'the painter was unknown, a person of the Sung dynasty'. The misty painted Chinese mountains seen by Snyder in Seattle are 'real' on several levels : in a generic sense they appear to him a true reflection of the kind of mountains with which he grew up, the verifiable Cascade and Olympic ranges. Yet the mountains painted by the Chinese artist were not the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, but in their carefully drawn verisimilitude they are a real image of those Chinese mountains. These are mountains that Snyder feels are 'magical and difficult, the routes are not clear, yet they are passable'. After the Yuan dynasty, Snyder theorizes that 'painting kept love of nature alive' for a civilization that was 'living more in cities and farther from the hills'. At times, Snyder walks the spaces of the landscape painting as if they were actually under his feet ; the trails of the painting are maplike in his mind. At other times, his understanding moves outside the painting as he coolly becomes critical of its style or of the civilization that style reveals. And then there are the times when he clearly imagines going 'beyond' into the spaces farther than the spaces of the painting, into 'visionary timeless lands of mountain rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas'. Snyder has painted numberless little travelers across the scroll of his poetic landscape. Some are historical, while some are mythical or legendary ; some are ghostly ; many are human, and many more are animal. 'Fellow travelers in the scroll' as Snyder said, 'are the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, bears, and elderly farm woman, wild sheep, the female Buddha Tira, woodrats, Coyote, Raven, macaque monkey, the poet Su Shi, the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka, and many others'. Snyder's concept of space always includes the possibility of Buddhist enlightenment. 2000 Robert Kern : Snyder pays tribute to certain teachers – those, for example, from whom he learned the discipline of the calligrapher's and painter's brush and pen, a discipline that becomes and important motif in the poem. He also acknowledges the importance to him of certain experiences, primarily of wilderness landscapes – mountains and rivers, in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere – but also of representations of such landscapes, particularly in Asian art, encountered in books and museums. It was in Asian paintings that he became aware of 'the energies of mist, white water, rock formations, air swirls – a chaotic universe where everything is in place'. In this way, his direct experience of the natural world seems to have merged with what he saw in artistic representations of it, and a similar merging of nature and culture takes place in the poem. Another key element that animates the poem is Zen Buddhism. Instead, as the title of the book in its several variations suggests, it is Asian landscape paintings, and especially hand scrolls, that provide Snyder with his most immediate structural format. Such paintings, as Snyder points out, are 'not fully realized until several centuries of poems have been added'. The sections of 'Mountains and rivers' are contributions to the realization of the paintings that the book as a whole evokes, and one of Snyder's metaphors for producing them derives from the techniques of Asian painting. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : After his return to America, Snyder visited some museums and a Chinese Song dynasty landscape painting entitled 'Streams and mountains without end' in Cleveland inspired him to us it with the similar title 'endless streams and mountains' in the opening poem of his book. Snyder made a series of long walks from different directions : a cultural walk through Chinese landscape scroll painting and through Native American lore, a physical walk through the real mountainous landscapes of China, Japan, India and North America, and a mental walk through Buddhist ideas, rituals and histories. Following natural boundaries, he made a great effort to explore the notions of origins and destinations through an extended meditative practice focusing upon the theme of 'walking on walking'. This project is an extended act of spiritual exploration and orientation through which Snyder hopes to create a set of guiding principles for a modern culture potentially set adrift from a sense of location or direction. Snyder gives the reader the best endnote pertaining to his deep sympathy for mountain practice. It covers a wide range : from his early mountaineering to his part-time work in the mountains ; from his Zen practice to his building a house in the foothills ; from his learning 'East Asian landscape painting as a meditative exercise' to his observation of Chinese landscape paintings in the museums ; and from his translation of Chinese poetry to his watching the Japanese Nô play 'Yamamba' (Old mountain woman). Snyder explains that he obtained this sense from the discernable natural energy of fluidity in Eastern Asian landscape paintings, such as mists, water, rocks, and clouds. In the Chinese tradition, these natural energies refer to the 'yin' and 'yang', a balanced dynamic force in nature. 2009 Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : In Mountains and rivers without end Snyder's cultural translation of Chinese literature, art and painting, resonates with Chinese motifs that help us to experience non-duality. In these exo-poetic figures, symbols, emblems or motifs, the real and virtual, profane and sacred, eye and gaze are juxtaposed in such a way what the polar ends are brought together. Snyder's translation of nature from the original Chinese texts expresses an insight that is both immanent and transcendent. The first poem 'Endless streams and mountains' is the gateway to the rest of the work. 'Ch'i Shan Wu Chin' is a Chinese landscape painting. Hsüan Tsang : Snyder tells the saga of the seventh-century Chinese monk Hsüan Tsang. In Snyder's hands, Hsüan Tsang and Kokop'ele are bringers of new ideas, appearing multifariously as culture 'carriers' or translators, journeyers and tricksters. Unlike Hsüan Tsang, who is mor of an ascetic, Kokop'ele is a bringer of sun and rain for good crops and a fertility god. |
|
| 46 | 2000 |
Snyder, Gary. Reflections on my translation of the T'ang poet Han-Shan [ID D29197]. A truly apt translation of a poem may require an effort of imagination almost as great as the making of the original. The translator who wishes to enter the creative territory must make an intellectual and imaginative jump into the mind and world of the poet, and no dictionary will make this easier. In working with the poems of Han-shan, I have several times had a powerful sense of apprehending auras of nonverbal meaning and experiencing the poet's own mind-of-composition. That this should happen is not altogether odd, for although Han-shan is intense, the range of his sensibility is not as strongly tied to Chinese cultural and historical phenomena as the sensibility of Po Chü-i, Tu Fu, or Tu Mu. Also, the purely physical side of the Han-shan world—the imagery of cold, height, isolation, mountains—is still available to our contemporary experience: I have spent much time in the mountains, and feel at home in the archetypal land of Han-shan. It would be well-nigh impossible to feel similarly at home with the concubines, summer palaces, or battlefields of much of Chinese poetry. Part of my translation effort was an almost physical recall of the pon¬derosa and whitebark pine, granite cliffs, and frozen summer lakes of my own Sierra Nevada experience. The mountain imagery in my translation can be taken as an analog (a 'translation') of the lower, wetter, greener mountains of south China. My initial blocking-out was done in the fall of 1955 in a graduate seminar in T'ang poetics at the University of California-Berkeley. The instructor was Chen Shih-hsiang. As I wrote elsewhere, "Chen was a friend and a teacher. His knowledge and love of poetry and his taste for life was enormous. He quoted French poetry from memory and wrote virtually any Chinese poem of the T'ang or Sung canon from memory on the blackboard". I had just returned from a summer working as a trail-crew laborer in the northern Yosemite backcountry, which attuned me to working with a "mountain poet". As the poem here makes adequately clear, though, Han-shan was not exactly a "nature poet". He was a person who left his old self behind to walk in the world of jijimuge ("fact-fact-no-obstruction"), which is, in the philosophy of Avatamsaka (Hua-yen) and in the practice of Zen, just this very world. The recurrent image of Cold Mountain and its roughness is the narrow gate through which Han-shan tried to force his perception of a whole world, and this helps to explain his poetry’s calm intensity. In some ways, our contemporary idea of Han-shan is the creation of the Zen tradition and the Chinese delight in eccentrics. His poems are much loved in Japan, and formal Zen lectures are given on his work. The mountains and caves that are associated with him are still there: people visit them regularly. According to traditional scholarship, Han-shan lived from a.d. 627 to 650. The scholar Hu Shih places him circa a.d. 700 to 750. In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place— Bird-paths, but no trails for men. What's beyond the yard? White clouds clinging to vague rocks. Now I've lived here—how many years— Again and again, spring and winter pass. Go tell families with silverware and cars "What's the use of all that noise and money ?" |
|
| 47 | 2004 |
E-mail from Gary Snyder to Joan Qionglin Tang. "Of course I was already a Buddhist, and particularly interested in Zen, so surely I absorbed some particular influence from him [Han Shan]. In regard to Buddhism and Zen, the First Precept 'Cause no unnecessary harm' is implicitly ecological – since it extends to all Beings – and I took that to heart very early on. This compassionate and generous view of nature is part of Zen, but it is also intrinsically part of art and poetry." |
|
| 48 | 2007 |
Snyder, Gary. Back on the fire : essays. (Emeryville : Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). "We study the great writings of the Asian past so that we might surpass them today. We hope to crate a deeply grounded contemporary literature of nature that celebrates the wonder of our natural world, that draws on and makes beauty of the incredibly rich knowledge gained from science, and that confronts the terrible damage being done today in the name of progress and the world economy." Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : Snyder summarized the three directions of his poetic project as : embracing environmental imagination/poetics ; declining environmental aesthetics and eco-philosophy ; and rejecting environmental racism. |
|
| 49 | 2009 |
Gary Snyder in Hong Kong. "International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong", a gala in celebration of poetry and poets, will be held from 26 to 29 November 2009. Famous poets from all around the globe will participate in the event, including Gary Snyder, the doyen of American poetry. http://asiancha.blogspot.ch/2009/10/international-poetry-nights-in-hong.html. |
|
| 50 | 2012 |
The man in the clearing : Ian Sinclair meets Gary Snyder. In : London review of books ; vol. 34, no 10 (2012). http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/iain-sinclair/the-man-in-the-clearing. …From early on, after seeing Chinese scroll paintings in the museum in Seattle, Gary Snyder adopted a linear continuity of narrative, with everything happening at once : the pilgrim with his staff on the mountain, the bridge over the stream, the forest and the ocean… When he gives public performances, the reading is beautifully constructed between translations from the Japanese and Chinese, short sharp on-the-road squibs, and longer, serial compositions that may have been cooking for decades… Driving down to work at UC David, Snyder had noticed another kind of urban edgeland. "There is a big rice field, flooded paddy, near Sacramento airport. It used to have a sign on it : 'This rice field annually feeds 20,000 people'. That's export only : There are a billion people in china. The Japanese don't import so much rice, they have their own subsidized industry. But they import wheat from Canada. It goes out through Vancouver. Along with wood, stripes forests, future furnishings for the new China…" "I'm not a prose writer, I'm a poet. That means I write when it hits me. I scribble a few things. When I do my organized editing and classifying, rewriting, I do it here, mostly in the morning. But not real early. Because the first thing I do is that I mediate…" |
|
| 51 | 2012 |
Gary Snyder in Hong Kong. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Centre for East Asian Studies. International poets in Hong Kong : Poetry workshop. Gary Snyder arrives in November. In preparation for Snyder’s Hong Kong visit, a 3-day Gary Snyder Poetry Workshop will be open for public participation. This is an occasion for literature lovers to learn more about Snyder’s work, as well as contemporary American culture and literature. http://www5.cuhk.edu.hk/cea/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=309:international-poets-in- hong-kong-gary-snyder-poetry-workshop&catid=37. |
|
Bibliography (19)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1958 |
Han, Shan. Cold mountain poems : twenty-four poems. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Evergreen review ; vol. 2, no 6 (1958). In : Snyder, Gary. Riprap & cold Mountain poems. (San Francisco : Four Seasons Foundation, 1965). (Portland, Oregon : Press-22, 1970 / cop. 1965). http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm. |
Publication / Sny4 | |
| 2 | 1959 | Snyder, Gary. Riprap. (Kyoto : Origin Press, 1959). | Publication / Sny26 |
|
| 3 | 1960 | Snyder, Gary. Myths & texts. (New York, N.Y. : Totem Press, 1960). [Enthält Eintragungen über China]. | Publication / Sny29 |
|
| 4 | 1961 | Snyder, Gary. Li Sao, A poem on relieving sorrows, by Ch'ü Yüan. Transl. by Jerah Johnson. In : Olivant quarterly ; no 4 (1959). In : Journal of American folklore ; vol. 74 (1961). [Qu, Yuan. Li sao]. [Review]. | Publication / Sny14 | |
| 5 | 1965 | Snyder, Gary. To the Chinese comrades. In : Coyote's journal ; no 4 (1965). [Geschrieben 1964]. | Publication / Sny15 |
|
| 6 | 1969 | Snyder, Gary. Earth house hold. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1969). [Enthält Eintragungen über China]. | Publication / Sny17 |
|
| 7 | 1974 | Snyder, Gary. Turtle island. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1974). | Publication / Sny27 |
|
| 8 | 1978 |
Snyder, Gary. Wild in China. In : CoEvolution quarterly ; vol. 19 (Fall 1978). In : Journal for the protection of all beings ; no 4 (1978). [Enthält] : Hsie's shoes, Oxhead mountain, The chase in the park, Empty mountain. |
Publication / Sny7 |
|
| 9 | 1983 | Snyder, Gary. Passage through India. (San Francisco, Calif. : Grey Fox Press, 1983). [Enthält Eintragungen über China]. | Publication / Sny8 |
|
| 10 | 1983 | Snyder, Gary. Sixteen T'ang poems : [translations]. In : Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder reader : prose, poetry, and translations, 1952-1998. (Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint, 1999). | Publication / Sny9 |
|
| 11 | 1983 | Snyder, Gary. Walls within walls. In : Co-evolution quarterly ; Spring (1983). | Publication / Sny11 |
|
| 12 | 1987 | Nineteen ways of looking at Wang Wei : how a Chinese poem is translated. Exhibit & commentary by Eliot Weinberger ; further comments by Octavio Paz. (Mt. Kisco, N.Y. : Moyer Bell Limited, 1987). | Publication / Sny13 | |
| 13 | 1990 | Snyder, Gary. The practice of the wild : essays. (San Francisco, Calif. : North Point Press, 1990). With a new preface by the author. (Berkeley, Calif. : Counterpoint, 2010). [Enthält Eintragungen über China]. | Publication / Sny12 |
|
| 14 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. The art of poetry No. 74. Interviewed by Eliot Weinberger. In : The Paris review ; no. 141 (Winter 1996). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1323/the-art-of-poetry-no-74-gary-snyder. |
Publication / Sny3 |
|
| 15 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. Mountains and rivers without end. (Washingon, D.C. : Counterpoint, 1996). http://books.google.ch/books?hl=de&id=CH7UL0WSnPEC&q=streams+and+mountains. |
Publication / Sny28 |
|
| 16 | 1999 | Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder reader : prose, poetry, and translations, 1952-1998. (Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint, 1999). | Publication / Sny6 |
|
| 17 | 2000 |
Snyder, Gary. Reflections on my translation of the T'ang poet Han-Shan. In : Manoa, Honolulu ; vol. 12, no 1 (2000). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/manoa/v012/12.1snyder.html. |
Publication / Sny10 | |
| 18 | 2003 | The New Directions anthology of classical Chinese poetry : translations by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, David Hinton. Ed. by Eliot Weinberger. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 2003). | Publication / Pou24 | |
| 19 | 2009 |
Ginsberg, Allen ; Snyder, Gary. The selected letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Ed. by Bill Morgan. (Berkeley, Calif. : Counter Point, 2009). http://books.google.ch/books?id=frxgXY_BvqAC&pg=PA257&lpg=PA257 &dq=gary+snyder+in+china+1984&source=bl&ots=T_nhVzzeDq&sig= KOQRgV9SoA8mOTztMUUCJF2SjcA&h=de&sa=X&ei=gRL9UMqUIMv 44QS4zoHwCA&ved=0CGoQ6AEwBg#v=snippet&q=china&f=false. |
Publication / Sny5 |
Secondary Literature (15)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1972 | Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael]. Cathay revisited : the Chinese tradition in the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder. (Los Angeles, Calif. : University of Southern California, 1972). Diss. Univ. of Southern California, 1972. | Publication / Pou97 | |
| 2 | 1972 |
Cheung, Dominic. Dang dai Meiguo shi feng mao. (Taibei : Huan yu chu ban she, 1972). (Chang chun teng wen xue cong kan ; 10). [Betr. Allen Ginsberg; Charles Olson; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Gregory Corso; Gary Snyder; Robert Lowell]. 當代美國詩風貌 |
Publication / Gin7 | |
| 3 | 1975-1976 | Lin, Yao-fu. "The mountains are your mind" : Orientalism in the poetry of Gary Snyder. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 6, no 2-vol. 7, no 1 (1975-1976). | Publication / Sny23 |
|
| 4 | 1982 | Denney, Reuel. The portable pagoda : Asia and America in the work of Gary Snyder. In : Asian and Western writers in dialogue : new cultural identities. Ed. by Guy Amirthanayagam. (London : Macmillan, 1982). | Publication / Sny22 |
|
| 5 | 1986 | Yip, Wai-lim. Against domination : Gary Snyder as an apologist for nature. In : The Chinese text : studies in comparative literature. Ed. by Ying-hsiung Chou. (Hong Kong : Chinese University Press, 1986). | Publication / Sny19 |
|
| 6 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. The art of poetry No. 74. Interviewed by Eliot Weinberger. In : The Paris review ; no. 141 (Winter 1996). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1323/the-art-of-poetry-no-74-gary-snyder. |
Publication / Sny3 |
|
| 7 | 1999 | Hunt, Anthony. Singing the dyads : the Chinese landscape scroll and Gary Snyder's Mountains and rivers without end. In : Journal of modern literature ; vol. 23, issue 1 (1999). | Publication / Sny20 |
|
| 8 | 2000 | Kern, Robert. Mountains and rivers are us : Gary Snyder and the nature of the nature of nature. In : College literature ; vol. 27, no 1 (2000). | Publication / Sny18 |
|
| 9 | 2007 |
Tsai, Robin Chen-hsing. Translating nature : Gary Snyder and cultural translation. In : Neohelicon ; vol. 34, no 2 (2007). http://www.google.ch/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=tsai+robin+translating+nature&source= web&cd=2&ved=0CD8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmuse.jhu.edu%2FjournalF comparative_literature_studies%2Fv049%2F49.4.tsai.pdf&ei=2ywj UauDF4fCswbGoYGgCw&usg=AFQjCNF00qkcnb4LKEsn6W2VkjXaMAJhwQ |
Publication / Sny21 |
|
| 10 | 2009 | Tan, Joan Qionglin. Han Shan, Chan buddhism and Gary Snyder's ecopoetic way. (Brighton : Sussex Academic Press, 2009). | Publication / Sny16 | |
| 11 | 2009 |
Tsai, Robin Cheng-hsing. The ethics of translation : Gary Snyder and Chinese literature. In : Ariel ; vol. 40, no 2-3 (2009). http://www.google.ch/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=Tsai%2C+Robin+Cheng-hsing.+ The+ethics+of+translation+%3A+Gary+Snyder+and+Chinese+literature. &source=web&cd=2&ved=0CD0QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fariel.synergiesprairies. ca%2Fariel%2Findex.php%2Fariel%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F4025%2F3946&ei= kcUlUa-iBIyThgepzIHQCw&usg=AFQjCNEZiZcvyLxf8bkgGfWoE3ewgsuF6Q |
Publication / Sny25 |
|
| 12 | 2010 |
Sherlock, John. Gary Snyder : a bibliography of works by and about Gary Snyder ; based in part on the Gary Snyder papers and other holdings of the University of California, Davis. 2nd ed., rev. and expanded. (David : University of California, Special Collections Department, 2010). http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/specol/researchprojects/files/bib-garysnyder-2ed.pdf. |
Web / Sny1 |
|
| 13 | 2011 | Cong, Zihang. Gary Snyder's defamiliarization translation of Chinese classic poems. In : Sino-US English teaching ; vol. 8, no 12 (2011). | Publication / Sny30 |
|
| 14 | 2013 |
Gary Snyder. http://www.mountainsongs.net/translator_.php?id=15. |
Web / Sny2 |
|
| 15 | 1987 | Shu, Yunzhong. Gary Snyder and taoism. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 17, no 3 (1987). | Publication / Sny24 |
|