[In the following essay, Almon investigates the Buddhist metaphysics that inform the poetry of Gary Snyder.]

For all its attention to the physical world, the poetry of Gary Snyder has always had a metaphysical dimension. He once called poetry "a riprap (cobbled trail) over the slick rock of metaphysics," but metaphysics can also provide a trail over the slick rock of the poetry, providing a path where we might see only a difficult physical terrain. I will put aside the important matter of the influence of American Indian spirituality on Snyder's work and investigate the Buddhist context. Snyder's interest in Zen Buddhism is well-known: he is the poet who spent years in Japan studying it. While much of the material in recent works, such as Regarding Wave (1970) and Turtle Island (1974), may certainly be clear without a knowledge of Buddhism, some is not, and Snyder's fundamental opposition to industrial civilization can be clarified by understanding the Buddhist influence.

Zen is one of the schools of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism prevalent in Buddhist countries outside of Southeast Asia. It is a very special school, one minimizing philosophy and emphasizing direct experience. Western readers familiar only with the Zen tradition—the Zen master stories, the koan exercises—may not be aware of certain basic Mahayana concepts. The Mahayana schools have an ideal of active compassion that extends to all living beings: even the grass should be led to enlightenment by the Bodhisattva, the "enlightenment being" who vows to deliver the whole universe. The Bodhisattva practices upaya, "skillful means," strategems and teachings fitted to the various beings he wishes to deliver. For the enlightened mind, the world is a state of being beyond all conflicts and oppositions. As Snyder puts it in "Four Changes," an important essay in Turtle Island: "… at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process which is beyond qualities and beyond birth-and-death." This state of nirvana is not accessible to most of us, and we experience samsara, the world of birth-and-death. On this relative level of being, the universe is conceived of as a dynamic realm of interdependent and transient phenomena. Living beings are temporary groupings of elements of this flux, a conception that Snyder translates into the terms of Western physics: "… we are interdependent energy-fields of great potential wisdom and compassion …" he says in "Four Changes." He puts it this way in the "Introductory Note" of the same collection: "The poems speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a 'song.'" In Snyder's work, the concept of interdependence is translated into ecological terms, and the conception of the world as flux is rendered in terms of physics: the world is a dynamic field of energy. Modern physics shows no interest in the potential wisdom and compassion of energy fields certainly. Science is an instrument of understanding and altering the world. Archimedes is with us yet, even if he may soon have no world to move. Ecology, on the other hand, is one science that does concern itself with wisdom. The ecologist knows how serious the consequences of acting without foresight and compassion can be. Ecological compassion is not a matter of sentimental humanitarianism, just as Snyder's notion of compassion does not rule out taking life, to sustain life.

But the poems in Riprap, and many in Myths & Texts, do not convey a world of flux. The poems are often contemplative: meditations set in stable landscapes, even if the poet laments transience and notes the passage of birds. Sherman Paul has said [in Iowa Review 1 (Fall 1970)] that "The unity of Riprap is essentially one of stillness.…" and I must agree with that insight. Zen awareness and Zen detachment permeate the early poems. Often they evoke quiet landscapes and sweeps of geological time. The scenes are composed, and composed very skillfully. The art of sumi painting comes to mind: vistas of clouds and mountains, a human figure or two almost lost in the mist, birds flying off into limitless space, all done in a few strokes. Not the intricate hum of transient elements in the void. And even the poems in Myths & Texts, though they describe logging and hunting, more often deal with contemplation than action.

There are transitional poems in The Back Country, but the striking change comes with Regarding Wave. Instead of a panoramic view of mountains or valleys, the poems frequently offer a world placed under the microscope. And rather than contemplation, the attitude is involvement. The proper analogy with painting would be the tonka art of Tibet, which arouses and transforms psychological energies through a blaze of color: processes instead of scenes. Consider the opening of the first poem ("Wave") in the book:

Grooving clam shell,
streakt through marble,
sweeping down ponderosa pine bark-scale
rip-cut tree grain
sand-dunes, lava flow

The dynamism of wave-forms is traced even in static objects. Physics and Mahayana Buddhism would agree that there are no stable objects, merely the illusion of stability. One of the objects of Buddhist meditation is to achieve awareness of impermanence in all aspects of reality, external and internal. The poetry of Regarding Wave often deals with what "Wave" calls "… the dancing grain of things/of my mind!" The "dancing grain" is a fine metaphor, and the activity of dancing is one of Snyder's favored means of conveying a dynamic world. Running water is another recurrent image used in the book. And the poet adopts the standard meditation strategy of imagining the physical world permeated with the sounds of the Dharma (Buddhist teachings) in several poems. In "Regarding Wave," the Dharma is "A shimmering bell/though all," and the slopes of the hills are said to flow. "All the Spirit Powers Went to Their Dancing Place" turns the very landscape into sound: "Hills rising and falling as music, long plains and deserts as slow quiet chanting."

The style of Regarding Wave tends toward the break-up of straight-forward description and narration. The lines frequently take the form of image clusters: phrases and single words replacing the extended utterance as the unit of expression. (I say "extended utterance" because Snyder's terseness sometimes led him to avoid the complete sentence in the early poems.) The images themselves often evoke minute particulars, such as seeds, sand grain, thorns, or bark-scales. The world is examined with a close-up lens. Not that the images are always visual. Tactile, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and kinesthetic impressions are prominent and heighten the impression of involvement.

I will return to the matter of involvement in a moment, but I should mention that Turtle Island reverses these stylistic trends. We still come upon lines like "Snow-trickle, feldspar, dirt." But the poet is more concerned with narrative, even exposition, and the style is therefore more conventional, less concerned with rendering the flow of process. Social criticism and the desire to come to terms with Western America take precedence over the dancing grain of things. There are poems like "On San Gabriel Ridges" which would easily fit into Regarding Wave, but in the later volume Snyder is engrossed with the anecdotal and didactic, and the writing reflects those intentions. The sweep of evolution (300,000,000 years go by in one poem) and the workings of the American political system get more attention than the intricate dynamics of sand grains.

Snyder's Buddhist training has been in the Zen school, but his philosophical position is now influenced by the Vajrayana sect, whose outlook he discusses in Earth House Hold. Vajrayana (literally, "The Diamond Vehicle") is a Tantric school, predominant in Tibet before the Chinese invasion of 1959, and still widely practiced in the Himalayan region. Tantra is an approach found in Hinduism as well as Buddhism. The Tantric method is to involve the practitioner with the very reality that most Hindu and Buddhist sects seek detachment from: the world of birth-and-death, the realm of the passions. The key is to transform this reality rather than to escape from it. The attitude toward the emotions in Vajrayana Buddhism is particularly important: passions are aroused and transmuted, not repressed. Anger and desire, for example, can be made instruments of enlightenment. They are changed from poisons into wisdom. Readers who assume that Buddhism is a religion of passivity and kindness may be puzzled by Snyder's ferocity in some of the Turtle Island poems. Anger can be a teaching method (consider the Zen master and his stick), and it can also be transmuted into compassion. Better, it is one of the possible forms of compassion, as in the polemics of the ecology movement.

Snyder's "Spel Against Demons" is a good example of the role of wrath in his poetry. The poem originally appeared with "Smokey the Bear Sutra" and "The California Water Plan" in a limited edition entitled The Fudo Trilogy. It alone was reprinted in Turtle Island. "Fudo" is the Japanese name for a Mahayana deity called "Achala" or "Acala" in Sanskrit. His iconography and the sadhana (ritual of worship, visualization and invocation) devoted to him are described in "The California Water Plan." The deity represents the struggle against evil and is sometimes called the Lord of Heat. His imagery is summed up in Alice Getty's The Gods of Northern Buddhism: "His appearance is fierce and angry. The sword in his right hand is to smite the guilty and the lasso in his left to catch and bind the wicked." He is associated with fire: "Behind him is a glory of flames, symbolizing the destruction of Evil.…" Snyder's Smokey the Bear is fancifully presented as a form of Achala, or Fudo, and the "Smokey the Bear Sutra" is a droll parody of Buddhist scriptures. "Spel Against Demons" is also modeled on a Buddhist literary form, the dharani.

A dharani is a charm or spell, usually invoking a Buddha or Bodhisattva. Although D. T. Suzuki gives examples of the form in his well-known Manual of Zen Buddhism, the dharani represents a magical dimension of Buddhism which has received little attention in the West. "Spel Against Demons" attacks "The release of Demonic Energies in the name of/the People" and "The stifling self-indulgence in anger in the name of/Freedom." Mindless terrorism is denounced as "… death to clarify/death to compassion." The poem represents anger without rancor: The poem calls upon Achala to bind "demonic killers" with his diamond noose and describes this deity "… who turns Wrath to Purified Accomplishment." The poem ends with a Sanskrit mantra, a power-formula—the "Spel" of Achala.

It is not, then, contradictory for Snyder to include poems of anger and denunciation ("The Call of the Wild," "Steak," "Control Burn") in the same section of Turtle Island that contains the warm family scenes of "The Bath" and the compassionate descriptions of "The Dead by the Side of the Road." The Vajrayana tradition embraces a life-giving exploitation of anger: some of the meditation masters of the Vajarayana were willing to use wrath and even force as teaching tools. The sensuous delight in the flesh that Snyder conveys in "The Bath" is equally respectable. The body is not the "running sore" for Vajrayana that it is for the Southern branch of Buddhism, the Theravada. Mindless craving is condemned, but the power of the senses is power that the spiritual life can harness.

The anger usually has a compassionate thrust. And the outrage Snyder feels often grows out of the abuse of living creatures that many religions ignore: animals and trees. The theoretical scope of Buddhist compassion is unlimited. The object of compassion is any living being, not just human beings. The Buddhist, like the North American Indian, gives a kind of equality to "… the other people—what the Sioux Indians called the creeping people, and the standing people, and the swimming people …" (Turtle Island, "The Wilderness"). Many of Snyder's "people" are birds, coyotes, whales, insects or even plants. It is easy to dismiss this sympathy as sentimental pantheism but Snyder knows that the ecological crisis grows out of such attitudes. His problem as a poet of the whole range of living beings is to create poems in which animals and plants appear as autonomous presences, not as mere symbols for human feelings or concepts. Naturally, the terms used are anthropomorphic, but anthropomorphism is a problem only for a world view that assumes an absolute gulf between man and other beings. Buddhism provides what Robinson Jeffers would call a transhuman perspective. The aim is not to raise the supposedly lower orders to a human level, but to see all beings as co-citizens in a community of life. Snyder assumes that the artist can imaginatively enter into the lives of other organisms and speak for them. In "The Wilderness," he says: "I wish to be a spokesman for a realm that is not usually represented in intellectual chambers or in the chambers of government." According to Snyder, the way to be such a spokesman is to create paintings, dances or songs to express an interpretation of other beings.

Snyder is perhaps most skilled at interpreting birds: Myths & Texts contains some fine descriptions of them, and poems such as "The Wide Mouth" in Regarding Wave (depicting a sparrow) and "The Hudsonian Curlew" in Turtle Island, are high points in the books. Deer, bears and coyotes get attention also. Plants present the biggest challenge: they are the basis of any ecological system, the "proletariat" on which other living beings feed, directly or indirectly, but they are very static characters, clearly. Snyder managed action in his early poems on plant life by describing forest fires and logging, and in Regarding Wave he deals with the dissemination of seeds by wind and water and on the fur of mammals. The distribution of seeds reminds us that plants have an active role in the shifting pattern of life.

Plants form the base of what in "Four Changes" Snyder calls "… a vast and delicate pyramid of energy-transformations." Those transformations usually take the form of eating and being eaten. Food is one of Snyder's favorite themes. Many of the poems in his books deal with eating, and sometimes on an Odyssean scale. For example, The Back Country ends, not with the mythical splendors of "Through the Smoke Hole," but with "Oysters," a poem about hunting and eating the shellfish. The implied theme of the poem is the abundance of nature. Poems like "Shark Meat" in Regarding Wave create an awareness of the interdependence of all phenomena. The shark traveled far to become part of a feast on Suwa-nose Island.

Miles of water, Black current,
Thousands of days
recrossing his own paths
to tangle our net
to be part of
this loom.

And "The Hudsonian Curlew" in Turtle Island evokes the complexity of the physical world in which such birds live, then goes on to present the eating of them as an incorporation of their being into the eater: "dense firm flesh,/dark and rich,/gathered news of skies and seas." Eating becomes a reverential act, rather than a brutal necessity. Snyder is probably more indebted to North American Indian attitudes toward hunting and eating in this poems than he is to the Buddhist tradition. Buddhism teaches gratitude toward food—acknowledgement that it represents a loss of life—and that attitude is common among the American Indians, but Buddhism also encourages vegetarianism in order to minimize suffering. It is mindfulness of the interconnections involved in eating which Snyder draws from Buddhism. On the question of vegetarianism he takes the side of the primitive hunter who believes that humility, gratitude and acts of propitiation expiate the blame for eating meat or taking furs. Snyder does see Buddhism and American Indian attitudes as compatible, and both are influences in the poems. In "One Should Not Talk to a Skilled Hunter about What is Forbidden by the Buddha'" (which invokes a Zen master's authority in the title), Snyder describes a Buddhist ceremonial in honor of a gray fox which is to be skinned: chanting the Shingyo, or Heart Sutra, a text often recited to the dying and at funerals. Another poem in Turtle Island, "The Dead by the Side of the Road," presents the use of animals killed by accident. The ceremony described, offering corn meal by the dead body, is North American Indian. The Buddhist tradition that meat not killed by or specifically for one can be eaten without blame, and the conclusion of the poem is an act of mindfulness in the Buddhist sense: it emphasizes that some blame does attach to human beings for building highways across animal trails. The Buddhist and North American Indian elements in Snyder's poems are more likely to reinforce than contradict each other.

Both traditions condemn thoughtless murder of any creature. The poems in Turtle Island reject such killing. "Steak" condemns those who eat grain-fattened beef without realizing the cost to the land or acknowl-edging the suffering of the animals. The poem concludes with an image of the live cattle which are being fattened-up:

Steaming, stamping,
long-lashed, slowly thinking
with the rhythm of their
breathing,
frosty—breezy—
early morning prairie sky.

The key word is "thinking." We prefer not to realize that cattle are sentient beings, capable of suffering.

The greatest anger in Turtle Island is reserved for wanton killing for mere gain or comfort, a different matter from eating to sustain life. "The Call of the Wild" is particularly effective, with its acid portrait of the man who has coyotes trapped because they make noise, and its terse, disgusted chronicle of the city hippies who move to the country but sell their cedars because someone tells them that "Trees are full of bugs." The anger is tempered with awareness and compassion that reduce the potential for a self-righteous tone. In "I Went into the Maverick Bar" the speaker disguises himself as a middle American ("My long hair was tucked up under a cap/I'd left the earring in the car.") and observes the mores of his countrymen with some sympathy. I am reminded of the Bodhisattva named Vimalakirti, who was famed for going into brothels and taverns in order to practice compassion. He always appeared to be one of the revelers, but only as a form of upaya, skillful means. One of the most interesting poems in Turtle Island is "Dusty Braces," in which the poet acknowledges the influence of his wandering, land-destroying ancestors and gives them "nine bows," a traditional form of homage in Buddhism. But acknowledging his karma—the formative influences on him—doesn't mean that he accepts the destructive ways of those ancestors.

The indignation recorded in Turtle Island reaches a climax in "Mother Earth: Her Whales," a denunciation of the "robots" who "… argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth/To last a little longer." This poem, like "Toward Climax" later in the book, strikes me as a good prose essay mysteriously incarnated as a bad poem. "Mother Earth: Her Whales" has too many discordant elements: a manifesto calling for an uprising of "otters, wolves and elk," lyrical passages describing the lives of the whales themselves, rhetorical denunciations of the "robots" at the Stockholm Conference on the Environment, fragments of ballads, and historical sketches. A reader can share the disgust and yet feel that the poem is not successful. Prose might have been a better vehicle for conveying the sense of outrage.

This particular poem does make it clear that the poet wants to take on all exploitative civilizations:

how can the head-heavy power-hungry politic
scientist
Government two world Capitalist-Imperialist
Third World Communist paper-shuffling male
non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

The technological abuses of Western civilization are envied by the non-Western nations: the instrumental approach—pragmatism and exploitation—is shared by many developing as well as developed nations. The energy crisis has shown that this approach is ultimately self-defeating. It breaks down those "energy-pathways" that sustain life. And energy in the narrow sense, mere fuel, can be exhausted.

Technically-advanced societies, and those aspiring to such status, regard energy as a means of controlling, altering and exploiting the natural world. The environment is a mass of raw material to be exploited. For Mahayana Buddhism, the world is a dynamic process to be interpreted through contemplation, or even transmuted (as in Vajrayana)—not cut-down, burned-out, torn-up or strip-mined. In Zen monasteries the ideal is to waste nothing, not even a drop of water. The Buddhist approach is one of gratitude for what one receives, while the industrial approach is to devise ways of getting more. One of Snyder's themes in Turtle Island is exploitation and wanton destruction. Much of the wrath can be accounted for by the shameless way in which governments that very slowly awoke to public pressure for environmental protection measures have moved quickly to give up those measures whenever they interfere with the need for energy. A shortage of energy in the limited sense—fuel—justifies further damage to the "… vast and delicate pyramid of energy-formations" which makes life possible. The real sources of energy are the sun and the mental energy within the mind. Opposed to these sources is the "Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor," which Snyder sees as "Death himself," a source of contamination likely to heighten the environmental damage already done by conventional approaches to creating industrial energy. The poet insists that "We would live on this Earth/without clothes or tools!" But this is not possible without vast transformations in our way of life, of course, and the prose essays in Turtle Island are meant to encourage such changes. His commentary on "As for Poets" declares that "… there is another kind of energy, in every living being, close to the sun-source, but in a different way. The power within. Whence? 'Delight.' The delight of being alive while knowing of impermanence and death, acceptance and mastery of this." Such power, he says, "… will still be our source when coal and oil are long gone, and atoms are left to spin in peace." He defines "Delight" in terms of Mahayana metaphysics, though he draws the term from William Blake, who said that "Energy is Eternal Delight." It is interesting to note that Herbert V. Guenther, seeking a term for the Karmamudra experience of sexual ecstacy in Tantric Buddhism, hit upon Blake's "Eternal Delight" also. For Snyder, Delight grows out of a perception of the world as a luminous, interdependent reality, which can be perceived as serene and joyful when observed without dualistic thinking:

Delight is the innocent joy arising
with the perception and realization of
the wonderful, empty, intricate,
inter-penetrating,
mutually-embracing, shining
single world beyond all discrimination
or opposites.

In "Charms" {Turtle Island), Snyder follows the Tantric tradition in suggesting that "The beauty of naked or half-naked women" evokes this perception of "… the Delight/at the heart of creation." There are other ways of evoking Delight, and the celebration of animals, plants and birds is one means of summoning up a joy in the energy of things. The flux of physical reality need not be perceived as a conflict if there is no desire to conquer or exploit it. And even the passion of anger can be plowed back into "Fearlessness, humor, detachment," genuine forms of power.