Eugene, Oregon • 2005
JULIA MARTIN: Gary, in Danger on Peaks there is clearly so much awareness of suffering and destruction at many levels, yet the collection is also deeply concerned with healing. So the main question that comes to mind for me when reading the poems is once again about how to work with integrity as a writer in the late modern world. At the same time I’ve also been wondering how this collection’s particular response to the experience of suffering and healing might relate to your understanding of the female Buddha Tārā—who appears quite significantly in some of the earlier work. In Mountains and Rivers Without End, for example, you have described that whole epic poem as a sort of sutra for Tārā. Now, although she isn’t mentioned explicitly, there seem to be some continuities in what you’re doing.
Let’s approach these questions through the poems. I’d like to start by talking about the vow that you made as a fifteen-year-old and now return to near the beginning of the book. The young Snyder has just come down from his first ascent of Mount St. Helens and reads the reports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He makes a vow: “By the power and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight this cruel and destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.” Of course that was sixty years ago now. Although you put it in the book, you are clearly no longer that fifteen-year-old, wanting to fight. And yet in another sense you have never stopped engaging with the powers you identified then, although the focus has changed over the years. So I am interested in how, from a Buddhist point of view, or from your point of view, one takes on the problem, the disease that you recognized as a teenager. If “fighting” it in an oppositional, dualistic way could be a way of replicating it, what alternatives are there? More particularly, could you say something about what has happened to that early vow?
GARY SNYDER: That’s a very large question. I’ll just say a few words about the idea of the vow. I was moved at that age of fifteen to express a vow to fight against, to oppose, governments and powers, scientists, politicians, whoever would dare use, hope to use, nuclear weaponry in any way on earth. The shock and outrage that had provoked that was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not only the suffering of human beings but realizing that these bombs could destroy much of nature itself.
One could take such a vow literally and try to act on it for a whole life. What I found over the years was a growth in my understanding of what had happened and why it happened. I also had to learn what is actually possible in the world. But most important, I learned more about what it means to take a vow. I could say, “Well I tried. And it didn’t work, did it? I’ve been living my life by this and I guess it didn’t come to anything—in fact it’s worse than ever!”
MARTIN: But?
SNYDER: Well I came to realize, no use being so literal. So I’ve measured my original intention against my ignorance and my gradual great understanding, all these years. I had no answers either. But I had questions. How did we get here? How can I not contribute to more war? And why is it, how is it, that so many fellow human beings on earth are apparently comfortable with it? I realized that there is also a war against nature. The biosphere itself is subject to a huger explosion by far than anything nuclear—the half-million-year-long slow explosion of human impact.
One of my tools has been my poetry, my art. My guide came to be Shakyamuni and all the other Buddhas. And my ally, my critic, old Doctor Coyote, who is not inclined to make a distinction between good and evil.
MARTIN: I suppose that by the end of Danger on Peaks, the vow has become the Bodhisattva’s vow to save all sentient beings.
SNYDER: The primary vow, the primal vow, is to save all sentient beings. Or to help all sentient beings. Or, as Dogen says, “I take a vow to help all sentient beings take a vow to save all sentient beings.” And I’d add, “Let myself, let us, be saved by all beings.”
MARTIN: The extra layer?
SNYDER: Yes, we don’t take it because we can do it. All we can do is take the vow to help others also take it. So the vow turns over on itself and rolls onward in its karma. In the Shin Buddhism of Japan it’s called the Hongwan, the primary—the original—cosmic vow. There are two huge temples in Kyoto called Hongwanjis, the East Hongwanji and the West Hongwanji. That is, the East Temple of the primary vow and the West Temple of the primary vow.
Now the primary vow was taken eons ago, absolutely eons ago, by some wandering girl or boy who was eventually to become Amitabha Buddha, and who said, “I take a vow to save all beings, however many lifetimes it takes.” So that is the story of Amitabha, Amida, whose primary vow is still at work in the world: to save all beings, regardless of how long it takes. Then Dogen says, “Well—to help them save themselves.”
This is the amazing Mahayana vision, which ultimately does not shrink from the disappearance of this universe either. Such a huge view. So, let’s have a cup of tea and take note of the falling leaves. Whatever else I have to say on that is in a poem or two.
MARTIN: In my own writing I keep returning to questions about impermanence and continuity. What is impermanent? What continues? In one sense everything is changing into everything else and is impermanent, falling leaves. But in another sense there is continuity.
SNYDER: Well, there’s continuity of impermanence. We know that.
MARTIN: It seems to me there are a couple of moments in the book when you hint at the possibility of a sense of continuity that is different from what one has come to expect in your work. I’m thinking of two beautiful poems, “Waiting for a Ride” and “The Acropolis Back When.” In the past you’ve tended to write away from the habitual big focus on self that is such a feature of modern culture. So instead of lots of I, you’ll situate personal experience in relation to the Big Flow, the big living system, the nondual world, and so on, and there are plenty of Buddhist and ecological reasons for doing so. But here I’m noticing something a bit different among the familiar. Both poems imagine the idea of some long continuity, perhaps even personal continuity, beyond this particular life. Words like: “Or maybe I will, much later / some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,” or else “Lifetimes ago [ . . . ] I climbed it.” What sort of continuity might this suggest?
SNYDER: When Allen, Peter, Joanne, and I were traveling together in India, I let myself imagine my way into the view of literal reincarnation. There’s a faint glimpse you catch once in a great while of ancient relationships, of eras come round again, deep déjà vu. One can play with these, but it’s dangerous to take them too lightly. Those are risky poems.
MARTIN: I suppose the idea of continuity in your writing is more often to do with the continuity of the wild, and our participation in it. In Danger on Peaks, there is that poem towards the end where you reflect on the human impact on the planet that you spoke about earlier: “we’re loose on earth / half a million years / our weird blast spreading.” But then the poem goes on to remember that in the long view, wildness is ineradicable and that wilderness inevitably returns, grows green again. That’s the long view.
SNYDER: That’s not actually terribly long. But there is a question about the long-term impact of the particular variety of human civilization we have right now, the developed-world variety of civilization. Truth is, human beings probably had little impact up till twenty or thirty thousand years ago, when they started setting fires everywhere to improve the landscape.
MARTIN: And the developed-world variety of that trend is a very recent experiment.
SNYDER: Yes. And as Tonto says, “Speak for yourself, white man.” It is not that everybody on earth is involved in that. There are many cultures and societies and peoples on earth who stand aside from the recent destructive side of civilization. Many are not doing it even now. They’re suffering from it as much as nature herself is suffering from the effects of it.
MARTIN: You see it as something that has a fairly limited period of duration?
SNYDER: Not that I hope for it, but it’s very likely that the present energy-intensive high population society will have to crash from key shortages and from garbage-glut. People will go on, keep a lighter technology going, and bring back the walking routes. Tell stories and meditate. Grow lots of garlic.
Another approach is Robinson Jeffers’s, who said, “I am an inhumanist. Not an antihumanist, just an inhumanist. In the inhuman perspective, humans are a passing problem.” We might ask, “Well what’s lost? When human beings are gone, what’s lost?” Is that something we should concern ourselves with?
MARTIN: Well what is lost? When you’re writing in the last section of the book about the bombing of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban, it seems to me that you’re looking at a sense of the loss of those human artifacts that have been destroyed.
SNYDER: Yes, I’m seeing it as deep art. It is what some bold builders tried to do, making a human figure into rock. What a culture.
MARTIN: Making big things, beautiful things.
SNYDER: Yes, there are some cultures who make bold things, as the Chinese did on quite a scale, for a long period of time. All the rich, high civilizations tried it. In my Bamiyan poem I don’t want to make more of it than to say, “Honor the dust.” Dogen somewhere says, “The whole planet is the dust of the bones of the ancient Buddhas.”
MARTIN: So what’s the difference?
SNYDER: So, honor the dust.
MARTIN: If it’s all bones of Buddhas, then surely we are thinking in a pretty vast timescale. I hear your point that it doesn’t need a very long view to think about the end of industrial civilization, but in terms of what you’re calling inhumanism, you’re also situating things in a geological perspective, a very long time.
SNYDER: Truth is, it’s not too useful to calibrate on too large a timescale for human affairs.
MARTIN: What sort of scale would you want to use?
SNYDER: A useful scale is the present moment. The present moment starts about 11,000 years ago. Probably has about the same time to go into the future.
MARTIN: Beginning with agriculture?
SNYDER: Holocene. Post-Pleistocene.
MARTIN: Post the last Ice Age.
SNYDER: That’s a Northern Hemisphere perspective, that the Holocene is about 11,000 years old. I’m not sure how it applies in other parts of the world. This is the moment in planetary time of our present climate, the flora and fauna in their combinations just for now. It’s the world in which we live. Are we living it well? Or are we not—in terms of what it is now?
MARTIN: That is interesting, because in Southern Africa where I come from, there was no glaciation at that time. So it’s more diverse and the plants are older, and the continuities go back a lot further.
SNYDER: More continuous, probably. Different portions of the globe have their own sort of present moment, assuming that things are constantly changing, but also knowing that there’s a certain stability there for a while. And that finite world is also where we challenge ourselves: what do we know?
MARTIN: Our finite capacities? The limits of what we are able to do?
SNYDER: The limits of who we are, and the limits of what our world is.
MARTIN: We personally, or we as a species?
SNYDER: Individually, personally. Also, whoever we are, as a family. But the very last two poems in Danger on Peaks push it to the point where you “go beyond” that. Like, you asked about Tārā. Tārā is not another version of the Earth Mother. She’s not the mother of all beings. She’s the mother of the Buddhas. She is the mother of beings who see beyond being. The Earth Mother, the mother of all beings, is the mother of birth and death. The mother of the Buddhas is the mother of those beings who see through birth and death. Some people would like to see a little bit toward what is through birth and death. And Tārā is represented as a virgin.
MARTIN: But a mother of those beings.
SNYDER: As I understand it, only the mother of the Buddhas, not the mother of beings. She’s a different kind of mother. She’s the mother of Wisdom, the mother of Wisdom and Compassion. She’s not giving birth to beings. She’s not even the mother of God, like Mary. She is also the same as Prajnā. The goddess Prajnā is represented exactly the same in the iconography. And Prajnā is also called the goddess Wisdom, “who is the mother of the Buddhas.”
MARTIN: And it’s the Wisdom that goes beyond, Mahāprajnāpāramitā.
SNYDER: Yes. I’d say she is the mother of nondual insight, beyond birth and death. So she can look like a virgin if she wants. It doesn’t matter. Or like a young woman. Actually, she’s just portrayed as a very young woman in the iconography.
MARTIN: Or even like the world, the nondual world? The other day when I was walking with a friend from San Francisco up Steep Ravine on Mt. Tamalpais through that wonderful green forest, I imagined we were walking in the body of Tārā. But perhaps you’d say it’s more like the body of Gaia—if we’re going to talk in archetypes at all.
SNYDER: Yes? Dogen would also say it’s the body of all the old dead Buddhas.
MARTIN: All those bones.
SNYDER: Sort of archaeological, geological. Or it is just the present moment happening.
MARTIN: We don’t need to turn it into a metaphor.
SNYDER: Mt. Tamalpais is a very fine place.
MARTIN: And so close to the city. We have the same sort of situation where I live in Cape Town.
SNYDER: What’s that mountain called?
MARTIN: Table Mountain. It really changes the sense of a city to have the wild mountain in the midst.
SNYDER: Tom Killion and I are working on a book on Mt. Tamalpais. He’s a woodblock artist, and he’s been doing some blocks of the Mt. Tamalpais area. He and I are doing some writing to go with that, and then there’s “The Circumambulation [of Mt. Tamalpais],” the older stories, the native Miwok stories about it, and so forth. We’re really focusing on its closeness to the city.
MARTIN: And the sea, sea and mountain and city, that combination. It’s extraordinary, and it’s something I recognize from home.
SNYDER: Yes, it’s wonderful.
MARTIN: Gary, to go back to Tārā or Prajnā as mother of nondual insight, of Wisdom and Compassion. Could you connect these Buddhist images with Coyote? You said at the beginning that Coyote was your ally and so on. He’s also nondual, isn’t he? He isn’t interested in those dualisms either.
SNYDER: No, he’s not. How Doctor Coyote fits into this is a good question. In fact, that is one of the things about the Trickster figure: the Trickster manages to stand outside of all these discourses. Indefinitely. We’ll have to work on that eventually.
MARTIN: Could you say something more about it now? We don’t have Coyote in Africa, so I always feel that I’m missing some resonances.
SNYDER: In West Africa isn’t Spider a Trickster figure? I know there is or was a San Trickster, Mantis. At any rate, it’s the Trickster we’re looking at—Coyote is just one incarnation (and one of the most remarkable). Jehovah is playing Trickster when he gets Abraham to almost sacrifice Isaac, and then slips a ram into the bushes. Let’s not try to do more than this with Trickster for now.
MARTIN: Sure. But to take it sideways slightly, there’s that poem in Danger on Peaks about Doctor Coyote consulting his turds, and then a couple of others about consulting the “old advisors.” You describe a feeling of not knowing what to do, like “despair at how the human world goes down.” And then, in the poem, you do this thing, you consult the fallen trees or the mountain or whoever it is, and some kind of response comes, some kind of healing insight, returning you to the present moment. Reading this makes me wonder about how one writes about nonhuman things in ways that seem to be telling a human story.
SNYDER: You just have to try. You can’t be sure if it’s fair or not. It takes a lot of nerve to do this stuff.
MARTIN: I’m not asking you to explain the poems. But when you appeal to Mount St. Helens for help and there is a sense of a response, what is happening?
SNYDER: There are mysteries that come to us. I could give a kind of reasonable answer to your question, but that would make it slighter than it is.
MARTIN: Yes, I know. It’s just that those are obviously key moments in the book.
SNYDER: It stands better as a question: “How is it that, ‘If you ask for help it comes, but not in any way you’d ever know’?” Many people who read that have said to me, “That’s true.” I don’t ask them, “How do you know it’s true?” I believe they know. It’s true for them. There is a truth there, but it’s not a truth that everybody recognizes until it happens to them. Some people never have the necessity, or the nerve, to even ask for help.