In Line With The Big Flow
excerpts from: The "East-West" Interview with Gary Snyder
I never started sitting [in meditation] like that [ten hours a day] until I went to Japan and was forced to. I still wouldn't sit ten hours a day unless somebody forced me, because there's too much other work in the world to be done. Somebody's got to grow the tomatoes. There's not going to be that much meditation in the world if we're going to have a democratic world that isn't fueled with nuclear energy, because there isn't that much spare energy. We damn well better learn that our meditation is primarily going to be our work with our hands. We can't have twenty-five percent of the population going off and becoming monks at the expense of the rest, like in Tibet; that's a class structure thing, a by-product of exploitation—sitting an hour a day is not. Sitting ten hours a day means that somebody else is growing your food for you; for special shots, okay, but people can't do it for a whole lifetime without somebody else having to give up their meditation so that you can meditate…
I had a pretty fair grasp of what the basic value of meditation is—an intellectual grasp, at least—even then. It wasn't alien to my respect for primitive people and animals, all of whom/which are capable of simply being for long hours at a time. I saw it in that light as a completely natural act. To the contrary, it's odd that we don't do it more, that we don't, simply, like a cat, be there for a while, experiencing ourselves as whatever we are, without any extra thing added to that. I approached meditation on that level; I wasn't expecting anything to happen. I wasn't expecting instantaneous satori to hit me just because I got my legs right. I found it a good way to be. There are other ways to be taught about that state of mind than reading philosophical texts: the underlying tone in good Chinese poetry, or what is glimmering behind the surface in a Chinese Sung Dynasty landscape painting, or what's behind a haiku, is that same message about a way to be, that is not explicable by philosophy. Zen meditation—zazen—is simply, literally, a way to be, and when you get up, you see if you can't be that way even when you're not sitting: just be, while you're doing other things. I got that much sense of sitting to make me feel that it was right and natural even though it seemed unnatural for a while…
I still think a lot about Oda Sesso Roshi… Oda Roshi was an especially gentle and quiet man—an extremely subtle man, by far the subtlest mind I’ve ever been in contact with, and a marvelous teacher whose teaching capacity I would never have recognized if I hadn’t stayed with it, because it was only after five or six years that I began to realize that he had been teaching me all along. I guess that’s what all the roshis are doing: teaching even when they’re not “teaching.” One of the reasons that you have to be very patient and very committed is that the way the transmission works is that you don’t see how it works for a long time. It begins to come clear later. Oda Roshi delivered teisho lectures in so soft a voice nobody could hear him. Year after year, we would sit at lectures—lectures that only roshis can give, spontaneous commentaries on classical texts—and not hear what he was saying. Several years later after Oda Roshi had died, one of the head monks, with whom I became very close, said to me, “You know those lectures that Oda Roshi gave that we couldn’t hear? I’m beginning to hear them now.”…
Unenlightened consciousness is very complicated—it’s not simple. It’s already overlaid with many washes of conditioning and opinion, likes and dislikes. In that sense, enlightened, original mind is just simpler, like the old image of the mirror without any dust on it, which in some ways is useful. My own personal discovery in the Zen monastery in Kyoto was that even with the extraordinary uniformity of behavior, practice, dress, gesture, every movement from dawn till dark, in a Zen monastery everybody was really quite different… The dialectic of Rinzai Zen practice is that you live a totally ruled life, but when you go into the sanzen room, you have absolute freedom. The roshi wouldn’t say this, but if you forced him to, he might say, “You think your life is too rigid? You have complete freedom here. Express yourself. What have you got to show me? Show me your freedom!” This really puts you on the line—“Okay, I’ve got my freedom; what do I want to do with it?” That’s part of how koan practice works.
The ‘truth’ in Buddhism is not dependent in any sense on Indian or Chinese culture… What I felt at the time and what I think all of us feel is that we’re talking about the Dharma without any particular cultural trapping. If a teaching comes from a given place, it’s a matter of courtesy and also necessity to accept it in the form that it’s brought. Things take forms of their own; we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. The Buddhadharma, which is the Dharma taught by a line of enlightened human beings (rather than the Dharma as received from deities via trance, revelation, or bhakta, which is what Hinduism is) is nirmanakaya-oriented—it goes by changeable bodies. Right now it goes primarily through human bodies. Already it is all over the globe, and it has no name and needs no name…
Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenment—traps for eager and clever fools—three-quarters of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage that they were tricked into entering…
There is a very fine spiritual line that has to be walked between being unquestioning/passive on the one hand and obnoxiously individualistic/ultimately-trusting-no-one’s-ideas-but-your-own on the other. I don’t think it’s uniquely American; I think that all people have these problems on one level or another. Maybe that’s one meaning of the Middle Way: to walk right down the center of that. In one of the Theravada scriptures the Buddha says, Be a light unto yourself. In this six-foot-long body is birth and death and the key to the liberation from birth and death.” There is one side of Buddhism that clearly throws it back on the individual—each person’s own work, practice, and life. Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.
Americans have a supermarket of adulterated ideas available to them, thinned out and sweetened just like their food. They don’t have the aparatus for critical discernment either. So that term “infantilization” [used by Robert Bly, who spoke of the infantilization of humanity—each generation following the Industrial Revolution is more infantile than the previous, thus, for example, needing many more supportive devices merely to survive] is something I can relate to. I think there’s a lot of truth in it. The primary quality of that truth is the lack of self-reliance, personal hardiness—self-sufficiency. This lack can also be described as the alienation people experience in their lives and work. If there is any one thing that’s unhealthy in America, it’s that it is a whole civilization trying to get out of work—the young, especially, get caught in that. There is a triple alienation when you try to avoid work: first, you’re trying to get outside energy sources/resources to do it for you; second, you no longer know what your own body can do, where your food or water come from; third, you lose the capacity to discover the unity of mind and body via your work.
The overwhelming problem of Americans following the spiritual path is that they are doing it with their heads and not with their bodies. Even if they’re doing it with their heads and bodies, their heads and bodies are in a nice supportive situation where the food is brought in on a tray. The next step, doing their own janitorial work and growing their own food, is missing, except in a few places… This is one of the legacies of Zen, Soto or Rinzai—to steadily pursue the unity of daily life and spiritual practice…
One of the things I learned from being in Japan and have come to understand with age is the importance of a healthy family. The family is the Practice Hall. I have a certain resistance to artificially created territories to do practice in, when we don’t realize how much territory for practice we have right at hand always…
[In your essay ”Buddhist Anarchism” you added the qualifier “gentle” to the “violence” you felt was occasionally permissible in dealing with the system.] If I were to write it now, I would use far greater caution. I probably wouldn’t use the word “violence” at all. I would say now that the time comes when you set yourself against something, rather than flow with it; that’s also called for. The very use of the word “violence” has implications—we know what they are. I was trying to say that, to be true to Mahayana, you have to act in the world. To act responsibly in the world doesn’t mean that you always stand back and let things happen: you play an active part, which means making choices, running risks, and karmically dirtying your hands to some extent. That’s what the Bodhisattva ideal is all about…
The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people’s consciousness… the nub of the problem [is] how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a non-acquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature… the ‘revolution of consciousness’ [can] be won not by guns but by seizing key images, myths, archetypes … so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.
It cannot even be begun without the first of the steps on the Eightfold Path, namely Right View. I’ll tell you how I came to hold Right View in this regard, in a really useful way. I’m a fairly practical and handy person; I was brought up on a farm where we learned how to figure things out and fix them. During the first year or two I was at Daitoku-ji Sodo, out back working in the garden, helping put in a little firewood, or firing up the bath, I noticed a number of times little improvements that could be made. Ultimately I ventured to suggest to the head monks some labor- and time-saving techniques. They were tolerant of me for a while. Finally, one day one of them took me aside and said, “We don’t want to do things any better or any faster, because that’s not the point—the point is that you live the whole life. If we speed up the work in the garden, you’ll just have to spend that much more time sitting in the zendo, and your legs will hurt more.” It’s all one meditation. The importance is in the right balance, and not how to save time in one place or another. I’ve turned that insight over and over ever since.
What it comes down to is simply this: If what the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Shoshone, the Hopi, the Christians are suggesting is true, then all of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because it’s drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving—real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind and into liberation. Implicit are the possibilities of a way of living and being which is dialectically harmonious and complexly simple, because that’s the Way. Right Practice, then, is doing the details. And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting—that ask, “What is the natural/spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor-saving?” “Spiritual price” means the time at home, time with your family, time that you can meditate, the difference between what comes to your body and mind by walking a mile as against driving (plus the cost of the gas). There’s an accounting that no one has figured out how to do.
The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension. The literalness of that other dimension is indeed going to have to be taught to us by some of these other ways…
The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that which I recognize more clearly now. Nobody can move from Right View to Right Occupation in a vacuum as a solitary individual with any ease at all. The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In a way the one that we pay least attention to and have the least understanding of is Sangha—community. What have to be built are community networks—not necessarily communes or anything fancy. When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature…
In actual fact, I’ve lived more in the flux of society on more levels that practically anybody I know. I’ve held employment on all levels of society. I can pride myself on the fact that I worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had been to college.
I grew up with a sense of identification with the working class. I have lots of experience with this society—always have had and still do. I realize the danger of getting locked into self-justifying groups, which we see all around us. Since I’ve come back to the U.S.—and for the last seven years I’ve lived in rural California—I’ve been able to live and move with all kinds of people, which has been very good for me. A lot of my friends are doing the same. The whole “back to the land” movement, at least in California, at first had the quality of people going off into little enclaves. But the enclaves broke down rapidly as people discovered not only that they would have to but that they would enjoy interacting with their backwoods neighbors. A wonderful exchange of information and pleasure came out of what originally was hostile; each side discovered that they had something to learn from the other. Certain things that at first were taboo have become understood and acceptable.
[“Snyder does not face problems of modern life… His poetry doesn’t answer to the tensions of modern life and depends on a life no longer accessible or even desirable for man.”— Thomas Parkinson, Southern Review] The interesting point is the criticism of my poetry as evoking essentially outmoded values or situations that are not relevant or desirable. It’s complicated to try to defend that. The answer lies in a critique of contemporary society and the clarification of lots of misunderstandings people have about what “primitive” constitutes, and even simpler clarifications about what your grandmother’s life was like. It isn’t really a main thrust in my argument or anyone else’s I know that we should go backward. Whenever you get into this kind of discussion, one of the first things you are charged with from some corner is that, “Well, you want to go backwards.” So you have to answer it over and over again, but still people keep raising it… Jerry Brown asked me the same question in a discussion about three weeks ago; he said, “You’re going against the grain of things all the time, aren’t you?” I said, “It’s only a temporary turbulence I’m setting myself against. I’m in line with the big flow.”
When we talk about a “norm” or a “Dharma,” we’re talking about the grain of things in the larger picture. Living close to the earth, living more simply, living more responsibly, are all quite literally in the grain of things. It’s coming back to us one way or another, like it or not—when the excessive energy supplies are gone. I will stress, and keep stressing, these things, because one of the messages I feel I have to convey—not as a preaching but as a demonstration hidden within poetry—is of deeper harmonies and deeper simplicities, which are essentially sanities, even though they appear irrelevant, impossible, behind us, ahead of us, or right now…
[“The peculiar strength of the technological culture is to be able to make tame commodities out of potentially revolutionary states of consciousness”—Marcuse]. The point by Marcuse that you raised is a real danger. I’m conscious enough of it, but I’m not sure about how one handles it except by being really careful and wary; that’s one of the reasons why I stay out of the media pretty much—maybe a simpleminded way of keeping myself from being prempted or made into a commodity…
I think it’s inevitable that American society move farther and farther away from certain kinds of extreme individualism… The negative side of the spirit of individualism—the “everybody get their own” exploitive side—certainly is no longer appropriate. It can be said to have been in some ways productive when there were enormous quantities of resources available; but it’s counterproductive in a postfrontier society. It’s counterproductive when the important insight for everyone is how to interact appropriately and understand the reciprocity of things, which is the actual model of life on earth—a reciprocal, rather than a competitive, network… We are moving away from Darwinism. As the evolutionary model dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, henceforth the ecological model will dominate our model of how the world is—reciprocal and interacting rather than competitive…
You’re asking me what is my Buddhist practice? I’ll ask you, “What do you mean by ‘practice’?”... So you’re defining “practice” essentially as a concrete, periodic activity… Periodic, repetitive behavior, to create, re-create, enforce, reinforce certain tendencies, certain potentialities, in the biopsyche. There is another kind of practice, which also is habitual and periodic, but not necessarily as easily or clearly directed by the will: that’s the practice of necessity. We are six-foot-long vertebrates, standing on our hind legs, who have to breathe so many breaths per minute, eat so many BTUs of plant-transformed solar energy per hour, et cetera. I wouldn’t like to separate our mindfulness into two separate categories, one of which is your forty-minute daily ritual, which is “practice,” and the other not practice. Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all of the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, “practice” is the practice of life. But from the enlightened standpoint, all of language is poetry, and all of life is practice. At any time when the attention is there fully, then all of the Bodhisattva’s acts are being done.
I’ve had many teachers who have taught me good practices, good habits. One of the first practices I learned is that when you’re working with another person on a two-person crosscut saw, you never push, you only pull; my father taught me that when I was eight. Another practice I learned early was safety, where to put your feet when you split wood so that the axe won’t glance off and hurt your feet. We all have to learn to change oil on time or we burn out our engines. We have to learn how to cook. By trial and error, but also by attention, it gets better. Another great teaching that I had came from some older men, all of whom were practitioners of a little-known esoteric indigenous Occidental school of mystical practice called mountaineering. It has its own rituals and initiations, which can be very severe. The intention of mountaineering is very detached—it’s not necessarily to get to the top of a mountain or to be a solitary star. Mountaineering is done with teamwork. Part of its joy and delight is in working with two other people on a rope, maybe several ropes together, in great harmony and with great care for each other, your motions related to what everyone else has to do and can do to the point of ascending. The real mysticism of mountaineering is the body/mind practice of moving on a vertical plane in a realm that is totally inhospitable to human beings.
From many people I learned the practice of how to handle your tools, clean them, put them back, how to work together with other men and women; how to work as hard as you can when it’s time for you to work, and how to play together afterwards. I learned this from the people to whom I dedicated my first book, Riprap. I came also to a specific spiritual practice, Buddhism, which has some extraordinary teachings within it. The whole world is practicing together; it is not rare or uncommon for people who are living their lives in the world, doing the things they must do, if they have not been degraded or oppressed, to be fully conscious of the dignity and pride of their life and work. It’s largely the fellaheen oppression and alienation that is laid down on people by certain civilized societies throughout history that breaks up people’s original mind, original wisdom, the sense and sanity of their work and life. From that standpoint, Buddhism, like Christianity, is responding to the alienation of a fragmented society. In doing this, Buddhism developed a sangha [community] which is celibate as a strategy to maintain a certain kind of teaching that in a sense goes against the grain of contemporary civilization, but will not go too much against the grain because it’s a survival matter.
The larger picture is the possibility that humanity has more original mind from the beginning than we think. Part of our practice is not just sitting down and forming useful little groups within the society but, in a real Mahayana way, expanding our sense of what has happened to us all into a realization that natural societies are in themselves communities of practice…
