The Portable Pagoda: Asia and America in the Work of Gary Snyder

Abstract

Despite a certain increasing literacy in the United States since the Second World War, the poet Gary Snyder is not as well known as he deserves to be among American readers. Those who do know his work are proud of the achievement, not only because he is nativeborn, but partly because his writing, nourished by adventurous and disciplined studies in Asia, happens to evoke and replenish themes that are American. These particularistic expressions are not the aim of his work, but they are without question the unforced by-product of it. He has had something new to say about how Americans can and should care for themselves and for others, and for their environmental and cultural heritage. The newness of the vision grows out of a tradition of Asian-influenced writing which Snyder has revivified by the application of imagination, intelligence and devotion.

It is in fact surprising that such a body of doctrines as the Buddhist, with its profoundly other-worldy and even anti-social emphasis, and in the Buddha’s words ‘Hard to be understood by you who are of different views, another tolerance, other tastes, other Training’ can have become even as ‘Popular’ as it is in the modern Western environment. We should have supposed that modern minds would have found in Brahmanism with its acceptance of life as a whole, a more congenial philosophy. We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. (Ananda Coomaraswamy)

Where the West does not peer at the stars, it looks to Asia. Or rather to the kitsch of Asia.

The children of Krishna tango along our soiled pavements. The stoned, their vacant minds hysterical or supine, mouth dime-store mantras. The mendacities of Zen and fairground meditation, prepackaged Nirvanas à la Hermann Hesse (an immensely over-rated writer) are big business. Neon tantras flash from the boulevards of San Francisco and Chelsea, Cadillac-wafted little tricksters, corrupt butterballs in saffron robes who proclaim themselves to be the light from the East, fill our lecture halls and take their tithes … (George Steiner)