Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji

Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
From Gary Snyder: Essential Prose

Interesting Links

Video: Gary Snyder on his friendship with Jack Kerouac (YouTube)

Official website of Shokoku-ji

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Yuki-Onna,” Lafcadio Hearn
• “Orion Rises on the Dunes,” Henry Beston
• “St. Clair Flats,” Constance Fenimore Woolson
• “Making It!” Seymour Krim

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Gary Snyder: Essential Prose
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The “Banryuzu,” a painting of a dragon by Kanō Mitsunobu (1565–1608) on the ceiling of the Hatto Hall (shown at right) at Shokoku-ji in Kyoto. The Hatto Hall (also known as the Dharma hall or the Lecture Hall) is usually the largest and central ceremonial building in a Japanese temple complex. (Kyoto Heritage Preservation Association. Inset photo by PlusMinus via WikiMedia)

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In October 1955, Jack Kerouac attended a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg read for the first time from Howl, which would be published in book form the following year, and Gary Snyder read “A Berry Feast,” which would appear in 1957 in the second issue of the influential countercultural magazine Evergreen Review. Ginsberg introduced Snyder to Kerouac, and later that month the two new friends, with a shared interest in Buddhism, went on a hike in the Yosemite—a trip described in Keroauc’s second novel, The Dharma Bums. As Snyder recalled two decades later:

So we headed up over Sonora Pass, leaving at night in Berkeley, and went over to Bridgeport, up to Twin Lakes and went in from there, over Sonora Pass. . . . It’s very beautifully described in The Dharma Bums, actually. It was very cold. It was late autumn. The aspens were yellow, and it went well below freezing in the night and left frost on the little creek in the canyon we were camped at. There was a sprinkle of fresh white snow up on the ridges and peaks. We made it up to the top of the Matterhorn and came back down again. Actually, Jack didn’t. I guess I was the only one that went up there. I was the persistent one.

One of Kerouac’s early titles for the novel was “Visions of Gary,” but much of the book, including its lead character, is a work of the imagination. “Japhy Ryder is not me,” Snyder wearily reminds readers whenever the subject comes up. “The novel is fiction. It’s not journalism. I have to say that all the time.” A few years after the book was published, he told an interviewer, “Jack made me out to be quite a lover in the book, which is not so. It’s a sort of strange feeling to be a hero of a book. People expect all sorts of things from you.” During a conversation in 2008 with Dana Goodyear of The New Yorker, Snyder said of one famous section: “The sex scene in The Dharma Bums was the result of me describing for Jack Kerouac Tantric sex in Tibetan Buddhism.”

During the decade following the book’s publication, Snyder was mostly away from the United States and missed out on much of the celebrity that might have attended him. Ten years ago, when Newsweek editor Sean Elder asked him if he had been surprised or annoyed by the popularity of the book, he responded:

I was away from the country during most of that. . . . I am only one small model for the Japhy Ryder character and a lot of what Japhy Ryder does is fictional. But some of it is interestingly drawn on what we did together; the mountain climbing scene is close. But as a piece of writing goes it’s not one of my favorite Kerouac novels. It was written too hastily, and you can see the haste. He’s just banged it together because his publisher said, “On the Road is doing so well, let’s have another novel right away.”

In Dharma Bums, the narrator Ray Smith (Kerouac’s alter ego) remarks on his friend’s theological beliefs: “Strangely Japhy wasn't interested in the Buddhism of San Francisco Chinatown because it was traditional Buddhism, not the Zen intellectual artistic Buddhism he loved—but I was trying to make him see that everything was the same.” In a 1961 interview with New York Post editor Alfred G. Aronowitz, Snyder indirectly responded to this and similar statements in the novel. “Jack doesn't know anything about Zen. He came onto it by reading the Sacred Books of the East series. I deeply respect Jack’s insights in Buddhism, and I think they are very valid, but this is simply some of the American Buddhism as it’s practiced.”

The year after the trip with Kerouac to Yosemite, Snyder traveled to Japan, where he lived off and on until 1968, the year before Kerouac died. Aronowitz, who caught up with Snyder in Kyoto in 1961, described the life of this reluctant celebrity:

Snyder’s present surroundings, of course, are no more surprising than he is. Kyoto, aside from its contributions to the post card, is also the site of Daitoku Temple, that labyrinthine compound of crumbling mud-and-tile walls, incredible gardens, wooden gates, impassable bamboo grove, high-gabled structures and painted dragons which serves as the home office for one of the several great temple-systems of the Rinzai sect of Zen and in which, with his head unshaven and with his beard flashing the red-oranges and yellows of the Van Gogh self-portraits he resembles, Snyder participates in the meditations and rigors of a Zen student. . . .

“They really get at the ego,” explains Snyder, describing the temple routine of zazen, those half-hour periods of cross-legged silence when the student monks mediate on their koans, little puzzles, semantic and irrational, to which there are no answers but to which they must find one, reciting it, finally, in the sanzen, a momentary but momentous interview with their Zen master, held often four times daily with the first at four in the morning, a confrontation which Snyder describes as “the fierce face-to-face moment where you spit forth truth or perish.”

After he left for Japan in the spring of 1956, Snyder never saw Kerouac again. Although their friendship was brief, he has acknowledged Kerouac’s influence on his own writing. “I much appreciated what he had to say about spontaneous prose,” he wrote a decade later. “I think it influenced my journal writing a lot, some of which would, say, be registered in Earth House Hold [Snyder’s first book of prose]. I think that I owe a lot to Jack in my prose style, actually. And my sense of poetics has been touched by Jack for sure.” One of his earliest published pieces, “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji,” about a week-long meditation retreat at a temple in Kyoto in May 1957, was included in that first collection of prose and we reprint it here as our Story of the Week selection.

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Notes: The Prajñaparamita-Hridaya Sutra, is also known as The Heart Sutra, the earliest text of which has been dated to 661 CE. Mumonkan (The Gateless Barrier) is an early thirteenth-century collection of Zen koans compiled by Wumen Huikai. Hekiganroku (The Blue Cliff Record) is a koan collection compiled in 1125 and expanded to its present form by Yuanwu Kequin before his death ten years later. Hinoki is Japanese cypress, a tree known for its rot-resistant timber; sugi is the Japanese cedar tree.

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Shokoku Temple is in northern Kyoto, on level ground, with a Christian college just south of it and many blocks of crowded little houses and stone-edged dirt roads north. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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