The Great Gold

An interview with Gary Snyder at Sakura time.

- Trevor Carolan

Gary Snyder’S new book The Great Clod (Counterpoint Press) offers some of his most luminous prose on a lifelong passion for the cultures of China and Japan. Borrowing its title from Chuang-tzu’s subtle classic, and subtitled “Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia,” this felicitous, late career volume presents Snyder’s unique weave of dharma scholarship and ecological pensées that his readers have come to treasure. In it, he reminds us too of China’s ancient Daoists and of their moral traditions that originated within a frame of reference shaped by nature and the human condition. Veteran Kyoto Journal contributor Trevor Carolan spoke by telephone with the beloved poet and elder of the global environmental movement from northern California’s Sierra Nevadas on April 5, 2016.

TREVOR CAROLAN: Gary, the epigraph from Chuang-tzu about life and death suggests that, when it’s time, you’re comfortable with the idea of moving on from this present incarnation…

GARY SNYDER: Yeah. It’s not a big deal. That’s not a big deal.

The epigraph reads, “The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death.So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death.”

That’s right. It is one of Chuang-tzu’s big statements on “The Great Clod.” There is another later on in the book that I quote too, about hiding yourself in the world. The whole of the Chuangtzu text is a good sized book and the complete text has been translated by Burton Watson. It’s one of the classics of Chinese literature. For one thing, it’s very early, a remarkable piece of writing. Much more playful and much more vivid than Lao-tzu’s Dao De Jing. Much longer.