“Off the Trail”: Ecophilosophy and Gary Snyder’s Idea of “the Wild”

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Notes

1. The term “guru” in Hinduism and Buddhism refers to “a spiritual teacher, especially one who imparts initiation.” See Oxford Dictionary.

2. Turtle Island is a Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of poems and essays by Gary Snyder (published by New Directions). When describing the title of the book, Snyder writes in his introductory note that Turtle Island is “the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.”

3. The term “off the trail” has repeatedly appeared in Snyder’s works. One of the essays in his finest prose work The Practice of the Wild, for instance, is titled “On the Path, Off the Trail,” and there is a poem titled “Off the Trail” in his No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992).

4. In Back on the Fire, Snyder notes that Chen Shih-Hsiang’s “translation of Lu Ji’s Wen Fu ‘Prose-poem on Writing’ gave me the angle on the ‘axe handle’ proverb ‘When making an axe handle, the pattern is not far off’” (142). In his book Axe Handles: Poems (1983), Snyder compares the transmission of cultural values and knowledge to an axe: “Chen was an axe, I am an axe /And my son a handle, soon /To be shaping again, model /And tool, craft of culture, /How we go on” (6). Lu Ji, Chen Shih-Hsiang, and Snyder are axes functioning as models that shape the axe handle. Snyder’s son Kai will “be shaping again” to become a handle, and this is how artists and poets act as communicators to transmit “craft of culture.”

5. In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder refers to the pathless world of wilderness as a “surpassing school,” the “primary temple,” and the living beings in the wild as tough, funny, and ferocious teachers (19, 25). Meanwhile, Snyder addresses a Zen master, who can be said to be the enlightened Buddha, as a “teacher.” For Snyder, wilderness is “a place of teaching” and thus also plays the role of a Buddha for all beings.