Death and Destruction in Snyder’s Twenty-First-Century Poems

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Funding

This research was made possible by MOE grant R-103-000-133-112.

Notes

1. See the entry for Śūnyatāśūnyatā in Buswell and Lopez (872) for a discussion of the emptiness of emptiness.

2. It is not clear whether Snyder, in clarifying his views of reincarnation to Harrison, is making a direct reference to Vaihinger’s work (which has frequently been reprinted through the twentieth century), but the logic appears to fit. An application of Vaihinger’s approach to the problem of reincarnation might look like this: if we live “as if” our situation in this life were determined by previous lives and as if our actions now will definitely have consequences later, then we can attain a greater sense of control about how life is now, and we will tend to live in a more disciplined and mindful manner.

3. McMahan includes “Sara” in a series of portraits that represent the variety of beliefs operant within modern Buddhisms to illustrate the straddling of positions typically found in modern Westerners’ approaches to karma and reincarnation: Sara believes “that she will continue in some sense to live beyond physical death but she vacillates on the idea of reincarnation. She has read an account of the Buddhist wheel of rebirth in which beings are reborn as humans, animals, gods, jealous gods, hunger ghosts, or hell beings but doubts their literal existence, seeing them as symbolic” (29–30).

4. Dōgen’s name appears twenty-four times in The Practice of the Wild, and Dōgen has never been far from Snyder’s thought when he discusses the Zen tradition since translations started to make his work more widely available in English since the 1980s.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by MOE grant R-103-000-133-112.