| This dissertation is an intellectual biography of Gary Snyder (b. 1930), a pioneering Zen Buddhist translator and poet, with reference to his informal and formal education in the liberal arts through reading and examined life experience. Snyder's education is informed by three main lineages: Buddhist thought and practice in the tradition of Hakuin Ekaku, Imagita Kôsen Rôshi, D. T. Suzuki, Sokei-an Sasaki Rôshi, and Oda Sessô Rôshi, literary production in the tradition of Han Shan, Bashô, and Kenneth Rexroth; and humanistic anthropology in the tradition of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Melville Herskovits. The thesis contends that Snyder's training in anthropology—his understanding of Boasian “culture”—made him a force in that nascent shift from theology to anthropology in the 1950s that marks the history of twentieth-century religious thought and scholarship in the United States. Snyder's apprenticeship at Ruth Fuller Sasaki's First Zen Institute of America in Kyoto at Ryôsen-an and his monastic training at Daitoku-ji receive considerable attention in the middle chapters. Concluding chapters turn to the work of the modern Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, whose 1960 Kyoto lecture Snyder attended and with whom Snyder's postmodern religious vision is compared. The Practice of the Wild (1990), a statement of Snyder's mature religious vision in prose, illuminates this comparison. Appendix 1 provides an introduction to Mountains and Rivers without End (1996), Snyder's mature religious vision in poetry. Research on Snyder's life and work as a prophetic religious intellectual is based on his voluminous personal journals, archived correspondence, published works, personal communication, and fieldwork in Kyoto and at Kitkitdizze (Snyder's “future primitive” home, library, and Zen practice place on the San Juan Ridge in Northern California, Turtle Island). The relation of reading and life experience is a theoretical preoccupation of this project, as is a concern with apprenticeship and participant-observation models for religious education. Writings of William James and Wilfred Cantwell Smith guide exposition of this project's religious and theological interests. The author aims to describe and to some degree exhibit what Snyder means when he makes reference to “the real work.”... |
