Gary Snyder

we would understand the sense of life if we would sing more and say less.

I wish I could show him that what he is looking for is not in India but in himself, and obvious for all to see.

Trying to catch the meaning of the universe in terms of some religious, philosophical, or moral system is really like asking Bach or Ali Akbar to explain their music in words.

When Christians go to church they leave their bodies at the door. The priest-at-large idea was too

Gilbert Keith Chesterton—that Catholic equivalent of Hotei, the “laughing Buddha”—who, though neither a great poet nor a great theologian, had the sort of bewitched imagination from which great poetry and theology can be made. He shone as an essayist and fantast, and of all his many essays the most profound and provoking was “On Nonsense,” the

flock to Esalen.

As in music, the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development, and in a world where there is neither self nor other, the only identity is just This—which is all, which is energy, which is God by no name.

Koya-san is a Shangrila, just as far-off hills are indeed blue. Both places and people should thus be respected and enjoyed in not inspecting them too closely with a vulgar, nosy, and intrusive attitude. Here the style of Buddhism is called Shingon and is closely related to Vajrayana, the ritualistic and magical Buddhism of Tibet, so that in this p