The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. - Gary Snyder

The Sioux idea of living creatures is that trees, buffalo and men are temporary energy swirls, turbulence patterns ... that’s an early intuitive recognition of energy as a quality of matter. But that’s an old insight, you know, extremely old—probably a Paleolithic shaman’s insight. You find that perception registered so many ways in archaic and primitive lore. I would say that it is probably the most basic insight into the nature of things, and that our more common, recent Occidental view of the universe as consisting of fixed things is out of the main stream, a deviation from basic human perception.

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.