Smokey Bear Sutra
It's Gary Snyder's 1969 bid to raise Smokey Bear to vajra status. A contemporary of Jack Kerouac, Snyder was an early American adopter of Zen – such as it existed in Western Buddhism's hippy phase.
Buddhism was popular among freethinking Westerners at the time, in part because it was (and is) viewed as territory ripe for conquest. As a religion with little cultural hegemony, local converts could make it advocate any bohemian thing they wanted. (This stands in contrast to Christianity, which has high cultural hegemony, and is therefore press-ganged into conservative crusades.)
Case in point: environmentalism, still a bedrock value of our Zen, though largely absent from the Asian sort. (Zen has well-established cultural hegemony there, and is consequently a conservative sandbox. See how that works?)
As it happens, Snyder wrote his neo-sutra to serve as Buddhism's contribution to the first Earth Day. What's most interesting to me is that he took Acala-vidyārāja – called Fudo Myōō in Japan, and patron of my practice – as his model, apparently because that figure is often depicted engulfed in flames. Snyder even flat-out appropriated Acala's mantra (namaḥ samanta vajrānāṃ caṇḍa-mahāroṣaṇa sphoṭaya hūṃ traṭ hāṃ māṃ), albeit with some creative transliteration.
Not that Fudo, or Smokey for that matter, probably cares.
Anyway, the text, and the comments Snyder made about it almost 50 years later, are worthwhile. They definitely capture that era, with its (sometimes cloying) earnestness, but mostly, the hope and determination that briefly motivated a generation.
(Photo courtesy of [the US] National Agricultural Library and Wikimedia Commons.)
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