Passage Through India: An Expanded and Illustrated Edition

In 1962, after studying Buddhism in Japan, Gary Snyder, with his former wife, the poet Joanne Kyger, joined Allen Ginsberg and his companion Peter Orlovsky for a long trip to India “to see the hearth-land of the Buddha’s teachings.”

Snyder kept extensive journals of his travels and, in this particular case, also wrote the whole account in one long letter to his sister. Passage Through India brings both together in celebration of and reverence for India and its teachings. As Snyder writes in his original preface, “I honor India for many things: those neolithic cattle breeders who sang daily songs of love to God and Cow, as a family, and whose singing is echoed even today . . . The finest love poetry and love sculpture on earth . . . But most, the spectacle of a high civilization that accomplished art, literature, and ceremony without imposing a narrow version of itself on every tribe and village.”

Complete with over a hundred photos from Snyder’s personal collection, Passage Through India is an opportunity to join one of our most heralded and beloved poets on a great spiritual journey under “an eternal sky of stars, and on a beginningless earth.”