Snyder: I quote to you one of Basho's disciples who took down something Basho once said to a group of students. He said, "To learn about the pine, go to the pine. To learn about bamboo, go to the bamboo. But this learn is not just what you think learn is. You only learn by becoming totally absorbed in that which you wish to learn. There are many people who think they have learned something and willfully construct a poem which is artifice and does not flow from their delicate entrance into the life of another object.
      Geneson: So when Sartre, the Western philosopher, goes to the tree, touches the tree trunk and says, "I feel in an absurd position—I cannot break through my skin to get in touch with this bark, which is outside me," the Japanese poet would say what?
      Snyder: Sartre is expressing the disease of the West. At least he's being honest.
      The Oriental will say, "But there are ways to do it, my friend. It's no big deal." It's no big deal, especially if you get attuned to the possibility from early in life.—from Gary Snyder interviewed by Paul Geneson in The Real Work

Wrote Jorge Luis Borges in "A Yellow Rose" (Prose Pieces from El Hacedor in Selected Poems 1923–1967, Delta Books edition),

Then the revelation came to him. Marino saw the rose as Adam first saw it in Paradise, and he felt that it lived in an eternity of its own and not in his words, and that we may mention or allude to a thing but not express it, and that the tall proud volumes casting a golden haze there in a corner of the room were not (as his vanity dreamed) a mirror of the world but only one more thing added to the world.
      This illumination came to Marino on the eve of his death, as perhaps before him it had come to Homer and Dante as well.

Words are not the things they represent—of course—but tools that human creatures use in group for the purpose of successfully navigating spacetime. Of course the rose lives in its own eternity and not in our words—but our words may well, and do, mirror the rose to the degree necessary to provide sufficient toolness for Human of the mirroredness in Word of Rose.

That the books in the corner could have been both reflective of the world and one more thing added to the world—as is a raindrop on a windowpane—appears not to have occurred to the writer. The understanding of Being as containerless, counterpartless Unity in which the differentiative subtools both, either, and neither exist only in Mind as constructs of creaturehood Perception appears to have been more remote still. The panhuman general absence of this understanding is the superset of the dysfunction that Snyder refers to as the disease of the West.

They suffer by Choice the Universe
Multiply suffering by Choice in Universe
They who do not realize
They are Universe.¹