eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101663653 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1995 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Editor’s Preface
“When everything exists within your big mind, all dualistic relationships drop away. There is no distinction between heaven and earth, man and woman, teacher and disciple. . . . In your big mind, everything has the same value.”
—SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI
In the Big Mind of Buddhism, the Beats found an antidote to the paranoia and conformity that were at the heart of fifties culture. Big Mind, or panoramic awareness, as Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described it, is “a state without center or fringe” in which there is no watcher or perceiver, no division between subject and object; in this view all phenomena are acknowledged as temporary, dependent on causes and conditions, and utterly devoid of any fixed identity or self-existing nature. Seeing the sky through the “bamboo tube” of everyday awareness, it looks separate, discrete, but in Buddhism’s Big Mind the boundaries between self and other are dissolved in the experience of the empty sky itself. The elimination of that distinction and the recognition that all such dualistic perceptions are illusions offered an irrefutable rebuke to the sense of hierarchy fundamental to the social and political structures of the fifties and rendered meaningless the Cold War catchwords of us and them, ally and enemy. Other fundamental teachings of Buddhism were also apropos: the acceptance of the impermanence of all life provided a new context in which to examine the fear of death and suffering that were further intensified by the development of the H-bomb and the Korean War, and Buddhism’s advocation of a mendicant, homeless path suggested a practical alternative to the rapidly accelerating cycle of work, produce, and consume that was the engine driving the culture of the fifties.
Forsaking bargain homes and gleaming machinery in favor of the freedom of the road, the Beats found their corollary for the open space of Buddhism in the vast empty space of the Western sky. During extended stays on the northern California coast and lookouts in the Cascades, the Beats experienced the limitless expanse of blue that had been inspiring pioneers and artists for centuries; there, they began to forge an American brand of mountain mysticism based on Buddhist sources as well as on American models—Whitman’s sense of the open road, Thoreau’s immersion in nature at Walden Pond, and the journey of the train-hopping American hobo. Not only did the Beats adapt the wisdom teachings of the East to a new, peculiarly American terrain, they also articulated this teaching in the vernacular, jazzy rhythms of the street, opening up what had been the domain of stuffy academics and stiff translators to a mainstream audience. With Jack Kerouac’s runaway best-seller The Dharma Bums and a paperback pocket-poet series published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the voices of American poets recounted the teachings of the Buddha to the general public for the first time.
Only now with the emergence of some long unpublished work and a revival of popular interest in the Beats are we beginning to appreciate the pivotal role these writers played in the transmission of Buddhism to America; the purpose of this volume is to document that contribution. Rather than purporting to be a Buddhist reader or a Beat reader, this collection is a conflation of the two. For that reason, certain essential Beat texts (“Howl,” for example) and some central Buddhist teachings (the Eightfold Path) are not to be found in these pages. Instead readers will find perhaps lesser known work alongside familiar poems and passages of prose. The selections are limited to the writings of those who had sustained interest in and contact with Buddhism, as well as some work by a very few “fellow travelers.” There are some notable omissions from the core group of Beat authors: Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and others, as well as those from the ranks of Buddhist poets who are not directly connected with the Beats. The exclusive focus of this volume is on those authors who explored Buddhism extensively in their work. For any oversights, I offer by way of comfort the hope that this book will open the conversation about Buddhism and the Beats rather than utter the last word.
Technically, the Beats were considered an East Coast phenomenon, and the first section of this book features the writers who hailed from that coast. The second section focuses on the Buddhist poets of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance. The two groups came together in what became known as the “Beat Generation,” the dates of which run roughly from 1944 and continue through the early sixties. The third section, “Echoes,” includes those Beats who were not formally affiliated with Buddhism, yet were influenced by it. The final section, “Like Minds,” concentrates on two poets who fall outside the perameters of the “Beat” chronology, but who were closely affiliated with the Beats: a member of an older generation of San Francisco Poets, Kenneth Rexroth, who translated Japanese and Chinese poetry and acted as an early mentor to the movement, and Anne Waldman, who grew up reading the Beats, and later went on to cofound the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, which is dedicated to combining the spontaneous composition pioneered by the Beats and Buddhist meditative practices. While this section of the book might have included many poets, we chose to focus on the two writers who were central to the dissemination of Buddhism in America and who, in a way, bracket the Buddhist Beats: Rexroth who acted as an ancestor to the Beats and Waldman who has been and continues to be instrumental in encouraging another generation of practitioner-poets.
The pieces included in this collection are not confined to those written during the “Beat” period. Instead each author’s selection includes work spanning the writer’s career from the Beat time period to the present in an attempt to explore the persistent influence of Buddhism. Consequently, in selecting work from so many writers with long and varied careers, there was much to choose from—too much to be able to offer a representative sample of the full career of each writer. For this reason, readers are directed to investigate the authors own collections and novels. In each author’s selection the pieces are arranged, roughly, according to the date of composition, except for those cases in which an author has proposed an alternative chronology in collected works.
Minimal notes have been provided. In most cases the author has composed the work for public consumption, letting the action of the poem itself be a clue to the meaning of unfamiliar words and foreign terms, some of them Buddhist. In some cases, brief explanations have been offered in a note preceding the poem or passage, and in most instances in which the author provided his or her own notes to text, they have been reprinted here. All original spellings and style have been retained. Any editorial mistakes or factual errors are mine alone.
—C.T.
Introduction
by Stephen Prothero
In a passage buried in the book that would eventually make him famous, American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau mused, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” Thoreau never informed the readers of Walden (1854) which book or books played this role in his life, but in reflecting on his own life, Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac did. In the winter of 1953–54, he sought out a copy of Thoreau’s Walden and was so inspired by its discussion of Indian philosophy, especially the Bhagavad Gita, that he was prompted to read other Hindu scriptures. However, like Thoreau’s Transcendentalist colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once described the Gita as “the much renowned book of Buddhism,” Kerouac apparently had some difficulty discriminating between the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. When he went to the library in search of Hindu holy books, Kerouac picked up instead an English translation of Ashvaghosa’s fourth-century The Life of the Buddha. A few months later, while visiting friends Neal and Carolyn Cassady in California, Kerouac ensconced himself in the San Jose Library, where he became entranced by Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932), an anthology of Buddhist scriptures. Soon he was devouring everything he could find on Eastern religions, including the Vedas, Patanajali’s Yoga Sutras, and writings by Lao-tzu and Confucius. But Buddhist sutras, especially those included in Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible, remained Kerouac’s favorite Asian texts.
Kerouac’s reading of Walden and, later, of Buddhist teachings, clearly marked a new era in his life, but it also marked a new era in the life of the nation, since Kerouac’s awakening to Buddhism stirred similar searches in other members of the Beat Generation and in the hippies of the sixties, thus helping to bend postwar counterculture eastward. Just as Kerouac, in a mood of desolation over a lost love and a large pile of unpublished manuscripts, had turned to Thoreau and to Buddhist texts, many young people disenchanted with Cold War America and the atomic age ushered in by World War II sought solace in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958). In turn, The Dharma Bums soon proved itself capable of marking new eras in individual lives, thus sparking something of the “rucksack revolution” of wandering “Zen lunatics” that it had prophesied.
Other members of the Beat Generation also came to Buddhism by way of books. Philip Whalen may have been the first of the Beats to read about Buddhism. In an investigation of religion prompted by questions about his own Christian Scientist upbringing, Whalen visited the Portland Public Library in the early 1940s, while still a teenager, and discovered the writings of theosophical Buddhists A. P. Sinnett and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Gary Snyder, who was a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, with Whalen in the late forties and early fifties, had become interested in things Asian as a boy when he saw Chinese landscape paintings in the Seattle Art Museum; but his more formal decision to study Buddhism was made in 1949 after he first read translations of Chinese classics by Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley. Soon Snyder, Whalen, and fellow Reed College student Lew Welch (all of whom were to become members of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance) were reading R. H. Blyth’s four-volume translation of Haiku (1949–52) as well as various works on Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki that Blyth had recommended.
These literary encounters define a lineage of sorts in the transmission of Buddhism to America—from Thoreau, who in 1844 in the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial published Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s translation from the French of the Lotus Sutra (the first time a Buddhist sutra appeared in English); to Dwight Goddard, a former American missionary to China who founded the Followers of the Buddha in 1934; to Jack Kerouac, the Beats, and the writers of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance; to today’s American Buddhists, many of whom were brought up in other traditions and who first learned of Buddhism by reading The Dharma Bums. This anthology takes one moment in this history—the moment when the Beats discovered and practiced Buddhism—to explore how a new Buddhism began to take shape in the America of the fifties and sixties and how that has transformed, and is transforming still, the landscape and culture in which we live. This collection of letters, poems, excerpts from novels, essays, artwork, journal entries, interviews, and even a sutra, makes an implicit argument that the Beats were significant not only in terms of their literary legacy, but also in terms of their spiritual legacy. Furthermore, this collection testifies that the Beats constitute an important branch in the lineage chart of Buddhism in America, and asserts further that the Beat encounter with the Buddhist tradition was as serious as it was sustained.
In the midst of a lifetime of considering how spiritual lineages are constructed and ancient wisdom handed down, Gary Snyder has noted that in traditional communities, wisdom is passed down orally from teacher to student, from grandparent to grandchild, without the intervention of texts. But in Western culture, Snyder has remarked, that same wisdom is often transmitted from author to reader, from book to book. Books are our elders, asserts Snyder, and libraries our repositories of spiritual insight. This observation can certainly be applied to Buddhism in America, which until very recently propagated itself largely through books.
While Americans had encountered Buddhists in the China trade of the late eighteenth century, and Buddhists crossed the paths of American Protestant missionaries as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, neither the traders nor the missionaries took Buddhism seriously enough to sit down with these Buddhists, to learn firsthand what they had to teach. And while Chinese immigrants began arriving on American shores in the mid-1800s and Japanese immigrants made their way here closer to the turn of the century, very few outside of these Asian communities took sufficient interest in their Buddhism to enter into dialogue with them about their beliefs and practices.
Buddhism began to make its way into mainstream American culture only when an odd mix of Unitarians, Transcendentalists, theosophists, and Orientalists picked up the Buddhist scriptures and began, first, to read about the Buddhist tradition and, later, to write new books themselves. In fact, despite the arrival of Buddhist missionaries in the late nineteenth century, and most notably the presence of Anagarika Dharmapala from Ceylon and Soyen Shaku from Japan at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, the American encounter with Buddhism remained largely confined to Asian-American communities. Among Americans brought up in other traditions, Buddhism remained for the most part a literary and intellectual enterprise until the sixties and seventies.
Against this backdrop, the Beats can be appreciated as transitional figures constructing a “middle way” between the early era of armchair Buddhism and contemporary Buddhist practice, which usually involves a formal setting and study with a teacher. In an America short on English-language texts and English-speaking teachers, the Beats helped to foster the interest that would support the subsequent establishment of dharma centers and sanghas, or communities. For example, when Gary Snyder vowed in the early fifties to sit and meditate, he had only a book as his guide. And when he decided to seek out a Zen master, he determined it was necessary to go to Japan. Beats who looked for Buddhist teachers later in life did not have to travel so far. Allen Ginsberg, for example, came across his Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche on the streets of New York City in 1970. And, after living in Japan, Philip Whalen discovered his American-born teacher, Richard Baker-roshi, in northern California in the early seventies. The Beats also adopted an Emersonian ethos of self-reliance and a Thoreauvian appreciation of solitude in nature; many of them went beyond books and embarked on a contemplative path by taking jobs—as loggers, sailors, and fire lookouts—that placed them in the midst of nature. The Beats had succeeded in picking up the thread of the Transcendentalists’ interest in the wisdom traditions of the East and in nature and began to weave it seamlessly into the fabric of American life.
The Beats and Transcendentalism
Nearly half a century ago historian Perry Miller contended in an introduction to The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) that American Transcendentalism, a school of thought influential among New England writers in the mid-1800s, was not primarily a literary movement. Transcendentalism, he argued, was essentially a “religious demonstration” and as such demanded the attention not only of students of American literature but also of scholars of American religion. Contemporary readers familiar with the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, not to mention the work of “second-cycle” Transcendentalists such as James Freeman Clarke and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, might be surprised to learn that this matter was ever in doubt. For instance, very early in his life, Emerson described in a letter to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson “the treasures of the Bramins [sic] and the volumes of Zoroaster” as “learning of El Dorado.” And as a young man writing essays such as “Compensation” and poems such as “Brahma” he worked at his desk with the Bhagavad Gita, the Laws of Manu, and the Puranas opened out before him. Thus, the spiritual concerns of the Transcendentalists now seem self-evident, but Miller’s argument needed to be made for two reasons. The first is that the Transcendentalists were rebels against religious orthodoxies. They rejected not only traditional Christianity but also Unitarianism, the unofficial orthodoxy of Boston and its environs. They did so, moreover, in unequivocal terms. Unitarian ministers, Emerson concluded, were “corpse-cold,” and his Transcendentalist colleagues added that Unitarianism’s sacred center of Harvard Divinity School was an “ice house.” Many critics of the Transcendentalists saw their rejection as incontrovertible evidence that they were uninterested in religion in general. A second factor that made Miller’s argument necessary was that the Transcendentalists’ interests in a variety of Asian religions were typically seen as proof that whatever minimal religious concerns they might have had were as shallow as they were wide.
For a long time, the Beats suffered a similar reputation as anti-religious enemies of god and country, or, at best, as dilettantes, fashionable dabblers in the exotic East. And while a recognition of the Beats’ contribution to literature has now been established by Allen Ginsberg’s winning of the National Book Award and Gary Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize, their interest in religion and their contribution to American religious history is still largely ignored. This is all the more surprising, given the fact that nearly every one of the Beats have claimed not simply to be writers, but to be religious writers with abiding spiritual interests. Early in his career, Jack Kerouac characterized the Beat Generation as “a ‘seeking’ generation.” And when a reporter, the young Mike Wallace, asked him what he was seeking, Kerouac replied, “God. I want God to show me His face.” In an influential Esquire essay on “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation” (1958), Beat author and observer John Clellon Holmes recast Kerouac’s remarks into the claim that the undeniable kinetic imperative of the Beats—their urge to go, go, go and “burn, burn, burn”—was motivated not, as critics claimed, by adolescent flight but by spiritual searching. “The Beat Generation,” he argued, quoting Kerouac, “is basically a religious generation.”
Given the claims of Kerouac, Holmes, and many other Beats that their work was essentially spiritual, the failure to view the Beat movement as religious cries out for explanation: one explanation is that this failure has been motivated by the same biases that led critics to view the Transcendentalists in exclusively literary terms. Set aside for the moment the many other intriguing parallels between the Transcendentalists and the Beats—their romantic longings for lives led apart from the unnatural rhythms of city life, their certainty of the correspondences between the natural and the supernatural, their sense of the prophetic role of the poet, and their disdain for “foolish consistencies”—and consider only these two key facts: first, the Beats, like the Transcendentalists, were rebels against entrenched religious orthodoxies, and, second, the Beats and the Transcendentalists looked to the East for spiritual inspiration.
While the Transcendentalists spurned “corpse-cold” Unitarianism, the Beats rejected what they saw as the unfeeling Protestant-Catholic-Jewish faith of Eisenhower’s icy-hearted America. During the period that bridged World War II and the Cold War and gave birth to the Beat movement, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were converging in a spiritual synthesis exquisitely suited to what historians have described as “the placid decade.” Rabbi Joshua Liebman’s Peace of Mind (1946), Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen’s Peace of Soul (1949), and Reverend Billy Graham’s Peace with God (1953) constituted something of the canon of this emerging generic faith. Although these books were written by a Jew, a Catholic, and a Protestant, respectively, their messages were as strikingly similar as their titles. Like Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), another best-seller of the time, each of these authors was convinced that the faithful could will their way to spiritual and material success in postwar America. This cheery outlook seemed almost surreal to the early Beats, who were downcast and alienated not only by the looming Cold War but also by the bomb, the Holocaust, and World War II.
Not surprisingly, critics of the Beats, like critics of the Transcendentalists, viewed this rejection not as a refusal to participate in the fifties versions of various religious traditions but as a wholesale rejection of religion. In fact, the most persistent criticism of the early Beats was that they repudiated not simply religion but meaning itself. Cultural icon Life magazine depicted the Beats’ refusal to “accentuate the positive” as an attempt to undermine all that was sacred in postwar America—“Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit, and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking H-bomb.” Even Playboy called them “nihilists.” This line of interpretation became an orthodoxy of its own with the publication of Norman Podhoretz’s strafing of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in Partisan Review in 1958. “The Bohemianism of the 1950s is hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, ‘blood,’” Podhoretz fumed. “This is a revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul.” In a note in the successive edition of Partisan Review, Podhoretz asked, “Where is the ‘affirmation of life’ in all this? Where is the spontaneity and vitality? It sounds more like an affirmation of death to me.”
To this sort of question, the early Beats responded in one voice. “The Beat Generation is insulted when linked to doom, thoughts of doom, fear of doom, anger of doom,” Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky complained. “It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets,” John Clellon Holmes added, “a perfect craving to believe.” Responding to a critic who described his poetic manifesto “Howl” as a nihilistic “howl against civilization,” Allen Ginsberg contended that the poem was a prophetic utterance—a protest in the original sense of “pro-attestation, that is testimony in favor of Value.” Howl and Other Poems (1956), he added, “is an ‘Affirmation’ by individual experience of god, sex, drugs, absurdity. . . . The poems are religious and I meant them to be.” Echoing Ginsberg, Kerouac responded to a claim advanced in The Nation that the Beats were “nay-sayers.” “I want to speak for things,” Kerouac explained. “For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out.”
Unfortunately, these testimonials did little to persuade critics that the Beat movement was, as Beat poet Michael McClure once argued, a “spiritual occasion.” In fact, the interest in Buddhism and other Asian religions made plain in Kerouac’s litany only reinforced the perception promoted in magazines such as Life and Time, as well as in more sophisticated literary publications including The Saturday Review and Partisan Review, that the Beat movement was areligious at best. Just as the Transcendentalists’ forays into Asian religious texts did little to persuade critics of Transcendentalism that religious concerns were integral to their movement, the Beats’ efforts to incorporate Asian meditation techniques into their lives and Eastern religious teachings into their writing only reinforced the widespread conviction that the Beats were, in Podhoretz’s terms, “spiritually underprivileged and . . . crippled of soul.”
Champions of Beat spirituality may take heart in knowing that advocates of Transcendentalist spirituality have won their argument. It is now scarcely defensible to teach a course in American religion without discussing Emerson’s “Nature,” Thoreau’s Walden, or some other “scripture” in the emerging Transcendentalist “canon.” And there are now a handful of scholarly books (Hindu Scriptures and American Transcendentalists, Emerson and the Rhetoric of Revelation, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, Zen and American Transcendentalism, etc.) and one anthology (The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists) devoted exclusively to Transcendentalist spirituality. Together these books document how the Transcendentalists’ interests in Asian religious traditions paved the way for future generations of Hindu and Buddhist sympathizers in the United States—the Beats included.
This anthology emerges out of the conviction that, like the Transcendentalists, the Beats have been appreciated for their contributions to literature at the expense of their spiritual offerings and influences. Big Sky Mind brings together in one volume what amounts to an unrelenting testimony to the Beats’ deep, persistent interest in Buddhism, challenging negative judgments of the Beats’ religious interests. It makes the case for viewing the Beat movement as, in Miller’s words, a “religious demonstration” and prepares the way for future considerations not only of the role played by Buddhism in the Beat movement but also of the role played by the Beats in popularizing and transforming Buddhism in America.
The Beat Movement and a “New Consciousness”
But who exactly were the Beats and what exactly is the Beat movement? First of all, the Beats did not, strictly speaking, comprise a generation. During the fifties, journalists, who eagerly exploited the Beats in order to sell magazines and newspapers, and Hollywood moguls, who also attempted to cash in on the Beat vogue with films such as The Beat Generation (1959) and The Beatniks (1959), fiercely promoted the idea that the Beats somehow stood for an entire generation of disaffected youth. But the attempt to sell the friends and followers of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs as a unified “Beat Generation” was like today’s attempt to turn so-called “slackers” into a “Generation X,” a vast overgeneralization devised by marketing executives rather than careful historians. Diane di Prima, who wrote Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), once remarked, “As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in [New York City] . . . We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San Francisco, and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the country.” So the Beats, in short, comprised not so much a generation as a movement; but the impact of the Beats can be seen in terms of generations that followed—the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. The Beats created the role models, the language, and the ideals that set off the “rucksack revolution.”
The Beat movement is frequently dated from the famous poetry reading held on October 13, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco—a reading that according to announcements for the event promised “free satori”—during which Allen Ginsberg offered the first public delivery of his brooding and prophetic “Howl.” But the Six Gallery reading functioned more as a coming-out party than as an inaugural meeting. A more reasonable time to begin the Beat story is 1944, the year that Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs first met in New York City. These three characters—a working-class Catholic with French-Canadian roots, a middle-class Russian-American Jew from New Jersey, and a well-to-do Anglo-American Protestant from the Midwest, respectively—stood at the center of the early Beat drama, which soon included a large and diverse supporting cast of novelists, poets, and hangers-on.
Although the Beat movement was clearly centered on Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, early on it incorporated other East Coast writers such as John Clellon Holmes, Lucien Carr, and Gregory Corso; as they criss-crossed the country, the Beat impulse made its way westward, embracing the poets of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance, among them Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and others, and then back east again, incorporating poets and novelists such as Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), and still others, all writing in the jazzy Beat style, many of them interested in Buddhism. The Beat movement proper came to an end in the early sixties, a victim of media overkill. Once you could “Rent a Genuine Beatnik” for a “bash” at your “pad,” it was clear that the movement was over. Still the Beat impulse marched on—steadily if no longer manically, surviving the deaths of Neal Cassady in 1968 and Jack Kerouac in 1969.
What united the work of the early Beats and defined them as a movement was not so much a common political stance or even a shared literary style but a distinctly spiritual quest for a “new consciousness.” This quest was most pronounced in Kerouac and Ginsberg, but even Burroughs claims he was in search of something: “Since early youth I had been searching for some secret, some key with which I could gain access to basic knowledge, answer some of the fundamental questions,” Burroughs wrote in Naked Lunch (1959). “Just what I was looking for, what I meant by basic knowledge or fundamental questions, I found difficult to define. I would follow a trail of clues.”
The trail the Beats traveled in the early fifties led to different understandings of “Beat” over time and thus to different understandings of Beat spirituality. Epitomizing one of these understandings was Herbert Huncke, one of Kerouac’s “desolation angels,” who according to Ginsberg “was to be found in 1945 passing on subways from Harlem to Broadway scoring for drugs, music, incense, lovers, Benzedrine inhalers . . . encountering curious & beautiful solitaries of New York dawn.” Huncke symbolized for the early Beats a social and spiritual type that Oswald Spengler had described in The Decline of the West (1939) as the “fellaheen.” According to Spengler’s sprawling history, which the Beats devoured in the 1940s, the fellaheen are characterized by “a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness . . . the naive belief. . . that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality.” The Beats may well have been romanticizing Huncke, but they saw him as the embodiment of the “second religiousness” of the “fellaheen.” “In his anonymity & holy Creephood in New York,” Ginsberg observed, “he was the sensitive vehicle for a veritable new consciousness.” This “new consciousness” was “Beat” in the sense that its living saints, like the Times Square hustlers from whom they borrowed the term, were both “beat-up” and “beat-down.” At least in the gospel according to Huncke, who was by legend the first of the group to have used the term “Beat” to describe himself, Beat spirituality was a dark and dreary matter that, depending on your point of view, either gracefully articulated the First Noble Truth or veered dangerously close to the amoral, apocalyptic nihilism that critics were so eager to pin on the Beat movement. Many of the Beats worked feverishly to distance themselves from this definition of “Beat” and its stereotyped nihilism, but, nonetheless, the image stuck.
Another version of this “new consciousness” was epitomized by Neal Cassady, who arrived in New York City in 1947 and was later immortalized as the irrepressible Dean Moriarty of Kerouac’s On the Road. If Huncke was a classic representative of what philosopher William James once described as the “sick soul,” Cassady was the epitome of James’s “healthy-minded” type. “His criminality,” Kerouac noted, “was not something that sulked and sneered; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long-a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides).” The recasting of “Beat” exemplified by Cassady celebrated the adhesiveness of comrades prophesied by Walt Whitman and preached the sacramentalization of everyday life—the sacred splendor of cosmic companions digging the open road.
The literature that emerged from this definition of “Beat” was, in Ginsberg’s terms, “a clear statement of fact about misery . . . and splendor.” And authors informed by this definition crafted literature that embraced the unalterable reality of suffering yet affirmed wholeheartedly, in Kerouac’s words, “the holy contour of life.” This holiness was further refined by Kerouac’s redefinition of the term in 1954, when he had a vision in a church in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, and saw “Beat” as part of the word “beatific.” This understanding came after Kerouac was already studying Buddhism, when he began to go beyond an appreciation of suffering on its own terms and started to see the possibility for the cessation of suffering, for liberation from it. With Kerouac leading the way, Beat literature came to concern itself with spiritual emancipation and the cultivation of a vast view, a Big Sky Mind. As Gary Snyder once said, “In a way the Beat Generation is a gathering together of all the available models and myths of freedom in America that had existed before, namely: Whitman, John Muir, Thoreau, and the American bum. We put them together and opened them out again.”
Tilting East
More than a century earlier, the Transcendentalists’ quest for a “new consciousness” of their own had led Emerson and Thoreau, most notably, to the sacred writings of Hindus, Buddhists, Confucian ethicists, and Persian poets. But the Beats turned primarily to Buddhism, rather than focusing on Hinduism as Emerson and Thoreau had. “Primarily” is an important qualifier here because the Beats’ spiritual interests were in no way confined to Buddhism. Kerouac’s Catholicism remained strong throughout his life; Ginsberg’s Judaism has never ceased to inform his writing; and Snyder has carefully studied Native American religion and culture.
In a decade in which other Americans were boasting of overcoming tensions between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the Beats were cultivating a much more radical ecumenism. This ecumenism was epitomized by Kerouac, who was born and died a Catholic but nonetheless identified himself as a Buddhist for a significant period in his life and once even fasted during Ramadan. His ecumenism is expressed in a creed from Mexico City Blues:
I believe in the sweetness
of Jesus
And Buddha—
I believe
In St. Francis,
Avaloki
Tesvara,
the Saints
Of First Century
India A D
And Scholars
Santidevan
And Otherwise
Santayanan
Everywhere
Ginsberg, a self-proclaimed “Buddhist Jew,” was even more eclectic. In this litany from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” he invoked spiritual beings from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam:
million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the Compassionate One
Jaweh Righteous One
all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
& holyman I chant to—
While it is clear that Beat spirituality was not committed exclusively to one religious tradition, it was inspired more deeply by Buddhism than by any other. And while we know how individual Beats came to study Buddhism, just why so many individuals were attracted to it at that time and why such a diverse flowering occurred independently across the country is not entirely clear. Among the East Coast Beats, William Burroughs claimed in a number of letters that he had studied Zen Buddhism and practiced some sort of yoga long before meeting up with his fellow Beats, and Allen Ginsberg has noted that Professor Raymond Weaver of Columbia University suggested in the 1940s that Kerouac and he look at the writings of Egyptian Gnostics and Zen Buddhists. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac were also exposed to Asian thought in the mid-1940s through their reading of Spengler. But it was not until the fifties, when Ginsberg encountered Chinese paintings in the New York Public Library and Kerouac read sutras in translation for the first time, that they began to look seriously at the Buddhist tradition.
Not surprisingly, the West Coast Beats came to Buddhism earlier and more easily. Asian immigration was both more longstanding and more sustained in California than in New York. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 had lured thousands of Chinese to the States, and by 1853 San Francisco boasted its first Chinese temple. Japanese immigrants did not begin to arrive in significant numbers until the 1890s, but shortly after the turn of the century important Japanese Buddhist teachers such as Nyogen Senzaki and D. T. Suzuki arrived in the United States. At least one future Beat, Japanese-American Albert Saijo, actually studied with Nyogen Senzaki, with whom he had been interred at the Heart Mountain camp for Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans during World War II. This Japanese and Chinese presence contributed to a climate that was conducive to introducing Buddhist influences into the culture at large. The climate encouraged the interests of men such as Lloyd Reynolds, who taught calligraphy at Reed College and encouraged Welch, Whalen, and Snyder to investigate Buddhism while they were students there, and Kenneth Rexroth, a poet and activist well read in Asian philosophy and literature who, on his weekly radio broadcast on San Francisco’s KPFA radio, frequently discussed Asian texts and Buddhist thought.
Kenneth Rexroth was also the one to suggest that Allen Ginsberg make the acquaintance of Gary Snyder; the meeting of the East Coast Beats and members of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance that resulted from this suggestion transformed the Beat impulse into a national movement that would soon be dubbed the “Beat Generation.” That meeting and the Six Gallery reading it gave rise to reconfirmed in the minds of all participants the importance of their artistic and spiritual experiments, including their mutual attractions to Buddhism. From this point on, the Beats were well on the way to carving out a path for Buddhism in American culture.
Gary Snyder, who came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1952 in order to study Asian languages at the University of California at Berkeley, left for Japan in May of 1956 to study and practice Zen, eventually becoming a disciple of Rinzai Zen master Oda Sesso Roshi, Head Abbot of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. Snyder and Kerouac provided the two points around which Buddhism and the Beat Generation came together. Snyder, who was becoming more immersed in formal Buddhist practice than any other Beat, would no doubt have exerted even more influence on the Beat movement if he had remained in the United States. Instead, it was Kerouac who, as the most prolific of the Beat Buddhists, became their official spokesperson. Buddhism commended itself to Kerouac because rather than denying suffering and death, it faced squarely up to both. Moreover, by tracing the origin of suffering and death to craving, desire, and ignorance, Buddhism also offered a way to transcendence. Finally, and perhaps most important, Buddhism seemed to be teaching that the phenomenal world was dreamlike and illusory. All of these teachings comforted Kerouac, especially the notion that the apparent world is “mind-only.” “Happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream,” he wrote in Lonesome Traveler (1960). And he echoed the sentiment (though in a decidedly biblical grammar) in The Dharma Bums: “Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.”
Although the popular press would come to associate the Beats with Zen Buddhism, Kerouac was not drawn to Zen but to a diffuse Mahayana Buddhism. He resisted Zen because of his conviction that it emphasized attaining mystical insight rather than cultivating compassion. “It’s mean,” Kerouac’s alter ego of Ray Smith complained to Japhy Ryder [Gary Snyder] in The Dharma Bums, “All those Zen masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly word questions.” “Compassion,” he concluded, “is the heart of Buddhism.” Kerouac, whom Burroughs would describe condescendingly as “a Catholic-Buddhist” [emphasis his], was also put off by Snyder’s apparent hostility toward Christianity. Like Kerouac, Ray Smith happily conflated Jesus Christ with Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. “After all,” he explained, “a lot of people say he is Maitreya [which] means ‘Love’ in Sanskrit and that’s all Christ talked about was love.”
Unlike the Transcendentalists, whose Asian religious interests remained largely textual, Kerouac translated his intellectual curiosity about Buddhism into actual practice. In the mid-1950s he chanted The Diamond Sutra (his favorite Buddhist scripture), meditated daily, and attempted for months at a time to live the ascetic and celibate life of a Buddhist monk. He also translated Buddhist scriptures from French to English and took notes on his Buddhist studies that soon swelled to an unpublished manuscript called Some of the Dharma. Inspired by Ashvaghosa’s life of the historical Buddha, Kerouac wrote Wake Up, a biography of Shakyamuni Buddha clearly informed not only by his reading of the ancient account but also by his Catholic upbringing. Neither of these texts have yet been published, but a book of Buddhist poems, Mexico City Blues (published in 1959), and a sutra called The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (which came out one year later) did provide early published evidence of his Buddhist concerns, as did novels such as The Dharma Bums, Visions of Gerard (1963), and Desolation Angels (1965).
Kerouac’s Buddhist interest faded in the early sixties—just as Ginsberg was beginning, however gradually, to study more rigorously the wisdom traditions of the East. And here again the parallels with Transcendentalism may be instructive. Students of Transcendentalism have noted for some time that Thoreau’s interest in Asian religions was intense but fleeting, while Emerson’s was slow to germinate but ultimately longer-lived. At least on this score, Kerouac was the Beat movement’s Thoreau and Ginsberg its Emerson. Like Thoreau, whose Asian interests faded, Kerouac ultimately turned away from the Buddhist tradition. And like Emerson, whose Asian interests deepened over time, Ginsberg’s affinity for Buddhism has grown stronger as he has grown older. Although he exchanged letters about Buddhism with Kerouac in the mid-fifties, it was not until he traveled in India and Japan in the sixties that Ginsberg became serious about Buddhist study. And it was not until May of 1972, nearly a full ten years after his first trip to India, that Ginsberg formally became a Buddhist by taking refuge vows with Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
If Snyder, Kerouac, and Ginsberg are the most celebrated Beats to take up the Buddhist path, they are not the only Beats to have been influenced by Buddhism. In fact, Albert Saijo was one of the Beat poets with the most extensive Buddhist training. As the first of the Beats to receive formal instruction in zazen, Saijo helped Whalen, Snyder, and others to correct their self-taught sitting posture in the mid-fifties. Saijo is described by Kerouac in Big Sur as George Baso, “the little Japanese Zen master hepcat” who in a 1959 trip across the country with Kerouac and Lew Welch sat in the lotus position on a mattress in the back of a Jeep composing spontaneous haiku.
Other poets drawn toward Buddhism include Joanne Kyger and Diane di Prima, both of whom studied Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center, and later investigated Tibetan Buddhism. The work of Lenore Kandel has been influenced by the tantric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Kandel claims to have been attracted to Buddhism at the age of twelve, and she practiced zazen at New York City’s First Zen Institute for much of 1959. Philip Whalen, meanwhile, was ordained a Zen monk in 1972 and in the mid-seventies became head monk at the Zen Mountain Center in Tassajara Springs, California. He now serves as the abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco. And a generation of younger poets similarly felt drawn to Buddhism, inspired in part by the writings of the Beats. Among these poets is Anne Waldman, who met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1970 and has since studied with other Tibetan Buddhist teachers.
Conclusion
When Allen Ginsberg was asked, “Were the Beats first and foremost artists, or first and foremost spiritual seekers?” he saw the trap and refused to enter. The two, he answered, are inseparable, and he cited the example of the Milarepa school of Tibetan Buddhism, where in order to be a lama one must reportedly also be an archer, a calligrapher, or a poet. “The life of poetry,” he added is “a sacramental life on earth.”
This sentiment circles back again, in a way, to the Transcendentalists, specifically to their understanding of the poet as prophet. Like the Transcendentalists, the Beats were far more than literary innovators or social critics; they were also wandering seekers of mystical visions and transcendence. They went on the road because they could not find God in the churches and synagogues of postwar America. They saw human beings as enmeshed in a vast network of connections with other human beings, with animals, and with life itself. They saw intimate correspondences between the human mind and the life of the universe. Like Emerson, the Beats aimed to make contact with the sacred in moments of indescribable intuition and then to transmit at least some of what they had experienced into words. Like Thoreau, they insisted upon the sanctity of everyday life, the sainthood of the nonconformist, and the awesome sacredness of Nature. And like those socially minded Transcendentalists who aimed to transform land at Brook Farm, Massachusetts, into an occasion for the cultivation not only of vegetables but also of the kingdom of God on earth, they aimed to create a spiritual brotherhood based on shared experiences, shared property, shared literature, and an ethic of what Kerouac called “continual conscious compassion.” With Transcendentalists of all stripes, the Beats gloried in eliminating distinctions between matter and spirit, divinity and humanity, the sacred and the profane.
The Beats, like the Transcendentalists, were committed to sharing these insights with others through their words even though it is widely accepted among practicing Buddhists that experience is untranslatable, that it cannot be captured accurately in words, that language can only hint at, point toward it. As it says in the Pali canon, “When all conditions are removed, all ways of telling are also removed.” All sermons, and all books, therefore, are doomed, at best, to be exquisite failures. Certainly Shakyamuni Buddha was aware that words could never come close to describing the reality of the world as he saw it. Certainly he knew that the students he would gather around him would misunderstand his spoken words, and that students of theirs would perpetuate those misunderstandings in volumes upon volumes of books. But still he committed himself to teaching, content, perhaps, that at least some of this transmission, recorded in a few books perhaps, would mark new eras in the lives of individuals. Perhaps he hoped, as well, that these individuals would be smart enough to read these books and then toss them aside in the name of an even deeper understanding. This sentiment, at least, was reiterated by one of the Beats: “When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away,” Jack Kerouac wrote in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. “I insist on your freedom.”
—Stephen Prothero
Philosophy Department
Georgia State University, Atlanta
PART ONE
The
Beats
Jack Kerouac
(1922–1969)
“The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me’—The blue sky adds ‘Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise.’”
—JACK KEROUAC
Jack Kerouac met Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg in New York where he attended Columbia University on a football scholarship; in 1944, the four friends formed the core of what was to become known as the Beat Generation. Kerouac published his first novel, The Town and the City, in 1950; it was a straightforward story told in a language reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe. By 1951, however, Kerouac was pioneering a stylistic revolution, forever changing the nature and content of his writing. Abandoning conventional techniques of editing and revision, Kerouac committed himself to a new method, the practice of spontaneous prose. Unsatisfied with simply creating a stream of consciousness in the characters of a novel, as the modernists had done, Kerouac wanted to take that idea further and use the movements and patterns of his own mind as his subject matter. His aim was to create an honest record of the writer’s modes of perception. In a three-week, Benzedrine-enhanced spontaneous writing experiment, Kerouac produced his first novel by this technique, On the Road. For six years, the manuscript languished, unable to find a publisher; during that time Kerouac, unbowed by market pressures, stuck to his resolve and committed himself to spontaneous writing, producing novels, sketches, dream visions, and poems.
In 1954, Kerouac’s reading of Thoreau’s Walden led him to pursue a serious, self-taught program of Buddhist study, and his affinity for the teachings was immediate. Both Kerouac’s sense of compassion for the down-and-out, the “beat,” who populated his novels, and his revolutionary new method of “spontaneous bop prosody” found full expression in Buddhist thought. The Surangama Sutra, for example, affirmed Kerouac’s own commitment to spontaneity; in the sutra, the Buddha counsels: “If you are now desirous of more perfectly understanding Supreme Enlightenment and the enlightening nature of pure Mind-Essence, you must learn to answer questions spontaneously with no recourse to discriminating thinking.” Kerouac had discovered a version of this text in a San Jose library; shortly thereafter he went north, where he wrote San Francisco Blues, his first book of “blues”-inspired poetry and a work that reflects his newfound spiritual interest. Kerouac returned to his mother’s home in April of 1954 determined to pursue a monastic, contemplative style of life. He then began an ambitious program of sitting meditation and sutra reading and incorporated Buddhist understanding into his own observations about the nature of consciousness, later describing the mind as a “beating light” that reveals the fluctuation, and hence the falseness, of all it illuminates.
Kerouac’s discovery of Buddhism also coincided with his redefinition of the term “Beat.” Not long after his initial reading of Buddhist texts, Kerouac went to visit his birthplace, Lowell, where he had a vision in a church. Having already coined the phrase “Beat Generation,” he now came to understand the word “Beat” as meaning not simply down-and-out but also “Beatific, trying to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, being utterly sincere and kind and cultivating ‘joy of heart.’” This flash of insight propelled Kerouac to attend to his Buddhist studies with still more fervor and despite acute phlebitis in his legs he immersed himself in the practice of sitting meditation. He also embarked on two Buddhist works, a life story of the Buddha, Wake Up, and a book of notes and translations based on his Buddhist readings, which he called Some of the Dharma.
Kerouac’s hermetic, meditative existence intensified while he lived at his sister’s home in North Carolina, but his practice of spending nearly all of his time in silent contemplation came under fire from his family, who equated his behavior with laziness. When in July of 1955 On the Road was finally accepted for publication, Kerouac immediately took his publisher’s advance and set off for Mexico City in the hope of finding a more peaceful setting for his meditation. There he wrote the Buddhist-inspired poem Mexico City Blues and Tristessa, a novel that Kerouac thought exemplified Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering.
In August of 1955, he wrote to Allen Ginsberg from Mexico: “All I want as far as life-plans are concerned from here on out, is compassionate, contented solitude—Bhikkuhood is so hard to make in the West—it would have to be some American streamlined Bhikkuhood, because so far all I’ve done is attract attention . . .” But this was only the beginning of the attention Kerouac was to receive. In the fall, Kerouac went on to Berkeley, where he found Ginsberg busy planning what was to become the legendary Six Poets at the Six Gallery reading, the event that launched the Beats into mainstream consciousness. It was at this time, after Kerouac had already enjoyed sustained periods of practice and solitary study, that he met the “dharma bums,” the West Coast poets who shared his interest in Buddhism, among them Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch. For the first time, Kerouac was exposed to other Buddhists, ones who had been informed not only by reading but also by contacts with teachers and Asian-American communities. When Kerouac attended one of Kenneth Rexroth’s famous literary evenings, he announced to everybody that he was a great Buddhist scholar, but, according to Rexroth, promptly quieted down after learning that everyone in the room spoke at least one Asian language.
Buddhist themes continued to dominate Kerouac’s creative work; during this time he produced Visions of Gerard as well as adding to Some of the Dharma. In the spring of 1956, Kerouac returned to the West Coast to spend time with Gary Snyder before Snyder’s departure for Japan. At Snyder’s suggestion, Kerouac tried his hand at writing a sutra, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, before ascending to a peak in the Cascades for an eight-week stint as a fire lookout. Kerouac had been looking forward to this experience of solitude as an opportunity to practice meditation and write, dreaming of “Zen lunatics” and solitary mountain mystics such as Han Shan (or “Cold Mountain”), the seventh-century Chinese poet. His taste for Buddhism in a formal setting was limited, and he envisioned instead a new American Buddhism—a meditation center without rules, where wandering bhikkus could rest and meditate during their journeys on the road. He confided to friends his desire to found a monastery in Mexico, starting with his own “dobe hut,” or, alternatively, to find a cave where he and Snyder could spend summers practicing “like Milarepa” (a Tibetan saint). After his stint on Desolation Peak, however, it became clear that such heavy doses of solitude did not agree with him. He was only too happy to return to the frenetic activity of the city.
In September 1957, On the Road was published and greeted with tremendous media attention—both positive and negative. Unwittingly, Kerouac succeeded in becoming the symbol of a generation. The life of a solitary Buddhist wanderer now an impossibility, Kerouac became increasingly overwhelmed by the pressures of celebrity, and began to take refuge in alcohol. In November of 1957, while On the Road was on the best-seller list, Kerouac, at the urging of his publisher, wrote The Dharma Bums. Again the reactions that his work provoked were extreme. Support from some corners was strong. The American Buddhist, the organ of the Buddhist Churches of America, ran a review of the novel that said, “As a book The Dharma Bums is an answer to the literature of disillusion, petulant sensualism and indignation against dry-heart bourgeois hypocrisy. . . . As an alternative to the packaged way of life it should be taken seriously by youth and taken as a threat by our policy makers on the east coast.” But, by the mainstream press, Kerouac was condemned as an enemy of the American way and his literary talents were dismissed as not writing but “typing.” Amid hostility from the scions of the literary establishment, outrageous demands from a reading public that gave him no privacy, and a rising tide of “beatniks” who had less and less to do with Kerouac’s beatific vision, he sank into alcoholic despair. Only a few years after their initial meeting, Kerouac wrote to Snyder that his Buddhism was dead. In his later years he turned toward the Catholic faith in which he was raised and continued to shy away from publicity, becoming more isolated even from his friends. In 1969, at the age of forty-seven, Kerouac died of cirrhosis.
This selection of Kerouac’s work focuses on pieces written during the height of his involvement with Buddhism. For many years Kerouac’s treatment of Buddhist themes was actively discouraged by editors and colleagues, a reaction not unique to his work. As he wrote to Philip Whalen in 1956: “Meyer Schapiro the art critic read your work one night when Allen [Ginsberg] visited him, and said it was good except when it dealt with enlightenment per se. . . . I dont agree that we should not discuss Buddha . . . who says? I like your poetry and Gary’s [Snyder] because it discusses enlightenment. . . .” This resistance to the Buddhist material proved so strong that Kerouac’s two works that deal most extensively with Buddhism, Wake Up and Some of the Dharma, have yet to be published, more than twenty-five years after the author’s death.
While Kerouac envisioned all of his novels forming one great autobiographical chronicle, “The Legend of Duluoz,” he wrote the books out of sequence; therefore, some of the works that recount the early part of “the legend” —Kerouac’s childhood, for example—are influenced by Buddhist thought, while those that cover later periods in Kerouac’s life, such as Visions of Cody, a novel about Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, are not. For that reason, the work is arranged not in order of Kerouac’s own treatment of his life story, but in a chronological order according to the approximate date of composition, so that the reader may chart the influence of Buddhism on his work. Because Some of the Dharma and Wake Up have not yet been published (at the time of the compilation of this volume), they are not represented in this selection.
Kerouac drew up this streamlined description of his spontaneous approach to writing at the insistence of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who were so impressed with The Subterraneans, written in three nights in 1953, that they urged him to share his method. Kerouac later included this version of his “essentials” in a letter written on May 28, 1955, to Arabel Porter, the editor of New World Writing, so that she could respond to one of his critics with his prediction that “the method of the modern jazz instrumentalist” would influence “the development and flowering of Western Letters.”
LIST OF ESSENTIALS
• Write on, cant change or go back, involuntary, unrevised, spontaneous, subconscious, pure
• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
• Be in love with your life every detail of it
• Something that you feel will find its own form
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
• Work from pithy middle eye out, from the jewel center of interest, swimming in language sea
• Accept loss forever
• Believe in the holy contour of life
• Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
• Profound struggle with pencil to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
• Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
• No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge
• Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures
• In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
• You’re a Genius all the time
• Writer-Director of Earthly Movies produced in Heaven, different forms of the same Holy Gold
This poem was composed for Allen Ginsberg in 1954 as part of Kerouac’s campaign to get him interested in Buddhism.
How to Meditate
—lights out—
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
I hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance—Healing
all my sicknesses—erasing all—not
even the shred of a “I-hope-you” or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes—and
with joy you realize for the first time
“Thinking’s just like not thinking—
So I dont have to think
any
more”
In an unpublished notebook from 1954, Kerouac outlined his plans to attain nirvana by the year 2000.
Modified Ascetic Life
1955 No more rich or/& expensive foods—elementary diet of salt pork, beans, bread, greens, peanuts, figs, coffee (and later grow everything & pick acorns, pinyon nuts, cacti fruit myself).
1956
Finally (after 5-volume LIFE) no more writing for communicating and other SKETCH books of wilds, no more writing or I art-ego of any kind, finally no I-self, or Name; no shaving of beard.
1970
No possessions, finally, but wilderness Robe, no hut, no mirror, begging at houses of village.
2000 Nirvana and willed death beyond death.
Written in August and September 1955, during a stay in Mexico, Mexico City Blues has been hailed as the great religious poem of the twentieth century. The following is a selection from the poem’s 242 choruses.