Rethinking Kerouac’s Contributions to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon

Abstract: Rethinking Kerouac’s Contributions to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) is an important figure in the popularization of Buddhism in America in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He is generally associated with other Beat Generation writers and artists under the umbrella category “Beat Zen” differentiated at the time from more normative “Square Zen”. Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism has been misunderstood, partly because he developed a Buddhist-Christian synthesis, but also because he was self-taught and unable to observe traditional discipline. Buddhist contributions to his experimental, modernist practice of spontaneous writing have also been misunderstood. This paper outlines the keys to the world-view of Kerouac’s texts, explores the ways in which Buddhist thought allowed Kerouac to critique American ideological tropes of freedom and the vast, details the extent to which Buddhist practice influenced the ways Kerouac constrained spontaneous writing, and points to ways Kerouac’s transformation of Buddhist norms might actual present a good model of Mahayana practice.
Rethinking Kerouac’s Contributions to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon

Introduction

In his 1979 overview of Buddhism in America, Charles Prebish wrote the following about Beat Buddhism and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969):
Had [the Beats} only understood more thoroughly the Zen tradition they associated with, and incorporated an authentic Zen lineage into their tradition, genuine success might have been achieved. Of the lot, it was only Gary Snyder who had any acumen in properly understanding the meaning of Zen.
and:
Whatever understanding Ginsberg may have attained seems to have come much later, and it is just not clear that Kerouac ever understood Buddhism very well, despite the fact that several of his novels (for example On the Road or The Dharma Bums) were clearly Buddhist inspired.
While other studies of Buddhism in America are more sanguine or politic about Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhism, Prebish’s position remains widely accepted, despite the absence of any rigorous study of Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism.

Kerouac has presented Buddhist Studies with two kinds of problems. First, Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism occurred outside institutional settings. He was largely self-taught and, from the first, read Buddhism through a set of lenses idiosyncratically assembled from his French Canadian Catholic Background and from his study of Oswald Spengler’s speculative history of religions in Decline of the West. In addition, Kerouac was famously dissolute. He failed almost completely in his efforts to observe lay disciplines and, far from achieving a life that demonstrated control, descended into alcoholic misery. Over the last forty years, both nascent American Buddhist institutions and scholars in the academy have had an interest in delineating Buddhist culture as if it could be understood as a distinctive, closed, constructive cultural topos. Kerouac’s example transgressed or blurred exactly those normative boundaries, and thus was a cautionary case at best.

Secondly, Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhist is largely available to us through his expressive writing. While this includes correspondence with friends, in the main, Kerouac presents Buddhism in aesthetic rather than didactic terms. Buddhist Studies scholars have been slow to approach Buddhist texts with the tools of contemporary critical theory; hence there are inadequate frameworks for working with Kerouac’s texts. There have been some good studies of the spiritual dimensions of Kerouac’s work; however, these have been done outside a Buddhist Studies context and, in some cases, lack a rigorous understanding of Buddhist cultures.

This paper is part of a larger project in which I have been considering Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism with a mind to reconsidering his example. Historically, Buddhist influence on a particular culture occurs both through the creation of a distinctive Buddhist topos, but also through a process of adaptation and synthesis. When Buddhism reached China, for instance, there were various stages of reception and interpretation, and, key features of what we might call indigenous or cultural versions of Buddhism occurred not just with the reproduction of an extant Indic or Buddhist norm, but with some integration of Buddhist and local ideology. Kerouac’s importance for Buddhist Studies is that his engagement with Buddhism grows out of and alongside efforts to reconcile inherited conflicts in American ideology related to freedom, sin, and a new public secularism. His case may offer us a lens for understanding the terms in which new American and Buddhist-Christian forms of Buddhist culture may emerge.

As a first step in a prolegomenon for a larger study on Kerouac, this paper focuses on delineating the key features of the world-views of Kerouac’s texts and an assessment of Buddhist influence on Kerouac’s work. I then end by taking up the way in which the emphasis Kerouac places on radical kindness affects the Buddhist narratives he produces. There are many good accounts of the biographical details of Kerouac’s life; hence, I have not given an overview of this. Many issues, including Kerouac’s Buddhist-Christian syncretism, the modernist roots for his experimental writing practices, and a deeper account of Kerouac’s place in American letters are mentioned, but not developed in detail.

Finally, I have developed some specific vocabulary for discussing moral problems in comparative contexts that I use in this paper. These terms are place-holders of a kind for issues about which there is obviously a good deal to say. Hence, without making an essay about any actual grounds or systematics, I use “being” to refer to the basic circumstances of desire, object relations, duration and so on that we address in our language and action. When I speak of problems given in being, I am referring to relations we wish in some way to solve. These become moral problems when we try to solve them in accordance with some inherited or otherwise determined principle of the good. With respect to this, I have elsewhere argued that a key moral problem exists in the violence attendant to being—our need to eat, but also the violence of agency, the violence that occurs in our object relations and so on. Hence, I sometimes gloss “a problem given in being” with “the violence given in being”. Further, in this context, I have suggested that at least one thing a metaphysics does is suggest a ground where we are free of that violence.

As will be seen, one of my approaches to Kerouac is to consider his writing as a search for a ground or term for resolving violence in being. Kerouac was, first and foremost, an experimental modernist writer who grew up in a working-class, French speaking Catholic community and was educated at Columbia in the 1940’s. Making sense of Kerouac’s thought requires that we understand that he explored moral problems through narrative, figuration and episodic scenario. By the time Kerouac encountered Buddhism he had largely abandoned plot, but he was still using figuration and episode as his primary means of making sense of moral problems given in being. In the end, Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism did not supplant his commitment to writing and, if anything, it reinforced his sense of artistic mission.



Friday Afternoon in the Universe

The world-view of Kerouac’s texts is structured by three basic intuitions: a sense of radical human sinfulness and concomitant suffering, a sensuous intuition of the existence of a good in being, and an insistent emphasis on mercy and care as an ultimate ethic in being. His texts are confessional with respect to the first. The documentary approach of that diction leads him to include fair witness of the second as a basis for hope. The emphasis on mercy and kindness is a consequence of Kerouac’s sense of universal sin and a sign of his refusal to accept any fantasy of freedom beyond that given in being.

To delineate the scope of Keroauc’s self-concept as sinner , it is useful to briefly consider a series of letters written by Kerouac to Neal Cassady in the weeks after Christmas 1950. These letters followed a now lost, stream-of-consciousness letter by Cassady describing a sexual escapade. Cassady’s letter triggered some 60 pages of letters from Kerouac in which, for the first time, he began to explore the spontaneous, confessional praxis he would pursue in different ways for the rest of his life.

Beginning with his birth in “the strange red afternoon light” of a February thaw, Kerouac relates a series of episodes—the death of his brother Gerard, a vision Kerouac has in San Francisco of having been a woman’s bad son in a prior life in Dickensian London, a visit to St Patrick’s in New York City the week Neil’s letter arrived, and a late adolescent sexual escapade—central to a “full confession of my life”. The first of these is the most extensive. Loosely sifting through memories, Kerouac exposes a series of key scenes and impressions that include his brothers tremendous kindness towards small animals, Gerard’s prescient awareness of his impending death, Kerouac’s own childish selfishness and careless desire, and Gerard’s admonition and insistence that Kerouac be kind and care. These are presented as if a charge had been laid on Kerouac, an awareness of the casual human cruelty characteristic even of children and of the certainty of death.

As the series of stories shifts to adult incidents and memories, Kerouac shifts to focus on sexuality and relationships with women as the fundamental context for sin. The vision in San Francisco, comes towards the last of the riotous cross-country escapades Kerouac would recount in On the Road. Walking away from a confusing amorous tryst, Kerouac suddenly saw himself as an English hoodlum making impossible demands on the women around him. At the heart of his vision in St. Patrick’s is his memory of the workman-like humility of the priests and a statue of the Virgin Mary, he believed to have been newly consecrated in honor of the Pope’s recent decree of her incarnate ascension. This led him to an insight that reflects the profoundly sexist ideas he and Neal shared, saying with surprise that “girls want to be pure souls too”, a thought which leads to a prayer that the church be a “refuge for the pure, the humiliated, and the suffering” so that someday “we could all become pure souls”. The sequence of letters ends with the next day’s letter in which a rather coarse and detailed account of an afternoon sexual escapade is given. In the overall sequence of letters, the tack Kerouac takes here reintroduces the base-note of confession, and re-establishes the extent to which Kerouac understood himself to be thoughtlessly violent when having sex and yet culpable in being.

Sexuality would haunt Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism in several ways. The years leading up to his discovery of Buddhist tropes in late 1953 were marked by a series of relationship disasters. He had essentially gone into hiding for several years in an effort to avoid child-support demands from a failed marriage in 1951, and, in the fall of 1953, he was coming off the failure of a relationship documented in The Subterraneans. Reading a copy of Ashavaghosa’s Life of the Buddha, Kerouac was particularly taken by the renunciation scene in which the Buddha looks into his wife’s chamber and sees his wife and her friends unattractive and abandoned in sleep. It seems fair to say that, at this point in his life, he was particularly susceptible to Buddhist critiques of desire, and, despite the fact that he would never actually be able to be chaste, chastity is the main discipline he makes witness to in his accounts of his subsequent efforts to practice.

While Kerouac’s ideas about sin would shift, in general, and, significantly, throughout his engagement with Buddhism, sin was understood to be inescapable and a sign of a radical limit in being. That the letter sequence to Cassady ends with a return to confessional voice bears witness to the depth to which Kerouac took this to be true. To use the language of the First Noble Truth, we could say Kerouac held that at least he, if not all being, was thoroughly marked as sinful. Kerouac’s writing suggests that, increasingly, he held the view that sin and concomitant suffering would not be redeemed in life and thus that to live was to sin and suffer. If anything, his reading of Buddhist texts reinforced this sense.

In Kerouac’s writing, confession of sinful nature is leavened by intimations of a radical good in being. He would express this in a variety of ways, perhaps the earliest being an evocation of the red glow of an afternoon sun in a playroom. Later variants of such suspended, timeless duration include both the vision which occurs at sunset in Des Moines in On the Road, the Good Friday “Friday Afternoon In the Universe” of Old Angel Midnight, and a post-meditation vision of “Golden Eternity” celebrated in The Scripture of Golden Eternity. These experiences served as a sensuous proof of a timeless peace Kerouac would variously refer to in American mythic idiom or, mixing Christian and Buddhist terms at will, as God, Heaven, the basic nature of mind, and so on.

The two intuitions about being—of radical sin and of eternal safety—are essentially contradictory, and Kerouac wrestled with the relationship between them throughout his life. In terms of practice, Kerouac’s approach was to adopt a series of cultural resolutions of the contradiction he then tested in writing. This was true whether adopting the hope of a possible heroic stance, or taking on a particular philosophical or theological perspective. For the purposes of this paper I will briefly outline the range of possibilities considered.

Kerouac’s early writing (1951-53) explores several possible heroic stances imagined as possible good positions to take in being. The first is that of the American trickster hero taken up in On the Road and then dissected in Visions of Cody. The second is the Faustian superman of Dr. Sax, secular, who attempts to will good. Neither posture holds. On the Road ends with Kerouac’s disillusioning awareness that Cassady is trapped in a cycle of destructive behavior, and Dr. Sax ends, much the way Faust does, with Sax’s discovery that “the Universe disposes of its own evil”. The possibilities of a third culture stance—finding peace in romantic love—is explored in Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans; these, of course, report Kerouac’s inability to find this for himself.

The philosophical and theological perspectives Kerouac used to frame his thoughts about sin and peace include a Catholic dualism, Oswald Spengler’s Kantian inflected notion of an invisible perennial being writ though history, and Mahayana Buddhist presentations of form and emptiness and the nature of mind. His position on the radical nature of sin required that he understand appearing form as in some way thoroughly marked—as created, as life, as illusory—over against an impossible openness in being thought of as God, Heaven, the Void, the non-positional essence of mind, Golden Eternity, and so on.

While Prebish has suggested Kerouac did not fully understand Buddhist thought, in his account of a retreat on Desolation Peak in the summer of 1956, Kerouac at least came to understand the problems of reifying emptiness and, more generally, the limits of language. Moreover, the stubbornness with which he remained loyal to some account of appearing form—if only by never giving up a sense that life was thoroughly marked as sinful—suggest a stronger rather than weaker grasp of the implications of the Perfection of Wisdom. In any case, his commitment was to both intuitions about being which led him in the end towards a Buddhist-Christian synthesis and away from Spengler’s monism.

In any case, from the very beginning, Kerouac’s texts reveal the third intuition that kindness and confessional humility constitute the basis of any satisfactory ethic in being. Whatever the origin of this fundamental value, in the reading that concludes this paper, I show it to be the standard used to test other possible ethics, and the ethic that is ultimately justified in his writing. It determines the way he reads and forms allegiances to texts and figures, and determines his subsequent loyalties and dissent. From his perspective, it was an ethic equally extant in Buddhism and Christianity, a beatific “beat” path of humility and kindness, whatever its name.


Twin Tree Grove: The Influence of Buddhism on Kerouac (1954-1958)

Jack Kerouac’s interest in and engagement with Buddhism began in Nov. or Dec. 1953 and was most intense during the years 1954-58. He was largely self-taught, and his understanding of Buddhism was based primarily on Mahayana sutra literature compiled in Dwight Godard’s A Buddhist Bible. After 1958, Kerouac would continue to use Buddhist tropes and, at times, present himself as a Buddhist, but always within a broader, synthetic religious perspective. These same dates cover a period of intense personal and social transformation. In 1954, Kerouac was a largely unknown iterant writer, living with family and friends or abroad to avoid child support payment. In the fall of 1955, the Gallery Six reading in San Francisco (where Alan Ginsberg debuted “howl”) put his “Beat Generation” in the public eye, and in the summer of 1957, On the Road would be published, catapulting Kerouac onto the public stage as that generation’s King. Largely at his publisher’s request for a fast read, Kerouac would dash off Dharma Bums in the fall of 1957. The book would come out in the spring of 1958, but, by October, Kerouac would have the first of a series of spiritual crises culminating in visions of Mary and the Cross that would shape the last decade of his life.

Many of the elements that marked Kerouac’s world-view and experimental practice were in place prior to his exposure to Buddhist thought. In the following I show that Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism gave new life to and an alternate language for these. Even though he became critical of extant Buddhist institutions in the last decade of his life, his work with Buddhist argument and trope served as a crucible in which his world-view and practice was clarified. In the following, I discuss two aspects of this: the influence on his writing of Buddhist presentations and critiques of scale or scope, and the extent to which this was reflected in his experimental practice.

The Fictive Nature of the Vast

The issue of scale or scope is of note in this context because of scale or scope is one of the key tropes by which violence in being is offset in American discourse. Throughout American history, occasional, colonial, and capitalist violence appears to be annulled in the face of larger-than-life landscapes (or figures like Paul Bunyan or John Wayne) and, despite counter-histories that more thoroughly count the relentless violence of American cultural expansion, this mythic scope continues to have the force of promise. The tropes of vast expanse and larger-than-life figure sustain a culturally legitimating sense of liberative possibility and freedom.

It is relevant for this context that the notion of the vast appears to secure freedom whether the vast is thought of as replete or empty. That is, the key to the American promise and to the ideal of freedom is that these are predicated on the idea that there are no limits, whether to empty space or land, or to the goods we can find.

One of the functions of an artist is to consider the coherence of ideological motif or system, testing it by the lens of narrative or figuration. Representational work often legitimates ideology by essaying the imagined gesture, but often mimetic gesture reveals flaw and contradiction as well, and, in this sense, tells the truth that ideology otherwise veils. To this end, Kerouac’s early writing—On the Road (1951) and Dr. Sax (1952)—explored a series of extant frameworks for understanding American tropes of scale in terms of modernity. In both, Kerouac’s findings found limits—to the road, to Sax’s will—that raised questions about the extent to which a notion of the vast could secure real freedom.

Beginning with the 1951 letters to Neil Cassidy, Kerouac began to the possibility that the vast could be found in text and language. Inspired by the examples of be bop and abstract expressionist painting, Kerouac experimented with the expressionist dimensions of written language, eventually settling on an effort to transcribe experience. Kerouac soon was interrogating and recording different kinds of experience—daily musing, drunken reverie and adrenalin rush, sexual interlude, intuitive pop or flash, dream—and considering, more generally, an epic conceit of creating a written record of a life in terms of the impressions, dreams, episodes, modes of interior dwelling and feeling that constituted it. He would call this project “The Legend of Dulouz”, the large frame for the whole of his work.

Because this project was a mimetic project—Kerouac’s intent was direct transcription of experiential process—it necessarily led to questions and insights concerning the structure of experience and being, the place of self in relation to sense and language, issues of inheritance and freedom, and became a mechanism for Kerouac to consider issues otherwise negotiated in the language of myth or narrative. One of the key issues must have been an awareness that expressive acts both figured and veiled experience, that the mark or voiced call not only recorded but transfigured. In relation to this, Kerouac’s instinct was to take this as a sign that experience as such was essentially aestheticized—already extent only in illusory, figural terms—a thought he would realize in his famous description of watching a film crew work on a scene with Joan Crawford in the spring of 1951. It was a short jump from these thoughts to Mahayana notions that appearing form is illusory display.

Kerouac’s encounter with Mahayana wisdom literature allowed Kerouac to make connections between the ideas he had for the Legend of Dulouz and Mahayana notions of mind as frame for being. In this sense, Mahayana literature gave Kerouac new versions of vastness at a time when his confidence himself and in American notions of the vast was wavering. Buddhist motifs gave him a new way to sustain the ideal of freedom he’d explored in terms of Cassady, the road, and Dr. Sax.

Still, there was a bit of the carrot and stick in Mahayana presentations of the view. While a person may be attracted at first because it allows one to imagine the strong freedom that “anything goes”, if one persists with the logic there is, in the end, no place that holds. Visions of a good in being are, finally, illusory visions—mere words—the good located impossibly in relation to one and seemingly unsayable. Kerouac’s confessional nature—his desire to be a faithful witness—made it difficult for him to ignore these deeper entailments.

To this end, Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhism sharpened the tensions he had scored in being by drawing the status of illusory ideal images into question. His confessional streak forced him to honestly reckon that Mahayana texts undermined previous notions both of what could be accomplished in writing and of that golden afternoon ideal in being—points that appear to have been decisively considered during the crises of the Desolation retreat in late summer 1956. From this point on, the categories of sin and peace were more categorically framed in antipodal terms such as word/sea and silence, life and heaven, becoming and emptiness—and Kerouac’s unswerving fidelity to the reality of the former, however illusory, left him abject.

Taken seriously, Kerouac’s realization of the fictive nature of the vast is a final, thorough critique of this trope in American culture, and, thus, there is a devastating irony that he was read as an icon of freedom. His subsequent critique of the violently transgressive youth movements of the 1960’s, far from being regressive, is actually consistent with a thorough critique of the trope of freedom. And, since Buddhist institutions may have been prospering precisely because they appeared to give a warrant to the vast, it is no wonder his example has been marginalized and problematic.

Measure and Form

Buddhist critiques of appearing form also had an influence on Kerouac’s experimental practice that is often misunderstood. While Buddhist thought lent a framework for Kerouac’s spontaneous practice, that practice was already largely in place, derived from modernist exploration in music and painting. The difference between his spontaneous work prior to engaging Buddhist thought and his subsequent experiments is the adoption of various kinds of regular, externally derived measure.

For instance, in his blues form—derived after his encounter with Buddhism—Kerouac used the arbitrary limit of a single page. A chorus poem was a product of spontaneous expression, but expression ended or resolved where the page ended. He accepted similar externally imposed constraints in his adaptation of Haiku form. Kerouac also began to use a more rigorous episodic structure in his prose work, often using arbitrary measures such as the length of time it would take a candle to burn to establish sequential pulse. Finally, although both of the vision texts written during this time—Tristessa and Visions of Gerard—belong to the Dulouz Legend, they are distinctively anti-epic and stele-like in scope.

Kerouac might have come to the imposition of arbitrary measure on his own, without Buddhist influence. However, implicit in Buddhist ideas of emptiness and mind is the notion of arbitrary episode, however, fleeting, however impossibly established. That is, in so far as a thing appears, it appears without final cause, against a limit that is not no limit and so on, like a flower abloom in the sky. While other Buddhist influenced artists like Cage and Ginsberg would pose figuration against an actual absence/emptiness, Kerouac used arbitrary measure as a way of marking figuration. His preference reflects the thought that Buddhist teachings on emptiness do not imply an actual, established emptiness from which appearance blooms but, rather, indicate that a term’s ground or limits are arbitrary.

A second possible Buddhist derived basis for establishing arbitrary measure may be given in meditation practice itself. Kerouac was already aware of using breath as measure from his exposure to jazz gesture. It is unclear how disciplined Kerouac was in efforts to achieve calm-abiding using breath as an object, but his instructions to others indicate an awareness that meditation involves an interruption of mental elaboration through a discipline of regularly returning attention to an arbitrary term. Hence, it may be that, however, irregular, Kerouac efforts to meditate led him to see arbitrary episode as a basic formal measure given in being.

Sin, Appearing Form, and Mercy

These examples suggest that the main influence of Buddhist thought on Kerouac’s work and world-view was to intensify his fidelity to appearing form as a measure, however fictive or illusory. Mahayana Buddhist teachings lent decided weight to his intuition that being was thoroughly marked by sin—he could as easily say suffering—by critiquing possible grounds in being for any freedom beyond such. In relation to language, Buddhist thought appears to his reinforced Kerouac’s sense that there was no “outside” as such beyond language, and that, given this, there was no way not to be at stake in his expressive choices. However arbitrary, the measures he applied admitted an end to which he submitted.

Conclusion

Although, in the end, Kerouac held a syncretic world-view, his influence on the development of Buddhism in America is considerable and worth new attention. Even in general cultural terms, Kerouac was an enormously influential writer simply because he considered issues related to identity and desire according to a range of idioms, including American folk and pulp iconography, American and European literature, Buddhist narrative and argument, Be-bop and Abstract Expressionism, and so on. His work as a whole brought these diverse voices and discursive contexts into relation, without subordinating one mode of discourse to another. While he may not have reproduced Buddhist norms faithfully, he did lend Buddhist thought legitimacy in American terms, and he bore popular witness to connections between Asian Buddhist cultures and a range of American sub-cultures. Kerouac’s work has been, for many people, the first door they opened onto Buddhist thought, whatever they may have been seeking.

Kerouac might also be an example of new dimensions in Buddhist culture in at least two ways. The first of these lies in the relentlessly confessional nature of his diction. In Buddhist contexts, confession is primarily tied to renunciation and the reassertion of vows. Some Buddhist writers use self-disclosure effectively, but, in general, norms tend towards a performance of self-mastery. What is critical is the re-adoption of resolve; one does not dwell in abjection. Kerouac makes an extended example of abjection and, in the end, largely determines himself in abject terms. If Kerouac’s texts allow us different kinds of access to a central theme, then the theme is confession and renunciation—admission of violence in being and sin, and a desire for change—writ first in American and then Buddhist terms.

The second difference Kerouac evinces lies where he places a higher value on kindness than wisdom. Except for Wake Up which is largely a reworking of extant Buddhist texts, the trajectory of his Buddhist narratives is towards grateful, merciful, patient being in the world and not accomplishment of insight or wisdom. The Dharma Bums, for instance, offers an accessible account of Kerouac’s reflections at the end of the Desolation Retreat. There, he describes a brief vision of his Gary Snyder as Han Shan yelling down the mountain side; this segues into the thought that “now comes the sadness of coming back to cities”. The passage concludes “Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said “God, I love you” and looked up to the sky and really meant it. “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.” He then gets down on his knees to make a little prayer of gratitude to the camp, gets up and “went on down the trail back to this world”.

It is true that, in Zen Buddhism, one finds just this notion of a return to “carrying water, chopping wood”, but, in the preceding account of the retreat, Kerouac uses the language of realization twice. The first is at the very beginning of the retreat, where he says he “realized I was truly alone and had nothing to do but feed myself and rest and amuse myself, and nobody could criticize”. The second occurs after a description of a dramatic change of weather in early August. Kerouac writes, “Poor gentle fish,” I realized, “there is no answer.” I didn’t know anything any more and I didn’t care, and it didn’t matter, and I felt suddenly free”.

The note struck at the end is actually an echo of the note struck at the conclusion of one of the best known passages of the book, Kerouac’s description of climbing a mountain with Snyder and a friend. In this section, Kerouac is unable to climb the peak and, instead leg-sore and perhaps out of shape, he stops at a ledge short of the summit. Sitting there he thinks of a Zen admonition to always keep climbing and then records the following: “Well, this old philosopher is staying right here,” and I closed my eyes. “Besides,” I thought, “rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything”. Sitting there he hears Snyder yodel when he reaches the peak and watches their friend at the camp below, laying in the sun. The section concludes:
Now, there’s the karma of these three men here: Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountain top and makes it. I almost make is and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all in the poet’s poet lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they’ll never get me up here again.
If there is insight here, it is insight into how to be kind to self and an adoption of an ethos of humble patience. Insight is not mastery and is not characterized in terms of achievement or knowledge, but rather in terms of rest, kindness, and simple patience.

____

Prebish 1979, p.24. Other discussions of Kerouac and what was called Beat Buddhism include: Layman 1976, p. 70; Fields, 1992, pp 210-216; Coleman 2001, p. 62; Morgan 2004, pp. 142-144; Prebish 1999, pp. 12-13; and Sutin 2006, pp. 301-305.
Prebish 1979. p.25. Prebish is incorrect, though, about Buddhist influence in On the Road, as it was written in 1951 some three years before Kerouac’s engagement with Buddhism.
Spengler 1950. Spengler’s influence on Kerouac is worth an article in itself; suffice to say here that his effort to map a cyclical theory of civilization on known intellectual histories of Europe and Asia was extraordinarily influential among Kerouac’s friends at Columbia in the 1940’s, supplying them with a way of understanding their depression childhoods and the cataclysmic violence of the Second World War. Influenced by German Idealism, but also attempting to work out Nietzsche’s theories of cyclical return, Spengler predicted European “Faustian” Civilization was in decline. Such periods of decline were also periods in which a perennial wisdom tradition would become visible, serving as a bridge to the next epoch of civilization—in his account of the decline of Vedic Culture, Spengler treats Buddhism as just such a tradition.
See, for instance, Nancy M. Grace 2007 and John Lardas 2001.
Other pieces of this project include are given in the Bibliography.
Kerouac has been a popular subject for biographers, and there are many biographies to choose from. The best critical biography is probably Nicosia 1983. For the specific period of his engagement with Buddhism, see also, Suiter, 2002.
For my discussion of these terms, see Need 2004, pp. 5-18.
Kerouac, 1995a, pp. 246-306. The letters are dated from Dec. 28th 1950 to Jan. 10th 1951.
Ibid. p. 249
Ibid. p. 246.
Ibid. p. 292.
Ibid. p. 268.
Kerouac 1993, p. 1. Old Angel Midnight is an experimental prose work written the same month as The Scripture of Golden Eternity and set on a Good Friday afternoon. For an interesting discussion of sunset imagery in American letters—particularly in Whitman’s “Brooklyn Bridge”, see Stanley Plumly 2007, p 31-35. Plumly writes (Ibid. p. 35):
We are all, I suppose, sunset poets and, being American, we like the sun right at the edge, the bloodaxe edge behind winter trees. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and step by step, its night. Whitman, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” sees “the sun half an hour high” and holds it there for a hundred and thirty-two long lines, holds it forever into the infinite future.
Kerouac 1959, p. 245. Although published in 1959, Dr. Sax was written for the most part in the bathroom of Bill Burrough’s Mexico City flat in 1952.
Kerouac 1965, pp. 4-7 & 56-61.
During Kerouac’s brief period of fame (1958-1961), he repeatedly critiqued the idea he led a “beat” generation of rebels and scofflaws, instead emphasizing he was pointing towards an ethic of kindness and humility. It is hard to imagine a public figure now making public witness of a Buddhist-Christian sensibility or one who would admit to seeing miracles or encounters with grace. Many of these interviews have been collected in Maher Jr. 2005. For Kerouac’s magazine articles and essays on the Beat Generation, see Kerouac 1995b, pp. 551-580.
My subtitle here refers to the name Kerouac gave a small grove of trees in Big Easonburg Woods in Rocky Mount, NC. During the winter and spring of both 1954-5 and 1955-6 Kerouac lived with his sister in Rocky Mount. His most extended daily meditation practices took place during these seasons, the second of which spent mostly at Twin Tree grove, named “because of the two trunks I leaned against, that wound around each other…”. [Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, (New York: Viking Press, 1958), p. 132 as cited in Dorfner 1991, p. 30.]
Goddard, 1970; 1st published 1938. The main body of the compilation are two sections: a collection of texts “From Sanskrit Sources” including Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, portions of two later Mahayana Sutras, and Ashvaghosa’s “The Awakening of Faith”, and a collection of “Selections from Chinese Sources” that includes translations of Lao’s Tzu’s Dao de Ching, a text on Dhyana by the T’ien Tai founder Chih-I and the “Sutra Spoken by the Sixth Patriarch”. The collection is rounded out by two Tibetan texts translated by Evans-Wentz, “The Life and Hymns of Milarepa” and “The Supreme Path”. Contemporary students of Buddhism will quickly see that Goddard’s selection largely presents a range of Chinese Buddhist materials with a preference for texts popular within Ch’an Buddhism. All of the texts said to be from Sanskrit sources are in fact based on Chinese translations, and many of these lack Sanskrit originals or, like the “Surangama Sutra” and “The Awakening of Faith”, are currently judged to be apocryphal. While the collection includes nods to then-established figures such as Rhys-Davids, Even-Wentz and D.T. Suzuki, much of the translation work—including the texts that were key for Kerouac—were the work of Goddard and a Chinese monk, Wai-tao
Kerouac’s encounter with Buddhism is documented in a range of texts and letters written during these years. In addition to Dharma Bums, published materials include:
1) a working journal covering the years 1954 to the spring of 1956 now published as Some of the Dharma,
2) two short novels—Tristessa and Visions of Gerard—and significant portions of a third, Desolation Angels,
3) blues sequences and haikus, including Mexico City Blues,
4) a version of the Buddha’s life, now published as Wake Up,
5) a sutra, The Scripture of Golden Eternity, written at Gary Snyder’s suggestion,
6) correspondence, including several letters detailing meditation instructions and a basic account of the view, and
7) an experimental visionary text, Old Angel Midnight, based partly on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and written along side The Scripture of Golden Eternity.
He also complied much a Book of Dreams during these years. Among unpublished papers in the Berg Collection are his notebooks from his fire retreat on Mt. Desolation (July-Sept 1956) and several scrolls on which Kerouac wrote out versions of the Diamond Sutra, including one which uses Western theological language to translate Buddhist terms. These last date to the early 1960’s and are further evidence of the important of the Diamond Sutra in Kerouac’s personal religiosity. Kerouac’s letters and materials lend weight to the biographical detail that had adopted a practice of reciting the Diamond Sutra in such a way that he could read the whole of the text in a week. This weekly schedule is attached to one of the scroll versions he typed up, and he reproduced the text several times, no doubt in keeping with the text’s prescription to do so. His journals suggest that later in his life he began to recite texts and prayers from the Christian tradition, but at least one of the scrolls was made during this period, and the practice itself, seems to have been laid down on the habit established in reciting the Diamond Sutra.
His friend, William Burroughs was quick to see this, warning Kerouac that he was just trying to avoid love and real relationship. I suspect Burroughs did not appreciate how intense Kerouac’s sense of sin was and thus the importance, for Kerouac, of some mediating ideal. See Kerouac 1965, p. xv.
Kerouac 2007, p. 460.
Ibid. p. 460
Ibid. p. 461.
Ibid. p. 454.
Ibid. p. 458. The only other experience of note is a brief description of the Avalokitesvara dream in which Kerouac was told, “You are empowered to remind people they are utterly free”. Ibid. p. 341. A fuller version of this vision is given in Tonkinson 1995, pp 367-369. She does not cite her manuscript, and I did not find it among the Berg Collection Papers. The one text which was likely her source was missing at the time of my visit in 2008. The passage is a favorite and worth citing. After Kerouac is told he can choose to go off with Avalokitesvara forever or stay and help the world, the conversation continues (Ibid. p. 368-9):
—Well, can I try to help?
—Yes.
—Will you help me help?
—Yes. (Smiling) But it won’t do any good or do any harm.
—I want to try it.
—All good souls want to try it, all souls are seen—all have made their original vows—I expected you to ask.
—Where do we go first?
—Its up to you. Do you remember what you wanted to do?
—Well I wanted to reassure everybody that everything is alright, forever & forever & forever.
—Think they don’t know it?
—They don’t act like it!
—Acts are nothing, its what they are, where it is, shining empty and awake and shot through with eternal bliss.
—But can we make them feel it?
—Sensation is unreal.
—Oh let’s try.
—Go ahead.
Ibid. p. 341.
Ibid. pp. 341-2.


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