Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Epigraph
ALSO BY JACK KEROUAC
THE DULUOZ LEGEND
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax
Maggie Cassidy
Vanity of Duluoz
On the Road
Visions of Cody
The Subterraneans
Tristessa
Lonesome Traveller
Desolation Angels
The Dharma Bums
Book of Dreams
Big Sur
Satori in Paris
POETRY
Mexico City Blues
Scattered Poems
Pomes All Sizes
Heaven and Other Poems
Book of Blues
Book of Haikus
Book of Sketches
OTHER WORK
The Town and the City
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde & Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap
Pic
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940-1956
Selected Letters: 1957-1969
Atop an Underwood
Door Wide Open
Orpheus Emerged
Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings
Windblown World
Beat Generation: A Play
On the Road: The Original Scroll
Jack Kerouac, “Enlightenment,” pencil in sketchbook, ca. 1956
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © John Sampas, Literary Representative of the Estate of Jack Kerouac, 2008
Introduction copyright © Robert Thurman, 2008
All rights reserved
Frontispiece: “Enlightenment,” a drawing by Jack Kerouac. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Selections from A Buddhist Bible, edited by Dwight Goddard. Copyright E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1938. Used by permission of Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
eISBN : 978-1-440-66235-5
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INTRODUCTION
What a surprise! Working on this introduction, it has become apparent to me that Jack Kerouac was the lead bodhisattva, way back there in the 1950s, among all of our very American predecessors. To introduce Kerouac introducing Shakyamuni Buddha, I’m just going to be personal since I’m not a scholar of the Beats and their literature. But Kerouac’s interpretation of “beat,” that it stands for “beatific” (which is how I like to translate the sambhoga of a buddha’s sambhoga-kaya, “beatific body”—his celestial, universal bliss-form) rather than for “beat up”—those who can’t take the industrial slave life, with its productions and its banks and its wars—this won my heart right away. Obviously it did way back when, I just couldn’t remember till now.
I am grateful for the opportunity to write this introduction. It has been nearly fifty years since I read The Dharma Bums. Now that my love for the Buddhadharma—“the reality of the Enlightened One,” “the teaching of the Awakener” (to use not-at-all-bad Kerouac expressions for “Buddha”)—has become a bit of a public confession, I am sometimes asked how I came to my interest in it. I tend to mention what I have remembered up to now, that the ground was sown by my reading of Nietszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Schopenhauer, Kant, Wittgenstein, Henry Miller, Herman Hesse, Freud, Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Lama Govinda, D. T. Suzuki, Evans-Wentz, and so on. I did not remember Kerouac. But I now realize that when I read The Dharma Bums as a teen in the late fifties, I was exposed to perhaps the most accurate, poetic, and expansive evocation of the heart of Buddhism that was available at that time. Not to say that it was perfect, or to pretend that I would be able to tell if it was or wasn’t—it’s just that it is so incredibly inspiring, and must have deeply affected my seventeen-year-old self in 1958, the year it was first published and the year I ran away from Phillips Exeter Academy and went looking for a revolution.
Since 1958, perhaps since 1058, the multifaceted, lush, Indian sort of Buddhism Kerouac preferred has returned to the planet from Tibet, after having been lost outside of Central Asia for a thousand years. Indian Universal Vehicle, Mahayana Buddhism and its monastic university institutions—vibrant communities of monks led by scientific sages, some of them adept explorers of inner universes, who accumulated mountains of texts in vast, multistoried “Libraries of Alexandria”—were destroyed by Islamized Persian and Turkic invasions and occupations of the Indian subcontinent, and its Great Mother of Civilizations was further obscured by Christianized European waves of invasion, domination, and exploitation.
I don’t think I ever did read On the Road until just now for this assignment, and I don’t think I would have liked the shuffling con man aspect of Dean Moriarty that much, though my own hitch-hikings and frenetic New York to California wanderings beginning in 1958 and running intermittently into 1961 were somewhat similar. I never managed to hop a freight, though, and I admire Kerouac for his knowledge and guts in doing that.
A question has apparently been hanging over Kerouac as to whether he really understood much about the Dharma, as if he were not really genuine in his understanding of enlightenment, or some such entity. Alan Watts was heard to say that he might have had “some Zen flesh but no Zen bones,” referring to the title of a work by another writer on Zen, the redoubtable Paul Reps. And Gary Snyder, who spent years in Zen monasteries and is himself today a kind of Zen Roshi master as well as a poet, may have thought Kerouac didn’t quite get it, though he remained a loving friend. There is no doubt that his tragic addiction to alcohol, which cut his life and practice short at a tender forty-seven years of age, is evidence that whatever enlightenment he had attained was short of perfect buddhahood, as buddhas don’t usually drink themselves to premature death, since such doesn’t help anyone else and that’s all that buddhas d
o naturally. But who can really lay claim to that sort of transcendent physical and mental cosmic transmutation? In the vast psychological literature of the Buddhists, there are many analyses of the various stages of enlightenment; according to them it is quite possible to be enlightened to a certain degree and still prey to human failings. In fact, one becomes a bodhisattva, or hero for enlightenment, just by sincerely resolving and vowing to become perfectly enlightened in some future life, near or far, for the sake of developing the knowledge and ability to free all sensitive beings from suffering. That is, not all bodhisattvas are celestial or divine entities. Many are human, all too human.
The thing about Kerouac that might have made him less accepted among early California Buddhists—Gary Snyder and Alan Watts and others—was that he was not so taken by the Ch’an/Zen line of things, though he loved the writings of Han Shan, the “cold mountain” poetic meditations transmitted by Snyder. Kerouac was more moved by the Indian Mahayana line, which emerges both in the work at hand, the sweet “lake of light” story of the Buddha’s life, and in his Some of the Dharma book notes composed for the benefit of his friend, dear Allen Ginsberg, which also gives us a record of Jack’s own study.
Kerouac clearly loved the compassion stuff, what the Tibetans call the “magnificent deeds lineage” descended from Maitreya and Asanga. He loved dogs and they loved him. The Tibetans have a tradition, perhaps coming from the famous story of Asanga meeting Maitreya in the form of a dog, that the future Buddha Maitreya manifests generously in the form of dogs, ahead of his Buddha incarnation far in the future, in order to encourage depressed and frightened people to rise above their fears and develop trust and affection for another sentient being.
Significant is the note Kerouac gave Gary Snyder on the latter’s departure for Japan and further years of Zen practice, as recorded in the semifictional Dharma Bums; “MAY YOU USE THE DIAMOND CUTTER OF MERCY.” (Of course, as Dharma Bums is semifictional, you can’t tell if he really gave him such a note or just wished he did; but the point is the same.) The Diamond Cutter is one of the Prajnaparamita Sutras, Transcendent Wisdom highest Mahayana sutras, and mercy and compassion were the facets of the wisdom of enlightenment that most spoke to Kerouac’s Christo-Buddhist heart, which he didn’t want Gary to lose sight of with his macho samurai focus on Zen. I love Kerouac’s statement later in the novel, when he spends a summer in a fire-lookout cabin on Desolation Peak in Washington State’s Skagit Range: “Whenever I heard thunder in the mountains it was like the iron of my mother’s love.” He called the Buddha the “Jesus of Asia,” even “sweeter than Jesus,” and in Wake Up he relies extensively on Dwight Goddard’s anthology A Buddhist Bible (Goddard, being a Christian, tended to emphasize aspects of Buddhism that resembled his own faith). At the beginning of Wake Up, Kerouac quotes Goddard’s own dedication: “Adoration to Jesus Christ, the Messiah of the Christian World; Adoration to Gotama Sakyamuni, The Appearance-Body of the Buddha.—A BUDDHIST PRAYER in the Monastery of Santa Barbara, Written by Dwight Goddard.” Kerouac here openly approves of adoring both “saviors” equally.
The Zen tradition developed in Japan in the context of a centuries’ long taming of the samurai violence of the warriors of that nation, and so Kerouac’s not having “Zen Bones” seems to be a reference precisely to his softness, his exaltation of kindness and gentleness, his love of dogs and their love of him. He also seemed less freewheeling sexually than some of the other Beats, a bit shy and perhaps a bit more considerate of his women friends. He certainly was well loved, having been a legendary athlete as a youth, a truly handsome and elegant man, a celebrity writer lionized for a while in the 1950s and early 1960s. He would have been in his eighties today, and very much would have enjoyed the “rising sun of the Dharma” that is happening now in America, as prophetically promised to me one morning in 1964 by my old Mongolian spiritual friend, Geshe Wangyal, as we finished setting the big brass om mani padme hum prayer wheels on the porch of the Labsum Shedrub Ling (Lamaist Buddhist Monastery) building in Freewood Acres, New Jersey.
Kerouac was very much brought up a Catholic. His family was deeply Catholic and it seems they were suspicious of his romance with Buddha and Buddhism. His many critical interpreters seem to insist that he remained a Catholic, and he certainly did have a strong attachment to Jesus and Mother Mary. There is no doubt that he loved both Jesus and Buddha. Most scholars maintain that Kerouac was “really” a Christian through and through and his Buddhism some sort of side interest. Being a Protestant apostate myself, I have noted that our American cultured types are still uncomfortable about Buddhism, puzzled by it, and even artists heavily indebted to Buddhism or “the East” are reluctant to acknowledge that debt, until perhaps late in their careers.
In this context, we should consider why people tend to think that Kerouac’s love for Jesus and spiritual (not the church variety so heavily compromised by dogma) Christianity implies that he did not understand and appreciate Buddhism (had he known better its various institutionalized forms he would no doubt have insisted on a non-church-dominated form of spiritual Buddhism). Do we need to reevaluate the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity?
Mahayana Buddhists are fond of embracing Christianity as fully resonant with their deepest intent. Christians often recoil from this embrace and emphasize their difference and, of course, their uniqueness. There is no doubt that the existence of an Absolute, Omnipotent yet Compassionate, Creator God is not believable to any educated Buddhist. That being said, relational, quite powerful, creative Gods are fully accepted and are an important part of the Buddha story, though they are not necessarily considered any more enlightened than most humans. The Gods of the many different heavenly levels and realms present in Buddhist cosmologies are immensely powerful and intelligent, very much absorbed in extremely long-lived, unimaginable rounds of lavish pleasure, and so are considered in danger of thinking that the egocentric life cycle is just fine and they really are the center of the universe—the very definition of the cosmic ignorance or misknowledge that is the root of the unremitting suffering of the unenlightened life.
But beyond this metaphysical difference about the status of God or the Gods, Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity arose and spread only one well-traveled ocean apart at the same time in Eurasian history. It was a time when stabilizing universal empires were spawning a new, more caring, more paternalistic form of imperial kingship, a time when divinity was being reenvisioned as balancing its terrible aspects with the loving concern for individuals so well represented by the celestial bodhisattva saviors such as Avalokiteshvara and Tara and messianic saviors such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
Jesus’ life and main teachings, though embedded within the metaphysic and presented in the culture of a fearsome Omnipotent Creator, could have been that of an itinerant Buddhist “Great Adept” (Mahasiddha). His central message was the same as the Mahayana’s: that divine love and compassion are the essential and most powerful energy of the universe. His provocation of oppressive rulers and challenge to them to do their utmost to put him to death was in fact precisely in order to show that they could not succeed in doing so, thus indicating the supremacy of the power of that love. He proved it to the satisfaction of his followers over thousands of years by showing his ability to overcome death and violence, proving that his love-body could rise up even from the cruelest crucifix-ion as a fountain of eternal life that lived luminously beyond any particular embodiment. The reincarnation teaching of “soul-transmigration” common in his time and culture (banned only two and a half centuries later by order of the emperor Constantine) made this kind of adept-like achievement plausible to his disciples and their successors, with a few exceptions.
There are many such stories of the Great Adepts of ancient India. The Buddha himself calmed by his mere gentle presence an enraged wild elephant sent to kill him by the patricidal king of Magadha. The young monk who converted the emperor Ashoka from being a paragon of cruelty to being a patron of the Noble Community (
the Sangha, which Kerouac called the “Church”) caught the emperor’s attention by levitating suspended in a cool bubble of energy over the raging flames of a cauldron of boiling oil. The enlightened alchemist Nagarjuna possessed the secret of immortality and lived six hundred years. The adept Naropa was burned at the stake with his female consort and both remained unharmed in the midst of the flames. India was rife with tales (modern folks will think “legends,” which is fine) of holy sages who demonstrated love’s power over death.
Then there are the teachings: Jesus’ beatitudes, his extraordinary teachings on nonviolence, to turn the other cheek to your enemy’s blows, to give your cloak when your shirt is demanded of you, to go beyond loving your friends and relatives and learn to love your enemy, and the central injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. These teachings are totally consonant with the Buddhist ethic of nonviolence, and resonate powerfully with the Mahayana’s messianic emphasis on selflessness, heroic tolerance, love, and compassion. On the wisdom level, Jesus’ statements that the kingdom of God lies within you are fully compatible with the Buddhist vision of the Buddha-nature in all beings, or Nagarjuna’s famous statement of nonduality, that the deepest reality is ultimate voidness as the womb of relational compassion (shunyatakarunagarbham). And Jesus’ powerful statement to the legalist priestly hierarchy he faced that “I am the way, the light, and the truth!” can be understood not as dictating religious exclusivism for a particular church or faith and furious intolerance of others, but rather as insisting by living example that divinity and salvation for each person lies within herself or himself as an individual, and not through membership in some denomination or institution.