by Jack Kerouac
This is not bullshit I really believe this and not only that I will prove it to you at some time or other. As to your going to desert, it ain’t necessary (scorpions in your pockets), it is for me, if it turns out to be the way of really Samboghakaya staying-with-it all the time then I’ll tell you and then it will be time to say you should do it. But nothing I can do to change your own vision of sad love which is after all Sebastian’s [Sampas] and the other night I realize that when Sebastian died on Anzio he probably did so by rushing through bullets to aid wounded comrade (he was medic) and died a Tathagata in his sad Charles Boyer Algiers hospital. Who knows? Yet there is no other way but sitting. The trick is dhyana, twice a day. That’s the trick. I’ll hip you, as you ask, on “specific bodily and mental inside signposts.”
THIRD SERIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PART—As prelude, I showed your “X” letter to Eugene because he wanted to see your letters and dint show him Peter O. letter but made up for it with “X” and what his comment: “Don’t show it to my father.” Urp. The talk about “breaks” etc. I guess.
Right this minute, because of silly elation, wine and benny, I cannot sit down and practice true dhyana. But here’s the trick:
Drink a small cup of tea, lock door first, then place pillow on bed, pillow against wall, fold feet, lean, erect posture, let all breath out of lungs and take in new lungful, close eyes gently and begin not only breathing gently like little child but listening to intrinsic sound of silence which as you know is the sea-sound shh under noises which are accidental. (It’s the sound of the imaginariness of the scene—the mind-sound of mind-stuff everywhere). This is the Tathagatas singing to me. To you too. This is the only teaching. Babes hear it. It never began, never will end. Tathagata means “He who has thus come and thus gone.” That is, the essence of Buddhahood. The first signpost is, that after five, ten minutes you feel a sudden bliss at gentle exhalation and your muscles have long relaxed and your stomach stopped and breathing is slow, this bliss of out-breathing means you are entering Samadhi. But don’t grasp at it. The bliss is physical and mental. Now you’re no longer interested in sounds, sights, eyes closed, ears receptive but non-discriminatory. Itches may rise to make you scratch; don’t scratch them; they are imaginary, like the world; they are “the work of Mara the tempter” (in yourself) trying to delude you and make you break up your Samadhi. As the breathing is blissful, now listen to diamond sound of “eternity,” now gaze at the Milky Way in your eyelids (which is neither bright nor dark, entertains neither arbitrary conception of sight). Body forgotten, restful, peaceful. I mention the tea, it was invented by Buddhists in 300 B.C. for this very purpose, for dyana. As bliss comes realize by INTUITION (this is where we leave the X) the various understandings you have concerning the day’s activities and the long night of life in general, their unreality, eeriness, dream-ness, like Harlem Vision again. Then if you wish, use a lil tantrism to stop thought; to stop thought you may say “This Thinking is Stopped” at each out-breath or “It’s all Imaginary” or “Mind Essence loves Everything” or “It’s only a Dream” or “(Adoration to) the Tathagata of No-Contact” (meaning no contact with thoughts.) But cutting off contacts with thoughts, their clinging ceases; they come and go, certes, like dreams in sleep, but you no longer honor their forms, because you’re honoring Essence. By a half hour of this a further bliss seeps in. But then there are leg-pains. Try often to stand the leg-pain as long as possible to dig that when it seems unbearable, at that instant, you can take it just one minute more, and suddenly during a few seconds of that minute, you forget cold about the pain, proving their imaginariness in Mind! But hung with body you have to come out. Try continuing with legs out, or better, rest, rub them, and start again . . . Practice ONE long dhyana a day, because it takes twenty minutes to quiet the machine motor of the mind. It’s simply by dhyana that you’ll come to what you seek to find because that in itself is, like in my vision of the subway, abiding “in self-less oneness with the suchness that is Tathagatahood.” (emptiness, rest, eternal peace)
Now as to the word. What you need at once is the DIAMOND SUTRA. If you haven’t got it in your Philo Collection (which I hanker to see) then tell me as swiftly I’ll type it for you and mail it. It is the first and highest and final teaching. I think you’re ready for the Diamond Sutra. All your “X’s” are or is answered, therein. The “X” is simply essence underlying forms . . . as essence, it is the quintessence of emptiness, . . . it is Nirvana, Highest Perfect Wisdom. The crystal reality. Form is a dream, essence is reality. Creation is illusion with a real origin.
(Two days later) I know these letters have the sound of bullshit because of the same level of enthusiasm all the time for thoughts that are sometimes powerfully exploding and sometimes weakly imploding, but this is like breathing and enthusiasm is like the life the breathing makes possible.
I been thinking all day, there’s just no point my trying to teach you via these letters. I’ll just have to tell you in person; conduct sorta lectures off my Some of Dharma notebooks, because writing-of-it there’s no beginning and no end to the work and the monotony. I don’t make light of your X or of your Harlem Vision; it’s only that you haven’t described it sharp enuf to make it look any different from 1000 samadhi sensations I’ve had. Sending it to you, incidentally, so you’ll be able to remember and judge.
Nothing “inhuman” about Buddhism, it’s simply a religion for “sentient” beings meaning all beings possessed of sense and therefore liable and under punishment of suffering and death. Ah, I’m sick of talking. talking.
I think the best thing to do next out is just send you my personal dharma notes with no comments because these letters are getting too much. A million things in my notes, why re-word them for you?
Yes, publish Neal’s Joan Anderson, it’s a masterpiece and was the basis for my idea about prose, tho Neal himself doesn’t care or understand; but that dense page where he breathlessly drew a diagram of the toilet window is the wildest prose I’ve ever seen and I like it better than Joyce or Proust or Melville or Wolfe or anybody.
Bill’s Interzone Tangiers is great, haunting, it looks like he’ll go very far on a hundred unpredictable tangents and be really a big writer especially because he is uncompromisingly amusing himself. His finger story is so accurate, the prose. Haunting concern with brevity. I should have written my ideas of that when I read his stories last week. I’m very mentally tired today; for two days I been wrestling like a mathematician with the problem of how the Seven Great Elements are sucked into action . . . a problem solved in the Surangama, but because of the poor translation or incomplete thought in Sanskrit, was not made manifestly clear; but this has wearied me so I rush this incomplete letter to you, begging for time to recoup. In my next letter I will simply chat awhile and then type up dharma notes. In them all the problems of karma, arbitrary conception, etc. Bah bah words words. Don’t think for a minute I’ve lost my faith, no, I’m tired of words and writing letters like this; my progress is slow but sure. Carl Solomon must be in Denver seeing Rudolf Halley. How can I check on him? He musta left that place on Madison by now.
Bev Burford going to Frisco in March. One of the best parts in Visions of Neal is that part about Saturday Night Red Neons Making Me Think of Chocolate Candy Boxes in Drugstores, remember?—good for Crazy Lights—Excuse this tired letter. I very glad to be free of jail. Now I go to Frisco this spring or summer or fall and eat lotsa panfry chowmein and drink wine with Al—also will live in Chittenden Riverbottom and write more poems on tea—go to desert via the Zipper right outa 3rd and Townsend all the way to Yuma Desert—Here I am yelling about Dharma and I write nothing about it. Patience. Wait till my next. Meanwhile accept this, and enclosed stories by you and Bill, and write again if you have something. What are your virgin feelings concerning your first Buddhist studies?
Jack
Jack Kerouac [Richmond Hill, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]
Feb 10 55
Allen,
Just idly reading your last letter in the afternoon, with glass of hangover wines (after big weekend at Tom Livornese with Ed and Maria, drinks and pianosingings) and I see the sad letter about the “X”—your metaphysical concerns and doubts—I understand the seriousness of your past path and applaud it and there is no difference between your past path and the Buddhist one you enter . . . As I have in my notebook writ, The life of an enlightened man is like a dream that is self-enlightening in which the dreamer knows that he’s dreaming before he wakes up.
And the reason why there is an Eightfold Path (of Purity) and why lust is unadvised is because a man led around by his dong will not have a mind free to realize that the dream of life is only an arbitrary conception (a conception arbitrated by false terrestrial judgment) (as a Judge arbitrating a court dispute between “two”) and so he will go on perpetuating occasion for rebirth and seeking rebirth himself and thus the Ocean of Suffering rolls on and on thru Kalpa after Kalpa with no let-up, like traffic in a great superhiway and everybody driving to another birth and further graves and cribs and all longfaced and solemn in charnels of their own making, like butchers in bloody aprons at morn regarding the empty blue sky with self-believing huge ignorance . . . so.
Saw Lucien. He said he was actually an ancient ex-Buddha devoted now to the full enjoyment and investigation and digging of life, and suffering too, but I see that he’s really only a dreamer absorbed in his dream, like my Town and City heroes Joe and Charley Martin absorbed fixing motors and so mystic Peter can’t understand what their absorption is all about nor Francis’ own silly absorption in denial. There is no way for a Buddha, an Awakened One, to reappear like a Lucien. But Lucien is beginning to know what I mean, his story is “I couldn’t be less interested,” which I see in his eyes; incidentally I’ve discovered that my little nephew in the south, Lil Paul [Blake], is Lucien really, and will grow up and be the same. How strange that I have to be hungup now with another seven year old Lucien and be his uncle and charged with the responsibility of watching over him and taking him [on] walks and giving him spiritual instruction . . . a little blond, green eyed desperate tortured introspection Lucien with unhappy life.
Anyway, to reap the realization that you’re dreaming, and that nothing necessarily exists after all if you don’t notice it, live in a childlike unconcerned contemplative way in the forest solitude. Or the city solitude, like a Seymour [Wyse] by the window, or a San Francisco Blues Poet sitting in skidrow rocking-chairs. But the forest solitude, about which I know nothing yet, is traditionally handed down from the Buddhas and Buddies of old and arhats and cats and I am going to try it.
First I go to South, to help build the new family house, dig ditches and carry planks and saw boards. Then, July, I drive to NY with new auto license, in old panel truck of brother’s, and pick up my mother and drive her back, with all our stuff. Then in August I go to New Orleans in bus and from NO to Del Rio Texas on Southern Pacific freights and from Del Rio to Villa Acuna across river and from there to south and plateau and sweet Actopan and thence on up to West Coast via Mazatlan searching for best seasons and areas for bhikku life of future. And if you in Frisco around October I will go, otherwise no reason. Will go on 1st class Zipper freight from Yuma on thru, fast and free.
Rebirth. Perhaps you been wondering. Coming back to the dream in a rebirth is like myself when I’ve been to the Village and Stanley Gould has scolded me for some silly camp I put down, I want to go back and do it over and redress the silly camp, there’s a residue called “cause for regret”—and this is now the phantom dreamer seeks his rebirth because of unmatured undeveloped unredressed Karma from the previous life dream. Though it’s hard for me to realize there’s no Stanley Gould, no scolding, no silly camp, no going back, and no coming-from, and no “I” in the matter, no individual in the matter, nothing but wholly imaginary burbujas possessing no more strength than imaginary blossoms seen in the empty sky, no more strength than forgotten images in forgotten dreams in forgotten centuries long ago, yet, Go! Svaha! Be Saved! Take up thy Staff! This is the Holy Life!—nevertheless it’s the truth, there was no Stanley Gould, there was no scolding, the silly camp was a gesture in a dream, I cannot go back and straighten it out because there is no straightening of gray space and open rain, there is no Jack Kerouac in the matter, I don’t necessarily exist except as an arbitrary conception stated by some fools.
Sunday I had the Dhyana of Complete Understanding—A happiness was in me, beyond the happiness of mortality, and neither a happiness nor not a happiness; and it was revealed and laid bare, not as a result wholly of my actions and efforts to realize the truth, but because it was already there, with no beginning, no ending—it was the bliss of knowing that our lives are but dreams and arbitrary conceptions, from which the big dreamer wakes—What could be more like a dream, with birth the falling-asleep, and death the awakening from sleep?—a dream, with beginning and ending and plot—a dream, with that which is not itself, bounding both it’s sides—a dream, taking place in dark sleep of the Universal night—I had a clear physical realization that it’s only a dream—
Practicing meditation and realizing that existence is a dream is an athletic, physical accomplishment—now I know why I was an athlete, to learn physical relaxation, smooth strength of strong muscles hanging ready for Nirvana, the great power that runs from the brow to the slope shoulders down the arms to the delicately joined hands in Dhyana—the hidden power of gentle breathing in the silence—it’s athletic—somehow I realized why Bill and Lucien liked me—And the big dreamer wakes from dream-after-dream and wants to keep going back to rebirth in a new life-body to redevelop his evil deeds (cause for regret) his good deeds leave no karma, no need to redevelop, to redress—but his bad deeds, his lies, lusts, cruelties and thefts do haunt him and he has to go back and work it over better, to Good—but if he becomes enlightened in the midst of the dream he sees all things as arbitrary conceptions merely (form that is emptiness, emptiness that is form), he realizes he himself, the ego-personality assumed in the dream is inexistent, he realizes that things, if you don’t notice them, don’t necessarily exist (the wisdom of the Tathagata, Suchness-Arrived, the Unborn) . . . that they are illusions that have no hold on reality . . . an unconditional void realization comes to the big dreamer and he awakes in the dream—even before death—and there will be no more rebirth for the phantom dreamer—but as long as the big dreamer fails to see that even karma, rebirth and death, dream and non-dream and the whole Dharma of Buddhas and Tathagatas, all conditioned conceptual things, including himself, exist only as arbitrary conceptions and not in reality, then the big dreamer will go on dreaming, perhaps in heaven, where he is not exempt from pain. Form is Dust and Pain.
When a dreamer is enlightened inside the dream, it means his karma was thus intended to reach its end as enlightenment became revealed—so when he leaves his body and the Five Skhandhas and Suzuki’s “pernicious corollaries of egoism” there is no gnawing need to pick up again and resume the dreaming again, because it is seen that “to come back” is only a dream, only an arbitrary conception, and there is no coming back and never was—these are the rough outlines of a complete understanding of the truth—I sat incidentally for mental inside hip signposts for you, with feet comfortably crossed under my legs, with the big toe of my right foot nestled in the hollow between calf and shinbone of the left leg—letting all my breath out slowly so as to relax the dangerous tense diaphragm—do that—I entered the Halls of Nirvana and understood—the hosts of Buddhas were there, the Bodhisattvas touched my brow, I felt a distinct touch on the brow (imaginary)—I distinctly heard a Chinese sentence sung—I realized that Sages and Saints are real men with astounding discoveries of the Mind, sitting plainly in assemblies waiting for supper, but with a smile—like Charley Parker I can see a Chinese Saint with Bird Parker’s face, Bird’s quiet virility and leadership and faint smile among the cats and arhats—Everybody is happy as they realize that Nirvana is the happiness
that never ends! and that it was already there!
Write soon,
Jean-Louis
The “silly camp” referred to was when Stanley showed me a drawing of Pound by [Sheri] Martinelli and I said “I don’t know anything about Art” and Gould said “O don’t give me that shit.” Incidentally, that was an afternoon spent with Stanley and Dave Burnett in a girl’s pad (Marylou Little) in Village and blasting and when I told David that Chris McLaine said he was the best poet in Frisco I heard D. say “He’s just a crazy knot”—saying “nut” with inconceivably elegant L.A. languidity . . . dig . . . but I find generally that the subterraneans are quippers only and feel they should honor the nihilism inherent in quippery and that is their substance . . . the nihilism of Bill and Allen and Lucien and Neal was greater tho not much smarter (and Joan [Burroughs] and Hunkey). Anton [Rosenberg] is their best quipper because he can come up with cries like Breboac Karrak Kerouac (from Finnegans Wake) but I find David inherently the most interesting one and kinder and more humane.