by Jack Kerouac
So in spite of the insistence by Christians that their teachings are sui generis and come down only from God and have no connection with any other movement on the planet, Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity have very strong “family resemblances.” It is likely that Kerouac understood the deeper, broader dimensions of Mahayana Buddhism better than his peers, either those like myself, who were strongly motivated to break away from their Christian background, or those who were receiving their knowledge through the prism of East Asian Chinese and Japanese cultures, and especially through the Ch’an/Zen connection, where meditation and samurai-like hardball “no-thought” are emphasized.
Most important to examine is Kerouac’s personal understanding of enlightenment, which he seems to assume is the experience of the oneness of all things, and yet he allows also for the persistence of engagement with a transformed relativity. Though he oftens mentions no-thing-ness and even nothing, he refuses to reify any sort of disappearance, and most often talks of “the holy emptiness,” not nothingness, and emphasizes that “emptiness is form” just as much as “form is emptiness.” He blew me away by referring to the “Womb of the Tathagata,” and seems comfortable in the profound realm that Nagarjuna calls shunyatakarunagarbham, “emptiness the womb of compassion.” He offers many accounts of his personal experiences in meditation (he knows all the original terms, dhyana, samadhi, samapatti) toward the end of Some of the Dharma. But the following passage from The Dharma Bums might be the one he would prefer I quote:
What did I care about the squawk of the little very self which wanders everywhere? I was dealing in outblownness, cut-off-ness, snipped, blownoutness, putoutness, turned-off-ness, nothing-happens-ness, gone-ness, gone-out-ness, the snapped link, nir, link, vana, snap! “The dust of my thoughts collected into a globe,” I thought, “in this ageless solitude,” I thought, and really smiled, because I was seeing the white light everywhere everything at last.
The warm wind made the pines talk deep one night when I began to experience what is called “Samapatti,” which in Sanskrit means Transcendental Visits. I’d got a little drowsy in the mind but was somehow physically wide awake sitting erect under my tree when suddenly I saw flowers, pink worlds of walls of them, salmon pink, in the Shh of silent woods (obtaining nirvana is like locating silence) and I saw an ancient vision of Dipankara Buddha who was the Buddha who never said anything. Dipankara as a vast snowy Pyramid Buddha with bushy wild black eyebrows like John L. Lewis and a terrible stare, all in an old location, an ancient snowy field like Alban (“A new field!” had yelled the Negro preacherwoman), the whole vision making my hair rise. I remember the strange magic final cry that it evoked in me, whatever it means: Colyalcolor. It, the vision, was devoid of any sensation of I being myself, it was pure egolessness, just simply wild ethereal activities devoid of any wrong predicates . . . devoid of effort, devoid of mistake. “Everything’s all right,” I thought. “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form and we’re here forever in one form or another which is empty. What the dead have accomplished, this rich silent hush of the Pure Awakened Land.”
I felt like crying out over the woods and rooftops of North Carolina announcing the glorious and simple truth. Then I said “I’ve got my full rucksack pack and it’s spring. I’m going to go southwest to the dry land, to the long lone land of Texas and Chihuahua and the gay streets of Mexico night, music coming out of doors, girls, wine, weed, wild hats, viva! What does it matter! Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light.” Sitting in my Buddha-arbor, therefore, in that “colyalcolor” wall of flowers pink and red and ivory white, among aviaries of magic transcendent birds recognizing my awakening mind with sweet weird cries (the pathless lark), in the ethereal perfume, mysteriously ancient, the bliss of the Buddha-fields, I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
“Colyalcolor” is a mystery for sure—it reminds me of Koorookoolleh, the name of the ruby-red goddess bodhisattva who is the archetype of passionate compassion. She stands in a dancing pose, stark naked except for garlands of flowers, and holds a flower bow with bee string, shooting flower arrows to open beings’ hearts. But I’m not saying that was what Jack’s amazing word really meant. Perhaps it is the name of the “Buddha-field” he will create when he perfects his “awakener-ship” someday. D. T. Suzuki was funny. When Jack reportedly asked him upon meeting if he could stay with him forever, he answered, “Sometime.” You can always get a sense of how someone really feels by how they explain the Buddha’s enlightenment and basic teachings. The only discordant note in his experience is “I have nothing to do but do what I want,” which evinces a trace of the “nothing matters after all” sort of nihilistic misunderstanding of emptiness and perhaps the kernel of his inability to take his alcoholism seriously enough to get free of it and preserve himself and his genius for our benefit somewhat longer than 1969. Fortunately, Kerouac goes on to say, “and be kind and nevertheless remain uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light,” which evinces his deeper instinct that the nonduality of voidness and form, nirvana and samsara, mandates that the free person remain causally committed to the improvement of the conditions of others in the illusory unreal relative world.
Wake Up Itself
What a thrill to read Wake Up, Kerouac’s vision of the life of Shakyamuni, the supreme Buddha emanation of our age! The long, streaming style makes the book majestic and something that you absorb in one sitting, like a symphony, culminating in a way in the Shurangama Sutra’s heroic march vision of the world dissolving in the diamond samadhi, and seeing the Tathagata Buddha (“Thus-gone Awakened One”) floating in the flower-petal universe beyond the body and the system there of seven elements: earth, water, fire, wind, space, perception, consciousness. Wake Up has a basic flavor of nonduality in that section but then returns to the more conventional dualist Buddhist vision at the time of the parinirvana (“final nirvana”), treating it as a dreamless sleep of extinction, since Kerouac did not have available to him the exquisite paradox of the Buddha’s revelation of his eternal presence at the moment of his final disappearance as a distinct body, as revealed in the Lotus and Mahaparinirvana Sutras.
Wake Up was written during the first half of 1955. In January of that year, Kerouac had moved with his mother from Richmond Hill, New York, into the house of his sister Nin, who lived in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Away from the hectic life of New York City, Kerouac was able to immerse himself in the idea of leading an ascetic life in the tradition of the Buddha—he sat by himself for hours, meditating under the clear night stars. The title page of the finished manuscript reads “Wake Up Prepared by Jack Kerouac,” but this had not always been the book’s title. Originally called “Your Essential Mind: The Story of the Buddha,” Kerouac also referred to it at various times as “my Buddhist handbook,” “Buddha Tells Us,” and “Buddhahood: The Essence of Reality.”
Kerouac does not attempt to hide his copious use of his sources, remarking at the beginning in his Author’s Note: “There is no way to separate and name the countless sources that have poured into this lake of light. . . . The heart of the book is an embellished précis of the mighty Surangama Sutra.” (The first “s” of the title should be written “sh” to be phonetically accurate without a diacritic mark.) “I have designed this to be a handbook for Western understanding of the ancient Law.” (He uses the old translators’ use of “law” for “Dharma,” which is not wrong in general, but is inaccurate in this context; it should be “truth” or “teaching.”) “The purpose is to convert.” (Here Kerouac surely does not mean to enroll people in any formal Buddhist denomination, but rather to convert them to the heart’s purpose in life, to the grand wisdom vision of the divinity within, and of the natural love and kindness in relationships.)
Kerouac also draws heavily on the Pali sources about the Buddha’s life, orally anc
ient but not written down until the fifth century C.E., and from the second century C.E. biographical poem Buddhacharita, by the great Asvhaghosha. He tends to mix up some of the details of most versions of the Buddha’s life, conventionally dated at 563-482 B.C.E. (though Tibetans date him in the ninth century B.C.E., and recent European scholars move him up into the fourth century B.C.E.). I will not concern myself with such details but will simply highlight some things in the text I find particularly beautiful.
Early in the book, Kerouac says, “Buddha means the awakened one. Until recently most people thought of Buddha as a big fat rococo sitting figure with his belly out, laughing, as represented in millions of tourist trinkets and dime store statuettes here in the western world. . . . This man was no slob-like figure of mirth, but a serious and tragic prophet, the Jesus Christ of India and almost all Asia. The followers of the religion he founded, Buddhism, the religion of the Great Awakening from the dream of existence, number in the hundreds of millions today.” I’m not sure why Kerouac thought Buddha was “tragic” rather than triumphant, as indeed he seemed to feel in the vision he recounts above in The Dharma Bums. Maybe because of the Buddha’s first noble truth, that “unenlightened life is bound to be frustrating, and so all suffering.” When Kerouac says Buddha was “the Jesus Christ of India and almost all Asia,” he repeats his apostasy from orthodox Catholicism, by putting the two on the same level.
A few pages later, Kerouac shows his awareness of the “four formless realms” and the fact that they are none of them nirvana: “Alara Kalama [Siddhartha, the young Buddha’s first ascetic teacher] expounded the teaching called ‘the realm of nothingness,’ and practiced self-mortification to prove that he was free from his body.” This is especially significant, since almost all translators and scholars in the 1950s thought that “emptiness” and “nothingness” were the same thing, and so spread the misconception that Buddhists were ultimately nihilistic. Kerouac shows precisely here his knowledge of the difference.
Kerouac evinces his realistic view and presages his eventual “samapatti,” by explaining accurately how Siddhartha critiqued the “oversoul” (Paramatma) theory of the Brahmins: “Of Arada Udarama [his other ascetic teacher at this time] he asked: ‘With respect to old age, disease, and death, how are these things to be escaped?’ The hermit replied that by the ‘I’ being rendered pure, forthwith there was true deliverance. This was the ancient teaching propounding the Immortal Soul, the ‘Purusha,’ Atman, the Oversoul that went from life to life getting more and more or less and less pure, with its final goal pure soulhood in heaven. But the holy intelligence of Gotama perceived that this ‘Purusha’ was no better than a ball being bounced around according to concomitant circumstances, whether in heaven, hell, or on earth, and as long as one held this view there was no perfect escape from birth and destruction of birth. The birth of anything means death of the thing: and this is decay, this is horror, change, this is pain.”
Kerouac goes on to recount, anticipating his later vision, “Approaching now his moment of . . . compassion the young Saint saw all things, men sitting in groves, trees, sky, different views about the soul, different selves, as one unified emptiness in the air, one imaginary flower, the significance of which was unity and undividable-ness, all of the same dreamstuff, universal and secretly pure.” Here he expresses the Mahayana nonduality, though he is still using Theravada sources: “He saw that existence was like the light of a candle: the light of the candle and the extinction of the light of the candle were the same thing. . . . Gotama saw the peace of the Buddha’s Nirvana. Nirvana means blown out, as of a candle. But because the Buddha’s Nirvana is beyond existence, and conceives neither the existence or non-existence of the light of a candle, or an immortal soul, or any thing, it is not even Nirvana, it is neither the light of the candle known as Sangsara (this world) nor the blown-out extinction of the light of the candle known as Nirvana (the no-world) but awake beyond these arbitrarily established conceptions.” I am awed and amazed at Kerouac’s elucidation of profound nonduality in this context.
The description of the Buddha’s enlightenment in Wake Up is especially moving, very majestic and insightful. It is too long to quote here in its entirety. Kerouac alternates between quoting Pali sources and his own “embellishments.” I will pick out a few choice passages.
The blessed hermit went to Budhgaya. At once the ancient dream of the Buddhas of Old possessed him as he gazed at the noble groves of palm and mango and ficus religiosa fig trees; in the rippling afternoon he passed beneath their branches, lonely and bemused, yet with a stirring of premonition in his heart that something great was about to happen here . . . rediscovering the lost and ancient path of the Tathagata (He of Suchnesshood); re-unfolding the primal dew drop of the world; like the swan of pity descending in the lotus pool, and settling, great joy overwhelmed him at the sight of the tree which he chose to sit under as per agreement with all the Buddha-lands and assembled Buddha-things which are No-things in the emptiness of sparkling intuition all around like swarms of angels and Bodhisattvas in mothlike density radiating endlessly towards the center of the void in ADORATION. “Everywhere is Here,” intuited the saint. . . . “I WILL NOT RISE FROM THIS SPOT,” he resolved within himself, “UNTIL, FREED FROM CLINGING, MY MIND ATTAINS TO DELIVERANCE FROM ALL SORROW.”
Many words have been written about this holy moment in the now famous spot beneath this Bodhi-Tree, or Wisdom-Tree. It was not an agony in the garden, it was a bliss beneath the tree. (Here is Kerouac’s comparison with Christ.) It was not the resurrection of anything, but the annihilation of all things. (He slips into the relative-absolute dualism of Theravada.) What came to Buddha in those hours was the realization that all things come from a cause and go to dissolution, and therefore all things are impermanent, all things are unhappy, and thereby and most mysterious, all things are unreal. (Here is Kerouac’s apprehension of the essential Buddhist insight into causation; he comes later to the famous verse, the key mantra of all Buddhism.)
By nightfall he reposed peaceful and quiet. He entered into deep and subtle contemplation. Every kind of holy ecstasy in order passed before his eyes. During the first watch of the night he entered on “right perception” and in recollection all former births passed before his eyes. . . . Knowing full well that the essence of existence is of onesuchness, what birth could not his Bright, Mysterious, Intuitive Essence of Mind recall? As though he had been all things, and only because there had never been a true “he,” but all things, and so all things were the same thing, and it was within the purview of the Universal Mind, which was the Only Mind past, present, and future. . . . It had been a long time already finished, the ancient dream of life, the tears of the many-mothered sadness, the myriads of fathers in the dust, eternities of lost afternoons of sisters and brothers, the sleepy cock crow, the insect cave, the pitiful instinct all wasted on emptiness, the great huge drowsy Golden Age sensation that opened in his brain that this knowledge was older than the world. . . . In the ears of the Buddha as he thus sat in brilliant and sparkling craft of intuition, so that light like Transcendental Milk dazzled in the invisible dimness of his closed eyelids, was heard the unvarying pure hush of the sighing sea of hearing, seething, receding, as he more or less recalled the consciousness of the sound, though in itself it was always the same steady sound, only his consciousness of it varied and receded, like low tide flats and the salty water sizzling and sinking in the sand, the sound neither outside nor within the ear but everywhere, the pure sea of hearing, the Transcendental Sound of Nirvana heard by children in cribs and on the moon and in the heart of howling storms, and in which the young Buddha now heard a teaching going on, a ceaseless instruction wise and clear from all the Buddhas of Old that had come before him and all the Buddhas a-Coming. Beneath the distant cricket howl occasional noises like the involuntary peep of sleeping dream birds, or scutters of little fieldmice, or a vast breeze in the trees disturbed the peace of this Hearing but the noises were merely accidental, the He
aring received all noises and accidents in its sea but remained as ever undisturbed, truly unpenetrated, and neither replenished nor diminished, as self-pure as empty space. Under the blazing stars the King of the Law, enveloped in the divine tranquillity of this Transcendental Sound of the Diamond Ecstasy, rested moveless.
Then in the middle watch of night, he reached to knowledge of the pure Angels, and beheld before him every creature, as one sees images upon a mirror; all creatures born and born again to die, noble and mean, the poor and rich, reaping the fruit of right or evil doing, and sharing happiness or misery in consequence. . . . The groundmist of 3 A.M. rose with all the dolors of the world. . . . Birth of bodies is the direct cause of death of bodies. Just as, implantation of its seed was the cause of the cast off rose.