JACK KEROUC’S THE DHARMA BUMS: AN APPRECIATION
After All These Years
I have been interested in Gary Snyder since I read The Dharma Bums (1958) in the late 1960s. Kerouac’s admiring portrait of Snyder as magnetic, erudite, and free yet disciplined intrigued me. Since that time I have kept up with Snyder’s career as poet, environmental activist, and essayist to some degree. In the 1980s, I enjoyed and was inspired by The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964–1979.
Recently, I picked up The Dharma Bums again to understand what made him, in Allen Ginsberg’s words “a great new hero of American culture.” It seems like Snyder is more relevant than ever at this time since the social maladies that he so clearly identifies are threatening the survival of our species. It also gave me the chance to come in contact with Kerouac’s writing at a very different stage of my life.
I had once thought a lot about Kerouac’s sad end, dying in 1969 from alcohol abuse at the age of 47. On the other hand, Snyder is still alive today at 94 and has been very productive while contributing much to American letters, other writers’ development, and environmental discourse. As I was reading The Dharma Bums, I speculated about who I resemble more. But I realized that a work of fiction can’t answer that question.
The Dharma Bums was written when Kerouac still thought that Buddhism and natural living pointed toward a much freer and more creative individual and society. While alone as a lookout on a remote mountain top for 63 days, after Snyder had gone off to Japan, Ray Smith, Kerouac’s stand-in says that Desolation, the name of the peak, is where he learned all. He is glad that he took up this enforced retreat from the city. Nevertheless, in Desolation Angels (1965), which was written a bit later, he emphasizes the boredom he felt while alone and described his mind as being “in rags” after the experience. The first book was written while he was still enthusiastic about Buddhism and the second as he was becoming weary of his life. Which self-portrait is more accurate? How reliable is the narrator?
Evoking Hope and Possibility
The Dharma Bums has to be appreciated on its own terms. I see it as a refreshing account of the aspirations of two seekers. Right from the beginning I amdrawn in by the way Kerouac evoked people, places, ideas, states of mind, and atmospheres. For example, hiking along a mountain trail inspires this reverie: “The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
It is also a celebratory novel of those who keep alive America’s wild spirit and point toward a more hopeful future. As Japhy Rider, Snyder’s stand-in puts it, these are the people who reject the privilege of working in order to consume all the junk they don’t really want; they are the Dharma Bums, the herald of a great rucksack revolution in which many many young Americans will become wanderers and pray in the mountains, enchanting people and writing spontaneous poems like Zen Lunatics. By being kind and engaging in unexpected acts they give all living beings a vision of freedom.
As someone who experienced a small-cale rucksack revolution in 1970 in Berkeley, I saw such a wave come and go. Still, the novel has a fresh feeling for me like it did many years ago and now, more than ever, Japhy Rider’s ecological outlook and way of life show how we might live sane lives in a world seriously out of joint.
Japhy keeps his independence by letting go of what he doesn’t need. Most Americans have forgotten this basic truth as they go after the American dream, but Japhy’s life is rich and well-rounded. His confidence is only shaken once in the novel when he tells Ray that he may be tiring of the Zen life of freedom and poverty. But his wavering is very brief. Of course, this kind of life is not for everybody and as we get older it becomes more difficult but Japhy’s ideal makes sense for young people. It is a practical way to develop an inner strength that will serve them well as they navigate the world in later years. There is also a ripple effect that carries over to the larger society.
Spiritual Wisdom
Kerouac’s understanding of Buddhism is a contentious matter, and Kerouac was disappointed with the response of respected Zen authorities like D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts to his treatment of Zen. Watts in Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen (1959) comments: “When Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, ‘I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference’ — the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say ‘To hell with it,’ nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes.” In other words, Kerouac is using Zen to justify his rejection of current society, whereas Zen neither accepts nor rejects what is. Zen is beyond the play of opposites.
In spite of Kerouac’s inability to let go of some psychological baggage, there is much food for thought on how to live more fully in the novel. The story is engaging and the portraits of artist-visionaries appeal to those of us who are also confronting a society whose materialism, consumerism, and spiritual emptiness has continued mostly uninterrupted since the 1950s. And the discussions and reflections of the two main characters about spiritual wisdom continue to be relevant today..
Japhy Ryder is clear that spiritual practice is not to be rigidly carried out and dogmatically adhered to. One the one hand he distrusts any kind of Buddhism that looks down on sex and the body. The path of the extreme renunciant is often a way of not facing mixed feelings about the physical and material realm. On the other hand, he solemnly prays out in the wilderness like “an old fashioned saint of the deserts.” Despite his deep study of East Asian philosophy and poetry and his mastery of Zen practice, he prays. Japhy’s openness and flexibility toward religion is refreshing.
The description of the Enlightenment process that Japhy offers appeals with its earthiness and the emphasis that there is nowhere to go as we wind up where we started but with new inner awareness. The disciples and Masters first “have to find and tame the ox of their mind essence, and then abandon that, and finally they attain to nothing … then having attained nothing they attain everything which is springtime blossoms in the trees so they end up coming down to the city to get drunk with the butchers like Li Po.” Here is another reminder not to give up the world in order to float above it as a disembodied spirit. The emergence of wisdom is an inner transformation; it does not require social isolation to avoid being tainted by the corrupt world.
The most important lesson, though, is to practice taming the mind, which means to resist the mind’s promptings to like this and to dislike that. This is the key to getting free of ego and it takes discipline. Japhy meditates every day before breakfast and then for quite a while in the afternoon unless some friends barge in. He also spends every day while in the city translating the Chinese scholar Han Shan’s poem Cold Mountain. Ray Smith thinks that such activities are a big reason why the atmosphere of his little shack is so peaceful.
Ray, too, has things to say that uplift. In North Carolina, at home with his mother in winter, he follows a program of Buddhist study and meditation. It bears fruit when one cold and silent night in the woods, he almost hears the words: “Everything is all right, forever and forever and forever.” He then thanks the wise and serene Awakener.
In real life, Kerouac never established himself in that state because his addictions took control. But in The Dharma Bums. Ray is not merely an exponent of “Beat Zen.” When he gets ready to come down from the solitary mountain, he proclaims: “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.” This sounds like a Christian more than a Buddhist outlook as his experience on the mountain teaches him to see eternity in this world. It is wise counsel to take time off from the ordinary world so we can fortify ourselves to deal with what Ray calls “the sadness of coming back to cities.”
Natural Living
The word “natural” has become so overused and overapplied, especially to describe food products, that it has lost any precise meaning. It has always been difficult to locate the boundary between natural and artificial living. If the natural path is best, what staples of our way of life ought to remain? What determines whether some activity is natural or not? These questions have become pressing as the inhabitants of late capitalism feel stressed-out and dislocated. Those who want to live a more simple, free, and spiritually rich life attuned with nature will find that Japhy Rider’s musings of the 1950s resonate with them and nourish their imaginations.
Japhy gets Ray to experience the joy of doing strenuous physical labor outdoors as they split logs and Ray gets the rhythm and it becomes effortless. The natural setting in the woods enhances the specialness of the moment. After eating a hearty meal Japhy tells Ray about the Buddha’s flower sermon. Kasyapa became the First Patriarch when the disciples were gathered and the Buddha was about to start a sermon but only raised a flower. All the other disciples were disturbed as the Buddha said nothing. But Kasyapa smiled. And that is how he was selected.
Ray gets another memorable lesson from Japhy about flowing with the natural world: You can’t fall off a mountain. Just after climbing one of the highest peaks in the Washington Cascades, Japhy cuts loose oblivious to the danger. Ray describes the amazing scene. “Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so; I saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running …” and Ray realizes that you can’t fall off a mountain and begins running after him. He compares the two of them in their leaping and yelling with mountain goats or Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago. He then comments as they get to a plateau that “when I looked up and saw you running down that mountain I suddenly understood everything.” The fellow climber awaiting them who hears this says “Ah, a little satori for Smith today.”
One of Japhy’s most important insights puts nature in a new light. He says that as you get closer to real matter like the natural elements (rock, air, fire, wood), the world is more spiritual. The no-nonsense materialists who try to be so practical have no clue about matter. They are the dreamers. Japhy is pointing toward an appreciation of animism that directs us to the wisdom of indigenous people. Now that the threat of ecological breakdown is becoming clearer, such thoughts don’t seem outdated and behind the times. Japhy is also very serious about food, anticipating another present-day concern. After seeing Japhy off as he departs for Japan, Ray wishes that people were more focused on food, using the money spent on weapons and rockets to make sure that all people could eat healthy food.
In Berkeley, Japhy lives a simple monastic life in a tiny shack with no chairs, orange crates for tables, second-hand and sewed-up clothes, and many scholarly books about East Asian religion and culture plus numerous volumes of poetry. And just before Japhy leaves for Japan to practice Zen meditation, after four days of wild partying, he and Ray sneak off for a few days of hiking. Japhy comments how good it feels to get away from dissipation. He enjoys sex and dancing, wine and long conversations, but never becomes dependent on them, a lesson that Ray who drinks too much takes to heart.
Spirituality and Society
Although Ray and Japhy get along very well and share a countercultural outlook, their approaches to Buddhism and the relation between spirituality and social and political engagement are very different. As Ray explains to Japhy soon after he meets him, his own Buddhism is not of the silly Zen variety but the serious Buddhism of the Hinayana. For him, Zen ignores kindness and instead focuses on confusing the mind so that it comes to see that all things stem from illusion. He rejects that path as too mean. It is remarkable how Ray throws out these remarks to someone he has just met, a scholar of Buddhism and translator of Chinese texts from a thousand years ago.
The other point that Ray emphasizes is that he is mainly interested in the Buddha’s first noble truth that all life is suffering and, to a lesser degree, the third one that suffering can be suppressed. Both Ray and Japhy like to call wise people Bodhisattvas, those beings who have been reborn out of compassion to help those who suffer. But they think differently about such people. Ray takes it to mean that the true self doesn’t judge people and he prays to God or Tathagata that he would be given the strength, the time, and the ability so that he could get across to people what he knows.
Japhy’s concern is wider. It extends beyond the personal level to the social and aesthetic realms. He is often put off by middle-class ways — at the gathering of howling poets in San Francisco (1956), he reveals anarchist sympathies, maintaining that Americans don’t know how to live. Unlike Japhy, Ray is not interested in examining the larger society. He ignores it, stays away from it, and goes around it. This divergence in thinking reflects one that has been prominent among the spiritually oriented since that time. Ray is advocating what has been called “spiritual bypass,” whereas Japhy sees a continuum on which his interest in Buddhism and his anarchist politics fit nicely.
A tension between the two is evident as Ray finds Japhy’s attitude toward ordinary people too harsh. He understands the lives of people like his mother who suffer just like he does. When Japhy criticizes the middle-class consumer of trashy goods that harm the environment and watches mindless television, Ray is aware that just as he wants to be accepted for his weakness and failures, so do others wish for that same forbearance. He upholds Buddhist compassion when Japhy’s frustration over the current state of society leads him to dehumanize ordinary Americans. This is not to say that Japhy is a hypocrite. As Ray notes: “He was always giving things, always practicing what the Buddhists call the Paramita of Dana, the perfection of charity.”
Reflections
The Dharma Bums is worth reading today because it raises perennial issues in an accessible, engaging, and honest way. We are still searching for spiritual food and exploring how to live as awakened beings and the implications for social and political life. If the novel was just evoking “Beat Zen,” then it wouldn’t be worth our time. Japhy Rider has something to offer. He is a modern city person with vast literary, cultural, and philosophical knowledge and a master of contemporary poetic forms; yet, he is also at home in rural settings with his practical survival skills and intimacy with the natural world. A highly unique individual, he fits in easily in a communal setting. As the modern world breaks down, people like him will stand out more than ever.
Japhy was one of the first to recognize that the American gaze needs to be turned outward. He went to Japan after studying Buddhism in depth. His enthusiasm for learning about other cultures, indigenous as well as East Asian, is needed today; after all, despite living in a globalizing world, Americans still tend to be insular. Even though the optimism that he embodies has evaporated, Japhy’s openness to new experience and his willingness to grow as a person are attractive. For people living in a materialistic society that is heavily administered and surveilled, his presence seems like a cool breeze.
This novel wears better than Kerouac’s other ones because he is less focused on his own personal issues. His sadness and melancholy don’t weigh it down. On the Road (1957) has a much faster pace but movement for its own sake doesn’t lead anywhere and manic energy only lasts for a time. Its appeal beyond adolescence and young adulthood is limited. In The Dharma Bums, the vitality and sheer wellbeing of Japhy take center stage, and Kerouac’s ability to enter another person’s world and bringit alive is at its best. Kerouac hoped that his novel would help to ignite a change in the way Americans perceive themselves and the marginal members of their society. He was wrong but such faith animates his storytelling and adds to its luster.
After more than sixty years have passed, it is poignant to look back on some of the people, ideas, and events in the novel. Now that we know how the actual lives turned out of those upon whom the main characters are based, I am struck by the very different directions of the life trajectories of Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. Once Japhy tells Ray that he foresees a bad end for him, but he thinks of Ray as a fellow pioneer in the rucksack revolution. “You and I ain’t out to bust anybody’s skull, or cut someone’s throat in an economic way, we’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints. Who knows, the world might wake up and burst out into a beautiful flower of Dharma everywhere.”
