China and the West

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma bums.[ID D29211]. (8)
Sekundärliteratur
Real-life person / Character name
Jack Kerouac = Ray Smith
Gary Snyder = Japhy Ryder
Allen Ginsberg = Alvah Goldbook
Neal Cassady = Cody Pomeray
Philip Whalen = Warren Coughlin
Locke McCorkle = Sean Monahan
John Montgomery = Henry Morley
Philip Lamantia = Francis DaPavia
Michael McClure = Ike O'Shay
Peter Orlovsky = George
Kenneth Rexroth = Rheinhold Cacoethes
Alan Watts = Arthur Whane
Caroline Kerouac = Nin
Carolyn Cassady = Evelyn
Claude Dalenberg = Bud Diefendorf
Natalie Jackson = Rosie Buchanan

Quellen :
Aiken, Charles Francis. India and Buddhism. (New York, N.Y. : Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, 1917).
Asvaghosa. The Buddhacarita ; or, Acts of the Buddha. (Calcutta : Baptist Mission Press, 1935-1936).
Buddhaghosha. Visuddhi magga.
Burlingame, E.W. Buddhist parables. (New Haven, Conn. : [s.n.], 1922).
Carus, Paul. The gospel of the Buddha. (Chicago, Ill. : Open Court, 1915).
Digha nikaya. The dialogues of the Buddha. (London : Hamphrey Milford, 1921).
Goddard, Dwight. A Buddhist bible. (Thetford, Vt., 1932). 2nd rev. ed. (New York, N.Y. : E.P. Dutton, 1938). [Anthologie buddhistischer Texte ; enthält Diamond sutra, Surangama sutra, Lankavatoara].
Horne, Charles F. The sacred books and early literature of the East ; vol. 18. (New York, N.Y. : Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, 1917).
Hui-neng. The platform sutra.
Lotus sutra.
Pure land sutras.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro.
The Dhampada.
Warren, Henry Clarke. Buddhism in translations. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University, 1909).

Kerouac dedicated his novel to Han Shan. In the novel he not only portrayed his friendship with Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen and other writers, but also described in detail Snyder's translation of Han Shan's poems and a Han Shan spirit in Snyder. This novel pushed Han Shan onto the American countercultural stage as a new mysterious Beat hero, while Snyder became a new living guru for the Beat Generation.

2004
Miriam Levering : While Kerouac was in Berkeley in 1955 and 1956 he was a 'real' Buddhist, and his novel The Dharma bums, written about his friendship with Gary Snyder, gives expression to real Buddhist insights and teachings. He wanted to devote his life to expressing dharma in wariting and conveys authentic Buddhist messages.
The Dharma bumsm in which Kerouac uses himsels as a model for the narrator (Ray Smith), Gary Snyder as the model for the hero of the novel (Japhy Ryder), and Allen Ginsberg as the model for Ray Smith's poet friend (Alvah Goldbook). But that best-selling novel was largely dismissed by literary critics as superficial, a kind of playing with Buddhism on the part of an author who was irresponsible, immoral, and undisciplined.
Beginning in 1953, Kerouac spent several years in concentrated Buddhis reading, study, and practice. Buddhism became central to his life and writing for the next few years.
Much of the novel draws a contrast between Ray Smith's attempts to practice Buddhism and those of Japhy Ryder, ways that correspond to what we know of the real ways of practicing Buddhism of Kerouac and Gary Snyder. But as the narrative time of the novel moves forward, tremendously admire Japhy's way of practicing Buddhism, and as the novel progresses Ray clearly becomes influenced by it.
One of the central structural devices of the book is the contrast it draws between Ray Smith's idea of bhikkhuhood and Japhy Ryder's model of Buddhist monastic life. Ray has also been practicing the Buddhist bhikkhu's restraint of body, speech, and mind.
Japhy, according to Ray, has learned Chinese and Japanese and become an Oriental scholar and discovered the greates Dharma bums of them all, the Zen lunatics of China and Japan. He too is practicing a kind of monastic simplicity. In Berkeley, Ray visits Japhy's small house, where he studies, meditates, and work on translating the poems of Hanshan. The Chinese poet Hanshan, Ray learns, is one of Japhy's great heroes and the chief model for his Buddhist practice.
There are two themes in the book that combine to make up the book's central Buddhist message, that America can be a Pure Land, a Buddha Land.The first theme is the association between purity, American mountains, and Buddhist realization. Japhy teaches Ray that mountains are the place where buddhas and 'true emptiness-marvelous being' are most directly experiences. Japhy and Ray agree, that America, this saha-world, is far from being a Pure Land. Both are critical of what America has become in the post-war period, the cold-war period of prosperity, the rush to experience the isolated conformist life of the suburbs, 'the organization man', the threat of the bomb, and the newly available wealth of electric appliances and TV.
The Dharma bums introduced the public to a romanticized and simplified version of the ideals, teachings, and practices of Buddhism in general. It also introduced readers to the wisdcom of Zhuangzi, Hanshan, Japanese haiku poets, and Buddhist masters. It also introduced readers to the long tradition in China and Japan of celebrating a life of wandering outside the settled world, and particularly in mountains, as a purifying and revivifying rout to the deepest kinds of human understanding of the world, the void, and the self. It also introduced readers to the notion that life's deepest meaning could be found in purifying the self and benefiting others, empowered by the dharma.

2007
Wang I-chun : Jack Kerouac, one of the leading members of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, impressed his readers with his melancholic sentiment, elegant style, and the themes of migration and exile. In his fictional and non-fictional writings especially, the recurrent motifs such as mutability of life, crossing on the borderlands and the discontent about life manifest the yearnings of the American lost generation. Throughout all the descriptions of the desperation and suffering of his characters, there is always a tough quality of the American spirit bespeaking the possibility of redemption and rejoicing of modern life through religion, especially Zen Buddhism. Kerouac confesses in several interviews that he was influences by Mahayana. Kerouac wins his celebrity by publishing a series of novels with his main characters troubled by their environment, economical problems and disengaged human relationship.
The Dharma bums proclaims the incorporation of Buddhism and Christianity in the life of the main character Smith. With the experience of spending a summer in isolation on the top of the Cascade Mountains as a fire look out, Kerouac uses the theme of migration to express another breakthrough : a 'satori', or sudden enlightenment. The Dharma bums represents a migration that evolves into a journey to appreciate a multitude of human lives and spirits. The mutability of life seems to be more keen and poignant because death and suffering fall upon Kerouac's acquaintances. He entitles his novel the wandering pilgrims. The speaker for Buddhism is Japhy who explains for Ray the meanings of Dharma. Basically, Dharma is trugh law, nature and concept. The ultimate Dharma as understood by Buddhists is to learn not to be overpowered by external phenomena, but Dharma to Kerouac does involce compassion and empathy.
Awareness of death prompts the Buddha to perceive the ultimate futility of worldly concerns and pleasures. Many of Kerouac's characters are devoted to transitory pleasures and material objects, and they are depicted as foolishly believing that wealth, power, friends, and family will bring lasting happiness. However, the calling from eternity is apprehended only by those who show real compassion and love.
Kerouac's most impressive dialogue revealing Buddhist teaching appears in Japhy Ryder. In Ryder he has merged the famous Buddhist disciple, Han Shan.
Throughout his years of traveling and writing, Kerouac tries to find Buddhism as an agent of equilibrium in his life and to provide an impetus to become a poet. His characters go to wilderness, to visit the landscapes that were infrequently visited, and they tend to cross the boundaries of physical realms to be enlightened by the simplest truth of nature.
In The Dharma bums Kerouac found his heaven, his Promised Land on the cold and windy Desolation Peak and he feels the energy of a blade of grass that is anchored on a rock. Along the road leading to Dalhart of Texas, he found the land was all mesquite and waste.

2013
Bent Sorensen : Kerouac's personal struggle with his childhood catholic belief which trapped him in unpleasant feeling of guilt at not being sufficiently devout and holy also served as an impetus for his quest for alternative enlightenment. It seemed for a while that travelling might offer one way for him to gain freedom from social and subjective repressions ; then it seemed that valorizing the ideal of madness might be another form of freedom from societal norms, and a productive means to deal with the effects of childhood guilt and the public conformity saturating American life in ehe 1950s.
The form of salvation Kerouac read into Buddhism was the potential for cessation of suffering, and his subsequent concept of heaven became a mixture of a Christian paradise and a Buddhist non-place of non-existence, nirvana. Kerouac sometimes envisaged nirvana as a condition that he could inhabit while still living here on earth, usually when he was closely in touch with the land and its unpretentious inhabitants, whom Kerouac called the fellaheen.
The novel starts out with a positive valorization of both social underdogs and outcasts, the titular characters known as dharma (or truth) bums. After Smith encounters Ryder's brand of Zen Buddhism with its emphasis on the mysteries and riddles of Zen practices, the novel eulogizes the so-called Zen lunatics of ancient Japan and China and contemporary California, where Japhy pursues free love, scholarship, poetry and mountaineering as if they were one and the same thing. This philosophy and life-style soon become so attractive to Smith that he apprentices himself to Ryder in order to refine his own brand of Buddhism with its emphasis on suffering and aloneness in the void as the central human condition. Smith characterizes himself as 'a serious Buddhist'.
The clearest example shifting valorization of madness concerns a minor character named Rosie, who suddenly goes mad and commits suicide. Smith's reaction to the death of Rosie quickly becomes inscribed in a guilt narrative that undermines his declared Buddhist credo that all is an illusion and that pain is not real.
For Kerouac, it seems as if madness has the potential, in Zen terms, to express a ceasing to grasp after conventional reality, an abandonment of conventional reason, and a pointer to the ultimate reality of a person's egolessness. While the mad ones promise much by way of liberation of mind and body, they ultimately succumb to silence and death, and Kierouac's narrators fall back on a Christian paradism to explain this as punishment for sin.
In the next decade of his life, Kerouac never again systematically examined Buddhist spirituality as a remedy for existential anomie and catholic guilt, but rather turned to alcohol do dull his pains. Catholicism circumscribed and tainted Kerouac's declared Buddhist creed from the very beginning, and it is the failure of his culture hoeroes or bodhisattvas to deliver on their promise of detachment from the material world, and from the ego-constraints of conformism, that leads him back into despair on the peak of desolation.
He wrote to Philip Whalen : "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary [Snyder] now I've become so decadent and drunk and dontgiveashit… I'm not a Buddhist any more, I'm not anyting, I don't care. I do care about hearts… I was all prophesied on Desolation."