1958 will be great year, year of Buddhism, already big stir in NY about Zen, Alan Watts big hero of Madison Avenue now, and Nancy Wilson Ross big article about Zen in Mademoiselle mentions me and Allen and knows her Buddhism good, now with Dharma Bums I will crash open whole scene to sudden Buddhism boom and look what'll happen closely soon . . . everybody going the way of the Dharma, this no shit . . . then with arrival of Gary (Snyder), smash! Watch, you'll see. It will be a funny year of enlightenment in America . . . everybody reading Suzuki on Madison Avenue . . . that in itself mighty strange . . .
—JACK KEROUAC, FROM 1957 LETTER TO PHILIP WHALEN, JUST BEFORE PUBLICATION OF THE DHARMA BUMS
I remember vividly, as a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate, first encountering Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums. While my college roommates clanged around the kitchen making dinner and playing music I closed myself in my room, utterly absorbed in Kerouac's lunatic world of spontaneous religion—so different from the stuffy, gloomy Protestant churches I'd visited with my grandmother at Christmas and Easter. Why, you could live and still be spiritual! I was reading the part where the Kerouac alias, Ray Smith, meditates alone in the woods every night. At one point, he spits into a puddle and watches the stars reflected there vanish—begging the question that if those stars, so apparently solid, were not, how could we know anything was? This was my first encounter with Buddhism—or Kerouac's idiosyncratic version thereof—and the effect was as though a door I'd never known existed suddenly swung open before me. Such a notion—that what we think of as the external world might at least in part be a projection of our minds—had never occurred to me before with such clarity and force. I put down my book and left my room, moved past my oblivious roommates eating their unreal hamburgers and drinking their unreal beers, and stepped out into the night. There, I stood out on the lawn, looking at ground and sky, touching trees, fence posts, a fire hydrant: all seemed equally unreal, equally an imposition of the mind, with its labels of name, color, and form, on some vast, unimaginable reality.
What I'd experienced, without knowing it, was a lingering echo of the Zen boom of the 1950s.
The second wave of Zen in America was led by three very different men: a Japanese scholar named D.T. Suzuki; an expatriate English philosopher, Alan Watts; and American novelist Jack Kerouac, the co-founder, with Allen Ginsberg, of the Beat movement.
Of the three, D.T. Suzuki was the one most grounded in formal practice, and therefore most qualified to speak of it. As a young man in Japan, he had trained under Soyen Shaku for some years, finally achieving satori, or kensho—insight into his true nature—under the tutelage of the master. Shaku had presented him with the name “Daisetsu,” meaning “Great Simplicity” or even, as Suzuki liked to translate it, “Great Stupidity”—a backhanded compliment in the world of Zen. Suzuki used the name for the rest of his life. Though he chose not to ordain as a monk, and was never formally sanctioned as a teacher, Suzuki became a formidable scholar of his tradition. With over one hundred books on Zen, including some thirty titles in English, in addition to a relentless program of lectureships, speaking engagements, and conferences all over the world, Suzuki is often credited with establishing Zen, almost single-handedly, in the West.
Poet Gary Snyder writes:
I clearly remember when I first read a book by D.T. Suzuki; it was September of 1951, and I was standing by the roadside in the vast desert of eastern Nevada hitchhiking the old Route 40. I had found his book a few days earlier in a “metaphysical” bookshop in San Francisco. I was on my way to enter graduate school in Indiana, and here by the highway in the long wait for another ride I opened my new book. The size of the space and the paucity of cars gave me much time to read Essays in Zen, First Series. It catapulted me into an even larger space; and though I didn't know it at the moment, that was the end of my career as an anthropologist . . . D.T. Suzuki gave me the push of my life and I can never be too grateful.
Suzuki lived in the U.S. at various points throughout his life; but his most influential period began in 1950 when, at the age of eighty, he returned from Japan to begin his well-known series of lectures on Zen at Columbia University, which were to attract the interest of artists, intellectuals, and seekers of every stripe. Despite Suzuki's soft-spoken, unassuming manner, the lectures were said to have had a remarkable air about them; and one professor at Columbia might have spoken for many when he said: “When I am listening to Dr. Suzuki's lectures, everything seems alright and certain, but when the lecture is over and I leave, the old confusion returns.”
That Suzuki was no ordinary academic is a fact attested to again and again by those who knew him. An attendee at a European conference reported how, at the end of the final meeting, the participants “hurried off in all directions to every continent”—all except Dr. Suzuki, who “delayed his departure by one day because the following night was the August full moon, and he wanted to enjoy calmly contemplating it over the Ticinese Mountains, and its reflection in Lake Maggiore.”
“In meeting him,” wrote Thomas Merton, “One seemed to meet that ‘True Man of No Title’ that the Zen masters speak of.”
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm remarked on Suzuki's “ever present interest in everything around him”:
He gave life to everything through his interest . . . (in) Mexico he visited the house of a friend . . . and admired the beautiful garden, with its many old trees. Two years later, when he returned . . . he looked at one of the trees and asked: “What happened to the branch that was here last time?” Indeed, a branch had been cut off, but Dr. Suzuki remembered that branch and missed it.
One day Miss Okamura and my wife were looking for him; they could not find him anywhere, and just as they began to become a little worried they saw him, sitting under a tree, meditating. He was so relaxed that he had become one with the tree, and it was difficult to see ‘him’.
During a much-heralded World Congress of Faiths, held at the Queen's Hall in London, Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki was asked to speak on the theme of “The Supreme Spiritual Ideal.” After listening to various other dignitaries hold forth on the subject, it was Suzuki's turn to take the platform.
“How can a humble person like myself talk about such a grand thing as the Supreme Spiritual Ideal?” he began. “Really, I do not know what Spiritual is, what Ideal is, and what Supreme Spiritual Ideal is.”
With that he proceeded to spend the rest of his speech on a description of his house and garden in Japan, and how life there differed from life in a big city.
The audience gave him a standing ovation.
Theologian Paul Tillich delivered a talk at Union Theological Seminary on the subject of religious authority. Afterward, he asked D.T. Suzuki, who was in attendance at his invitation, where he thought religious authority might ultimately reside. Suzuki raised himself up on his toes, leaned forward, and placed his index finger lightly against the chest of his much larger host.
“You, Dr. Paul Tillich, are the authority,” Suzuki responded.
“Yes,” replied Tillich, after a moment. “I thought you might say something like that.”
D.T. Suzuki, in a question-and-answer period after one of his American lectures, was pressed by a psychic who insisted that he must have developed some clairvoyant abilities as a result of his Zen training.
Having fended off her questions a number of times, Suzuki finally responded: “What's the use of knowing the mind of another? The important thing is to know your own mind.”
Suzuki's eloquent writings about the freedom inherent to Zen, its iconoclasm, distrust of authority, and absence of ritual or dogma, sent a compelling message to an American society whose spiritual traditions appeared to be running out of steam. Some of these statements however, have turned out to be, strictly speaking, not entirely accurate—as many of the Zen Boomers discovered when they went on to train with traditional masters and discovered form and hierarchy were very much in place. And Suzuki frequently neglected to mention the essential practice of zazen. Why?
I once asked an American Zen priest, a vocal admirer of Suzuki, what he thought the reason was for these omissions.
“He was trying to invent a new tradition,” replied the priest. “He felt the Asian forms had grown stale and the spirit had gone out of the practice. He was trying to save it by creating a new Zen for the West—a Zen westerners could handle. That he could handle. And he probably thought trying to get us to actually sit still and be silent was a hopeless mission!”
Suzuki died in 1966 at the age of 96. His assistant, Miss Okamura, reported that she “did not feel any great change occurred between him alive, and him in death.” Although she saw his body lying there motionless, she said, it seemed to her as though his life would continue on.
The scholar's parting words, in keeping with his unassuming demeanor, were simply: “Don't worry. Thank you! Thank you!”
While attending a symposium hosted by psychoanalyst Dr. Karen Horney on the changeability of human nature, D.T. Suzuki was asked to respond to the question of whether human beings could change.
“The question is not ‘can human nature change,’” responded Suzuki. “Human nature must change. Thank you very much.”
“It is said, perhaps with truth,” wrote Alan Watts in his autobiography In My Own Way, “that my easy and free-floating attitude to Zen was largely responsible for the notorious Zen boom . . . in the late 1950s.” This is a statement with which anyone who traveled in circles with an Eastern bent in the Fifties, Sixties, or even Seventies would find it hard to disagree—for when the word Zen was heard to cross anyone's lips at that time, the name Alan Watts was likely to follow.
Despite his position as a teacher and administrator for the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, and the vigorous publishing and speaking schedule he maintained as the nation's leading exponent of Zen philosophy, Alan Watts, like Jack Kerouac, had never at that point actually visited Japan. Nor had he undertaken any formal Zen training beyond a few abortive weeks of koan study with Sokei-an, which he broke off after deciding that trying to find the answers to the koans was like “trying to find a needle in a haystack.” Nevertheless Watts, whose religious background included a Doctorate in Divinity and several years as an Anglican priest, had a knack for re-interpreting the wisdom of the East in a way that made it seem as though any Westerner could grasp the heart of Zen, if only they'd loosen up a bit and open their eyes.
“From the beginning,” wrote Watts, “I was never interested in being ‘good at Zen’ in the sense of mastering a traditional discipline . . . What I was after was not so much discipline as understanding . . . To sit hour after hour and day after day with aching legs, to unravel Hakuin's tricky system of dealing with koan . . . was not what I needed to know.”
There were sometimes uneasy relations between Watts and the Beats—Watts' 1958 essay, “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen” was, by his own admission, “somewhat severe” in its assessment of Jack Kerouac and his associates, and he was quoted elsewhere as saying that Kerouac had “Zen flesh but no Zen bones.” But they all eventually mended their differences, and Watts later wrote in glowing terms of Gary Snyder, one of the few original Beats to undertake formal Zen study: “My only regret is that I cannot formally claim him as my spiritual successor . . . I can only say that a universe which has manifested Gary Snyder could never be called a failure.”
Though it has become fashionable to dismiss Watts as a popularizer, this ability to popularize was part of what brought so many Americans to Zen practice. As Gary Snyder said, “Whether or not his books are ‘real Zen’ is beside the point. You meet people all the time who say, ‘I owe so much to Alan Watts' writings. They helped me lead my life.’”
And when Shunryu Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center overheard one of his students criticizing Watts, he admonished him, saying: “You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great Bodhisattva!”
When Alan Watts finally did get to Japan, in the early 1960s, he spent a pleasant evening with Morimoto Roshi, in the village of Nagaoka, while a ceaseless rain drummed upon the roof of the temple.
“There's no real point,” Morimoto told Watts, during a prolonged but relaxed conversation, “of going to the trouble to translate all our old Chinese texts—not if you're serious about understanding real Zen. The sound of rain needs no translation.”
Jack Kerouac, the most famous of the Beat writers, made his discovery of Buddhism independently, through stumbling upon various texts, including Dwight Goddard's The Buddhist Bible, in a public library. Shortly thereafter, in 1954, Kerouac wrote to poet Allen Ginsberg about his “discovery . . . of sweet Buddha . . . I always did suspect that life was a dream, now I am assured by the most brilliant man who ever lived, that it is indeed so . . .”
Kerouac wasn't afraid to reinterpret Buddhism to suit his Beat ethos. He wrote Gary Snyder at the monastery where Snyder was practicing in 1956, in a letter true as ever to his idiosyncratic style of spelling and punctuation: “I'm really humbled now before the spectacle of these magnificent men forsaking alcohol and tobacco to just watch cows in the hazy moon and make it off what is there, the objective beautiful sad ungraspable world as it is . . . Altho really frankly I think an American zendo with no rules and all the cats talking all day when they feel like it and orgies at night with shaktis would be the best thing . . .”
Kerouac went on in the same letter:
O what a dream or vision . . . I had of [Zen poet] Han Shan! He was standing in the marketplace in China on a Saturday morning, with a little peaked hat . . . and a seamed and weatherbrowned face, and very short, and hopelessly tangled rags hanging from him all over, and a small . . . bindlestiff bundle, he looked very much like you but smaller and he was old. Cant you find someone like that in Japan? Well I went to Chinatown alone one night at 2 and while eating I drummed on the table to every beat of the pots and voices in the kitchen, quietly, and when I left all the cooks came to look at me . . . But a week later I went to another restaurant and saw the old blue-aproned chinaman sitting in the kitchen door and askt him, “Why did Buddha come from the west?” Answer: “I'm not interested.” My answer: “Because Buddha came from the West.” And left. And was almost crying.”
For all Kerouac's willing manipulation of Buddhist truths, he managed to capture a certain spirit of freedom at the heart of the practice. And The Dharma Bums, published in 1957 (whose main character, Japhy Ryder, is based on Gary Snyder) is remarkable for its prophetic vision of a “rucksack revolution” to come, in which America would be thronged with hitchhiking seekers, youthful, ragged, “beat” but free—legions of Dharma bums, turning to the East for spiritual guidance.
It would be less than a decade before it would all, in a sense, begin to come true.
Today, the lineage established by Kerouac and the other Beats is carried on at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University (formerly the Naropa Institute) in Boulder, Colorado, the Buddhist-influenced college founded by Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Lama. While revisiting Naropa in order to interview several of my former teachers who had frequented the American Buddhist world for many years, I stumbled to my great delight upon several volumes of Kerouac's selected letters in the Allen Ginsberg Library. These contained correspondence exchanged over a number of years between Kerouac and fellow Beats Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen on the subject of Zen. Included was Kerouac's original account of his famous meeting with D.T. Suzuki, which is better known in a later version Kerouac wrote for a Bay Area magazine, as well as the author's original dust-jacket copy for The Dharma Bums. Later, in my small home-town library, (in case anyone should doubt the ongoing influence of the Beats), I miraculously discovered a copy of the long-out-of-print As Ever, a collection of correspondence between Allen Ginsberg and the legendary Neal Cassady, which yielded an account of Ginsberg's first investigations into Zen. There I also discovered Big Sky Mind, an anthology of Beat writings on Buddhism, which featured Philip Whalen's “Weird Satori.” Together, they provide a glimpse into the spirit and enthusiasm of both the Beat scene and the American Zen world as it existed at the time.
On the day his novel The Dharma Bums was published, Jack Kerouac was on his way to a party in his honor, accompanied by poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. On impulse, he stepped into a phone booth and phoned Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, who was then living in New York, and had recently sent word that he wanted to meet him. Kerouac's 1958 letter to Philip Whalen, who had served as the model for the Warren Coughlin character in The Dharma Bums, and later became a Zen teacher in his own right, contains this version of the encounter:
Word came out that DT Suzuki wanted to see me so I called him on the phone, a woman answered and said (as Allen and Peter waited outside phonebooth listening with big serious faces of Dharma), “. . .When can we arrange the appointment with Dr. Suzuki?” and I said, “Right now,” and she said, “I'll go tell Doctor Suzuki” and was gone into big back secret whispering chambers and came back and said, “Half an hour all right?” I said “Yes” . . . [we] came to a door with a nameplate with his name on it and rang a long, long time. Finally I rang three times deliberately and he famously came, walking downstairs, a small bald Japanese man of 80 and opened the door. Then he . . . led us upstairs to a room where he picked out special chairs and made us just sit there and picked his own chair facing us behind a huge bookpiled desk. So I wrote him out my Koan, “When the Buddha was about to speak a horse spoke instead,” and he had a funny look in his eye and said, “The Western mind is too complicated, after all the Buddha and the horse had some kind of understanding there.”
. . .Then he said, “You young men sit here quietly and write haikus while I go and make some powdered green tea.” And we told him all about you and Gary [Snyder] and drank the tea in black bowls and he said it was weak . . . so he made another batch real strong and Allen said, “It tastes like shrimps” . . .he said “Don't forget that it's tea.” . . . then we all got high on that green tea . . . [ he] said he drank it every day, something has happened to me since then I think . . . I wrote a haiku for him:
Three little sparrows
on the roof.
Talking quietly, sadly
and they wrote some too, Allen and I both wrote the same haiku in fact, in different words . . .
Big books packaged
from Japan—
Ritz crackers
Because of his big box of Ritz crackers on the shelf under big books packaged from Japan, and so finally I told him I'd had some samadhis lasting a whole halfhour or 3 seconds and o yes, the great thing . . . as we were leaving I suddenly realized he was my old fabled father from China and I said, “I would like to spend the rest of my life with you, sir,” and he said “Sometime.” And he kept pushing us out the door, down the stairs, as tho impatient, tho was me instituted the idea of leaving . . . then when we were out on the street he kept giggling and making signs at us through the window and finally said “Dont forget the tea!” And I said “The Key?” He said “The Tea.”
In a second letter to Whalen later that month Kerouac added:
Dear Phil,
A golden giant has finally pulled the Dharma out of my eyebrows.
Whalen, according to Kerouac, later wrote back in response to Suzuki's remarks about the Western mind:
Tell Mr. Suzuki that I had no idea there was such a thing as a Western mind. In Buddhism, there's only a universal mind.
Allen Ginsberg describes his earliest explorations into Zen Buddhism in a letter to Neal Cassady dated May 14, 1953:
I am on a new kick 2 weeks old, a very beautiful kick which I invite you to share . . . I am now spending all my free time in Columbia Fine Arts library and NY Public leafing through immense albums of asiatic imagery. I'm also reading a little about their mystique and religions . . . if you begin to get a clear idea of the various religions, the various dynasties and epochs of art and messianism and spiritual waves of hipness . . . you understand a lot of new mind and eyeball kicks. I have begun to familiarize myself with Zen Buddhism thru a book by one D.T. Suzuki . . . Zen is a special funny late form with no real canon or formal theology, except for a mass of several hundred anecdotes of conversations between masters and disciples. These conversations are all irrational and beguiling . . . [they] are given to the Zen novitiates, and made up as they go along sometimes, until the novitiate is completely beflabbered intellectually and stops thinking . . . then finally one day he gets the Big point and has what is known as SATORI, or illumination. This is a specific flash of vision which totally changes his ken . . .
They refuse to have a theology or admit that one exists, or anything verbal at all. That's the point of these anecdotes, to exhaust words. Then the man sees anew the universe.
Beat poet Philip Whalen, who later went on to become a Zen teacher, described during an interview with writer Aram Saroyan a “visionary experience” he'd had while on his way to spend the summer working as a fire lookout in Washington state:
It was a big guard station that was built on a raft on Ross Lake, way up by the Canadian border. And we used horses to pack people into the lookouts from that raft, and one night all the horses were on a raft that was tied up next to ours, and in the middle of the night one of the horses fell off, with a great splash, because they had all been jumping around—I don't know what got at them, the moon or something—and the horses were all dancing and singing, and one of them got excited and went overboard. And so I got up out of bed . . . we were all rushing around trying to find the horse that had fallen overboard. Well, I was the one that found her. She was a horse with one eye called Maybelle, and here she was in the water, so that people yelled at me, and I said, “I found it.” And they said, “well, hold up her chin, and we'll get a rope on her.” . . .I was kneeling over the edge of this raft in my underwear, and holding this horse under the chin, and the rope in the other hand, and the sense—you know, it was two o'clock in the morning, and it was a beautiful summer night, and the mountains were all around, and the lake, and this horse, and me—and I suddenly had a great, weird, kind of satori, a sort of feeling about the absolute connection between me, and the horse, and the mountain, and everything else . . .
Text from Jack Kerouac's original dust jacket copy for The Dharma Bums, early July 1958:
“The Dharma Bums” is a surprising story of two young Americans who make a goodhearted effort to know the Truth with full packs on their backs, rucksack wanderers of the West Coast hiking and climbing mountains to go and meditate and pray and cook their simple foods, and down below living in shacks and sleeping outdoors under the California stars.
Although deeply religious they are also spirited human beings making love to women, relishing poetry, wine, good food, joyful campfires, nature, travel and friendship. The hero is young Japhy Ryder, poet, mountaineer, logger, Oriental scholar and dedicated Zen Buddhist, who teaches his freight-hopping friend Ray Smith the Way of the Dharma Bums and leads him up the mountain where the common errors of this world are left far below and a new sense of pure material kinship is established with earth and sky. Yet it is the ancient way of all the wild prophets of the past, whether St. John the Baptist in the West or the holy old Zen Lunatic Han Shan in the East. Japhy and Ray adventure in the mountains and on the trails, and then they come swinging down to the city of San Francisco to teach what they have learned, but the city will not listen. “Yabyum” orgies, suicide, jazz, wild parties, hitch hiking, love affairs, fury and ignorance result but the Truth Bums always return to the solitude and peaceful lesson of the wilderness.
In this new novel, Jack Kerouac departs from the “hipster” movement of the Beat Generation and leads his readers towards a conception of “continual conscious compassion” and a peaceful understanding truce with the paradox of existence.
The Dharma itself can never be seen, but it is felt in this book. It is the strangest of tales, yet an honest, vigorous account depicting an exciting new Way of Life in the midst of modern despair . . .
Read slowly and see.
Perhaps the most influential artist to emerge from the 1950s Zen boom was avant-garde composer John Cage. Cage encountered Zen, in the form of D.T. Suzuki's lectures at Columbia University, at a time when he felt so confused about his personal life and the role of art in society that he was seriously considering giving up composition and entering psychoanalysis instead.
The encounter with Suzuki not only radically altered his world view; it overturned his approach to his art. “[Since my] study with D.T. Suzuki,” said Cage, “I've thought of music as a means of changing the mind. Of course my proper concern first of all has been with changing my own mind. Through Buddhism . . . I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the artist to the audience, but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves. And in being themselves, to open the minds of the people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than they had previously considered.”
In the early 1950s, the composer delivered his famous Zen influenced lecture on the subject of “Nothing” at the Artists' Club in New York. “Our poetry now,” said Cage, “is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight, since we do not possess it, and thus need not fear its loss.”
For the rest of his life, Cage sought to create an ego-free, intentionless approach to musical composition. He is perhaps most famous for his explorations into what Alan Watts called “the melodies of silence”—the most infamous example being a composition called 4'33,” in which the performer sits for four minutes and thirty-three seconds before the piano without ever laying fingers to the keys, and the only sounds heard by the audience are those that naturally occur in the room. “After a while,” wrote Watts, “one hears [these] sounds emerging, without cause or origin, from the emptiness of silence, and so becomes witness to the beginning of the universe.”
“In connection with my study of Zen . . .” says Cage, “I have used . . . chance operations in all my works . . . in order to free my ego from its likes and dislikes.” He explains, “I attempt to let sounds be themselves in a space in time. There are those . . . who find this attempt on my part pointless. I do not object to being engaged in a purposeless activity.”
Alan Watts tells the story of an example he witnessed of John Cage's often cited choiceless awareness of sound, which occurred one evening when Cage slept on the philosopher's living room couch. There was a hamster cage in the room, equipped with a squeaky exercise wheel, and Watts offered to move it to another location if it was bothersome.
“Oh, not at all!” replied the composer, who apparently had been enjoying the performance already. “It's the most fascinating sound, and I shall use it as a lullaby.”
Isshu Miura Roshi, a Rinzai Zen master who came to New York in the late 1950s at the invitation of the First Zen Institute of America, went on to quietly lead a small group of ten or so Zen students in his New York apartment for some years. He was once asked what the most important element of Zen was.
“Mind your own business,” replied the roshi.