Wake Up -- A Life of the Buddha by Jack Kerouac (1955)

Wow. I has no idea. I did not know that Kerouac wrote this until I found a reference to it in a paper on Gary Snyder a couple of weeks ago.

In 1955 Kerouac was not yet famous or the icon he would become after the publication of "On the Road" in 1957. Kerouac was still in precarious circumstance when he set out to write "A Life of the Buddha" but it doesn't really show in the work itself. There is very little of Kerouac in the book unlike most of his others which are so deeply personal.

No, "Wake Up" is a more or less straightforward retelling of the Life of the Buddha from the Sutras in English for Americans, and as approachable as any number of Catholic "Life of St. So-and-So" pamphlets and books. Or more pertinently, "The Life of Jesus."

In fact, that seemed to me to be the model Kerouac followed in writing his "Life of the Buddha."

And he makes explicit comparisons between Jesus and Sakyamuni Buddha in a few places. He sees them as kindred spirits. 

Which of course many people do. And in a sense they probably were. In their own times and later.

Much is made in Kerouac biographies of his strict Catholic upbringing and strenuous Catholic belief. Yet from my perspective having read some though not all of his books, he had submerged most of his Catholicism in a conceptual Buddhism that encompassed the "good parts" of Catholicism and left the rest behind.

He was a practicing Buddhist but not a practicing Catholic (though he could be).

I'm still not entirely sure where he picked up his Buddhism. It's clear from "Wake Up" and other works that he's studied Buddhism deeply and for quite a long time, too. None of it is unfamiliar to him. He could be a Dharma teacher if he wanted to be, and in some passages of some of his works, that's exactly what he was.

I'm assuming he must have encountered Buddhist teaching in New York in the early '50s, perhaps through Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs, maybe among others of the Early Beats. I don't know. But I feel it had to have been years before he wrote "Wake Up" -- or it wouldn't have been as sensitive and as straightforward a telling as it is. 

I came to Zen in the mid-'60s through Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" (1958), but from all the evidence, Kerouac is not really a Zen practitioner; Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) in "The Dharma Bums" is. Kerouac's Buddhism is more Indian or Tibetan, Theravada rather than Mahayana, whereas Snyder's is becoming very strict and Japanese in the book. At the end, Snyder has sailed off to Japan to join the Sokoku-Ji temple monastery in Kyoto where he will learn and practice for years, and return to America as a Zen Master --  in I believe 1965. 

And it will change him. I would say not necessarily for the better, but that's just me. 

From "Wake Up" and other works, I get the impression Kerouac was very much a Believer in Buddhism, much as a Catholic or other Christian believes in Christianity. 

From a Buddhist perspective, that's a mistake, perhaps a critical one, because Buddhism is not a religion. You don't believe in Buddhism, you practice it. The Dharma is a path, way, not the end point. Nirvana comes or not, but it doesn't matter. As long as you stay on the Dharma Path (following the precepts, etc.) then you're on the road to Enlightenment, and once Enlightened, you're on the road to Nirvana -- eventually. Don't worry about it. Just follow the Path. Keep going. Don't give up, even if you fail, make mistakes, or get confused. 

As I was taught many years ago, "The Buddha is within you, the Dharma is you, and the Sangha is with whomever you find on the Dharma Path -- even if they don't know it."

So there were times when I was reading "Wake Up" that I felt Kerouac was making an attempt to "own" the Buddha, something like Christians "own" Jesus and the Gospels. It won't work very well, at least not in the form of salvation. There is no salvation as such in Buddhism. As I said to one of the Dharma teachers, my practice is "chopping wood and carrying water." In other words, my practice is my life. ("The Dharma is you.") Whatever I do, day by day, even hour by hour, is practice. And it is never perfect, never ideal, never complete. Whatever is, is. 

I think about Kerouac ("Ti Jean" as he referred to himself from time to time. I think it was his mother's endearing name for him) and how he drank himself to death in 1969, still I imagine believing in Buddhism and probably believing that drinking to excess for as long as he did -- until it killed him -- was a form of practice, and in a sense, of course, it was. Of course he was violating the precepts, but that's what people do. Drinking to excess is a direct violation of the precepts, as were so many of the other things Kerouac did during his brief life. Some Buddhists would say (and I suspect he would say) that he was living out the karma he was born with. Interestingly, the way he presents karma in "Wake Up" is essentially no different than genetic inheritance. He wrote in 1955 at a time when psychological inheritance was being made much of in plays and movies like Maxwell Anderson's "The Bad Seed," essentially arguing that what you inherit from your ancestors -- including your "mind" and its many impulses -- is immutable and inescapable. 

Rhoda Penmark was a murderer because her mother's biological father was a murderer. She had inherited the "psychopath" gene from him. There was nothing (much) she or anyone else could do about it. 

That's as may be. The Buddhist path says there is something you can do about it by following the precepts and the Eightfold Path. In that way it's something like AA or psychotherapy. No matter what your karma -- or genetic inheritance -- you can be in charge of your own life and change what you do and what you leave behind, though it may take many, many lifetimes to work out all that "ancient twisted karma" you're born with.

I don't know what sort of ancient twisted karma Ti Jean may have inherited. I've read that he was alienated from his father, but I know no details. Also that he was very close to his mother and sister, though their relationships were clearly complicated. The loss of his brother when he was a child was very troubling for him. And at least from the time he was at Columbia and soon thereafter, he acted kind of wild and crazy given the conformity of the times. Yet except for his alcoholism and frequent heavy drug use (mostly amphetamines and marijuana), he was never as wild and crazy as some of his Beat friends and colleagues proudly were and as he sometimes says he wishes he could be.

But "Wake Up, A Life of the Buddha" isn't about Kerouac. 

It's about Siddhartha Gautama, Sakyamuni Buddha, World Honored One, as told by the Sutras and commentaries, interpreted "for Americans today" by Jack Kerouac. As I say, I did not know he wrote this until I did some research on Gary Snyder and found a reference to it in a scholarly paper about Snyder. Snyder became an acknowledged Zen master -- as no doubt he still is -- and Kerouac wrote "Wake Up" during the period he and Snyder were palling around and climbing Sierra peaks and such well before Snyder left for Zen studies and practice at a monastery in Japan. 

To me, "Wake Up" follows the standard stories of the Buddha's life, Enlightenment and teachings very closely. It's not any more embellished than the usual stories are, but there are several passages of deeply felt poetics in the work that are more Kerouac than the Sutras. Yet they stick with the story. They are not out of place. 

It's just too bad this is not a more widely known work than it is. 

Some Post-Practice Period Ruminations

It was good to get back into regular zazen practice, though my way is not exactly that of the Zen center. Of course, "my way" started with instructions from the San Francisco Zen Center c. 1965 -- before it became hip and trendy, before New Age, before hippies. Zen was still very Japanese in those days. We were followers of Suzuki Roshi's training, and he went way back in Japanese Soto Zen practice. I think he was made a monk when he was 11, and that would have been sometime around 1915 or so. He brought Zen in perhaps its strictest and purest form from Japan to the United States in the late 1950s, but it didn't really catch on until a decade or so later. Even then, it was still very Japanese.

It isn't any more. Not really. And I've struggled with that. Some of the forms are still observed -- robes and chanting in "Sino-Japanese" (the chants transliterated into syllables, but no translation as such). Zendos. Cushions to sit upon. In fact The Cushion seems to have become the central fact of modern Western Zen. Being On the Cushion is sometimes thought of as Everything. Ok. Well. That's interesting.

During practice period, we had three one hour sits a day and then during sesshin, sitting increased to up to 8 hours a day and could go longer. For me? No. 

Sitting is very important in Zen practice, necessary in fact. But... a wealth of caveats are necessary too. 

Remember, I took up Zen based on instructions from San Francisco Zen Center in the mid '60s. I wasn't at the Center, so I couldn't practice the way they did with such rigid and formal discipline. I wasn't a monk, and I couldn't be. Guess what? I was told I didn't have to strictly observe the forms, that learning how to sit and making time to sit regularly, and the study of the Sutras and Paramitas was essentially all a lay practitioner of Zen needed to do. 

Zen appealed to me because it was so lean and straightforward. You could sit zazen anywhere, any time for as long or short a time as needed. By studying the Sutras and Paramitas, by incorporating the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, becoming the Dharma as it were, you were doing all you really needed to do. 

The rituals that Zen monks and officiants engaged in at temples and monasteries and in this country at Zen Centers that weren't either temples or monasteries were akin to Catholic or other church services. Necessary for some -- some of the time -- but rarely appropriate for continual practice by lay-people.

Who have lives to live. The point is to get to a point in practice where "practice" is everything you do in life. 

There is nothing that is Not-Practice. 

So what happens when this rotten old bhikkhu (as I call myself sometimes) enters the more rarefied and ritualized modern Zen world, and I look around and say, "Wait, this isn't Zen."

And yet it's appealing for what it is, a sort of amalgam of psychotherapy, counseling, Tibetan Buddhism, and bits and pieces of a Zen tradition barely recalled or understood mixed with memories of Santa Fe New Age.

OK, fine, let's go with it, see where it leads.

It was a remarkable experience, and an astonishing reminder of not only where I've been in my wandering bhikkhu phase, but where I'm headed, too.

I learned, among other things, that so much I thought I had forgotten was still with me and had been so incorporated into my day-to-day life, I took it for granted and didn't notice.

Very vivid memories were brought back, and I learned that those memories ("Dreams" if you want) are guideposts. They're there to be recollected, yes, but also to point forward: this is where you've been, and where you're going.

None of what I learned over the years has gone away. It's all still there. And for whatever reason or no reason, I'm not quite done yet. 

I've never lacked for teachers or guides. The Void I entered all those years ago showed me a vision of Truth that has never gone away, and it never left me.

Being as isolated as I've been during this pandemic was disruptive to what had come to be my routine as "bhikkhu in the world." That's not a bad thing at all. 

I've already seen how my viewpoint and actions have changed since starting the practice period, and how much I've recovered, and how much more I need to get done.

Zen is there as a pivot point, but it's not a whole lot more than that, and by golly, it's not for everyone. Nor is Buddhism. It is simply a way among many to exist in the world and act on our better nature. 

🙏