Wake Up (2 page)

The Zen tradition developed in Japan in the context of a centuries’ long taming of the samurai violence of the warriors of that nation, and so Kerouac’s not having “Zen Bones” seems to be a reference precisely to his softness, his exaltation of kindness and gentleness, his love of dogs and their love of him. He also seemed less freewheeling sexually than some of the other Beats, a bit shy and perhaps a bit more considerate of his women friends. He certainly was well loved, having been a legendary athlete as a youth, a truly handsome and elegant man, a celebrity writer lionized for a while in the 1950s and early 1960s. He would have been in his eighties today, and very much would have enjoyed the “rising sun of the Dharma” that is happening now in America, as prophetically promised to me one morning in 1964 by my old Mongolian spiritual friend, Geshe Wangyal, as we finished setting the big brass om mani padme hum prayer wheels on the porch of the Labsum Shedrub Ling (Lamaist Buddhist Monastery) building in Freewood Acres, New Jersey.

Kerouac was very much brought up a Catholic. His family was deeply Catholic and it seems they were suspicious of his romance with Buddha and Buddhism. His many critical interpreters seem to insist that he remained a Catholic, and he certainly did have a strong attachment to Jesus and Mother Mary. There is no doubt that he loved both Jesus and Buddha. Most scholars maintain that Kerouac was “really” a Christian through and through and his Buddhism some sort of side interest. Being a Protestant apostate myself, I have noted that our American cultured types are still uncomfortable about Buddhism, puzzled by it, and even artists heavily indebted to Buddhism or “the East” are reluctant to acknowledge that debt, until perhaps late in their careers.

In this context, we should consider why people tend to think that Kerouac’s love for Jesus and spiritual (not the church variety so heavily compromised by dogma) Christianity implies that he did not understand and appreciate Buddhism (had he known better its various institutionalized forms he would no doubt have insisted on a non-church-dominated form of spiritual Buddhism). Do we need to reevaluate the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity?

Mahayana Buddhists are fond of embracing Christianity as fully resonant with their deepest intent. Christians often recoil from this embrace and emphasize their difference and, of course, their uniqueness. There is no doubt that the existence of an Absolute, Omnipotent yet Compassionate, Creator God is not believable to any educated Buddhist. That being said, relational, quite powerful, creative Gods are fully accepted and are an important part of the Buddha story, though they are not necessarily considered any more enlightened than most humans. The Gods of the many different heavenly levels and realms present in Buddhist cosmologies are immensely powerful and intelligent, very much absorbed in extremely long-lived, unimaginable rounds of lavish pleasure, and so are considered in danger of thinking that the egocentric life cycle is just fine and they really are the center of the universe—the very definition of the cosmic ignorance or misknowledge that is the root of the unremitting suffering of the unenlightened life.

But beyond this metaphysical difference about the status of God or the Gods, Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity arose and spread only one well-traveled ocean apart at the same time in Eurasian history. It was a time when stabilizing universal empires were spawning a new, more caring, more paternalistic form of imperial kingship, a time when divinity was being reenvisioned as balancing its terrible aspects with the loving concern for individuals so well represented by the celestial bodhisattva saviors such as Avalokiteshvara and Tara and messianic saviors such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Jesus’ life and main teachings, though embedded within the metaphysic and presented in the culture of a fearsome Omnipotent Creator, could have been that of an itinerant Buddhist “Great Adept” (Mahasiddha). His central message was the same as the Mahayana’s: that divine love and compassion are the essential and most powerful energy of the universe. His provocation of oppressive rulers and challenge to them to do their utmost to put him to death was in fact precisely in order to show that they could not succeed in doing so, thus indicating the supremacy of the power of that love. He proved it to the satisfaction of his followers over thousands of years by showing his ability to overcome death and violence, proving that his love-body could rise up even from the cruelest crucifix-ion as a fountain of eternal life that lived luminously beyond any particular embodiment. The reincarnation teaching of “soul-transmigration” common in his time and culture (banned only two and a half centuries later by order of the emperor Constantine) made this kind of adept-like achievement plausible to his disciples and their successors, with a few exceptions.

There are many such stories of the Great Adepts of ancient India. The Buddha himself calmed by his mere gentle presence an enraged wild elephant sent to kill him by the patricidal king of Magadha. The young monk who converted the emperor Ashoka from being a paragon of cruelty to being a patron of the Noble Community (the Sangha, which Kerouac called the “Church”) caught the emperor’s attention by levitating suspended in a cool bubble of energy over the raging flames of a cauldron of boiling oil. The enlightened alchemist Nagarjuna possessed the secret of immortality and lived six hundred years. The adept Naropa was burned at the stake with his female consort and both remained unharmed in the midst of the flames. India was rife with tales (modern folks will think “legends,” which is fine) of holy sages who demonstrated love’s power over death.

Then there are the teachings: Jesus’ beatitudes, his extraordinary teachings on nonviolence, to turn the other cheek to your enemy’s blows, to give your cloak when your shirt is demanded of you, to go beyond loving your friends and relatives and learn to love your enemy, and the central injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. These teachings are totally consonant with the Buddhist ethic of nonviolence, and resonate powerfully with the Mahayana’s messianic emphasis on selflessness, heroic tolerance, love, and compassion. On the wisdom level, Jesus’ statements that the kingdom of God lies within you are fully compatible with the Buddhist vision of the Buddha-nature in all beings, or Nagarjuna’s famous statement of nonduality, that the deepest reality is ultimate voidness as the womb of relational compassion (
shunyatakarunagarbham
). And Jesus’ powerful statement to the legalist priestly hierarchy he faced that “I am the way, the light, and the truth!” can be understood not as dictating religious exclusivism for a particular church or faith and furious intolerance of others, but rather as insisting by living example that divinity and salvation for each person lies within herself or himself as an individual, and not through membership in some denomination or institution.

The deeds of St. Thomas in the Kerala area of India are very much like those of any Buddhist itinerant monk and preacher. The Nicene Council’s editing of the Gospels, especially the excision of St. Thomas’s Gospel, among others; the banning of the Buddhist or Indian doctrine of transmigration of souls, such as was championed even by the semi-martyred Origen; and Constantine’s transformation of Buddhism into a tool of the Roman state—these obscure the Christ-Buddha connection; but, nevertheless, it was perceived by Mani and others closer to the time. Professor Thomas McEvilley mentions “early 3rd-4th century Christian writers such as Hippolytus and Epiphanius” who wrote about a man named Scythianus, who brought to Alexandria “the doctrine of the Two Principles” from India around 50 A.D. According to them, Scythianus’ pupil Terebinthus presented himself as a “Buddha” and went to Palestine and Judaea, where he met the Apostles, who apparently condemned him. He then settled in Babylon, where he transmitted his teachings to Mani, who himself founded what could be called Persian syncretic Buddho-Christianity, known as Manicheism, which was the youthful religion of Augustine of Hippo, who later condemned it.

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:

 

“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
.