According to Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder said to him one day, "Okay, Kerouac, it's about time for you to write sutra." That was in the spring of 1956 when they were cohabiting a shack owned by Locke McCorkle, in Marin county. This particular season was perhaps the pinnacle of Jack Kerouac's Buddhist insight, understanding, and practice.
The word "sutra" comes from the Sanskrit root "siv" and refers to sewing with thread or yarn. There's also the implication of the intersection between the student's understanding versus the Buddha's explanations in dialogue with his own disciples. Strictly speaking, a sutra was only written after deep and prolonged meditation and study upon a particular teaching or theme. At this point, Kerouac had been studying Buddhism and meditating for about two and a half years. You might call it presumptuous to write a sutra after a mere few years of study, but then, that's the weakness of the West -- we're so anxious to rush headlong into everything, often before we're ready and certainly without real understanding of any depth. I suppose I'm a case in point, in trying to write about such subject matter.
Kerouac brought this sutra or scripture down to McCorkle one morning and said, "Last night I had it, Locke -- and this morning I can't make head nor tails of it." Most writers have had this experience, where something is written in a rush of inspiration and makes perfect sense in the flow of creativity. But once you look at it with your everyday, logical mind, you're apt to say, "What the hell....?" Actually, I've had just the opposite experience, where a poem comes so fast, I'm merely taking dictation and then am stunned later when I see meanings I hadn't grasped, or an internal rhyme structure that was not apparent in the writing.
Which is all to say, to some extent this piece comes from Kerouac's "higher mind," his aspirations to be "hip" notwithstanding. Hipsterism has some shucksterism in it, after all.
But there exists in the East the tradition of "sandhyabasha," or trickster speech. This is partly because spiritual experience doesn't equate to logical explication. That's not so hard to understand. If you think about your subjective thought process while you're going to sleep, for a brief span your mind slips back and forth between the logic of the dreamtime mind and that of the daytime mind, and they are two disparate and distinct forms of consciousness. If you notice, what made perfect sense in your dreamtime mind, escapes encapsulation or articulation once your mind slips back into your regular daytime mode. This doesn't mean the dreamtime mind is nonsense. It means that these are two distinct forms of consciousness that don't necessarily translate into one another. It's like that with mystical experience as well. It's felt, it's understood viscerally, but it is not translatable into everyday language and thought. Which does not mean that it is unreal. It just means that it's a different and perhaps more rare form of reality.
On the other hand, sometimes people just indulge in nonsense and try to pass it off as wisdom. I have to admit that in reading this work, I sometimes have the feeling that this is what Kerouac is doing. That's the problem with the hubris of a mere human being trying to write a "scripture." Kerouac did avow in his Forties journals that he wanted to be an "earthly prophet." It's not unlike Walt Whitman's aspirations with his original version of "Leaves of Grass." He also wanted his work to be a new bible or scripture. It's that line that gets blurred between the Muse of artistic inspiration, and genuine spiritual insight. I would say artistic inspiration is momentary, whereas spiritual insight is earned and thereby permanent. This confuses the neophyte, and spiritually speaking, we're all neophytes. Spiritually mature people are extremely rare in this world.
Kerouac had a semi-mystical strain in his character, but he was also deeply sensual and addictive. He loved altered states of consciousness and used that "love" to justify his own alcoholism. He sought intoxication. That's not a Buddhist path. Strangely enough, in the East a path does exist that involves overwhelming mental states of intoxication, the path of Masti, but it's not something you choose. It chooses you. I don't know how you get on that path, but those that try probably only get more deeply entangled in life, when presumably they're trying to free themselves. I'm thinking of Tantrics and maybe Shaivites here. Jack was neither.
As Eric Mottram said, in a very insightful introduction to this work, written rather remarkably way back in 1970, "...(Kerouac)...lived the traditional life of the underground, of those who live out the double promises of Demeter and Persephone: you shall have both ecstasy and despair, and you will be reborn." Kerouac, of course, didn't want to be reborn; he was Catholic in the sense that he simply wanted to escape this world and its suffering. You'd be surprised how many of my friends have said to me, "This is my last life." And my response is, "Yeah, good luck with that." It's not so easy to escape the web of Existence, nor do many really want to try.
In Gary Snyder's "Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique," he states that poetry can be "the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the (writer), but at deep levels common to all who listen."
I think that is perhaps an accurate description of what Kerouac was attempting to do, at his best. He was attempting to give voice to the Voice within us all, and that was part of his not wanting to edit or overthink what he wrote: spontaneous prose, or as he also put it, "first thought, best thought." That's not always true in writing, but it is sometimes true in an inspired passage of writing.
To get into some of the text itself, in the opening stanza (they are numbered, 1 through 66) Kerouac says, "There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one, one golden eternity." It's a Whitmanesque expression. But Kerouac gets lost in the solipsism of words. It's easy to do. In Vedanta, there's the assertion, "I am That," or even, "I am God," which is a ridiculous avowal to any ordinary human being. But the fatal flaw of these assertions is this: they're intellectual statements. They are simply statements of thought, not expressions of lived or real experience. In that sense, they are meaningless.
Jack gets caught in that conundrum. Although he tried to absorb the doctrine of Sunyata, or "emptiness," in Kerouac it became a kind of fatalism, nihilistic. He really didn't identify with the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana as "extinction." Instead, he called his idea of spiritual perfection "the Golden Eternity." And thus said, "I am Mortal Golden Eternity," and "I am the golden eternity in mortal animate form," or perhaps most charmingly, "I call it the golden eternity -- what do you call it, brother?"
Phillip Whalen, an old friend of Gary Snyder's who was both an accomplished poet and an experienced Zen practitioner, complained that Kerouac's Buddhism was merely intellectual or literary.
I think he was right in the sense that Jack mistook intellectual insight for mystical insight. As I understand it, the general idea of the many forms of Buddhist meditation is to dis-identify with the mind and one's own thoughts. But Jack's was a life of the mind. He was most interested in his own thoughts. His "meditations" were wild and unmoored excursions of thought. It's that old dichotomy between intellectual insight, mere thought, and the visceral, felt experience of insight, when one has a moment of gestalt and experiences, say, a sudden insight about a relationship one has. If you see it truly, your insight is genuine and felt; it changes forever the way you see something. For instance, if you suddenly see a hidden dynamic in your relationship with another person, if it is real, it will forever change the way you view that relationship or person.
Jack made the mistake of thinking that his abstracted, spiritually-motivated insights were moments of satori or enlightenment. If they had been, they would have changed Jack, permanently. But they didn't. And in the end, what he had to say about Buddhism was, "It's all just words." That's a statement that doesn't tell us the truth about Buddhism per se, but it does tell us the truth about Jack Kerouac's version of Buddhism.
I don't want to pick this apart further. That, in itself, would only be yet another intellectual excursion, like piling sand upon sand. Perhaps I will leave this little post with one more quote from Eric Mottram's introduction, which I like so much. He says, "...the Scripture is a statement of what we have come to know as a necessity: a joyful modesty as the condition of living in the universe without a restless urge to conquest, moral dogmatism and hierarchy."
Perhaps. I say it is another example of one man's attempt to come to terms with his life. And we read him, I think, in order to try to come to terms with our own.
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