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Jack Kerouac

Buddhism and the Poetry of Jack Kerouac


For we all go back

where we came from,

  God's Lit Brain,

      his Transcendent Eye

of Wisdom


And there's your bloody circle

called Samsara

            by the ignorant

            Buddhists, who will

still be funny Masters

    up there, bless em.


        Jack Kerouac                

          -from Heaven


 

Jack Kerouac spent his creative years writing in a prosperous post world war II America.   He was in many ways a very patriotic person who had no problem making known his love for his country , particularly within his literature.   It was, quite literally, America that he was in love with. Taking cues from writers such as Whitman, he embraced the American landscape as a field for spiritual cultivation.   Kerouac was indeed a writer with spiritual preoccupations.   He saw himself as partaking in a lifelong journey through the America that was waiting to reveal itself and, consequently, himself.   Also, of course, considering himself a serious writer, he would chronicle this spiritual expedition throughout a series of novels that together would be called "The Duluoz Legend."   This was the name Kerouac had intended the novels to take on when he would assemble them in chronological order before he died.   Unfortunately he died earlier than he expected and was unable to formally assemble them.   However, the legend remains.

Kerouac undoubtedly made his mark on the literary world with his prose.   And his prose proves itself to be a very good example of his writing as spiritual commentary.   Kerouac, while wandering the country in freight cars and the backs of pick-up trucks, saw himself as a modern day sage or bodhisatva, discovering the essence of "the void" and using his literature as a record of these discoveries.   His body of work is a wonderful example of integrating Buddhism into the daily life and thought of a man living in a western culture.   Kerouac...