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ZEN_FLESH

                                                    May 25, 2008

   Gary Snyder (in the documentary
   "The Source", I think) has commented
   that in the days when Kerouac first
   came out to San Francisco he was still
   trying to wrap his brain around the
   idea that there were other American
   Buddhists besides himself.
   Snyder commented something like
   "Sure Jack, I'm a Buddhist, Philip is
   a Buddhist, everyone in California
   is a Buddhist."


   The west coast beats (and beat-oids) grew-up
   on the Pacific Rim, Buddhism may have seemed
   exotic to them, but probably not quite so
   alien.

     But where did Kerouac pick up on it?

       There's no mention of Burroughs being
       into Buddhism (he was pushing the likes        I get the sense that
       of Oswald Spengler and Wilhelm Reich,          Buddhism seemed too
       but not Buddah.)                               nicey-nice for
                                                      Burroughs, the wannabe
       Did Kerouac learn it from Ginsberg?            tough guy.
       No, apparently it went the other way,
       Kerouac recommended works on Buddhism
       to Ginsberg in a letter in 1954.

       Gregory Corso liked to say that Kerouac and
       Ginsberg learned about eastern religion
       from a woman he met called Sura, but the
       timing on that doesn't quite work: the
       Kerouac/Ginsberg letter pre-dates Corso's
       meeting Sura.


    As far as I can tell, Kerouac just came
    to Buddhism in his own self-directed           Possibly the early writings
    reading, hanging out in libraries... and       of D.T. Suzuki or Alan
    I haven't yet come across any record of        Watts?
    the chain of associations he followed
    into that subject.                               D.T. Suzuki moved to
                                                     New York (and began
         I do, however, have a theory:               lecturing at Columbia)
                                                     in 1951.
         Once upon a time, there were
         these radio shows about The                 Watts "Way of Zen" was
         Shadow, a man who learned                   out in 1957, but his
         his mystic knowledge through                "Spirit of Zen" was
         years of study in "The Orient".             out way back in 1936.
         Kerouac grew-up on these.

            I suspect that that was
            enough to turn his head        ORIENTED
            toward the East.


                     LONG_SHADOW


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