The Dharma Bums has the familiar strains and sad falsettos of On the Road, arguably Kerouac’s best, and its simplistic yet seminal structure of one-cool-place to another one-cool-place and move back and so on and so forth. The heavy spastic breathing pace that transported On the Road once more up-tempoed the breakneck narration of Keroauc’s confused pursuit of life’s essential truths. Kerouac’s often derided spontaneous and marathon gallop of writing his piece delivered the dharma moments as would the crazy jazz of his times. Dizzy Gillespie aside, however, Bums highlighted the spiritual period of the Beats and Jack Kerouac as Ray Smith and shaman poet Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder were at the forefront of it all. The story undulated from a frantic spiritual pilgrimage to an orgy of cultural headiness, frenetic intellectual energies and hedonistic excess. The novel, as does the story, subverts one’s attention as it is not typified as a beginning-to-end tale as it does not clearly have one. The Dharma Bums is a pastiche, a vignette of moments, ideal and spleen, be it in Berkeley, in the High Sierras or the US East Coast suburbs.
Bums has one of the most memorable opening paragraphs just as On the Road has one of the most unforgettable, often quoted closing paragraphs in modern fiction. While Sal Paradise/Jack Keroauc in Road sadly elucidates on the vast raw land and all the roads going and don’t you know that God is pooh Bear? in one languorous, free-flowing sentence, Ray Smith/Jack Keroauc in the Bums’ prelude, bumming a ride to San Francisco in a freight train, sits and shares a boxcar with a hobo whose most treasured belonging is a magazine cutout of a Saint Teresa prayer. The hobo is the first dharma bum Smith meets and Japhy Ryder is going to be the second and the No. 1 of them all. Touched by the hobo’s modest belief system centered on Saint Teresa’s promise of returning to shower the earth with roses from heaven, Smith jumps off the gondola, heads to a beach, cooks hotdogs and macaroni in the sand and swigging wine to no end, contemplates on Avalokitesvara, chomp, chomp, his place in God’s merciful design, glug, glug, and after passing out, wakes up to a gray dawn to gasp in a voice-in-a-void manner a Zen quip: "It’s all the same thing."
After reading a few pages, I flipped the book back and marveled at the front cover of Bums – the fat Buddha in half lotus, John Lennon specs, rolled weed between fingers, smoke sneaking then enveloping him. This was not a smooth ride to Sunday Gospel school for sure.
Japhy Rider’s Zen Buddhism counterpoints the rather tory and piously traditional spiritual approach Ray Smith has taken. In all the chance and contrived encounters between the two, the disparate Buddhist approaches are keenly accentuated: Ryder the Zen lunatic incarnate vs. Smith the strict no-nonsense Theraveda Buddhist. Smith pursues the wonted spiritual perspective of the opposites: good-evil, purity-lust, truth-illusion. Ryder, the primitivist poet grounded his matter-of-fact spirituality to intuition and basic impulses. Ryder heartily leads a Buddhist life while Smith wrestles with tenets, catechisms, rituals and their nuances. Smith is Ryder’s novice, the wide-eyed, steadfast chronicler of the omnipresence of the latter. Ryder, the ultimate dharma bum, stands cooed and vituperated like everyone he venerates and crowes about from Bodhidharma to Han Shan to a lonesome lumberjack somewhere in the Oregon forest.
Smith abhors the Buddhist myths and only cares for Sakyamuni’s four noble truths about life’s suffering. As the novel or as the events unravel, it is not about the opposites melding and the golden truth lurking not far behind but Smith’s, not Ryder’s, uneasy articulation and eventual resolution of his suspended spiritual duty amidst the variety of explorations both sacred and profane.
Bums is not so much a road book as much as it is a pursuit book. The whole story in itself is outwardly anecdotal but, introspectively, it is sequential as well as reflective of Smith’s spiritual pilgrimage and journey away from the trappings of his middle-class bearings. The loci of events – Gallery Six (where Allen Ginsberg first "Howl"-ed), Mount Matterhorn, Skid Row in San Francisco, the backwoods of Jersey, Corte Madera in California, the Cascade Mountain ranges and the over 300,000 miles of roads tracking them – are electric dharma points as they are interstices of the American soul which molded Smith and his pack and which they now learn to detest for being superficial, meaningless and empty-headed.
Smith, Ryder, Alvah Goldbook/Allen Ginsberg, Warren Coughlin/Philip Whalen and the rest of the horde engineer a subtle yet radical departure from the middle-class values that nurtured them to embrace the ancient verities that the Orient represent. It is not accurate, however, to point out that the Beats in the Bums are just writers on the cusp of literary fame flying on a Buddhist kick. It was the confusion, their spiritual and moral orphanage, which characterized them and the ensuing passionate search for the essential truths by Smith and Ryder, poetic, innocent and sad in turn, gesticulated the unflinching attitude of the Beat generation writers to explode the forms and habits of thought imposed by tradition and class.
The novel turned out to be a primer of sorts for my credulous and pretentious desire for the highbrow and the abstruse. It introduced me to Buddhism, Zen and its other incarnations, better than, say, the overbearing references of Phil Jackson or the tear-jerking accounts of Leo Buscaglia or the pedantic meanderings of D.T. Suzuki et.al. The exchanges between Smith and Ryder and the entr’acte with the others offer religious insights in so oblique and in so expansive lengths punctuated by the innate humor and honesty of the interlopers and brought to fore by the intensely personal and pictorial narration of Smith/Kerouac. The pocket-sized tome is a minefield of Buddhist thought and recitals, sewn in a poetic mesh that only Kerouac can weave. Yabyum, a sexual Tibetan religious ceremony, is performed by Japhy, Ray and Alvah with a beautiful guest, princess, and the repartee that follows cannot be more sad or poetic, rolling as it does from getting naked in tea-ceremony fashion to arcane Buddhist chants to Boddhisattva women to Pound taking peyote and concluding with Smith, describing the rooftops of Berkeley as "pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the eternality of the heavens which they feared to face." Whew.
The characteristically earthy mountain climbs by Smith, alone or with Ryder, to seek lessons in solitude are symbolic and epigrammatic escapes short of deliverance. In those suspended moments, Smith/Kerouac is at his most articulate, poignant and zestful. Days before the big climb to Matterhorn, Ryder had Smith read his translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain, a fitting if not perfect overture as the poem is ideographic and impassioned. Smith’s climb with Ryder and Morley teaches him valuable lessons about rocks, peaks and screes. Smith’s remembrance of what Han Shan and the Zen lunatics impart, of climbing mountains even at their crests, of not ever falling off mountains brightlines his battles within and without and his failure to let go and give up vain desires. This, once again and for the last, he confronted, backstabbed and pinned to the ground when he spent a season as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountain ranges. With everybody gone, Ryder in Japan, the rest in some other places, Smith was on the top of the desolation Peak sometimes joined by another dharma bum, Happy the Mule Skinner, watching lightning, errant bears, magic rocks and clefts, writing in his diary, "Oh, I’m happy!" and meditating, praying and hearing comforting words from Avalokitesvara and Dipankara. When the season ends, always in gratitude, he kneels on the trail and says, "Thank you, shack. Blah!" as he hikes down and navigates through the thinner mist.
As every reading affects us in some way or another, Bums devoured me the sucker that I am. Actually, Kerouac seems to do that to every unsuspecting, trying-hard boheme. My classmate, after reading On the Road, embraced quickies with neighbors and after reading The Dharma Bums embraced poetry readings until a girlie bar in Cubao had him arrested after attempting to read one while somebody was strip dancing. Road gave me a nervous breakdown while Bums lulled me into believing that I can be a Zen Buddhist on my own. I started writing haikus and tankas, read Buddhist texts and articles hyperlinked by Bums and before long I started to call myself – in all pretentious glory – a Catholic Buddhist until somebody rebuked my claim that I can have satori and more flashes of enlightenment by merely staring at a National Geographic picture of the Ryoanji rock garden.
Reading The Dharma Bums was no different as when I had my first alcohol fix: it gave me the buzz to adopt the life I had always wanted to lead. Recalling Han Shan’s taunt though, I hemmed and hawed until the drone was gone and I realized sooner that I had to go to work as everybody else.
In the spoken words of Lourd Ernest de Veyra: "I emerge from the thrushes/ completely unenlightened." What the heck, reading Kerouac was a helluva ride. A helluva ride.