“All things are different appearances of the same emptiness”: Buddhism and Jack Kerouac’s Nature Writings

Abstract

Jack Kerouac’s ties with Buddhism are well known. Steve Odin, after mentioning D. T. Suzuki and before mentioning Philip Kapleau, Thomas Merton, and Alan Watts, writes that “it was Jack Kerouac’s novel Dharma Bums (1958) that triggered the ‘Zen boom’ in America” forming “an East-West kind of ‘Beat-Zen’” (582). Carole Tonkinson reiterates this idea that Kerouac’s Dharma Bums was among the texts written by Americans who “recounted the teachings of the Buddha to the general public for the first time” (viii). Stephen Prothero also argues that “The Dharma Bums soon proved itself capable of marking new eras in individual lives” (2). Prothero’s introduction to Big Sky Mind traces Kerouac’s initial “devouring [of] everything he could find on Eastern religions” and also asserts that Kerouac fostered “similar searches in other members of the Beat Generation and in the hippies of the sixties” (2); Prothero deems Kerouac’s writings part of the transition stage in America “between the early era of armchair Buddhism and contemporary Buddhist practice” (4); the highly prolific Kerouac, according to Prothero, became “the official spokesperson” of the “Beat Buddhists” (16). Similarly, in Thomas A. Tweed’s history of American Buddhism, Kerouac is the representative 1950s to 1970s American interested in Buddhism (160).KeywordsBuddhist PhilosophyBlue SheepBuddhist ConceptEastern PhilosophyEastern ReligionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.