cineSOURCE magazine

Beats Writers Blend East and West
by Doniphan Blair

Gary Snyder, the most Buddhist of the original beats, in his monastery room, Kyoto, Japan, circa 1960. image: courtesy G. Snyder

EASTERN PHILOSOPHY WAS FIRST
brought to America by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists in 1875, the Japanese Zen Buddhist master D.T. Suzuki twenty years later and Muslim Sufi musicians, a decade after that.

But it was the beatniks who made it hip, especially Buddhism.

The very word beat referenced both “beat down” and “beatitude,” according to author Jack Kerouac, making it inherently anti-materialistic, spiritual and Buddhist. And the poets, artists, rebels and travelers who began gathering in the Bay Area in the late-1940s naturally followed his lead.

Although a devout Catholic, Kerouac read up on Buddhism, recommended it to his friends, especially the poet Allen Ginsberg, and wrote about its influence on his life in his fourth book, the bestselling “The Dharma Bums” (1958), dharma being a Buddhist term for eternal nature or cosmic law.

Before that, Alan Watts had moved from England in 1938 and began training in Zen in New York. After shifting to San Francisco to teach eastern thought, he began his popular KPFA radio program on the subject in 1953 and eventually published over 25 books, mostly on Buddhism, making him its biggest proselytizer.

Gary Snyder was the most Buddhist of the original beats, which is why Kerouac made him the protagonist in “The Dharma Bums”, and he prepared assiduously for his eastern studies. Finally, in 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a year’s training in Japan, which he was able to do after overcoming interference by the State Department, which withheld his passport on the spurious claim he was a communist.

Poster for an East-West monthly poetry meeting hosted by Chinese-American cultural activist Hanson Lee and cineSOURCE editor Doniphan Blair. image: D. Blair

In Kyoto, Snyder served as an attendant and English tutor to a Zen abbot and hung out with or learned about the western Buddhists preceding him, notably Dwight Goddard, the first native pioneer of Buddhism in America, who lived there in the early 20th century.

Studying Japanese, Snyder learned enough to converse and read Zen kōans, or parables. For a decade, he flitted back and forth between the Bay Area and Japan, once even bringing a girlfriend, whom the abbot obliged him to marry. Although they soon divorced, he married a Japanese woman with whom he had two sons. So strong was Snyder’s East-West interaction, a small Kyoto press published “Riprap”, the first of his over two dozen books of poetry, in 1965.

While Snyder favored active, descriptive poems, often based on his adventures around the west coast, many came to include Eastern ideas, notably his well-known “Regarding Wave” (1970).

The voice of the Dharma, the voice now
A shimmering bell through all.
Every hill, still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes flow.
Old woods, new seedlings, tall grasses plumes.
Dark hollows; peaks of light.
Wind stirs the cool side. Each leaf living.
All the hills.
The Voice is a wife to him still.

Allen Ginsberg first learned about Zen at Columbia University, in the ‘40s, and then from his dear friend Kerouac. But being Jewish and a bit more sensuous, he chose to focus on the Indian variant and went to the subcontinent in 1963, precursing India's hippie invasion, which exploded in the late-‘60s and lasted a decade.

Although he studied religion, learned Hindu mantra chants and took up the meditative harmonium instrument, all of which he used to good effect for the rest of his life, Ginsberg also had affairs with local boys and shot morphine, making his East-West interplay a bit wilder. Indeed, it was already on full display by 1955 in his little-known but excellent “Haiku (Never Published)”, written on Milvia Street, in Berkeley.

American poet Allen Ginsberg with 8th century poet and wildman Li Bai. image: Jiang Yuan Hua

Drinking my tea without sugar—no difference.
The sparrow shits upside down—ah! my brain and eggs.
Mayan head in a Pacific driftwood bole—someday I'll live in NY.
Looking over my shoulder, my behind was covered with cherry blossoms.
Winter Haiku, I didn't know the names of the flowers—now my garden is gone.
I slapped the mosquito and missed. What made me do that?
Reading haiku I am unhappy, longing for the Nameless.
A frog floating in the drugstore jar: summer rain on grey pavements (after Shiki) [Masaoka Shiki, the 19th century Japanese poet, critic and pioneer of the modern haiku].
On the porch, in my shorts; auto lights in the rain.
Another year has past—the world is no different.
The first thing I looked for in my old garden was the cherry tree.
My old desk: the first thing I looked for in my house.
My early journal: the first thing I found in my old desk.
My mother's ghost: the first thing I found in the living room.
I quit shaving but the eyes that glanced at me remained in the mirror.
The madman emerges from the movies: the street at lunchtime.
Cities of boys are in their graves, and in this town...
Lying on my side in the void: the breath in my nose.
On the fifteenth floor the dog chews a bone—screech of taxicabs.
A hard-on in New York, a boy in San Francisco.
The moon over the roof, worms in the garden. I rent this house.

Ginsberg became the beats’ fairy godmother and hardest working impresario, rallying them to write, write, write, while flogging their books around New York, even as his bestselling “Howl” (1956) made him the earth’s most famous poet. Indeed, he toured his terrain relentlessly, including the then-closed closed communist block, and never ceased supporting any comrade, despite their descent into right-wingism or alcoholism, like Kerouac, or other infirmities.

Another beat Buddhist was poet Philip Whelan, who attended Reed College with Snyder in the ‘40s. Whelan got way into Zen, after Snyder gave him a book by Suzuki, and even joined him in Japan, also becoming a monk for a couple of years.

Then there was Bob Kaufman. The son of a German Jew and a Caribbean woman of color, who grew up in New Orleans, he came to San Francisco to devote himself to poetry in 1958, where he was credited with coining “beatnik”, in homage to the Soviet sputnik satellite. Along with Ginsberg, William Margolis and others, he founded and helped edit Beatitude magazine, which highlighted beat-Buddhist synergy.

While Kaufman was hardly an ascetic when it came to sex and drugs, upon hearing of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he took a Buddhist vow of silence and dutifully stuck by it for a decade until the Vietnam War ended in 1973.

Generally not Puritans, Buddhist beatniks simply suggested that you could enjoy a more fulsome, fruitful life by rejecting materialism, following your dreams and adhering to Asian ideas of abstention, cosmic unity and natural ways.

The beats do Islam: (lf-rt) Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, Tangier, Morocco, circa 1958. photo: courtesy A. Ginsberg

But these were beat easternism’s more genteel prescriptions. More boundary-breaking ideas emerged from those who went to Morocco and immersed themselves in Islamic culture. William Burroughs also did a lot of young men and heroin in Morocco, but he wrote prodigiously, which became “Naked Lunch”, after Kerouac and Ginsberg visited him and heroically typed up and pieced together his scraps of paper covered with scribbles. Fortunately, Burroughs liked Byron Gysin’s “cut-up”, or collage, technique, which helped him revolutionize writing, refashioning the novel into something like a Jackson Pollock painting or a holistic Eastern vision.

First published in France in 1958 but harassed by pornography trials in the US until 1966, it is based on Burroughs's adventures in drugs, love and ideas from New York and Mexico City to Morocco. Admittedly a bit hard to decipher, the dedicated reader is rewarded with a devastating, sometime riotously funny, critique of squares, hipsters, junkies and Western culture, including language in general, which made “Naked Lunch” the most influential beat book after Kerouac’s “On the Road”, and the most avant-garde American novel since Henry Miller’s two “Cancers” (see cineSOURCE article, "Should We Re-Censor Henry Miller?".

Also monumental were the novels of Paul Bowles: “The Sheltering Sky” (1949), “Let It Come Down” (1952) and “The Spiders House” (1955). Bowles moved to Tangier, Morocco, in 1947, and lived there until his death in 1999, graciously hosting the beats on their visits.

While using traditional novel elements, like well-crafted characters and lush descriptions, Bowles slowly pushes the reader out of their comfort zone, beyond known literary landmarks, much like the protagonist of “The Sheltering Sky”, who finally finds himself psychologically albeit lost in the desert physically. Although no longer read much, “Sheltering Sky” made a pretty good Bernard Bertolucci film in 1990 and remains high on many critics’ lists of the 20th century’s top novels.

Buddhism also figured in the ideas and work of many other beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane diPrima and Gregory Corso. While a few were criticized for dimestore Buddhism, many have been lauded for good work and East-West activism in many essays and books, notably “Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation” (1995) by Carole Tonkinson, former editor of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle.

Of course, from its conception by Gautama Buddha in Benares, India, in the fourth century BCE, Buddhism had to make long journeys and cross many borders to achieve success. Fleeing Hindu oppression, Buddhists emigrated to Afghanistan, where they built the magnificent sculptures tragically destroyed by radical Muslims in 1999. Then they traveled to China and finally Japan, where fully a third of the population identify as Buddhist (compared to only 18% in China), proving once again that it is the aggressive multiculturalist and long-distance traveler who hybrids the headiest worldview.

For more on the beats, if not their Buddhism, see the great "The Beats: A Graphic History" (2009), by Harvey Pekar and a host of others—graphic referencing its sex as well the fact it’s a graphic novel. Or, for more details and chronology and less sex, see the masterful "The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation" (2010) by Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's personal archivist, bibliographer and amanuensis from 1982 to 1997.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jun 26, 2019 - 08:54 AM