Beat Buddhism

Brian Balogh: The 1950s marked the emergence of the Beat Generation in the United States. The Beats created style all their own, with themes of restlessness and nonconformity filtered through a jazz-like prose. They were much more than just a literary phenomenon. The Beats sparked a countercultural movement that rejected mainstream society, and in the process, helped spread Buddhism in America. I caught up with scholar Kyle Garton-Gundling to talk about Buddhism and the Beat Generation. He’s an expert on the assimilation of Eastern religions in American literature. I started by asking why the Beats were drawn to the Buddhist tradition.

Kyle G.-G.: The Beats thought of themselves as a countercultural movement. They were rebelling against what they saw as the stifling conformity of the post-World War Two 1950s. When they were looking around for various ideologies that could help them promote their rebellious agenda, what they saw in Asian religions such as Buddhism was an alternative to the dominant Christianity of mainstream American society. Whereas the Christian god had this vision of being like some kind of tyrannical king, Buddhism was a nontheistic religion that in their minds was a better platform for free expression and spontaneity. They also used certain Buddhist role models in the past who were wandering monks as models for a kind of delinquent itinerancy that again was this way of resisting the middle-class stability that they thought was stifling and conformist.

Brian Balogh: Who are the best-known Beat Buddhists? Name some of them and tell us what they were about.

Kyle G.-G.: I think there are three Beat Buddhists in particular who really stand out. They are Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac. Those three guys all knew each other very well. They traveled in the same circles. They all influenced each other in many ways. They all shared in common this investment in using and reinterpreting Buddhist teachings to revitalize what they thought of as an American spirit that has been forgotten in the post-war climate. They thought of themselves as trying to revive an authentic sense of American revolution in the spirit of Walt Whitman. They also thought that America needed something outside of its own Western traditions to really overcome the momentum of its increasingly conformist consumerism. To them, Buddhism with its ideals of nonattachment and emptiness was a way of trying to get people to be less attached to material things in a time when material prosperity was an increasingly high priority in American middle class society.

Brian Balogh: I understand that these guys hung out with each other, but could you describe any differences between the three or characteristics that separated the three of them?

Kyle G.-G.: I think there’s two different areas where you might talk about some differences. One difference is the level of seriousness with which they actually learned about Buddhism. Jack Kerouac was notoriously sloppy. He got a lot of things wrong. He was very appropriative and stereotyping a lot of things. Allen Ginsberg started out a little sloppy, but he got more and more serious as he went on. Later in life in the ’70s he became a student of the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and became a very serious and diligent student of traditional forms of Buddhist meditation. Gary Snyder was the most serious of all from beginning to end. He actually spent lots of time in Japan over a roughly 12-year period from the early ’50s to late ’60s training in actual zen monasteries in Japan and has continued to be a very serious and well-read practitioner who could actually work in the original languages.

Kyle G.-G.: Another area where there are some differences is how optimistic they were about how well you could actually make this crosscultural adaptation work. Gary Snyder was an optimist. He thought that you could have a very harmonious blending of East and West. Kerouac was very much less optimistic. He felt very conflicted, and his tortured soul expressed itself in being very unsure whether Americans were actually ready for Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg again is somewhere in the middle. He was optimistic in many ways, but pessimistic in others. I think you could talk both about their degree of seriousness and their degree of optimism, in terms of how they tried to bring Buddhism to an American audience.

Brian Balogh: What was distinctly American about the kind of Buddhism that was practiced by the Beats?

Kyle G.-G.: The Beats justified Buddhist philosophy in their minds using the language of American individualism and American revolution. They said that just as the Buddha taught to create a revolution for ourselves by turning away from our selfish desires, this actually is a better version of American freedom than Americans already knew that Buddhist ideals were actually the ultimate fulfillment of the aspiration for American freedom as expressed in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Their strong investment in American ideals and actually attempting to directly synthesize American and Buddhist ideals is what makes Beat Buddhism distinctly American.

Brian Balogh: How would you distinguish the differences between American and Buddhist conceptions of freedom?

Kyle G.-G.: Generally speaking, American versions of freedom have their most paradigmatic expression in the Declaration of Independence, where in Thomas Jefferson’s language, everybody has the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When he says the pursuit of happiness, what he means is something like that ability to pursue the things that you want. In a Buddhist version of freedom, it’s actually the exact opposite. It’s not that we should pursue the things we want. It’s that the pattern of wanting things makes us unfree. Our desires are what keep us in chains. Our desires keep us unsatisfied. In a way it’s very difficult to reconcile these seemingly contradictory ideas of freedom. The Beats tried to do the impossible, and they came up with a lot of really interesting poetry and fiction in the process.

Brian Balogh: From your writing I get the sense that these Beats were really using Buddhism as a lens through which to critique American society. Could you give us a concrete example of how that worked?

Kyle G.-G.: One example I can give comes from a book by Jack Kerouac called The Dharma Bums, which is the most famous text about Buddhism that Kerouac wrote. In that book he has these fictional versions of himself and Gary Snyder, and it’s pretty obvious who they really are. He slightly changes the names, but you can tell who they are. He has this fictional version of Gary Snyder named Japhy Ryder, so the scansion is the same even. He has this character say that in America you’re supposed to work for the privilege of consuming, but what is it all for? Instead, a Buddhist ideal of freedom is much better. What he says is that we need a revolution, a revolution that both affirms American freedom, but also critiques current American complacency, which Kerouac thought of as a corruption of a more authentic American freedom.

Kyle G.-G.: There’s a specific passage that’s very famous that I think is worth reading. I have it written down here, so I’ll read it for you. This character says, “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, of thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of them zen lunatics.” In that passage Kerouac is trying to take this Buddhist notion of eccentric spontaneity and is directly using it to critique American society and encourage people to stop just going to their boring jobs and doing what they’re told and go wander off in the wilderness and find enlightenment. That’s how he uses Buddhism to critique American society.

Brian Balogh: I think that’s a terrific example, but I also imagined that they had notions of at least reforming, if not radically revising mainstream society. How did expect that they could do that?

Kyle G.-G.: I don’t think they could expect that they could actually do it, but they were going to try. I mentioned earlier that there are some different levels of optimism or pessimism in a lot of the Beat Buddhists. Jack Kerouac was the most pessimistic. He said, “I’m not sure Americans can handle Buddhism. The very reason that Americans need Buddhism, their attachment to stuff, is what makes it so hard for Americans to accept.” It’s a catch-22. Allen Ginsberg though did think that it was worth trying to use Buddhism directly in social activism. For example, in the ’60s during the Vietnam years, this is a bit after the height of the Beat Generation, but still he’s working in that mode, he tries to actually use Asian mantras from Buddhism and Hinduism and combine it with Western protest chanting when he was leading protests against the Pentagon and the Vietnam War. He wanted to use Asian religions to create a new kind of protest movement, one that was directly politically active, but one that wasn’t angry like the old left, but more uplifting and actually happy, even though it was also protesting in justice.

Brian Balogh: I’m guessing that didn’t go viral, but were there other ways that the Beat Generation tried to popularize Buddhism in America?

Kyle G.-G.: They tried to popularize it by getting a lot of media attention. The Beats were actually pretty successful at making it look like they were more influential than they really were. There were lots of profiles of Beat writers and interviews with them in widely read publications like Time Magazine, Life Magazine, the Paris Review, and so on. Through these mass-marketed magazines, a lot of Americans became familiar with Buddhism because of what the Beat Generation writers were saying about it. There was a 1957 issue of Time Magazine that declared that 1957 was the year of what they called the Zen Boom. The Zen Boom was mainly due to the Beats popularizing Buddhism, helping it to gain media attention and a much broader audience than it had before.

Brian Balogh: Earlier you talked about existing West Coast Buddhist community, existing Eastern Buddhist communities. What did those communities feel about these Beat Buddhists?

Kyle G.-G.: There wasn’t a whole lot of direct interaction between Beat Buddhist writers and Asian immigrants who practiced Buddhism as a part of their ethnic tradition, but when there was it was often a relatively tense affair. Beat Buddhists did tend to view their version of Buddhism as more authentic than the Japanese or Chinese Buddhists. That was obviously very offensive to the Asian Buddhists who said, “Who are you people, coming in here and appropriating Buddhism, and then saying that you’re doing it better than us?” What the Beats were doing is they tried to emphasize meditation and philosophy, whereas the Asian American Buddhists focused more on devotional practices and maintaining a physical shrine and having ritual community.

Brian Balogh: Once the dust settled, what was the impact of Beat Buddhism on American society more broadly?

Kyle G.-G.: I think the biggest impact is that from the Beat Generation onward, the overall image of Buddhism in the U.S. became firmly entangled with the counterculture. That was not the case prior to the Beat Generation. Before the Beats, the people who knew about Buddhism were considered slightly odd intellectuals, but not particularly countercultural. It was after the Beat Generation firmly popularized Buddhism with their own countercultural stamp on it that every generation of spiritual seekers in America after that got Buddhism through that countercultural lens. The Beat Generation with the ’50s, the hippie movement in the ’60s, the transcendental meditation movement in the ’80s, and so on and so forth, that countercultural stamp has never really gone away. Even to this day, the way that people learn about Buddhism is mainly through these kind of new agey publications that have usually Beat or hippie pedigrees if you connect the dots back far enough. That countercultural image and version of Buddhism is the Beat Generation’s most lasting legacy.

Brian Balogh: Kyle Garton-Gundling is an English professor at Christopher Newport University. He’s the author of Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature From the Beats to the Present.