Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

"It goes on and on, the disciples and the Masters go through the same thing, first they have to find and tame the ox of their mind essence, and then abandon that, then finally they attain to nothing, as represented by this empty panel, then having attained nothing they attain everything which is springtime blossoms in the trees so they end up coming down to the city to get drunk with the butchers like Li Po."

That was a very wise cartoon, it reminded me of my own experience, trying to tame my mind in the woods, then realizing it was all empty and awake and I didn't have to do anything, and now I was getting drunk with the butcher Japhy. We played records and lounged around smoking then went out and cut more wood.

Then as it got cool late afternoon we went up to the shack and washed and dressed up for the big Saturday night party. During the day Japhy went up and down the hill at least ten times to make phone calls and see Christine and get bread and bring up sheets for his girl that night (when he had a girl he put out clean sheets on his thin mattress on the straw mats, a ritual). But I just sat around in the grass doing nothing, or writing haikus, or watching the old vulture circling the hill. "Must be something dead around here," I figured.

Japhy said "Why do you sit on your ass all day?"

"I practice do-nothing."

"What's the difference? Burn it, my Buddhism is activity," said Japhy rushing off down the hill again. Then I could hear him sawing wood and whistling in the distance. He couldn't stop jiggling for a minute. His meditations were regular things, by the clock, he'd meditated first thing waking in the morning then he had his mid-afternoon meditation, only about three minutes long, then before going to bed and that was that. But I just ambled and dreamed around. We were two strange dissimilar monks on the same path. I took a shovel, however, and leveled the ground near the rosebush where my bed of grass was: it was a little too slanty for comfort: I fixed it just right and that night I slept well after the big wine party.

The big party was wild. Japhy had a girl called Polly Whit-more come out to see him, a beautiful brunette with a Spanish hairdo and dark eyes, a regular raving beauty actually, a mountainclimber too. She'd just been divorced and lived alone in Millbrae. And Christine's brother Whitey Jones brought his fiancee Patsy. And of course Sean came home from work and cleaned up for the party. Another guy came out for the weekend, big blond Bud Diefendorf who worked as the janitor in the Buddhist Association to earn his rent and attend classes free, a big mild pipesmoking Buddha with all kinds of strange ideas. I liked Bud, he was intelligent, and I liked the fact that he had started out as a physicist at the University of Chicago then gone from that to philosophy and finally now to philosophy's dreadful murderer, Buddha. He said "I had a dream one time that I was sitting under a tree picking on a lute and singing 'I ain't got no name.' I was the no-name bhikku." It was so pleasing to meet so many Buddhists after that harsh road hitchhiking.

Sean was a strange mystical Buddhist with a mind full of superstitions and premonitions. "I believe in devils," he said.

"Well," I said, stroking his little daughter's hair, "all little children know that everybody goes to Heaven" to which he assented tenderly with a sad nod of his bearded skull. He was very kind.

He kept saying "Aye" all the time, which went with his old boat that was anchored out in the bay and kept being scuttled by storms and we had to row out and bail it out in the cold gray fog. Just a little old wreck of a boat about twelve feet long, with no cabin to speak of, nothing but a ragged hull floating in the water around a rusty anchor. Whitey Jones, Christine's brother, was a sweet young kid of twenty who never said anything and just smiled and took ribbings without complaint. For instance the party finally got pretty wild and the three couples took all their clothes off and danced a kind of quaint innocent polka all hand-in-hand around the parlor, as the kiddies slept in their cribs.

This didn't disturb Bud and me at all, we went right on smoking our pipes and discussing Buddhism in the corner, in fact that was best because we didn't have girls of our own. And those were three well stacked nymphs dancing there. But Japhy and Sean dragged Patsy into the bedroom and pretended to be trying to make her, to bug Whitey, who blushed all red, stark naked, and there were wrestlings and laughs all around the house. Bud and I were sitting there crosslegged with naked dancing girls in front of us and laughed to realize that it was a mighty familiar occasion.

"Seems like in some previous lifetime, Ray," said Bud, "you and I were monks in some monastery in Tibet where the girls danced for us before yabyum."

"Yeh, and we were the old monks who weren't interested in sex any more but Sean and Japhy and Whitey were the young monks and were still full of the fire of evil and still had a lot to learn." Every now and then Bud and I looked at all that flesh and licked our lips in secret. But most of the time, actually, during these naked revels, I just kept my eyes closed and listened to the music: I was really sincerely keeping lust out of my mind by main force and gritting of my teeth. And the best way was to keep my eyes closed. In spite of the nakedness and all it was really a gentle little home party and everybody began yawning for time for bed.

Whitey went off with Patsy, Japhy went up the hill with Polly and took her to his fresh sheets, and I unrolled my sleeping bag by the rosebush and slept. Bud had brought his own sleeping bag and rolled out on Sean's straw mat floor.

In the morning Bud came up and lit his pipe and sat in the grass chatting to me as I rubbed my eyes to waking. During the day, Sunday, all kinds of other people came calling on the Monahans and half of them came up the hill to see the pretty shack and the two crazy famous bhikkus Japhy and Ray. Among them were Princess, Alvah, and Warren Coughlin. Sean spread out a board in the yard and put out a royal table of wine and hamburgers and pickles and lit a big bonfire and took out his two guitars and it was really a magnificent kind of way to live in Sunny California, I realized, with all this fine Dharma connected with it, and mountainclimbing, all of them had rucksacks and sleeping bags and some of them were going hiking that next day on the Marin County trails, which are beautiful. So the party was divided into three parts all the time: those in the living room listening to the hi-fi or thumbing through books, those in the yard eating and listening to the guitar music, and those on the hilltop in the shack brewing pots of tea and sitting crosslegged discussing poetry and things and the Dharma or wandering around in the high meadow to go see the children fly kites or old ladies ride by on horseback. Every weekend was the same mild picnic, a regular classical scene of angels and dolls having a kind flowery time in the void like the void in the cartoon of the Bulls, the blossom branch.

Bud and I sat on the hill watching kites. "That kite won't go high enough, it hasn't got a long enough tail," I said.

Bud said, "Say, that's great, that reminds me of my main problem in my meditations. The reason why I can't get really high into nirvana is because my tail isn't long enough." He puffed and pondered seriously over this. He was the most serious guy in the world. He pondered it all night and the next morning said "Last night I saw myself as a fish swimming through the void of the sea, going left and right in the water without knowing the meaning of left and right, but because of my fin I did so, that is, my kite tail, so I'm a Buddhafish and my fin is my wisdom."

"That was pretty infinyte, that kyte," says I.

Throughout all these parties I always stole off for a nap under the eucalyptus trees, instead of by my rosebush, which was all hot sun all day; in the shade of the trees I rested well. One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree. I noticed how the leaves almost looked human the way they bowed and then leaped up and then swayed lyrically side to side. It was a crazy vision in my mind but beautiful. Another time under those trees I dreamt I saw a purple throne all covered with gold, some kind l80Chapter of Eternity Pope or Patriarch in it, and Rosie somewhere, and at that moment Cody was in the shack yakking to some guys and it seemed that he was to the left of this vision as some kind of Archangel, and when I opened my eyes I saw it was only the sun against my eyelids. And as I say, that hummingbird, a beautiful little blue hummingbird no bigger than a dragonfly, kept making a whistling jet dive at me, definitely saying hello to me, every day, usually in the morning, and I always yelled back at him a greeting. Finally he began to hover in the open window of the shack, buzzing there with his furious wings, looking at me beadily, then, flash, he was gone. That California humming guy…