But the quarrel between the extremes is of great philosophical interest, being a contemporary form of the ancient dispute between salvation by works and salvation by faith, or between what the Hindus called the ways of the monkey and the cat. The cat — appropriately enough — follows the effortless way, since the mother cat carries her kittens. The monkey follows the hard way, since the baby monkey has to hang on to its mother's hair. Thus for beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master. In seventeenth-century Japan these two attitudes were approximately typified by the great masters Bankei and Hakuin, and it so happens that the followers of the latter "won out" and determined the present-day character of Rinzai Zen.(*) For Kerouac, the time he spent with the group of Beat poets yielded prime material for creative work and had implications for his immediate life. Kerouac admired Snyder for his dedication and religious discipline and Snyder maintained an influential role on Kerouac’s interpretation of Buddhism (Charters 264). Through his relationship with Snyder, Kerouac was able to carve out a niche in his orientation to Buddhism by sharply distinguishing himself as a follower of the Hinayana school of Buddhism, which emphasized the liberation of the individual practitioner while categorizing his friend as a Mahayanist, which placed a great deal of importance on compassion and relieving the suffering of sentient beings (Charters 263). The Buddha teaching the Four Noble Truths. Sanskrit manuscript. Nālandā, Bihar, India. The stories that Snyder and Whalen shared with Kerouac about their Zen practice and experiences working as fire look-outs inspired Kerouac to apply for a job in the Mount Baker National Forest in 1955 (Suiter 179). His plan was to use the solitude to write and study the dharma, along with meditation. Before he was supplied with a job as a fire look-out, Kerouac wrote the Scripture of the Golden Eternity at the urging of Snyder. The document served as a religious expression of Kerouac’s unique synthesis between Catholicism and Buddhism (Tonkinson 215). He was stationed to serve at Desolation Lookout on February 6, 1955, with only one book to occupy his time—a copy of The Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard. The intensity of solitude and boredom that ensued caused the novelty of asceticism to wear off within ten days (Suiter 210). Desolation Peak fire lookout / photo by Pete Hoffman – CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia Anyways, I certainly wasn’t planning on making this stand today, but I typed a thing, and here we are! And don’t get me wrong, I like breasts too! But just because something feels good doesn’t make it right, ya know? But I appreciate the argument, y’all. Disagreeing and talking about it is part of how we all grow as human beings. In the summer of 1957 Irving Rosenthal offered me the job of Guest Poetry Editor on the Review. The title had been cooked up, he explained, because technically I was ineligible, having left the midway a few years before. I remember him saying he wanted "only the best poems" and to hell with literary politics or equal representation of all schools of contemporary poetry. I was delighted.

I'm honestly not having a go at you or anything, I just wanted to provide my actual viewpoints and feelings rather than being labelled something that I'm certainly not. If you weren't talking about me then that's egg on my face live n let live is all I'm saying.I see no real quarrel with either extreme. There was never a spiritual movement without its excesses and distortions. The experience of awakening which truly constitutes Zen is too timeless and universal to be injured. The extremes of beat Zen need alarm no one since, as Blake said, "the fool who persists in his folly will become wise." As for square Zen, "authoritative" spiritual experiences have always had a way of wearing thin, and thus of generating the demand for something genuine and unique which needs no stamp.

Biographer Ann Charters believed that Kerouac can be understood as a religious and literary figure much more simply, and states that “Kerouac was always a believing Catholic; he was just a self-taught Buddhist for a while” (190). Charters established in Kerouac: A Biography that the writer felt consolation from Buddhism for the disappointment in his life and that his attraction was to the noble truths for the spiritual context they provided him in light of his own suffering (190). His relationship to Buddhism can be understood as a form of philosophical inquiry that supplemented his existential questions regarding the death of his brother Gerard, in addition to his curiosity involving deeper explanations for the meaning of life. Thus, however transient his affair with Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac undertook a disciplined approach to its study and for a brief while committed himself to exploring and applying the truths he discovered therein to his life. Contemplating his journey after coming home, Ginsberg reflected on his experiences traveling abroad and his vision quests (Schumacher 394). He arrived at a conclusion of his spiritual inquiries that would sustain him into the second part of his life: Decisively, he thought, it was his heart and the present moment he aspired and yearned for. Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social criticism and “digging of the universe” such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg, Whalen and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac, who is always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.

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The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in Taoism. They saw nature in its total interrelatedness, and saw that every creature and every experience is in accord with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept themselves as they were, moment by moment, without the least need to justify anything. They didn’t do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse for getting away with murder. They didn’t brag about it and set themselves apart as rather special. On the contrary, their Zen was wu-shih, which means approximately “nothing special” or “no fuss.” But Zen is “fuss” when it is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and “fuss” when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture five hours a day. And I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also fuss—but a little less so. HYUNG WOONG PAK, who translated the essay by Shinichi Hisamatsu (Hoseki) and later became editor of the Review, remembered the issue's lingering effect: "With the publication of the Zen issue, Gary Snyder's poems, and the sponsorship of a series of lectures by Alan Watts, people thought that Chicago Review was a guidepost for Zen Buddhism. We had many letters of inquiry and phone calls about Zen Buddhism and Zen temples." Watts was one of the chief popularizers of Zen during the era; we've included his essay, "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen," here. In 1972, almost two years after their meeting, Ginsberg took both the Refuge and Bodhisattva Vows under the guidance of his teacher and received his dharma title, Dharma Lion. That same year, Philip Whalen took his Refuge Vows separately and committed to the practice of Zen Buddhism (Prothero 19).

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However, he had discovered something of value—a collection of essays by D.T. Suzuki, Buddhism in the Philosophical Library Series. In this work, Allen read passages on the Zen satori, or enlightenment experience, that greatly interested him (Charters 191). It was in part due to a vision he had almost five years earlier when he experienced a spontaneous poetic elaboration in a visionary experience involving the poet William Blake that left him inspired and confused. The concept of satori in Suzuki’s work matched up perfectly with the nature of his Blake vision and provided a new context with which to pursue his mystical inquiries. The Dharma Bums would go on to influence a generation of spiritual seekers and counter-cultural reformers in the 1960s who used the book to guide them through their existential and social crises. The book helped facilitate the emerging value structures that were represented by freedom from life’s social constraints during the 1960s (Tonkinson 61). Scholar and author of Buddhism in America, Richard Hughes Seager, credits Kerouac for helping to establish a model of the non-conformist religious practitioner which helped create the cultural image of the counter-cultural seeker, in part preserving his legacy for a future generation of American seekers with The Dharma Bums (42). In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.