by Jack Kerouac
Long afternoons just sitting in the straw until I was tired of "thinking nothing" and just going to sleep and having little flash dreams like the strange one I had once of being up in
some kind of gray ghostly attic hauling up suitcases of gray meat my mother is handing up and I'm petulantly complaining: "I won't come down again!" (to do this work of the world). I felt I was a blank being called upon to enjoy the ecstasy of the endless truebody.
Days tumbled on days, I was in my overalls, didn't comb my hair, didn't shave much, consorted only with dogs and cats, I was living the happy life of childhood again. Meanwhile 1 wrote and got an assignment for the coming summer as a fire lookout for the U. S. Forest Service on Desolation Peak in the High Cascades in Washington state. So I figured to set out for Japhy's shack in March to be nearer Washington for my summer job.
Sunday afternoons my family would want me to go driving with them but I preferred to stay home alone, and they'd get mad and say "What's the matter with him anyway?" and I'd hear them argue about the futility of my "Buddhism" in the kitchen, then they'd all get in the car and leave and I'd go in the kitchen and sing "The tables are empty, everybody's gone over" to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "You're Learning the Blues." I was as nutty as a fruitcake and happier. Sunday afternoon, then, I'd go to my woods with the dogs and sit and put out my hands palms up and accept handfuls of sun boiling over the palms. "Nirvana is the moving paw," I'd say, seeing the first thing I saw as I opened my eyes from meditation, that being Bob's paw moving in the grass as he dreamed. Then I'd go back to the house on my clear, pure, well-traveled path, waiting for the night when again I'd see the countless Buddhas hiding in the moonlight air.
But my serenity was finally disturbed by a curious argument with my brother-in-law; he began to resent my unshackling Bob the dog and taking him in the woods with me. "I've got too much money invested in that dog to untie him from his chain."
I said "How would you like to be tied to a chain and cry all day like the dog?"
He replied "It doesn't bother me" and my sister said "And / don't care."
I got so mad I stomped off into the woods, it was a Sunday afternoon, and resolved to sit there without food till midnight and come back and pack my things in the night and leave. But in a few hours my mother was calling me from the back porch to supper, I wouldn't come; finally little Lou came out to my tree and begged me to come back.
I had frogs in the little brook that kept croaking at the oddest times, interrupting my meditations as if by design, once at high noon a frog croaked three times and was silent the rest of the day, as though expounding me the Triple Vehicle. Now my frog croaked once. I felt it was a signal meaning the One Vehicle of Compassion and went back determined to overlook the whole thing, even my pity about the dog. What a sad and bootless dream. In the woods again that night, fingering the juju beads, I went through curious prayers like these: "My pride is hurt, that is emptiness; my business is with the Dharma, that is emptiness; I'm proud of my kindness to animals, that is emptiness; my conception of the chain, that is emptiness; Ananda's pity, even that is emptiness." Perhaps if some old Zen Master had been on the scene, he would have gone out and kicked the dog on his chain to give everybody a sudden shot of awakening. My pain was in getting rid of the conception of people and dogs anyway, and of myself. I was hurting deep inside from the sad business of trying to deny what was. In any case it was a tender little drama in the Sunday countryside: "Raymond doesn't want the dog chained." But then suddenly under the tree at night, I had the astonishing idea: "Everything is empty but awake! Things are empty in time and space and mind." I figured it all out and the next day feeling very exhilarated I felt the time had come to explain everything to my family. They laughed more than anything else. "But listen! No! Look! It's simple, let me lay it out as simple and concise as I can. All things are empty, ain't they?"
"Whattayou mean, empty, I'm holding this orange in my hand, ain't I?"
"It's empty, everythin's empty, things come but to go, all things made have to be unmade, and they'll have to be unmade simply because they were made!"
Nobody would buy even that.
"You and your Buddha, why don't you stick to the religion you were born with?" my mother and sister said.
"Everything's gone, already gone, already come and gone," I yelled. "Ah," stomping around, coming back, "and things are empty because they appear, don't they, you see them, but they're made up of atoms that can't be measured or weighed or taken hold of, even the dumb scientists know that now, there isn't any finding of the farthest atom so-called, things are just empty arrangements of something that seems solid appearing in the space, they ain't either big or small, near or far, true or false, they're ghosts pure and simple."
"Ghostses!" yelled little Lou amazed. He really agreed with me but he was afraid of my insistence on "Ghostses."
"Look," said my brother-in-law, "if things were empty how could I feel this orange, in fact taste it and swallow it, answer me that one."
"Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake."
"Well, if that's so, I still don't care." All enthusiastic I went back to the woods that night and thought, "What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty, awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else. In other words it means that I've become the same as everything else. It means I've become a Buddha." I really felt that and believed it and exulted to think what I had to tell Japhy now when I got back to California. "At least he'll listen," I pouted. I felt great compassion for the trees because we were the same thing; I petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters. I told that to the dogs, too, they listened to me perking up their ears and licking my face. They didn't care one way or the other as long as I was there. St. Raymond of the Dogs is who I was that year, if no one or nothing else.
Sometimes in the woods I'd just sit and stare at things themselves, trying to divine the secret of existence anyway. I'd stare at the holy yellow long bowing weeds that faced my grass sitmat of Tathagata Seat of Purity as they pointed in all directions and hairily conversed as the winds dictated Ta Ta Ta, in gossip groups with some lone weeds proud to show off on the side, or sick ones and half-dead falling ones, the whole congregation of living weedhood in the wind suddenly ringing like bells and jumping to get excited and all made of yellow stuff and sticking to the ground and I'd think This is it. "Rop rop rop," I'd yell at the weeds, and triey'd show windward pointing intelligent reachers to indicate and flail and finagle, some rooted in blossom imagination earth moist perturbation idea that had karmacized their very root-and-stem. ... It was eerie. I'd fall asleep and dream the words "By this teaching the earth came to an end," and I'd dream of my Ma nodding solemnly with her whole head, umph, and eyes closed. What did I care about all the irking hurts and tedious wronks of the world, the human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars. "I am Bhikku Blank Rat!" I dreamed.
What did I care about the squawk of the little very self which wanders everywhere? I was dealing in outblownness, cut-off-ness, snipped, blownoutness, putoutness, turned-off-ness, nothing-happens-ness, gone-ness, gone-out-ness, the snapped link, nir, link, vana, snap! "The dust of my thoughts collected into a globe," I thought, "in this ageless solitude," I thought, and really smiled, because I was seeing the white light everywhere everything at last.
The warm wind made the pines talk deep one night when I
began to experience what is called "Samapatti," which in Sanskrit means Transcendental Visits. I'd got a little drowsy in the mind but was somehow physically wide awake sitting erect under my tree when suddenly I saw flowers, pink worlds of walls of them, salmon pink, in the Shh of silent woods (obtaining nirvana is like locating silence) and I saw an ancient vision of Dipankara Buddha who was the Buddha who never said anything, Dipankara as a vast snowy Pyramid Buddha with bushy wild black eyebrows like John L. Lewis and a terrible stare, all in an old location, an ancient snowy field like Alban ("A new field!" had yelled the Negro preacherwoman), the whole vision making my hair rise. I remember the strange magic final cry that it evoked in me, whatever it means: Coly-alcolor. It, the vision, was devoid of any sensation of I being myself, it was pure egolessness, just simply wild ethereal activities devoid of any wrong predicates . . . devoid of effort, devoid of mistake. "Everything's all right," I thought. "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form and we're here forever in one form or another which is empty. What the dead have accomplished, this rich silent hush of the Pure Awakened Land." I felt like crying out over the woods and rooftops of North Carolina announcing the glorious and simple truth. Then I said "I've got my full rucksack pack and it's spring, I'm going to go southwest to the dry land, to the long lone land of Texas and Chihuahua and the gay streets of Mexico night, music coming out of doors, girls, wine, weed, wild hats, viva! What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light." Sitting in my Buddha-arbor, therefore, in that "colyalcolor" wall of flowers pink and red and ivory white, among aviaries of magic transcendent birds recognizing my awakening mind with sweet weird cries (the pathless lark), in the ethereal perfume, mysteriously ancient, the bliss of the Buddha-fields, I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
A strange thing happened the next day, to illustrate the true power I had gained from these magic visions. My mother had been coughing for five days and her nose was running and now her throat was beginning to hurt so much that her coughs were painful and sounded dangerous to me. I decided to go into a deep trance and hypnotize myself, reminding myself "All is empty and awake," to investigate the cause and cure of my mother's illness. Instantly, in my closed eyes, I saw a vision of a brandy bottle which then I saw to be "Heet" rubbing medicine and on top of that, superimposed like a movie fade-in, I saw a distinct picture of little white flowers, round, with small petals. I instantly got up, it was midnight, my mother was coughing in her bed, and I went and took several bowls of bachelor's buttons my sister had arranged around the house the week before and I set them outside. Then I took some "Heet" out of the medicine cabinet and told my mother to rub it on her neck. The next day her cough was gone. Later on, after I was gone hitchhiking west, a nurse friend of ours heard the story and said "Yes, it sounds like an allergy to the flowers." During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilizing physical opportunities to punish themselves because of their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last "miracle" because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.
Everybody in the family heard of my vision and what I did but they didn't seem to think much of it: in fact I didn't, either. And that was right. I was very rich now, a super myriad trillionaire in Samapatti transcendental graces, because of good humble karma, maybe because I had pitied the dog and forgiven men. But I knew now that I was a bliss heir, and that the final sin, the worst, is righteousness. So I would shut up and just hit the road and go see Japhy. "Don't let the blues make you bad," sings Frank Sinatra. On my final night in the woods, the eve of my departure by thumb, I heard the word "star-body" concerning how things don't have to be made to disappear but to awake, to their supremely pure truebody and star-body. I saw there was nothing to do because nothing ever happened, nothing ever would happen, all things were empty light. So I took off well fortified, with my pack, kissing my mother goodbye. She had paid five dollars to have brand new thick rubber soles with cleats put on the bottom of my old boots and now I was all set for a summer working in the mountains. Our old country-store friend, Buddhy Tom, a character in his own right, took me in his vehicle out to Highway 64 and there we waved goodbye and I started hitching three thousand miles back to California. I would be home again the next Christmas.
22
Meanwhile Japhy was waiting for me in his nice little shack in Corte Madera California. He was settled in Sean Monahan's hermitage, a wooden cabin built behind a cypress windrow on a steep little grassy hill also covered with eucalyptus and pine, behind Sean's main house. The shack had been built by an old man to die in, years ago. It was well built. I was invited to go live there as long as I wanted, rent free. The shack had been made habitable after years as a wreck, by Sean Monahan's brother-in-law Whitey Jones, a good young carpenter, who had put in burlap over the wood walls and a good woodstove and a kerosene lamp and then never lived in it, having to go to work out of town. So Japhy'd moved in to finish his studies and live the good solitary life. If anybody wanted to go see him it was a steep climb. On the floor were woven grass mats and Japhy said in a letter "I sit and smoke a pipe and drink tea and hear the wind beat the slender eucalyptus limbs like whips and the cypress windrow roars." He'd stay there until May 15, his sailing date for Japan, where he had been invited by an American foundation to stay in a monastery and study under a Master. "Meanwhile," wrote Japhy, "come share a wild man's dark cabin with wine and weekend girls and good pots of food and woodfire heat. Monahan will give us grocery bucks to fall a few trees in his big yard and buck and split 'em out for firewood and I'll teach you all about logging."
During that winter Japhy had hitchhiked up to his home-country in the Northwest, up through Portland in snow, farther up to the blue ice glacier country, finally northern Washington on the farm of a friend in the Nooksack Valley, a week in a berrypicker's splitshake cabin, and a few climbs around. The names like "Nooksack" and "Mount Baker National Forest" excited in my mind a beautiful crystal vision of snow and ice and pines in the Far North of my childhood dreams. . . . But I was standing on the very hot April road of North Carolina waiting for my first ride, which came very soon from a young high-school kid who took me to a country town called Nashville, where I broiled in the sun a half-hour till I got a ride from a taciturn but kindly naval officer who drove me clear to Greenville South Carolina. After that whole winter and early spring of incredible peace sleeping on my porch and resting in my woods, the stint of hitchhiking was harder than ever and more like hell than ever. In Greenville in fact I walked three miles in the burning sun for nothing, lost in the maze of downtown back streets, looking for a certain highway, and at one point passed a kind of forge where colored men were all black and sweaty and covered with coal and I cried "I'm suddenly in hell again!" as I felt the blast of heat.
But it began to rain on the road and few rides took me into the rainy night of Georgia, where I rested sitting on my pack under the overhanging sidewalk roofs of old hardware stores and drank a half pint of wine. A rainy night, no rides. When the Greyhound bus came I hailed it down and rode to Gainesville. In Gainesville I thought I'd sleep by the railroad tracks awhile but they were about a mile away and just as I thought of sleeping in the yard a local crew came out to switch and saw me, so I retired to an empty lot by the tracks, but the cop car kept circling around using its spot (had probably heard of me from the railroad men, probably not) so I gave it up, mosquitoes anyway, and went back to town and stood waiting for a ride in the bright lights by the luncheonettes of downtown, the cops seeing me plainly and therefore not searching for me or worrying about me.
But no ride, and dawn coming, so I slept in a four-dollar room in a hotel
and showered and rested well. But what feelings of homelessness and bleak, again, as the Christmas trip east. All I had to be really proud of were my fine new thick-soled workshoes and my full pack. In the morning, after breakfast in a dismal Georgia restaurant with revolving fans on the ceiling and mucho flies, I went out on the broiling highway and got a ride from a truckdriver to Flowery Branch Georgia, then a few spot rides on through Atlanta to the other side at another small town called Stonewall, where I was picked up by a big fat Southerner with a broadbrimmed hat who reeked of whisky and kept telling jokes and turning to look at me to see if I laughed, meanwhile sending the car spurting into the soft shoulders and leaving big clouds of dust behind us, so that long before he reached his destination I begged off and said I wanted to get off to eat.
"Heck, boy, I'll eat with ya 'n' drive ya on." He was drunk and he drove very fast.
"Well I gotta go to the toilet," I said trailing off my voice. The experience had bugged me so I decided, "The hell with hitchhiking. I've got enough money to take a bus to El Paso and from there I'll hop Southern Pacific freights and be ten times safer." Besides the thought of being all the way out in El Paso Texas in that dry Southwest of clear blue skies and endless desert land to sleep in, no cops, made up my mind. I was anxious to get out of the South, out of chaingang Georgia.
The bus came at four o'clock and we were at Birmingham Alabama in the middle of the night, where I waited on a bench for my next bus trying to sleep on my arms on my rucksack but kept waking up to see the pale ghosts of American bus stations wandering around: in fact one woman streamed by like a wisp of smoke, I was definitely certain she didn't exist for sure. On her face the phantasmal belief in what she was doing . . . On my face, for that matter, too. After Birmingham it was soon Louisiana and then east Texas oilfields, then Dallas, then a long day's ride in a bus crowded with servicemen across the long immense waste of Texas, to the ends of it, El Paso, arriving at midnight, by now I being so exhausted all I wanted to do was sleep. But I didn't go to a hotel, I had to watch my money now, and instead I just hauled my pack to my back and walked straight for the railroad yards to stretch my bag out somewhere behind the tracks. It was then, that night, that I realized the dream that had made me want to buy the pack.
