Syncretic Visions of the Buddha: Melding and Convergence in the Work of Kerouac and Ginsberg

The field of Beat studies has at times struggled for academic legitimacy. In the preface to The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, Kostas Myrsiades notes “the academy’s hostility towards the Beats” (2002, ix), while in her introduction to Reconstructing the Beats, Jennie Skerl observes that “[a]lthough influential in many artistic circles and bohemian enclaves and celebrated in the burgeoning youth culture, these writers and many other less famous Beats were condemned and ridiculed by mass media journalists, the then-reigning public intellectuals, and by academic critics.” As a result, “very little serious criticism appeared in the 1960s and 70s, and the Beats were largely excluded from academic discourse” (Skerl 2004, 1). William Lawlor echoes both Myrsiades and Skerl:

That the Beats should be a subject of study in the established halls of learning is a peculiar, multi-faceted irony. The Beats scorned stuffy academics, insisting that the literary establishment was boring. Various scholars and professors, distrustful of young, outspoken nonconformists, belittled the Beats. Neither group envisioned the Beat Generation as part of the curriculum in schools and universities.

(Lawlor 2000, 232).

Clearly, the Beats have not been the most popular denizens of the ivory tower—although as Lawlor indicates, not that they would have wanted to be.

Having said that, Beat studies experienced a revival during and after the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and as Skerl notes, the field has been further establishing its academic credibility ever since (2004, 1). Recent trends in Beat studies include a broad impulse to expand the canon of Beat literature; a feminization of Beat culture through the inclusion of women and by documenting the ancillary but integral roles that women played in Beat culture; and a theoretical “reconstruct[ion]” and reinterpretation of the Beats through a process of “re-historicizing,” “recovering,” and “re-visioning” (2004).

Two recent works continue this move toward rethinking Beat culture and Beat literature, Nancy M. Grace’s Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination (2007) and Peter Trigilio’s Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (2007). Each takes a different approach, but taken together both studies examine how personal struggles with religion and sexuality led the respective authors on quests for meaning and truth, quests that led them eventually toward Buddhism as a philosophy for their own lives, and by extension their literary works. Each book considers how its subject used the teachings of Buddhism in their own way in an attempt to reconcile and resolve competing ideologies that were at the heart of their own inner struggles. By “melding” (Trigilio 2007, 20, 192; Grace 2007, 14) competing ideologies and seeking their “convergence” (Trigilio 2007, 4), Kerouac and Ginsberg engaged in a conscious syncretism of opposing forces. Using this syncretism as a focal point and theoretical filter, both studies argue that the Buddhist influences present in the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg respectively were not simply an “easy Easternness” (33), in which Buddhist teachings and themes are adopted whenever it was convenient, but instead were the result of a serious and disciplined applications of Buddhist teachings in an effort to find meaning and spirituality in their own lives. The careful application of those teachings in their writing resulted in a form of carefully constructed “wisdom literature” in the case of Kerouac (Grace 2007, 22), and a “Buddhist poetics” for Ginsberg (Trigilio 2007, ix).

Grace’s study reaches beyond a focus on Buddhism—or the Buddhist-Catholic tension—in Kerouac’s life, and also attempts to detail Kerouac’s overall “literary imagination,” and his efforts at negotiating and incorporating an American master narrative (12),the figure of the American folk hero (13), American literary romance (14), and the mindset of an unstated but present American gnosticism (17) that ran contrary to Buddhism’s emphasis on...