Kerouac’s Buddhism: When, Where, and Why It Began

I’ve always gravitated to Jack Kerouac’s more spiritual nature—his thoughts on the big questions that religions try to answer. What is life’s meaning and purpose? Why are things the way they are? Is there an order to the universe? Is someone watching over us? What are we to do with ourselves? Is there a right way to live? What constitutes the good? Why do bad things happen to good people and vice versa? How are we to deal with the knowledge of death; and what happens to us, to our loved ones, to everyone, afterward? Kerouac spent his life asking these questions, having been traumatized at age four with the death of his nine-year-old brother, Gerard. And in “My Sad Sunset Birth,” the first piece included in The Buddhist Years, a new collection of writings from Kerouac’s archive, Kerouac, then 19, writes of the moment as a six year old when his spiritual questioning began:

I was walking along the sidewalk with my sled, unborn, and suddenly I saw everything, the old glow of dying sun, chimneys stringing off mournful smoke upward, snowbanks in the street being pink and sadly hunched—and I was born. “Pourquois?” I asked myself. “Pourquois?” Which is exactly what I ask myself even today. (36)

The Buddhist Years is the third in a series of writings drawn from the Kerouac archive published by Rare Bird Books and Sal Paradise Press under the auspices of the Kerouac estate. Jim Sampas, the estate’s literary executor, has been granting researchers much broader access to the archive’s vast wealth of material, which deepens our understanding of Kerouac and his methods. Desolation Peak (2022), the series’ first release, for instance, dramatizes Kerouac’s struggles both spiritually (his quest for ultimate enlightenment and inner peace) and creatively (his search for the proper form and direction of his writing, torn between more conventional approaches and his spontaneous sketching technique, ultimately choosing the latter). Self-Portrait (2024), which encompasses Kerouac’s whole writing career, shows the seriousness of his artistic strivings from an early age, the depth of his self-examination, and his writings’ stylistic range. What The Buddhist Years reveals is the earnestness of Kerouac’s spiritual strivings both for himself and for others: he sought to share his discoveries and to convert, bringing “The Happy Truth” to relieve people’s suffering. In several pieces included in this collection, he also tells the story of what led him to Buddhism, and while they include slight discrepancies, they correct some misperceptions. Meanwhile, through my own investigations reading through the same Buddhist texts that he did (e.g., the bibliography he offers in Some of the Dharma (SOD 8), etc.), I can provide some additional details regarding Kerouac’s intensive study of Eastern philosophy over a two-and-a half year period, from the fall of 1953 to the spring of 1956.

One of the misperceptions that has lingered over the years is the sense that Kerouac’s “serious” study of Buddhism began in February 1954 while staying with the Cassadys in San Jose, California. Neal and Carolyn had recently read Many Mansions, Gina Cerminara’s book about Edgar Cayce, a clairvoyant who advocated beliefs including karma and reincarnation based on the Christian notion of the immortality of the soul. When Jack arrived, they advocated Cayce’s ideas, and in order to counter them, Jack retreated to the San Jose Library, where he read, among other books, A Buddhist Bible, a collection of Buddhist texts edited by Dwight Goddard. This version of events has been presented, with some variation, in many Kerouac biographies, and over the years it has become even more prevalent, to the point where a Google search today reveals it as an accepted truth, espoused by AI, Wikipedia, and numerous other sources, some versions saying that Jack found the book in the San Jose Library, and others that he stole it.

Three pieces included in The Buddhist Years serve to correct the record. Of these, “The Long Night of Life,” written in December 1954, states that his “discovery of the dharma” (universal truth) began “the moment I went to the library in December 1953 and took a book called ‘Sacred Books of the East’ and opened it accidentally to ‘The Life of Buddha’ and saw these words: ‘O worldly men! how fatally deluded! beholding everywhere the body brought to dust, yet everywhere the more carelessly living; the heart is neither lifeless wood nor stone, and yet it thinks not ‘All is Vanishing’” (151-52). Next, “On the Path,” written in Mexico City in August 1955 just before writing his Mexico City Blues poems, Kerouac offers a more detailed story of how his Buddhist study began. In this case he dates it earlier and makes it clear that the instigator was his breakup with Alene Lee (Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans):

It was November. I had just concluded a love affair with a girl who was so pretty to me she had driven me mad and sometimes sex-mad … I came out of it feeling like an old and lousy man whom no girl would ever cleave to again. […]      

Idly I thumbed through Thoreau, procured at the library. Interested I was in the thoughts of a hermit in the woods. […] Thoreau talks of Hindoos, philosophies from the other side of the sunrise where you put a stop to everything and everything stops with you. And he alluded to mysteries of silent profundity. Afternoons I crossed the railyards, slowly, and went to the little library […] I took a book on Oriental Philosophies and Religions.

At home at night in my sweet and quiet room I perused the news about the Indian Bhagavad heroes, the Zendavesta, the Koran, till I came to Asvaghosha’s Life of Buddha (translated by Samuel Beal) and there I stopped.

“Rest beyond heaven,” in effect it said. Buddha says you dont have to struggle to go to heaven, all you have to do is rest beyond heaven. There is no heaven, and no no-heaven either. All that is to be done, has long been done. Saved, sweet hero. Sufferer, your suffering is stopped. All life is suffering. So ignore life. The cause of suffering is ignorant craving. Grab no more at pretty girls. The suppression of suffering can be achieved.

“What?” I thought, always thought it was impossible. “Suppression of suffering” is possible. Thought after thought, torment after torment, night after night of human loneliness when it rains on a cold night—fears—all poof! “They dont even exist—They are illusions of the mortal mind.”

“Get you to a quiet place in the woods, sit down under a tree, stop, realize, and slip into Nirvana from whence you originally came, perfect like you always suspected you were.”

I was dazed. I got out Lin Yutang too. All books. For the first time since I was a kid in my mother’s house, I sat in my room reading seriously deep into the night. […]

I read the Surangama Sutra, the little of it in Lin Yutang’s book, then went to the NY Public Library to get the rest, emerging with a stolen copy of Goddard’s Buddhist Bible under my belt and walking jubilant down the waterfront, safe from all harm.

“It’s a sin to steal my books but my purpose is to absorb this, then I will return it in five or ten years.”

All the instructions and disciplines were there. I began to make plans to leave New York City and head for the open country where I could meditate undisturbed under trees. In America, with my stolen Bible, covers sliced off and covered with soft leather and held in by rubber bands and holy and as soft as a foodstuff to my reverent touch (195-97).

The reference to “Yin Yutang’s book,” by the way, refers to The Wisdom of India and China, one of the first texts Kerouac was drawn to and which also led him to appreciate Taoist philosophy. The phrase “spit forth intelligence,” which Ginsberg used referring to Kerouac in his dedication to Howl and Other Poems, comes from the section “On Tolerance” by Chuangtse (Zhuangzi) in that book, which Jack first quoted in his “Dharma A” notebook (see SOD 14): “Rest in inaction, and the world will be reformed of itself. Forget your body and SPIT FORTH INTELLIGENCE. Ignore all differences and become one with the Infinite. Release yr mind and free yr spirit. Be vacuous, be devoid of soul. Thus things will grow and prosper and return […] to their root.”

The third piece in The Buddhist Years, entitled “Avalokitesvara,” written in May 1957, is yet another attempt to tell the story of his discovery of Buddhism, this one written in wilder, more digressive prose. Many of the details are the same: again he dates the beginning as November, the impetus the breakup with Alene Lee, and the first step the re-reading of Thoreau’s Walden, declaring himself suicidal and contemplating a forest retreat. (He also mentions a Korean prisoner-of-war cap he was wearing symbolizing his abject state, although in “On the Path” he bought it “to wear to work on the railroad to get money for baby” (195) and in “Avalokitesvara” “they were selling them to painters and bums in Army Navy stores, my mother’d bought it, it was too small for my head” (228). Again, Thoreau’s references to “Hindoos” intrigued him. Kerouac was broke, of course, despondent over not only his lost love but also his inability to be published, having written five novels in the past two-and-a-half years. So it was this quote from Walden that likely inspired his inquiry:

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm)

Both versions also credit his reading of Aśvaghoşa’s Buddhacarita (Life of Buddha), translated by Samuel Beal, as the launching point, which makes sense psychologically: In the Buddha’s story Kerouac read of a prince who retreated from a life of luxury, forsaking his family and all worldly possessions, to seek the truth and an end to suffering. Kerouac, “an unself-confident man, at the same time […] an egomaniac, naturally” (Sub 1), could readily imagine himself on such a journey.

There is ample evidence corroborating these Buddhist Years accounts. In his letter to Stella Sampas dated October 12, 1955, he told a similar story – that after a

wild summer, ending in despair and sadness, over unrequited love […] miracle of miracles, in October [1953], sadly walking across the railyards by the full sad yellow moon, I went to the library to pick up books on Oriental Philosophy and came up, idly, with Asvhaghosha’s Career of Buddha, or Buddha-Charita, which I read with heavy heart getting lighter every hour, rushing back to the library for more Buddhism, ending, with one night, complete enlightened realization that life is like a great strange dream taking place in something (that whole blue sky) as endless as endlessness and suddenly where I saw the words “If a disciple will simply practice kindness he will immediately attain Highest Perfect Wisdom” (SL1 525-26).

The first of the Dharma notebooks, which Kerouac labeled “Dharma A,” shows how his Buddhist notetaking began organically: the notebook’s first 36 pages contain dreams later included in Book of Dreams, and then his Buddhist notes begin in the same way as in Some of the Dharma, with the “FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS,” the “8 Fold Path,” etc.). Many notebook pages later, a poem dated “Dec. 8 – 53” begins “Day by day / Haggard and dull signs on / the sheen of this skin —” which appears undated in SOD 5. In SOD 8, after listing his Buddhist “BIBLIOGRAPHY,” he states in parentheses that he has “Goddard’s Buddhist Bible” in his possession. And further on in Dharma A there’s a heading of “EL DORADO, ARKANSAS” (SOD 16) followed after a few more pages by a salacious transcription of writing from “EL PASO SHITHOUSE WALL” (not included in SOD), so it is only at that point that he’s en route west. The first indication that he has reached California is when he transcribes “DIALOG BETWEEN MAN AND CHILDREN” (Jamie and Cathy Cassady) in SOD 17-18.

As for whether he in fact stole the copy of A Buddhist Bible from the Richmond Hill branch of the New York Public Library, there is his letter to Allen Ginsberg dated September 8, 1958. In an earlier letter (May 1954) he’d told Ginsberg that it was “by far the best book because it contains the Surangama Sutra and the Lankavatra [sic] Scripture, not to mention the 11-page Diamond Sutra which is the last word, and Asvaghosha’s Awakening of Faith, and the Tao” (SL1 415-16). Four years later, still trying to convince Ginsberg of Buddhism’s truths, he told him (writing from his home in Northport, LI, to Allen in Manhattan), “you know where to go … Surangama Sutra, Lankavatara Scripture, Diamond Sutra, the MAHAYANA WRITINGS […] so, just get Dwight Goddard’s Buddhist Bible in Library unless they havent replaced the copy I stole)” (SL2 149). Ironically, eight days later Allen wrote back, stating, “I’m reading the Goddard book which three years ago I stole from I think San Jose library and have been carrying around since” (JK-AG 411). So this is perhaps how the story of Kerouac’s having stolen it from that library came about.

It’s worth mentioning that Kerouac’s investigation into Buddhism in the fall of 1953 was not his first exposure to it. Ginsberg spoke several times of the influence of Raymond Weaver, a Columbia University professor renowned for launching the Melville Revival in the 1920s, having written the first Melville biography (Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, G.H. Doran, 1921) and discovered the Billy Budd manuscript among Melville’s papers. Weaver, who had spent three years teaching English in Japan, was knowledgeable about Zen and incorporated it into his Columbia classes. In the mid-1940s, before writing The Town and the City, Kerouac brought a manuscript for Weaver to read (perhaps The Sea Is My Brother, although Ginsberg was unsure of this), and Weaver had given Kerouac a reading list that included The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the early Gnostics, Plotinus “[m]aybe something Chinese of Taoist” (JB 42) “and I think some Zen classics. So Weaver perceived immediately the magical aspect of Kerouac’s character and his mystical potential” (EP 3). Also, in the spring of 1953, Ginsberg himself, while studying Chinese painting, read D.T. Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism. His enthusiasm is evident in his letter to Neal Cassady of May 14, 1953, where he writes of “SATORI, or illumination […] a specific flash of vision” and in his poem “Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain,” which includes the refrain “humility is beatness” (AG:CP 90-91). He also tells Cassady, “Zen also says ‘There is no god’ and ‘god is big toe’ and ‘I am god’ and “don’t presume to think you are god” (AE 141-42). He may well have shared his discoveries with Kerouac (he was living in New York and the two frequently socialized once Kerouac returned in July) although in his own study, Jack rejected Zen, favoring the Mahayana texts he found in A Buddhist Bible and elsewhere.

The three stories included in The Buddhist Years where Kerouac writes of his discovery of Buddhism are all preliminary attempts at later works, “The Long Night of Life” being something of a precursor to Visions of Gerard, written a year later, and all three were seemingly abandoned because their focus was on Kerouac himself, whereas in The Dharma Bums, written two-and-a-half years after “On the Path” and six months after “Avalokitesvara,” he shifted the focus onto Gary Snyder. Kerouac wrote another version in June 1957, soon after “Avalokitesvara,” which he later published as one of his “Last Word” columns for Escapade magazine in October 1959.[1] In it he again attributes the impetus to his breakup with Alene Lee:

… after a bad love affair [I] sat in my lonely November room thinking “It’s all a bog crrrrok, I wanta die,” […] yet these thoughts didn’t stand up to the Four Noble Truths as propounded by Buddha and which I memorized under a streetlamp in the cold wind of night […] But it was Ashvaghosa’s incomparable phrase that hooked me on the true morphine of the Buddha: “REPOSE BEYOND FATE” – because since life is nothing but a short vague dream encompassed round by flesh and tears […] “repose beyond fate” meant “rest beyond what happens to you,” “give it up, sit, forget it, stop thinking” […] And all things vanished, what was left was the United Stuff out of which all things appeared to be made of without being made into anything really, all things I then saw as unsubstantial trickery of the mind, furthermore it was already long gone out of sight, the liquid waterball earth a speck in sizeless spaces … (GB 165-67).

A sidenote about this reference to “repose beyond fate” is that it doesn’t actually appear in Aśvaghoşa’s Buddhacarita; it’s a term that Kerouac made up himself—i.e., his takeaway from reading the text. Yet in his letters, his notebooks, and Some of the Dharma he attributes that and other such phrases as actual quotes. See, for example, in “On the Path” (quoted above) where he writes, “‘Rest beyond heaven,’ in effect it said” (italics mine). Explanation for this appears in Kerouac’s “Author’s Note” to Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, where he writes that the text “contains quotations from the Sacred Scriptures of the Buddhist Canon, some quoted directly, some mingled with new words, some not quotations but made up of new words of my own selection. […] The purpose is to convert” (5-6). And we can see him further playing with the phrase “repose beyond fate” when he writes “FREELY RELAX BEYOND CONSCIOUSNESS” and “Retire beyond happiness” in SOD 234. So let this serve as a warning not to take Kerouac’s words too literally.

One more version of Kerouac’s discovery of Buddhism appeared in the October 1960 issue of Escapade: Al Aronowitz’s article “The Yen for Zen,” in which he quotes Kerouac extensively:

How did I become a Buddhist? Well, after that love affair I described in The Subterraneans, I didn’t know what to do. I went home and just sat in my room, hurting. I was suffering, you know, from the grief of losing a love, even though I really wanted to lose it. Well, I went to the library to read Thoreau. I said “I’m going to cut out from civilization and go back and live in the woods like Thoreau,” and I started to read Thoreau and he talked about Hindu philosophy. So I put Thoreau down and took out, accidentally, The Life of Buddha by Ashvaghosa (52).

Speaking of the Buddha, Kerouac goes on to state, “So, he discovered that the world didn’t really exist, and it doesn’t exist, except in some relationship to the form of being, which fits me perfectly. I have some eighteen-year-old writings which are pure Buddhism!” (52). For an example of this, see “Where the Road Begins” in Atop an Underwood, written when Kerouac was 18. And in regard to his desire to “live in the woods like Thoreau,” The Buddhist Years includes a lot of evidence that he was serious in this pursuit. A section entitled “Ascetic Plans for the Future” contains lists of what to bring for subsistence living in the woods or a Mexican hut, and the book’s illustrations include pages from a notebook primarily devoted to Book of Sketches: one giving directions to follow “Pomo Trails” east from Mendocino, CA, to an area south of Tulle Lake; another with a hand-drawn map of the same (see fig. 1); and seven pages devoted to identifying edible mushrooms and plants from those that are poisonous (see figs. 2 & 3). While making these plans, though, Kerouac wavered. In a list entitled “ELEMENTS OF THE BASIC DECEIT” he includes fears such as “Changeminding,” “No patience or stamina,” “Cowardice,” and “Appetites rule,” as well as “Fears Specifically” regarding regions where he was considering hermiting, calling Mexico “Alien scorpion land,” etc. (181). Also in The Buddhist Years is a story entitled “The City and the Path, written in April 1955,” in which Peter Martin is

living the life of a religious hermit in a hollow in the hills outside of Tenancingo, Mexico, a tiny village at the end of the road […] Now it was almost Autumn, he had spend six months living and meditating in his hermitage, which consisted of a grass sitting-mat under a tree and a crudely, thickly piled system of branches further off to which he resorted when it rained. He was living in accordance with the ancient rules of the homeless disciples of all the Buddhas of old. […] For six months he had gradually begun to ascend the stages to true apprehension of the emptiness of reality, divine by nature. Nevertheless he was still attached to the notion of his self and his meditations were often interrupted by a bug, a noise in the thicket, a stray memory of life past in the town and the city in America. (187)

The story describes his thoughts amid his daily existence, which includes a monthly six-mile walk into town for supplies. He does his best to keep his thoughts and behavior pure, but he is tempted by the beauty of the “beautiful brownskinned maidens” of Tenancingo, and “whenever he succumbed to a bottle of mescal in the Village, bringing it back to the hermitage with a few bottles of orange pop, and getting drunk on mescal cocktails in the hitherto holy night of his previous month’s meditation, on the following day he experienced strong and sickly thoughts of pornographic sexuality” (188). At the end of the story, after writing a letter to Leon Levinsky [Ginsberg] in New York, the temptations of returning to city life prove too much, and he decides to leave his hermitage, saying to himself, “‘If I was a piece of empty space I’d be perfectly enlightened and I’d never run off into thoughts like this and I wouldnt even have to practice solitary asceticism. I would be a perfect Tao cloud, floating, dissolving, returning to origin in nothingness. But I’m foolish Peter, hankering after life” (194). That attitude proved prescient as the following year, in the summer of 1956, hoping to achieve ultimate enlightenment, he lived in solitude for two months atop Desolation Peak as a U.S. Forest Service fire lookout, and the effort proved a failure, marking the start of the diminishing of his Buddhist beliefs.

On my most recent trip to the New York Public Library for further research in the Berg Collection’s Kerouac archive, I was able to inspect a treasure: Kerouac’s copy of A Buddhist Bible. Just as he described it in “On the Path,” the book is stripped of its front and back covers to remove evidence of its being a library copy, and it’s protected in a homemade jacket of plain dark-brown leather. Also, surprisingly, there are almost no annotations. On the blank first page, Kerouac wrote in pencil a quote from Aśvaghoşa’s Buddhacarita that he also included in “The City and the Path”: “In solitude of desert hermitage nourish a still and peaceful heart” (see figs. 4 & 5).[2] In the “Maha-Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya” (aka the Heart Sutra), he crossed out one word, changing “emptiness is sensation” to “emptiness is perception,” anticipating his effort to transliterate the Diamond Sutra into language more attuned to a modern, Western audience. And in the Diamond Sutra itself he made very light penciled notations in the top right corners of the pages to indicate his reordering of the text into seven daily readings, which he did while on Desolation Peak, calling it “The Diamondcutter of Perfect Wisdom” (see DP 243-65). The care that he took to preserve the book is evidence, I think, of his reverence for it and his overall seriousness of purpose. While he admitted to himself that stealing it was a sin, he certainly used it for a good, productive purpose, exposing generations of readers to its teachings.

Figures 1-5 used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate.

The Buddhist Years will be available in hardcover and as an audiobook on May 6, 2025.

Thanks to Jerry Cimino of San Francisco’s Beat Museum and new Counterculture Museum for suggesting this essay.

Works Cited:

AE = As Ever: The collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, ed. by Barry Gifford. Creative Arts Book Company, 1977.

AG:CP = Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems 1947-1980. Harper & Row, 1984.

DP = Desolation Peak: Collected Writings, ed. by Charles Shuttleworth. Rare Bird Books / Sal Paradise Press, 2024.

EP = Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac, ed. by Paul Maher, Jr. Thunders Mouth Press, 2005.

GB = Good Blonde & Others, ed. by Donald Allen. Grey Fox Press, 1993.

JB =  Gifford, Barry, and Lee, Lawrence, Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. St. Martin’s Press, 1978.

JK-AG = Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, ed. by Bill Morgan and David Stanford. Penguin Books, 2011.

Sub = The Subterraneans. Grove Press, 1958.

SL1 = Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. by Ann Charters. Penguin Books, 1995.

SL2 = Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. by Ann Charters. Penguin Books, 1995.

SOD = Some of the Dharma. Penguin Books, 1997.

[1] The original version is in the New York Public library’s Kerouac archive, Berg Collection 19.17: “Berkeley Way – June 1957.” (Begins: “Because none of us want to think that the universe is a blank dream . . .”).

[2] The actual quote in the Samuel Beal translation reads “in quiet solitude of desert hermitage nourish and cherish a still and peaceful heart.”