The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

After his breakthrough into the all-out confessional and bebopinspired style he named “spontaneous prose,” in a creative feat seldom matched in American letters, Kerouac had written five major novels between 1951 and 1955 that no publisher would touch—

“in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road,” was a sorcerer’s apprentice; once set in motion, he couldn’t stop.

footwalking freedom,”

“Practice charity without holding in mind any conceptions about charity, for charity after all is just a word.”

Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live.

I warned him at once I didn’t give a goddamn about the mythology and all the names and national flavors of Buddhism, but was just interested in the first of Sakyamuni’s four noble truths, All life is suffering.

“Great, hey Rosie?” I yelled, and she took a big slug from my jug

The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under and meditate on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.

But without further ado he uncapped the bottle himself and took a big slug and we all sat crosslegged and spent four hours screaming news at one another, one of the funniest nights.

“Pretty girls make graves,”

“Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda philosophy or social system that puts down sex,”

“But you know, Ray, Japhy is really sharp—he’s really the wildest craziest sharpest cat we’ve ever met. And what I love about him is he’s the big hero of the West Coast, do you realize I’ve been out here for two years now and hadn’t met anybody worth knowing really or anybody with any truly illuminated intelligence and was giving up hope for the West Coast? Besides all the background he has, in Oriental scholarship, Pound, taking peyote and seeing visions, his mountainclimbing and bhikkuing, wow, Japhy Ryder is a great new hero of American culture.”

“All Japhy’s doing is amusing himself in the void.”

Smith, I gotta tell you all about the romance of Northwest logging, like you keep talking about railroading, you shoulda seen the little narrow-gauge railways up there and those cold winter mornings with snow and your belly fulla pancakes and syrup and black coffee, boy, and you raise your doublebitted ax to your morning’s first log there’s nothing like it.”

colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class nonidentity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

“All these people,” said Japhy, “they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it’s all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.”

we stopped for gas and nothing but bluejeaned Elvis Presleys in the road, waiting to beat somebody up, but down beyond them the roar of fresh creeks and the feel of the high mountains not far away.

I went in and the pancakes were ready, hot and steaming, and poured syrup over my three pats of butter and cut them up and slurped hot coffee and ate.

“That’s what I like, hitchhiking around, feeling free,

his eyes shine with joy, he’s on his way, his heroes are John Muir and Han Shan and Shih-te and Li Po and John Burroughs and Paul Bunyan and Kropotkin;

“It don’t make a damn frigging difference whether you’re in The Place or hiking up Matterhorn, it’s all the same old void, boy.” And I mused about that and realized he was right, comparisons are odious, it’s all the same, but it sure felt great and suddenly I realized this (in spite of my swollen foot veins) would do me a lot of good and get me away from drinking and maybe make me appreciate perhaps a whole new way of living.

“Japhy I’m glad I met you. I’m gonna learn all about how to pack rucksacks and what to do and hide in these mountains when I’m sick of civilization.

there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.

“This is the way I like it, when you get going there’s just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy.”

“The secret of this kind of climbing,” said Japhy, “is like Zen. Don’t think. Just dance along. It’s the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen.” Which it was.

“Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,” said Japhy. “Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”

Ray when you’re up here you’re not sittin in a Berkeley tea room. This is the beginning and the end of the world right here.

Let’s ramble around and eat snowballs and drink water and wait.”

Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity

the air itself was enough to get your drunk ass drunk.

Then when he laid boughs over the rock of our clearing and the poncho over that he made sure his sleeping bag was farther away from the fire than mine so I would be sure to be warm. He was always practicing charity.

“Smith you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.”

There’s no feeling in the world like washing your face in cold water on a mountain morning.

moving like a little animate being in the immense void.

In no time at all it was two o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was getting that later more golden look

I remembered the famous Zen saying, “When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.”

“It’ll be mostly okay.” Morley pointed to the sliver of moon in the pinkening deepening blue sky. “That oughta light us a way.”

A little weariness’ll change a lot of things.

And that roaring creek was a beauty by moonlight, those flashes of flying moon water, that snow white foam, those black-as-pitch trees, regular elfin paradises of shadow and moon.

“That’s what’s the trouble with you Japhy, you’re just an old anarchist scared of society. What difference does it make? Comparisons are odious.”

We got in the car and drove back to San Francisco drinking and laughing and telling long stories and Morley really drove beautifully that night and wheeled us silently through the graying dawn streets of Berkeley as Japhy and I slept dead to the world in the seats.

a completely dreamless beautiful sleep.

danger makes you real again,

Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume,

Now listen to me, and when you have learned the Dharma of the Buddhas of old and yearned, to sit down with the truth, under a lonesome tree, in Yuma Arizony, or anywhere you be, don’t thank me for tellin, what was told me, this is the wheel I’m a-turnin, this is the reason I be: Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.’”

I wanta swim in rivers and drink goatmilk and talk with priests and just read Chinese books and amble around the valleys talking to farmers and their children.

“I wanta bicycle in hot afternoon heat, wear Pakistan leather sandals, shout in high voice at Zen monk buddies standing in thin hemp summer robes and stubble heads, wanta live in golden pavilion temples, drink beer, say goodbye, go Yokahama big buzz Asia port full of vassals and vessels, hope, work around, come back, go, go to Japan, come back to U.S.A., read Hakuin, grit my teeth and discipline myself all the time while getting nowhere and thereby learn…learn that my body and everything gets tired and ill and droopy and so find out all about Hakuyu.”

“Think of barn swallows and nighthawks filling the fields.

Only one thing I’ll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they’re not hurting anyone while they’re sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy…. I see him in future years stalking along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch.

But I had my own little bangtail ideas and they had nothing to do with the “lunatic” part of all this. I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas.