Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation [Paperback]

Carole Tonkinson (Editor)

Book Description

Release date: September 1, 1995

Essays, poems, photographs, and letters explore the link between Buddhism and the Beats--with previously unpublished material from several beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Diane diPrima.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the early '50s, Allen Ginsberg began to dabble in Buddhism on one coast while Jack Kerouac (with the help of Gary Snyder, the model for Kerouac's hero in The Dharma Bums) expanded on his Transcendentalist-based interest in Eastern religion on the other. In 1955, with Ginsberg's famous reading of "Howl" at Six Gallery in San Francisco, East and West came together. The poetry and prose of this anthology shows the beat movement as a direct link between Emerson and Thoreau and the "new consciousness" of Eastern philosophy, which places the power of the individual at the spiritual center of life. Though some have criticized the beats as armchair Buddhists with Western values, most of them took their study of Eastern religion seriously: meditating, reading scriptures and, in some cases, traveling to Japan and becoming disciples of monks. Through poetry, letters, journal entries, interviews and lectures, Tonkinson, former managing editor of Tricycle, traces not only the relationships between these seminal figures and their influence on other writers, but also their shared beliefs.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The degree to which the Buddhist explorations of the Beat writers have pervaded American society and shaped the acceptance and development of that religion here has often been given a rather timid nod. This anthology, edited by Tonkinson, formerly of Tricycle magazine, serves to place the Beats and their influence in perspective. The volume takes from each writer only work that has a clear connection to Buddhist thought, hence a picture emerges of a well-developed, if occasionally naive, grasp of the central concepts of Buddhism in its various forms. Familiar names like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder are well represented as are writers less well known; special sections are devoted to those who, while not considered part of the Beat movement, either influenced the Beats or were influenced by them. The result is a nicely organized collection that makes a convincing case for placing the Beats in the mainstream of any discussion of the coming of the dharma to the West. Highly recommended.?Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib.,
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 387 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade; Riverhead ed edition (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573225010
• ISBN-13: 978-1573225014
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,114,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Beat Generation

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Buddhism and the Beat Generation December 12, 2000

By Rod L. Phillips

Format:Paperback

This anthology makes a statement which has been needed for 50 years: the Beat Movement was at its core a spiritual quest. Beat poets and novelists of the 1950s hungered for something more satisfying than the mainstream Judeo-Christianity of Eisenhower's America. For many writers of the Beat era, this search for enlightenment brought them to Buddhism. Editor Carole Tonkinson has gathered together a terrific complilation of Beat writings on Buddhism, including major figures in the Beat canon such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. But more interestingly, she has also included texts by less well known Beats such as Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, Albert Saijo, and Harold Norse. The introductory essay, by Stephen Prothero, does an excellent job of providing literary and historical background for the Beat movement's embrace of Eastern thought. Several excellent anthologies of Beat writing have been released in the last decade, but this one is the best for readers who want to understand the profoundly spiritual roots of this group of cultural rebels.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting collection April 19, 2010

By Lily Penny

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Carole Tonkinson's "Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and The Beat Generation" is a collection of writings from various poets associated with the "Beat" era. In the introduction, Tonkinson makes clear that her point is to show the undeniable connection between the Beat poets and Buddhism. She wants to show that despite the historical depictions of the Beats as "nihilists", they were in fact spiritual people whose religious practices heavily influenced their writing. She claims that the most influential of these religious practices originated in the East and focused on Buddhist ethics and practice. Many of these people, she says, not only practiced Buddhism but practiced other faiths as well, including Catholicism, Judaism, and many more. Her most important claim is that despite most people's conception of the Beats as nihilists, they were actually spiritual writers trying desperately to convey their experiences to others. She says, "The Beats, like the Transcendentalists, were committed to sharing these insights with other through their words" (Tonkinson 20).

Tonkinson proves her claim about the Beat poets by organizing her book into chapters, with each chapter containing several or many works by a particular writer. For each writer she begins by giving a short biography and, where applicable, an overview of the writer's major connections to other Beat poets of the generation. She starts with a section titled "The Beats", which contains chapters for each of several major East Coast Beat poets. The next section, "The San Francisco Poets", has chapters pertaining to poets based in San Francisco and the West Coast. The third section is called "Echoes" and is similar poetry written a few years after the Beat era.... The last section is called "Like Minds" and has writings from people who expressed similar interests and ideas, but were not directly associated with the other Beat poets.

For a reader to new to this subject, this book is an excellent introduction to Beat writers and the generation as a whole. The introductions both at the beginning for the entire book and at the beginning of each chapter are very informative and help to secure the basis for the book. It is easy to see the connections between the writers throughout the book and see how they fit together as not only writers of the same era, but as a community. These introductions also do a wonderful job of pointing out where each of these people found their Buddhist ideas and made it clear that they were writing for the purpose of spreading political and religious messages. The organization of keeping all of the works by each author together was also very clear and helped make it easy to keep up with where the ideas in the poems were coming from. The only thing that was not very strong with this book was that Tonkinson places the works of writers who were less connected to the movement at the end of the book. This makes the reader become less interested at the end of the book and more likely to skip these last authors who had less to do with the generation as a whole. She counters this by placing a "Coda" at the end called "Jack Kerouac's Dream". This ensures that the book's final pages relate directly to the important pieces of text, and makes the book cohesive by beginning and ending with the same author. Read more ›

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A fresh angle on two cool topics! April 29, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Poets, buddhists and a lively history of how they mixed together. . . this is a great read for anyone who likes the beat poets OR the buddhist view of the world. There are details and connections and insights in this book that you won't find anywhere else

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars In-depth review: beyond the hype August 26, 2012

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

"Show me a good Buddhist novelist." So challenges William Burroughs, in italics. In his Retreat Diaries, he prefaces this with a nod to how he uses writing for meditation. However, he distrusts giving up what Buddhism deems "distractions" such as "visions and fireworks" in order to find creativity. "Indeed existence is the cause of suffering and suffering may be good copy." (298)

This tension permeates many within this anthology subtitled "Buddhism and the Beat Generation." The editor conflates the Buddhist transmission with the literary and intellectual impact of the Beats. She argues for a more spiritual appreciation of their cultural mission, and she shows briefly how what had been orally passed along in Asia now started to find Western recipients, eager to learn not from books but each other the dharma. Some poets had stumbled upon the teachings on their own, and were astonished to learn that others had preceded them. Jack Kerouac strutted into a gathering announcing himself a Zen "expert" only to find that all those there knew at least one Asian language.

Tonkinson arranges authors by "The Beats" (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, Harold Norse); "The San Francisco Poets'' (Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, Lew Welch among others); "Echoes" (Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure); "Like Minds," fellow travelers Kenneth Rexroth and Anne Waldman. Stephen Prothero adds an introductory essay emphasizing how the "middle way" of the Beats, inspired by Transcendentalism a century before, connected the "early era of armchair Buddhism" with the contemporary practice of a formal setting and recognized teacher.... As this 1995 collection comes under the aegis of the American Buddhist review Tricycle, it fits into the readership anticipating a sustained presentation of Beats as bhikkus. Examined carefully, hints of complexity emerge to counter the usual pop culture marketed storyline.

Kerouac's familiar celebration of Japhy's (Snyder) "rucksack revolution" appears from "Dharma Bums." Yet, less famous works do too: he watches a Mexican bullfight as "the bull slid in dust like a dead fly kicked unconsciously." So does his 1960 departure from a Buddhist affiliation via an interview in a "men's magazine" Escapade. Kerouac explains how he could no longer reject the love of women (while the as of 1995 unpublished "Some of the Dharma" notebooks document his earlier, more fervent stages in exhaustive detail, a facsimile of the notebooks he kept while trying to live like a monk in the world).

Tonkinson does not include those notebooks or Kerouac's life of the Buddha, "Wake Up!" (Copyright issues may be to blame, as both works appeared only in the next decade.) Still, the editor shows how he and Ginsberg utilized meditation--as would Burroughs in less dogmatically earnest fashion--to inspire insight for prose and verse. Spontaneous writing guides them, and it's not so much writing as reading, Burroughs insists, what has previously been revealed. Ginsberg ties this to the "actual breath" for the line, and this expands for him and the 60's revolutionary stances assumed by Diane Di Prima into a "spiritual poetics," a "disembodied" adaptation of Keats' "negative capability."

Lew Welch tried to follow a hermit's path, taking Kerouac's direction further. He fashioned North American koans. In "He Prepares to Take Leave of His Hut," he ends up with two juxtaposed quotes. "Why should it be so hard to give up something you know you can't possess?" "Who ever said it was easy?" (259) He wound up ending his life.

Gary Snyder sought nature also, and found more healing and similar honesty there. He contrasts in a 1977 essay here the mountains and waters of Asian "mythic iconography" with the "dusty world" of 7-Elevens and parking meters to which we must return. His 1961/9 essay "Buddhist Anarchism" gains inclusion. It calls for the "mercy" of the Western "social revolution" joined to the Eastern "individual insight into the basic self/void." (178) This compliments the reminder from that essay about the cost exacted of "natural-spiritual price" when we pay for "this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving." (182)

Snyder's journey to a more formal identification with Japanese practice intersects with Philip Whalen, who wound up leading a San Francisco monastery. Still, Joanne Kyger--in a poem about his green Walgreen's tropical hat perched high on his bald pate as he sits--finds humor in such a meditative state. It concludes: {...}I ask him which mantra he is doing--but he tells me/ in Zen, you don't have to bother with any of that./ You can just play with the beads." (239)

Finally, Kenneth Rexroth, who as an earlier student of Asian culture as well as a proto-radical had jump-started the Beats out in San Francisco even as he then quickly sidestepped away from the hype, weighs in. His poetry tends to be more academically mainstream, more controlled. Similarly, he finds a more analytical ground in his 1980 interview "The Jewel Net of Indra" with the pioneering chronicler of Buddhism in the U.S, Rick Fields. Rexroth preferred less explicit identification with Buddhism until much later than the Beats. He sought to accommodate the dharma within a more eclectic mindset, as did in a different fashion on paper his contemporary Burroughs.

Still both men, as the Beats themselves, could not fall in line with conformity. Rexroth's anarchism (shared with Snyder) meshed with his pacifism. "A life lived according to the Buddha law will not need much. If Christianity was put into effect tomorrow every state on earth would collapse in twenty-four hours." (336) He may differ somewhat from other radicals, as he places Buddhist practice apart from political alignment. He takes pains to show how Zen had been connected with right-wing Japanese movements, and how the power structure in many Asian regimes helped form a "synthetic" Buddhism abhorred by "Buddhologists" from the West who seek in vain to recover a pure form from the "so-called historic Shakyamuni." (337-9) For Rexroth, the meaning lies in recognizing that evil is always present, and always passes. War continued as sport under the Buddhist reigns in Japan, for fun. Honesty exacts a toll. Illusion is confronted and worn down by steady observation and principled scrutiny. He cites St. John of the Cross: "the measure of the defect of vision is visions."

Here, Rexroth as elder statesmen comes round to what one of his first Beat proteges also figured out, in time, by that Escapade interview in 1960. "Buddhism is just words. Also, wisdom is heartless. I quit Buddhism because Buddhism--or Mahayana Buddhism--preaches against entanglement with women. To me, the most important thing in life is love." (83) As you can see, this anthology reveals many provocative moments, and it digs deeper than the stereotypes to uncover--beneath trace elements of pious smugness inherent to shallower Beat braggadocio--the core of a tougher, sometimes playful but often more persistent, existential, and everyday dharma as encountered and transformed.

(See my reviews of Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums," "Some of the Dharma," "Wake Up! A Life of the Buddha" and "On the Road: the Original Scroll." I also reviewed Prothero's subsequent "Religious Literacy" and "The American Bible") Read more ›

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars If you love poetry and admire buddhism... December 18, 2008

By R. Williams

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Well, I growing more and more interested in Buddhism and had learned about the Beat poets, so I ordered this book. I actually, waited until I'd gotten a decent grasp on Buddhism (few courses and independent study) to really explore this book. I must admit I did read some of my favorite poets upon receiving it just to get a taste of what was in store.

But I was recommended this book by a creative writing teacher as an undergrad who said my work reminded him of the works included in this book. He read a few poems in class and that piqued my interest. Anyway, great book...Four stars only because it is an overview in my opinion and these cannot fully succeed by nature...