A fan's notes on the Awakened One.Iconic Beat writer Kerouac, whose
On the Road celebrated its 50th anniversary with suitable fanfare
last year, took a modest interest in Buddhism while hanging out
with Allen Ginsberg and dabbling in college in New York. Later in
the 1950s, his studies became more serious, and he began to think
of himself as a "dumbsaint bodhisattva" who, inclined to poverty
and wandering, was a living embodiment of what Gautama, ne
Siddhartha, was up to back in the fifth century BCE. (It didn't
hurt the self-identification that Buddha "was a handsome young
prince.") This previously unpublished work is a rather
indifferently written biography of the Buddha, largely cribbed from
other sources - a notebook for Kerouac's own studies, in other
words, and apparently not something he was in a hurry to publish
during his short but prolific lifetime. There are a few Kerouackian
touches to the piece, as when the author instructs that Buddha "was
no slob-like figure of mirth," but instead "the Jesus Christ of
India and almost all Asia." Kerouac offers a few novelistic
touches, sometimes to beautiful effect, as when he writes, "The
groundmist of 3 A.M. rose with all the dolors of the world."
However, the overall narrative stance is matter-of-fact,
encyclopedic and conventional, with a kind of didactic approach to
dialogue, as when Buddha tells an Indian king, "Though your face
has become wrinkled, in the perception of your eyes, there are no
signs of age, no wrinkles. Then, wrinkles are the symbol of change,
and the un-wrinkled is the symbol of the un-changing. That which is
changing must suffer destruction, but the unchanging is free from
deaths and rebirths."Kerouac completists will have to have this, of
course. Literary-minded students of Buddhism will find Hermann
Hesse's Siddhartha to be the more attractive introduction, and
devotees will have had this story from many other sources, as
Kerouac himself did. (Kirkus Reviews)
Never before published in Kerouac's lifetime, Jack Kerouac's Wake
Up is a clear and powerful study of the life and works of Siddartha
Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, from the author of On the Road.
This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by
Robert Thurman. Wake Up recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's
royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all
human suffering, despite a prediction that he would become a great
holy man in later life. Departing from his father's palace,
Siddhartha adopts a homeless life, struggles with his meditations,
and eventually finds Enlightenment. Written at the end of Kerouac's
career, when he became increasingly interested in Buddhist
teachings, and collected for the first time in one book, this fresh
and accessible biography is both an important addition to Kerouac's
work and a valuable introduction to the world of Buddhism itself.
Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and
part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town
and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published
in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other
books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The
Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. If
you enjoyed Wake Up, you might like Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, also
available in Penguin Modern Classics. '[Kerouac] defines the
attitudes of an entire generation' Guardian
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