Wake Up
was written during the first half of 1955. In January of that year, Kerouac had moved with his mother from Richmond Hill, New York, into the house of his sister Nin, who lived in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Away from the hectic life of New York City, Kerouac was able to immerse himself in the idea of leading an ascetic life in the tradition of the Buddha—he sat by himself for hours, meditating under the clear night stars. The title page of the finished manuscript reads “Wake Up Prepared by Jack Kerouac,” but this had not always been the book’s title. Originally called “Your Essential Mind: The Story of the Buddha,” Kerouac also referred to it at various times as “my Buddhist handbook,” “Buddha Tells Us,” and “Buddhahood: The Essence of Reality.”
Kerouac does not attempt to hide his copious use of his sources, remarking at the beginning in his Author’s Note: “There is no way to separate and name the countless sources that have poured into this lake of light. . . . The heart of the book is an embellished
précis
of the mighty Surangama Sutra.” (The first “s” of the title should be written “sh” to be phonetically accurate without a diacritic mark.) “I have designed this to be a handbook for Western understanding of the ancient Law.” (He uses the old translators’ use of “law” for “Dharma,” which is not wrong in general, but is inaccurate in this context; it should be “truth” or “teaching.”) “The purpose is to convert.” (Here Kerouac surely does not mean to enroll people in any formal Buddhist denomination, but rather to convert them to the heart’s purpose in life, to the grand wisdom vision of the divinity within, and of the natural love and kindness in relationships.)
Kerouac also draws heavily on the Pali sources about the Buddha’s life, orally ancient but not written down until the fifth century C.E., and from the second century C.E. biographical poem
Buddhacharita,
by the great Asvhaghosha. He tends to mix up some of the details of most versions of the Buddha’s life, conventionally dated at 563-482 B.C.E. (though Tibetans date him in the ninth century B.C.E., and recent European scholars move him up into the fourth century B.C.E.). I will not concern myself with such details but will simply highlight some things in the text I find particularly beautiful.
Early in the book, Kerouac says, “Buddha means the awakened one. Until recently most people thought of Buddha as a big fat rococo sitting figure with his belly out, laughing, as represented in millions of tourist trinkets and dime store statuettes here in the western world. . . . This man was no slob-like figure of mirth, but a serious and tragic prophet, the Jesus Christ of India and almost all Asia. The followers of the religion he founded, Buddhism, the religion of the Great Awakening from the dream of existence, number in the hundreds of millions today.” I’m not sure why Kerouac thought Buddha was “tragic” rather than triumphant, as indeed he seemed to feel in the vision he recounts above in
The Dharma Bums
. Maybe because of the Buddha’s first noble truth, that “unenlightened life is bound to be frustrating, and so all suffering.” When Kerouac says Buddha was “the Jesus Christ of India and almost all Asia,” he repeats his apostasy from orthodox Catholicism, by putting the two on the same level.
A few pages later, Kerouac shows his awareness of the “four formless realms” and the fact that they are none of them nirvana: “Alara Kalama [Siddhartha, the young Buddha’s first ascetic teacher] expounded the teaching called ‘the realm of nothingness,’ and practiced self-mortification to prove that he was free from his body.” This is especially significant, since almost all translators and scholars in the 1950s thought that “emptiness” and “nothingness” were the same thing, and so spread the misconception that Buddhists were ultimately nihilistic. Kerouac shows precisely here his knowledge of the difference.
Kerouac evinces his realistic view and presages his eventual “samapatti,” by explaining accurately how Siddhartha critiqued the “oversoul” (
Paramatma
) theory of the Brahmins: “Of Arada Udarama [his other ascetic teacher at this time] he asked: ‘With respect to old age, disease, and death, how are these things to be escaped?’ The hermit replied that by the ‘I’ being rendered pure, forthwith there was true deliverance. This was the ancient teaching propounding the Immortal Soul, the ‘Purusha,’ Atman, the Oversoul that went from life to life getting more and more or less and less pure, with its final goal pure soulhood in heaven. But the holy intelligence of Gotama perceived that this ‘Purusha’ was no better than a ball being bounced around according to concomitant circumstances, whether in heaven, hell, or on earth, and as long as one held this view there was no perfect escape from birth and destruction of birth. The birth of anything means death of the thing: and this is decay, this is horror, change, this is pain.”
Kerouac goes on to recount, anticipating his later vision, “Approaching now his moment of . . . compassion the young Saint saw all things, men sitting in groves, trees, sky, different views about the soul, different selves, as one unified emptiness in the air, one imaginary flower, the significance of which was unity and undividable-ness, all of the same dreamstuff, universal and secretly pure.” Here he expresses the Mahayana nonduality, though he is still using Theravada sources: “He saw that existence was like the light of a candle: the light of the candle and the extinction of the light of the candle were the same thing. . . . Gotama saw the peace of the Buddha’s Nirvana. Nirvana means blown out, as of a candle. But because the Buddha’s Nirvana is beyond existence, and conceives neither the existence or non-existence of the light of a candle, or an immortal soul, or any
thing
, it is not even Nirvana, it is neither the light of the candle known as Sangsara (this world) nor the blown-out extinction of the light of the candle known as Nirvana (the no-world) but awake beyond these arbitrarily established conceptions.” I am awed and amazed at Kerouac’s elucidation of profound nonduality in this context.
The description of the Buddha’s enlightenment in
Wake Up
is especially moving, very majestic and insightful. It is too long to quote here in its entirety. Kerouac alternates between quoting Pali sources and his own “embellishments.” I will pick out a few choice passages.
The blessed hermit went to Budhgaya. At once the ancient dream of the Buddhas of Old possessed him as he gazed at the noble groves of palm and mango and
ficus religiosa
fig trees; in the rippling afternoon he passed beneath their branches, lonely and bemused, yet with a stirring of premonition in his heart that something great was about to happen here . . . rediscovering the lost and ancient path of the Tathagata (He of Suchnesshood); re-unfolding the primal dew drop of the world; like the swan of pity descending in the lotus pool, and settling, great joy overwhelmed him at the sight of the tree which he chose to sit under as per agreement with all the Buddha-lands and assembled Buddha-things which are No-things in the emptiness of sparkling intuition all around like swarms of angels and Bodhisattvas in mothlike density radiating endlessly towards the center of the void in ADORATION. “Everywhere is Here,” intuited the saint. . . . “I WILL NOT RISE FROM THIS SPOT,” he resolved within himself, “UNTIL, FREED FROM CLINGING, MY MIND ATTAINS TO DELIVERANCE FROM ALL SORROW.”
Many words have been written about this holy moment in the now famous spot beneath this Bodhi-Tree, or Wisdom-Tree. It was not an agony in the garden, it was a bliss beneath the tree. (Here is Kerouac’s comparison with Christ.) It was not the resurrection of anything, but the annihilation of all things. (He slips into the relative-absolute dualism of Theravada.) What came to Buddha in those hours was the realization that all things come from a cause and go to dissolution, and therefore all things are impermanent, all things are unhappy, and thereby and most mysterious, all things are unreal. (Here is Kerouac’s apprehension of the essential Buddhist insight into causation; he comes later to the famous verse, the key mantra of all Buddhism.)
By nightfall he reposed peaceful and quiet. He entered into deep and subtle contemplation. Every kind of holy ecstasy in order passed before his eyes. During the first watch of the night he entered on “right perception” and in recollection all former births passed before his eyes. . . . Knowing full well that the essence of existence is of onesuchness, what birth could not his Bright, Mysterious, Intuitive Essence of Mind recall? As though he had been all things, and only because there had never been a true “he,” but all things, and so all things were the same thing, and it was within the purview of the Universal Mind, which was the Only Mind past, present, and future. . . . It had been a long time already finished, the ancient dream of life, the tears of the many-mothered sadness, the myriads of fathers in the dust, eternities of lost afternoons of sisters and brothers, the sleepy cock crow, the insect cave, the pitiful instinct all wasted on emptiness, the great huge drowsy Golden Age sensation that opened in his brain that this knowledge was older than the world. . . . In the ears of the Buddha as he thus sat in brilliant and sparkling craft of intuition, so that light like Transcendental Milk dazzled in the invisible dimness of his closed eyelids, was heard the unvarying pure hush of the sighing sea of hearing, seething, receding, as he more or less recalled the consciousness of the sound, though in itself it was always the same steady sound, only his consciousness of it varied and receded, like low tide flats and the salty water sizzling and sinking in the sand, the sound neither outside nor within the ear but everywhere, the pure sea of hearing, the Transcendental Sound of Nirvana heard by children in cribs and on the moon and in the heart of howling storms, and in which the young Buddha now heard a teaching going on, a ceaseless instruction wise and clear from all the Buddhas of Old that had come before him and all the Buddhas a-Coming. Beneath the distant cricket howl occasional noises like the involuntary peep of sleeping dream birds, or scutters of little fieldmice, or a vast breeze in the trees disturbed the peace of this Hearing but the noises were merely accidental, the Hearing received all noises and accidents in its sea but remained as ever undisturbed, truly unpenetrated, and neither replenished nor diminished, as self-pure as empty space. Under the blazing stars the King of the Law, enveloped in the divine tranquillity of this Transcendental Sound of the Diamond Ecstasy, rested moveless.
Then in the middle watch of night, he reached to knowledge of the pure Angels, and beheld before him every creature, as one sees images upon a mirror; all creatures born and born again to die, noble and mean, the poor and rich, reaping the fruit of right or evil doing, and sharing happiness or misery in consequence. . . . The groundmist of 3 A.M. rose with all the dolors of the world. . . . Birth of bodies is the direct cause of death of bodies. Just as, implantation of its seed was the cause of the cast off rose.
Then looking further, Where does birth come from? he saw it came from life-deeds done elsewhere; then scanning those deeds, he saw they were not framed by a creator, not self caused, nor personal existences nor were they either uncaused; he saw they themselves obtained along a further chain of causes, cause upon cause, concatenative links joining the fetters binding all that is form—poor form, mere dust and pain.
Then, as one who breaks the first bamboo joint finds all the rest easy to separate, having discerned the cause of death as birth, and the cause of birth as deeds, he gradually came to see the truth;
death
comes from
birth,
birth
comes from
deed
s,
deeds
come from
attachment
,
attachment
comes from
desire
, desire comes from
perception
,
perception
comes from
sensation
,
sensation
comes from
the six sense organs
,
the six sense organs
come from
individuality
,
individuality
comes from
consciousness
. [Here Kerouac heads off through the all-important twelve links of dependent origination.] . . . In him, thus freed, arose knowledge and freedom, and he knew that rebirth was at an end, and that the goal had been reached.
Kerouac goes on to list the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Then he opens up a more Mahayana vision:
And he knew as he sat there lustrous with all wisdom, perfect in gifts, that the way of perfect knowledge had been handed down to him from Buddhas Innumerable of Old that had come before in all ten directions of all ten quarters of the universe where he now saw them in a mighty vision assembled in brightness and power sitting on their intrinsic thrones in the Glorious Lotus Blossoms everywhere throughout phenomena and space and forever giving response to the needs of all sentient life in all the kingdoms of existence, past, present, and future.
With the discernment of the grand truths and their realization in life the Rishi became enlightened; he thus attained
Sambodhi
(Perfect Wisdom) and became a Buddha. Rightly has Sambodhi been called, it can be accomplished only by self help without the extraneous aid of a teacher or a god. . . . The morning sunbeams brightened with the dawn, the dustlike mist dispersing, disappeared. The moon and stars paled their faint light, the barriers of the night were all removed. He had finished this the first great lesson and the final lesson and the lesson of old; entering the great Rishi’s house of Dreamless Sleep, fixed in holy trance, he had reached the source of exhaustless truth, the happiness that never ends and that had no beginning but was always already there within the True Mind.
Not by anxious use of outward means, had Buddha unveiled the True Mind and ended suffering, but by resting quietly in thoughtful silence. This is the supreme fact of blessed rest.
He was
sihibhuto
, cooled.