The Beat Enigma
When he saw a statue of the Virgin Mary turn its head in his hometown church's basement in the early 1950s, Jack Kerouac said it dawned on him that the word "Beat" is a religious word with a relation to the beatific vision.
Yet it's probably a safe bet that Kerouac was a Buddhist: He saturated many of his books with Buddhist themes. He practiced Buddhist meditation. He at times took vows to lead a Buddhist life. In one vow, he promised to limit his sexual activity to masturbation (his idea of austerity), another time he vowed to eat only one meal per day and to write about nothing but Buddhism. He at times exclaimed, "I am Buddha" and once asked D. T. Suzuki if he could spend the rest of his life with him.
But scholars have never been able to write-off his Catholicism. He never wholly deserted it, and he embraced it more toward the end of his life. New materials from the Timothy Leary archive will only perpetuate the mystery of Kerouac's religion proclivities. Although all of the archives haven't been released yet, New York magazine has acquired some excerpts, which it has reproduced here in the form of an imaginary conversation among the drug testing participants. Two of the Kerouac pieces of dialogue further cement his Catholico-Buddhist ways (with maybe a little Hindu and shamanism thrown in for good measure):
“I saw you, Leary, as a Jesuit Father ”¦ I saw Allen [Ginsberg] as Sariputra (the Indian saint). My old idea of St. Peter (about Peter OrlovÂsky) was strengthened ”¦ Pearl became a Lotus of indescribably [sic] beauty sitting there in the form of a Buddha woman Bhikkushini ”¦ Mainly I felt like a floating Khan on a magic carpet with my interesting lieutenants and gods.”
and
“On mushrooms I felt quite strong, quite angry in fact at the atheists for fighting Christianity.”
