Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation

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. (Sept.)