Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dharma Bums, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Enlightenment and Nature
Counterculture and Freedom
Friendship
Literature and Authenticity
Inclusion, Exclusion, and Community
Summary
Analysis
Ray is now living with Alvah Goldbrook in a cramped, one-room, book-filled cottage in someone’s backyard in Berkeley. Every morning, he reads the Diamond Sūtra. Japhy lives in a similar, even smaller and more austere backyard shack up the road. He spends most of his time between reading classic Buddhist religious texts and poetry, but he also sometimes goes hiking in the mountains for weeks at a time. Outside his shack, Japhy keeps a small “Japanese tea garden” of rocks and trees that he’s found on his hikes.
Ray, Alvah, and Japhy’s living situation clearly represents their countercultural values: they prioritize simplicity, frugality, and spiritual pursuits over material possessions and comfort. Ray and Japhy’s attentive study of Buddhist religious scriptures also demonstrates how literature can play a central role in shaping such a lifestyle. Japhy’s long hikes in the mountains are his way of putting the lessons he learns in these texts into practice.
Themes
When Ray visits Japhy for the first time, Japhy is busy translating “Cold Mountain,” a thousand-year-old poem carved into a mountainside by his idol, the mysterious Chinese poet Han Shan. He makes Ray take off his shoes and then offers him some tea and tells him about Han Shan, who wrote “Cold Mountain” about the path up to the remote mountain caves where he lived in ascetic solitude. Japhy and Ray debate how to translate the poem, since each of its lines has five Chinese characters, but this structure doesn’t always work in English. Japhy proposes that the two of them climb Mount Matterhorn together, and Ray agrees.
Between making Ray remove his shoes, serving him tea, and translating Han Shan, Japhy clearly models his life after Chinese and Japanese cultural traditions, which he seems to think will help him realize his spiritual goals as a Buddhist. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to literally translate Han Shan into English, which suggests that the act of translating Asian Buddhist cultures into a North American context might also be more complex than Japhy assumes. Han Shan’s life in remote mountain caves seems to be the model for Japhy’s life of wandering in the wilderness, which shows how literature can inspire people to live according to an unconventional set of values.
Themes
In the rest of “Cold Mountain,” Han Shan writes about learning that his friends and family members have died, and he then contemplates the cold and the seasons on his mountain. Japhy explains that he admires Han Shan’s dedication to meditation and solitude, and Ray feels like Japhy is bestowing some much-needed higher knowledge on him. Japhy explains that he spends much of the day meditating, unless friends visit. Sometimes, a girl visits him for yabyum—but he won’t tell Ray what that is. Ray notices that Japhy seems sad about something.
“Cold Mountain” reflects key Buddhist values: being resilient in the face of suffering, accepting that change is inevitable, and appreciating the natural world. Ray’s feeling of wonder around Japhy clearly indicates that their friendship will point Ray down the path to enlightenment. Specifically, it foreshadows the sense of fulfillment and peace that Ray finds through the Buddhist practices that Japhy teaches him. Meanwhile, however, Japhy reveals that a girl sometimes visits him for yabyum—a reference to the Buddhist symbol of a male deity having sex with a female consort. The fact that he seems sad about this perhaps suggests that he feels guilty about this aspect of his life, or that his relationship with this girl is troubled.
Themes
When Ray is getting ready to leave, Rol Sturlason, one of Japhy’s friends, visits to report about an upcoming trip to a mystical rock garden in Japan that supposedly helps people who stare at it achieve internal peace. He shows Ray a picture of the garden and a diagram of how the rocks are laid out in a way that liberates people’s minds.
The Japanese rock garden points to the way Ray, Japhy, and the Buddhists who influence them see connecting with nature as the best way to achieve enlightenment. Specifically, Rol Sturlason suggests that the rocks’ organization somehow reflects—and helps people perceive—the fundamental order of the universe.
Themes
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