In the semi-autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac recounts his travels around North America in 1955–1956, focusing particularly on his friendship with the eccentric Buddhist environmentalist Gary Snyder. At his publisher’s request, Kerouac changed everyone’s names in the book, so he calls Snyder Japhy Ryder and he refers to himself as Ray Smith. Even though Ray spends much of the book hitchhiking around and getting drunk, he is really on a dedicated quest for mental liberation and spiritual enlightenment. He pursues this enlightenment by practicing Buddhism and immersing himself in nature. Through Ray’s journey, Kerouac suggests that people can achieve true happiness by meditating and connecting with the natural world, as this allows them to accept certain fundamental truths about their place in the universe.
Ray Smith views his life through the lens of Buddhism, which promises that humans can achieve enlightenment through insight, self-discipline, and meditation. At the beginning of the book, Ray describes himself as a modern-day bhikku—or Buddhist monk—wandering around North America on a kind of endless pilgrimage. Like a monk, Ray’s main goal in the book is to find enlightenment and help others do the same. He explains this quest in terms of the Buddhist belief that life is full of suffering, but it’s possible to overcome that suffering by achieving philosophical insight, becoming virtuous, and practicing meditation. Ray orients all of his relationships, travels, and internal monologues around his desire to follow this path and eventually reach enlightenment.
About halfway through the book, Ray realizes that his quest for enlightenment will require him to spend time in the wilderness. He views nature as an uncorrupted place where people can more directly perceive the underlying reality of the universe and achieve spiritual well-being through meditation. He prefers it to the city for a number of reasons. For instance, in the city, he feels distracted and drawn to vices like drinking, while he feels no pressure to drink—or do anything besides meditate—when he’s isolated in nature. Of course, hiking or camping alone also gives him all the all the time in the world to meditate, allowing him to focus on spiritual matters rather than worldly ones. And nature’s breathtaking beauty also gives Ray spiritual insight by reminding him of his own insignificance and impermanence. When gazing out at impossibly vast million-year-old mountains, for example, Ray sees physical proof that he is miniscule and will soon cease to exist, while the world will go on. By recognizing his own insignificance, Ray hopes to shed his fear of death, which Buddhists consider a main cause of human suffering. Finally, Ray deepens his spiritual understanding by connecting with other beings in nature: at different points in the book, he befriends a hummingbird, a eucalyptus tree with dancing branches, and a herd of deer. Together, these encounters remind him of his interconnectivity with all living beings, as everything and everyone is part of the same universe and made of the same basic elements. This fundamental Buddhist teaching helps Ray cope with conflicts and setbacks, as he realizes that he and his problems are small and fleeting relative to the universe as a whole.
Over the course of the book, Ray has several epiphanies and visions while meditating in nature, and these episodes affirm his faith that Buddhism can lead people to pure happiness (or enlightenment). Ray’s first set of realizations comes while hiking Mount Matterhorn with Japhy. This trip illuminates many of the Buddhist principles that Ray knew about theoretically but never fully understood or applied to his life. For instance, he had often heard the Buddhist proverb “When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.” But until he’s literally on top of the mountain, he doesn’t really understand what it means: that people can constantly improve and will always face more suffering, so their spiritual work is never done. This trip sparks Ray’s interest in living in nature because it shows him that Buddhism’s fundamental truths about the universe are far easier to directly perceive in the wilderness. Later, Ray has another series of profound epiphanies while meditating in the woods next to his mother’s house in North Carolina. These realizations help him apply Buddhist principles to his life. For instance, while he meditates on the silence of nature and then hears a lone frog croak, he remembers that the universe is really made of empty space, but that this emptiness is awake in the form of conscious beings. This epiphany leads to another, as he realizes that his inevitable death will just be part of the natural cycle of change in the universe. Accordingly, he comes to terms with his death, finds a new sense of peace, and moves one step closer to enlightenment. Finally, at the very end of the book, Ray spends several months working as a fire lookout and living alone atop Desolation Peak in the Cascade Range. Between the stunning view and the animals that surround him, Ray feels immersed in nature and at one with the universe for the first time. He spends his days meditating, dancing and singing in ecstasy, and thinking about Japhy. In fact, on his last day at the mountain, a rainbow forms all around him, which he calls a “vision of the freedom of eternity.” Although Ray certainly hasn’t reached enlightenment, this vision suggests that he’s approaching it, and the sense of peace and joy he feels is clearly the reward for his spiritual journey.
At the very end of the book, Ray sends the universe a message of his own: he says the word “Blah” aloud, a seemingly meaningless syllable that he thinks represents how human existence is both pointless and also still part of the universe’s larger, interconnected whole. Ray’s journey to enlightenment is never totally complete, but the universe clearly rewards his efforts. This convinces him that meditation and connecting with the natural world are the best ways to understand human nature and achieve inner peace.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Enlightenment and Nature ThemeTracker
Enlightenment and Nature Quotes in The Dharma Bums
I really believed in the reality of charity and kindness and humility and zeal and neutral tranquillity and wisdom and ecstasy, and I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world (usually the immense triangular arc of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco) in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise. I had not met Japhy Ryder yet, I was about to the next week, or heard anything about “Dharma Bums” although at this time I was a perfect Dharma Bum myself and considered myself a religious wanderer.
I wondered why Han Shan was Japhy's hero.
“Because,” said he, “he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things, a vegetarian too by the way though I haven't got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they can. And he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself.”
“That sounds like you too.”
I'm telling you she was actually glad to do all this and told me “You know, I feel like I'm the mother of all things and I have to take care of my little children.”
“You're such a young pretty thing yourself.”
“But I'm the old mother of earth. I'm a Bodhisattva,” She was just a little off her nut but when I heard her say “Bodhisattva” I realized she wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express it was this way, which had its traditional roots in the yabyum ceremony of Tibetan Buddhism, so everything was fine.
Alvah was immensely pleased and was all for the idea of “every Thursday night” and so was I by now.
“Alvah, Princess says she's a Bodhisattva.”
“Of course she is.”
“She says she's the mother of all of us.”
He was always being bugged by my little lectures on Samadhi ecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary.
[…]
“Don't you think it's much more interesting just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all this silly sitting under trees?”
“Nope,” I said, and meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me. “All Japhy's doing is amusing himself in the void.”
“I don't think so.”
“I bet he is. I'm going mountainclimbing with him next week and find out and tell you.”
The vision: it's pure morning in the high dry Sierras, far off clean firs can be seen shadowing the sides of rocky hills, further yet snowcapped pinpoints, nearer the big bushy forms of pines and there's Japhy in his little cap with a big rucksack on his back, clomping along, but with a flower in his left hand which is hooked to the strap of the rucksack at his breast; grass grows out between crowded rocks and boulders; distant sweeps of scree can be seen making gashes down the sides of morning, his eyes shine with joy, he's on his way, his heroes are John Muir and Han Shan and Shih-te and Li Po and John Burroughs and Paul Bunyan and Kropotkin; he's small and has a funny kind of belly […] because his spine curves a bit, but that's offset by the vigorous long steps he takes […] and his chest is deep and shoulders broad.
There was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I'd lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
“I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like ‘Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,’ then I run on, say, to ‘David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha’ though I don’t use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words ‘equally a coming Buddha’ I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think ‘equally a coming Buddha’ you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy’s eyes.”
Once I opened my eyes and saw Japhy sitting there rigid as a rock and I felt like laughing he looked so funny. But the mountains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that matter so was I, and in fact laughter is solemn.
It was beautiful. The pinkness vanished and then it was all purple dusk and the roar of the silence was like a wash of diamond waves going through the liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand years. I prayed for Japhy, for his future safety and happiness and eventual Buddhahood. It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.
I promised myself that I would begin a new life. “All over the West, and the mountains in the East, and the desert, I'll tramp with a rucksack and make it the pure way.”
“Yessir, that's what, a series of monasteries for fellows to go and monastate and meditate in, we can have groups of shacks up in the Sierras or the High Cascades or even Ray says down in Mexico and have big wild gangs of pure holy men getting together to drink and talk and pray, think of the waves of salvation can flow out of nights like that, and finally have women, too, wives, small huts with religious families, like the old days of the Puritans. Who's to say the cops of America and the Republicans and Democrats are gonna tell everybody what to do?”
I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. […] I didn't want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy's ideas about society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah's ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.
Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried “I'm gonna die!” because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live. I knew this!
After a while my meditations and studies began to bear fruit. It really started late in January, one frosty night in the woods in the dead silence it seemed I almost heard the words said: “Everything is all right forever and forever and forever.” I let out a big Hoo, one o’clock in the morning, the dogs leaped up and exulted. I felt like yelling it to the stars. I clasped my hands and prayed, “O wise and serene spirit of Awakenerhood, everything's all right forever and forever and forever and thank you thank you thank you amen.” What'd I care about the tower of ghouls, and sperm and bones and dust, I felt free and therefore I was free.
“Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.”
[…]
I went back to the woods that night and thought, “What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty, awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else. In other words it means that I've become the same as everything else. It means I've become a Buddha.”
“It goes on and on, the disciples and the Masters go through the same thing, first they have to find and tame the ox of their mind essence, and then abandon that, then finally they attain to nothing, as represented by this empty panel, then having attained nothing they attain everything which is springtime blossoms in the trees so they end up coming down to the city to get drunk with the butchers like Li Po.” That was a very wise cartoon, it reminded me of my own experience, trying to tame my mind in the woods, then realizing it was all empty and awake and I didn't have to do anything, and now I was getting drunk with the butcher Japhy. We played records and lounged around smoking then went out and cut more wood.
Japhy said “Why do you sit on your ass all day?”
“I practice do-nothing.”
“What's the difference? Burn it, my Buddhism is activity,” said Japhy rushing off down the hill again. Then I could hear him sawing wood and whistling in the distance. He couldn't stop jiggling for a minute. His meditations were regular things, by the clock, he'd meditated first thing waking in the morning then he had his mid-afternoon meditation, only about three minutes long, then before going to bed and that was that. But I just ambled and dreamed around. We were two strange dissimilar monks on the same path.
It was all mine, not another human pair of eyes in the world were looking at this immense cycloramic universe of matter. I had a tremendous sensation of its dreamlikeness which never left me all that summer and in fact grew and grew, especially when I stood on my head to circulate my blood, right on top of the mountain, using a burlap bag for a head mat, and then the mountains looked like little bubbles hanging in the void upsidedown. In fact I realized they were upsidedown and I was upsidedown! There was nothing here to hide the fact of gravity holding us all intact upsidedown against a surface globe of earth in infinite empty space. And suddenly I realized I was truly alone and had nothing to do but feed myself and rest and amuse myself, and nobody could criticize.
Suddenly a green and rose rainbow shafted right down into Starvation Ridge not three hundred yards away from my door, like a bolt, like a pillar: it came among steaming clouds and orange sun turmoiling.
What is a rainbow, Lord?
A hoop
For the lowly.
It hooped right into Lightning Creek, rain and snow fell simultaneous, the lake was milkwhite a mile below, it was just too crazy. I went outside and suddenly my shadow was ringed by the rainbow as I walked on the hilltop, a lovely-haloed mystery making me want to pray. “O Ray, the career of your life is like a raindrop in the illimitable ocean which is eternal awakenerhood. Why worry ever any more? Write and tell Japhy that.”
And suddenly it seemed I saw that unimaginable little Chinese bum standing there, in the fog, with that expressionless humor on his seamed face. […] It was the realer-than-life Japhy of my dreams, and he stood there saying nothing. “Go away, thieves of the mind!” he cried down the hollows of the unbelievable Cascades. […] “Japhy,” I said out loud, “I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.”
And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said “Thank you, shack.” Then I added “Blah,” with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.
