Kerouac's Wake Up; Review, Part 1

WAKE UP by JACK KEROUAC: A NEW BOOK REVIEW.

Last year, a little bomb was lobbed out of the book-world with the first-time publication of another biography of the Buddha, Prince Siddartha Gotama, written in 1955 by none other than the iconic 20th century novelist Jack Kerouac. Three years after finishing this work, Kerouac launched his groundbreaking novel The Dharma Bums, which was considered to be largely responsible for spawning an indigenous American Buddhism. Aptly entitled Wake Up, the new posthumous release is a very careful and ardent (“the purpose is to convert,” he admits at the beginning) approach to the epic story of the Buddha’s opulent childhood, his search for enlightenment and his teachings. Though raised Catholic, Kerouac immersed himself in Buddhism in the early 1950s to the extent that his spiritual ideas overflowed into his writing from Mexico City Blues to The Dharma Bums. Drawing on diverse sutras and canonical scriptures, Kerouac transcribes concisely for the reader (and perhaps as a grounding assignment for himself) the central ideas and events of the Buddhist saga. The result is a lucid wholehearted meditation on suffering, desire, wisdom and on the nature of being.

The royal prince was born into boundless wealth. To fend off an augury that Siddartha would become a famed travelling holy man, his father protected him inordinately from signs of human suffering and plied him with every comfort. His mother died giving him birth, in 563 B.C. in India, and he was brought up by an aunt. The sick and dead were removed from the kingdom, until one day when in his late twenties, he accidentally met a very old withered man and witnessed a deceased body. Already melancholic, these encounters turned his world upside down. And why wouldn’t they, really, if someone intelligent, furnished with proofs of an immortal safe world, now faced the reality of imperfection and decay? The betrayal of trust, for one granted so much autonomy and honour in everything else, must have been overwhelming, and like Oedipus Rex’ parents, the actions taken to avoid fate simply became part of the ‘problem’, substantially serving the fulfilment of the feared prediction.

On departing the kingdom, he wandered homeless, clad only in rags, and he proceeded searching for truth in the traditional ways but he became disillusioned with the methods available. He resolved to risk his life for a revelation in stillness. As he sat in vigil under the Bodhi tree, his awareness of his ears expanded: "... 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 that Buddhas a-coming."

Thus he came to understand the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path out of suffering. After some uncertainty, he decided that he should now share knowledge of this new route to freedom with other beings, and he embarked on a life of itinerant teaching. ->->->
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