You probably know the legend of Buddha. Princely Asian questioner-of-existence sits under a tree for like 8 years, exercises extreme mental focus and physical discipline, works out the problems of the world in his mind, then tells everyone who will listen what he learned, which alters millions of lives and leads to a major world religion.
Imagine if after only a few days of meditating, he had said, “That was cool, now I’m gonna go drive around for a while, try every drug imaginable, meditate some more, write a bunch of rambling novels, get famous and drown myself in alcohol.”
According "Wake Up," Jack Kerouac loved dogs and "dogs loved him."
Then he would have turned out something like Jack Kerouac.
It turns out Kerouac wrote a little tome about his ancient alter ego called Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which I picked up at a used bookstore in Tennessee while on a not-totally-Kerouacian road trip this summer.
In the foreword to this long-lost religious fiction, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (a brilliant/awesome fellow actually) points out that Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism focused on the Tibetan/Indian sects of the religion that emphasize compassion. He wasn’t crazy about the Samurai-rigid, discipline-minded Far East Zen schools, which he referred to as “mean” when discussing it with a fictionalized Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums.
