Wake Up Read Free Page B

than 1969. Fortunately, Kerouac goes on to say, “and be kind and nevertheless remain uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light,” which evinces his deeper instinct that the nonduality of voidness and form, nirvana and samsara, mandates that the free person remain causally committed to the improvement of the conditions of others in the illusory unreal relative world.
     
    Wake Up Itself
    What a thrill to read Wake Up, Kerouac’s vision of the life of Shakyamuni, the supreme Buddha emanation of our age! The long, streaming style makes the book majestic and something that you absorb in one sitting, like a symphony, culminating in a way in the Shurangama Sutra ’s heroic march vision of the world dissolving in the diamond samadhi, and seeing the Tathagata Buddha (“Thus-gone Awakened One”) floating in the flower-petal universe beyond the body and the system there of seven elements: earth, water, fire, wind, space, perception, consciousness. Wake Up has a basic flavor of nonduality in that section but then returns to the more conventional dualist Buddhist vision at the time of the parinirvana (“final nirvana”), treating it as a dreamless sleep of extinction, since Kerouac did not have available to him the exquisite paradox of the Buddha’s revelation of his eternal presence at the moment of his final disappearance as a distinct body, as revealed in the Lotus and Mahaparinirvana Sutras .
    Wake Up was written during the first half of 1955. In January of that year, Kerouac had moved with his mother from Richmond Hill, New York, into the house of his sister Nin, who lived in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Away from the hectic life of New York City, Kerouac was able to immerse himself in the idea of leading an ascetic life in the tradition of the Buddha—he sat by himself for hours, meditating under the clear night stars. The title page of the finished manuscript reads “Wake Up Prepared by Jack Kerouac,” but this had not always been the book’s title. Originally called “Your Essential Mind: The Story of the Buddha,” Kerouac also referred to it at various times as “my Buddhist handbook,” “Buddha Tells Us,” and “Buddhahood: The Essence of Reality.”
    Kerouac does not attempt to hide his copious use of his sources, remarking at the beginning in his Author’s Note: “There is no way to separate and name the countless sources that have poured into this lake of light. . . . The heart of the book is an embellished précis of the mighty Surangama Sutra.” (The first “s” of the title should be written “sh” to be phonetically accurate without a diacritic mark.) “I have designed this to be a handbook for Western understanding of the ancient Law.” (He uses the old translators’ use of “law” for “Dharma,” which is not wrong in general, but is inaccurate in this context; it should be “truth” or “teaching.”) “The purpose is to convert.” (Here Kerouac surely does not mean to enroll people in any formal Buddhist denomination, but rather to convert them to the heart’s purpose in life, to the grand wisdom vision of the divinity within, and of the natural love and kindness in relationships.)
    Kerouac also draws heavily on the Pali sources about the Buddha’s life, orally ancient but not written down until the fifth century C.E., and from the second century C.E. biographical poem Buddhacharita, by the great Asvhaghosha. He tends to mix up some of the details of most versions of the Buddha’s life, conventionally dated at 563-482 B.C.E. (though Tibetans date him in the ninth century B.C.E., and recent European scholars move him up into the fourth century B.C.E.). I will not concern myself with such details but will simply highlight some things in the text I find particularly beautiful.
    Early in the book, Kerouac says, “Buddha means the awakened one. Until recently most people thought of Buddha as a big fat rococo sitting figure with his belly out, laughing, as