The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [19]
“Who is he?”
“He’s my big best friend from up in Oregon, we’ve known each other a long time. At first you think he’s slow and stupid but actually he’s a shining diamond. You’ll see. Don’t let him cut you to ribbons. He’ll make the top of your head fly away, boy, with a choice chance word.”
“Why?”
“He’s a great mysterious Bodhisattva I think maybe a reincarnation of Asagna the great Mahayana scholar of the old centuries.”
“And who am I?”
“I dunno, maybe you’re Goat.”
“Goat?”
“Maybe you’re Mudface.”
“Who’s Mudface?”
“Mudface is the mud in your goatface. What would you say if someone was asked the question ‘Does a dog have the Buddha nature?’ and said ‘Woof!’”
“I’d say that was a lot of silly Zen Buddhism.” This took Japhy back a bit. “Lissen Japhy,” I said, “I’m not a Zen Buddhist, I’m a serious Buddhist, I’m an oldfashioned dreamy Hinayana coward of later Mahayanism,” and so forth into the night, my contention being that Zen Buddhism didn’t concentrate on kindness so much as on confusing the intellect to make it perceive the illusion of all sources of things. “It’s mean,” I complained. “All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly word questions.”
“That’s because they want them to realize mud is better than words, boy.” But I can’t recreate the exact (will try) brilliance of all Japhy’s answers and come-backs and come-ons with which he had me on pins and needles all the time and did eventually stick something in my crystal head that made me change my plans in life.
Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o’clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem “Wail” drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling “Go! Go! Go!” (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness. Japhy himself read his fine poems about Coyote the God of the North American Plateau Indians (I think), at least the God of the Northwest Indians, Kwakiutl and what-all. “Fuck you! sang Coyote, and ran away!” read Japhy to the distinguished audience, making them all howl with joy, it was so pure, fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean. And he had his tender lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries, showing his love of animals, and great mystery lines about oxen on the Mongolian road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature even on to Hsuan Tsung the great Chinese monk who walked from China to Tibet, Lanchow to Kashgar and Mongolia carrying a stick of incense in his hand. Then Japhy showed his sudden barroom humor with lines about Coyote bringing goodies. And his anarchistic ideas about how Americans don’t know how to live, with lines about commuters being trapped in living rooms that come from poor trees felled by chainsaws