The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [26]
“Hey Princess we’ll do this every Thursday night, hey?” yelled Japhy. “It’ll be a regular function.”
“Yeah,” yelled Princess from the bathtub. 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.”
“The Bodhisattva women of Tibet and parts of ancient India,” said Japhy, “were taken and used as holy concubines in temples and sometimes in ritual caves and would get to lay up a stock of merit and they meditated too. All of them, men and women, they’d meditate, fast, have balls like this, go back to eating, drinking, talking, hike around, live in viharas in the rainy season and outdoors in the dry, there was no question of what to do about sex which is what I always liked about Oriental religion. And what I always dug about the Indians in our country…You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn’t feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom. That’s why I was always sympathetic to freedom movements, too, like anarchism in the Northwest, the oldtime heroes of Everett Massacre and all….” It ended up with longearnest discussions about all these subjects and finally Princess got dressed and went home with Japhy on their bicycles and Alvah and I sat facing each other in the dim red light.
“But you know, Ray, Japhy is really sharp—he’s really the wildest craziest sharpest cat we’ve ever met. And what I love about him is he’s the big hero of the West Coast, do you realize I’ve been out here for two years now and hadn’t met anybody worth knowing really or anybody with any truly illuminated intelligence and was giving up hope for the West Coast? Besides all the background he has, in Oriental scholarship, Pound, taking peyote and seeing visions, his mountainclimbing and bhikkuing, wow, Japhy Ryder is a great new hero of American culture.”
“He’s mad!” I agreed. “And other things I like about him, his quiet sad moments when he don’t say much….”
“Gee, I wonder what will happen to him in the end.”
“I think he’ll end up like Han Shan living alone in the mountains and writing poems on the walls of cliffs, or chanting them to crowds outside his cave.”
“Or maybe he’ll go to Hollywood and be a movie star, you know he said that the other day, he said ‘Alvah you know I’ve never thought of going to the movies and becoming a star, I can do anything you know, I haven’t tried that yet,’ and I believe him, he can do anything.