The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [71]
Days tumbled on days, I was in my overalls, didn’t comb my hair, didn’t shave much, consorted only with dogs and cats, I was living the happy life of childhood again. Meanwhile I wrote and got an assignment for the coming summer as a fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service on Desolation Peak in the High Cascades in Washington state. So I figured to set out for Japhy’s shack in March to be nearer Washington for my summer job.
Sunday afternoons my family would want me to go driving with them but I preferred to stay home alone, and they’d get mad and say “What’s the matter with him anyway?” and I’d hear them argue about the futility of my “Buddhism” in the kitchen, then they’d all get in the car and leave and I’d go in the kitchen and sing “The tables are empty, everybody’s gone over” to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “You’re Learning the Blues.” I was as nutty as a fruitcake and happier. Sunday afternoon, then, I’d go to my woods with the dogs and sit and put out my hands palms up and accept handfuls of sun boiling over the palms. “Nirvana is the moving paw,” I’d say, seeing the first thing I saw as I opened my eyes from meditation, that being Bob’s paw moving in the grass as he dreamed. Then I’d go back to the house on my clear, pure, well-traveled path, waiting for the night when again I’d see the countless Buddhas hiding in the moonlight air.
But my serenity was finally disturbed by a curious argument with my brother-in-law; he began to resent my unshackling Bob the dog and taking him in the woods with me. “I’ve got too much money invested in that dog to untie him from his chain.”
I said “How would you like to be tied to a chain and cry all day like the dog?”
He replied “It doesn’t bother me” and my sister said “And I don’t care.”
I got so mad I stomped off into the woods, it was a Sunday afternoon, and resolved to sit there without food till midnight and come back and pack my things in the night and leave. But in a few hours my mother was calling me from the back porch to supper, I wouldn’t come; finally little Lou came out to my tree and begged me to come back.
I had frogs in the little brook that kept croaking at the oddest times, interrupting my meditations as if by design, once at high noon a frog croaked three times and was silent the rest of the day, as though expounding me the Triple Vehicle. Now my frog croaked once. I felt it was a signal meaning the One Vehicle of Compassion and went back determined to overlook the whole thing, even my pity about the dog. What a sad and bootless dream. In the woods again that night, fingering the juju beads, I went through curious prayers like these: “My pride is hurt, that is emptiness; my business is with the Dharma, that is emptiness; I’m proud of my kindness to animals, that is emptiness; my conception of the chain, that is emptiness; Ananda’s pity, even that is emptiness.” Perhaps if some old Zen Master had been on the scene, he would have gone out and kicked the dog on his chain to give everybody a sudden shot of awakening. My pain was in getting rid of the conception of people and dogs anyway, and of myself. I was hurting deep inside from the sad business of trying to deny what was. In any case it was a tender little drama in the Sunday countryside: “Raymond doesn’t want the dog chained.” But then suddenly under the tree at night, I had the astonishing idea: “Everything is empty but awake! Things are empty in time and space and mind.” I figured it all out and the next day feeling very exhilarated I felt the time had come to explain everything to my family. They laughed more than anything else. “But listen! No! Look! It’s simple, let me lay it out as simple and concise as I can. All things are empty, ain’t they?”
“Whattayou mean, empty, I’m holding this orange in my hand, ain’t I?”
“It’s empty, everythin’s empty, things come but to go, all things made have to be unmade, and they’ll have to be unmade