The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [95]
“Tomorrow afternoon on our run to Stimson Beach,” said Japhy, “you’ll see the whole white city of San Francisco miles away in the blue bay. Ray, by God, later on in our future life we can have a fine free-wheeling tribe in these California hills, get girls and have dozens of radiant enlightened brats, live like Indians in hogans and eat berries and buds.”
“No beans?”
“We’ll write poems, we’ll get a printing press and print our own poems, the Dharma Press, we’ll poetize the lot and make a fat book of icy bombs for the booby public.”
“Ah the public ain’t so bad, they suffer too. You always read about some tarpaper shack burning somewhere in the Middlewest with three little children perishing and you see a picture of the parents crying. Even the kitty was burned. Japhy, do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.”
“Ho, who would you mean by God?”
“Just Tathagata, if you will.”
“Well it says in the sutra that God, or Tathagata, doesn’t himself emanate a world from his womb but it just appears due to the ignorance of sentient beings.”
“But he emanated the sentient beings and their ignorance too. It’s all too pitiful. I ain’t gonna rest till I find out why, Japhy, why.”
“Ah don’t trouble your mind essence. Remember that in pure Tathagata mind essence there is no asking of the question why and not even any significance attached to it.”
“Well, then nothing’s really happening, then.”
He threw a stick at me and hit me on the foot.
“Well, that didn’t happen,” I said.
“I really don’t know, Ray, but I appreciate your sadness about the world. ’Tis indeed. Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate. What do you think about death, Ray?”
“I think death is our reward. When we die we go straight to nirvana Heaven and that’s that.”
“But supposing you’re reborn in the lower hells and have hot redhot balls of iron shoved down your throat by devils.”
“Life’s already shoved an iron foot down my mouth. But I don’t think that’s anything but a dream cooked up by some hysterical monks who didn’t understand Buddha’s peace under the Bo Tree or for that matter Christ’s peace looking down on the heads of his tormentors and forgiving them.”
“You really like Christ, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. And after all, a lot of people say he is Maitreya, the Buddha prophesied to appear after Sakyamuni, you know, Maitreya means ‘Love’ in Sanskrit and that’s all Christ talked about was love.”
“Oh, don’t start preaching Christianity to me, I can just see you on your deathbed kissing the cross like some old Karamazov or like our old friend Dwight Goddard who spent his life as a Buddhist and suddenly returned to Christianity in his last days. Ah that’s not for me, I want to spend hours every day in a lonely temple meditating in front of a sealed statue of Kwannon which no one is ever allowed to see because it’s too powerful. Strike hard, old diamond!”
“It’ll all come out in the wash.”
“You remember Rol Sturlason my buddy who went to Japan to study those rocks of Ryoanji. He went over on a freighter named Sea Serpent so he painted a big mural of a sea serpent and mermaids on a bulkhead in the messhall to the delight of the crew who dug him like crazy and all wanted to become Dharma Bums right there. Now he’s climbing up holy Mount Hiei in Kyoto through a foot of snow probably, straight up where there are no trails, steep steep, through bamboo thickets and twisty pine like in brush drawings. Feet wet and lunch forgot, that’s the way to climb.”
“What are you going to wear in the monastery, anyway?”
“Oh man, the works, old T’ang Dynasty style things long black floppy with huge droopy sleeves and funny pleats, make you feel real