The Connection Between Buddhism And The Beats

----------------------------------------------------------------- "Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation" Edited by Carole Tonkinson Tricycle/Riverhead, $15 paperback -----------------------------------------------------------------

The Beat Generation writers were out to destroy barriers to spiritual growth, and their disdain for rules, far from being an end in itself, was part of a search for enlightenment beyond convention. Despite accusations of nihilism and hedonism, they were passionate believers.

The poet Michael McClure claimed that the movement was a "spiritual occasion." Allen Ginsberg said his "poems are religious and I meant them to be," and in the famous obscenity trial over his "Howl," the judge conceded that the poem "ends with a plea for holy living."

Jack Kerouac, too, described his goal as "to become immersed in the Truth that is all One Undifferentiated Purity." With Francis Ford Coppola's movie of Kerouac's novel "On the Road" forthcoming, we will soon see how such lofty aspirations come across on film.

The Beats were drawn to Eastern spirituality, especially Buddhism, as an antidote to the rigid, rationalizing dogma of mainstream American religion. America had become a society of barriers.

Now, with "Big Sky Mind," an important theme in recent American literature is fully illuminated. It is the first volume in the new publishing program by the magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, which has steadily gained recognition in its four years of publication. While there are plenty of Beat anthologies - except for diehards, many readers probably prefer an anthology over the repetition and self-indulgence of almost any Beat work in its entirety - "Big Sky Mind" is unified by more than an editor's whims.

Carole Tonkinson offers a fine introduction and unintrusive but helpful commentaries. Her thoughtful selections leave no room for doubt that Buddhism was a vital and pervasive element in Beat Generation writing. Besides placing the Beats firmly in the context of their times, Tonkinson also shows how their very iconoclasm places them in a venerable American tradition.

"Buddha, an old and wise father, will save them by holy subterfuge," wrote Kerouac. A hundred years earlier, Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau - the transcendentalists of the mid-19th century - were up to the same "holy subterfuge," and much of their inspiration, too, came from sacred Eastern texts. The perspective-bending turns of Whitman's poetry, the meditative silences that fill the huge gaps between Emerson's cryptic, koan-like sentences - these were tricks in the service of enlightenment.

In one interview, the poet Gary Snyder addresses the "spiritual price" of modern life. " `Spiritual price,' " he says, "means time at home, time with our family, time that you can meditate, the difference between what comes to your body and mind by walking a mile as against driving (plus the cost of the gas)."

In the 1840s, after hearing someone extol the amazing speed of the new railroads, Thoreau had proposed a race: himself on foot against a man riding the train. Thoreau said that if our accounting included the time worked to earn the price of a train ticket, as it rightly should, he would win - and that he would win a race of any distance, given the same methods of accounting.

It's a sobering thought, and "Big Sky Mind" shows us that for all our love of profits and progress, Americans have never altogether lost their yearning for a fuller accounting. An article by Richard Wakefield, who teaches American literature at Tacoma Community College and the University of Washington, Tacoma, appears in the current issue of The Robert Frost Review. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Book discussion

Helen Tworkov, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, will discuss "Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation" at 4 p.m. Thursday at the Elliott Bay Book Co.