I first discovered the buddhadharma through the novels of Jack Kerouac, as a junior in high school. One of my best pals, Ante V., and I read a lot of them together—Dharma Bums, Visions of Gerard, On the Road, Big Sur. We thought they were the bee’s knees. So this weekend the two of us got together, along with my mad-poet cousin Tom, to celebrate the late novelist’s life on his birthday, March 12. He would have been 89. In Kerouac’s honor, we recreated a famous picture of him that was taken by Allen Ginsberg by Tomkins Square in the Fall of 1953.
Read Allen Ginsberg’s “Negative Capability: Kerouac’s Buddhist Ethic,” from Tricycle‘s Fall 1992 issue.