Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation [Paperback]

Essays, poems, photographs, and letters explore the link between Buddhism and the Beats--with previously unpublished material from several beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Diane diPrima.Carole Tomkinsonis the author ofBig Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation.

Editor’s Preface

“When everything exists within your big mind, all dualistic relationships drop away. There is no distinction between heaven and earth, man and woman, teacher and disciple. . . . In your big mind, everything has the same value.”

—SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI

In the Big Mind of Buddhism, the Beats found an antidote to the paranoia and conformity that were at the heart of fifties culture. Big Mind, or panoramic awareness, as Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described it, is “a state without center or fringe” in which there is no watcher or perceiver, no division between subject and object; in this view all phenomena are acknowledged as temporary, dependent on causes and conditions, and utterly devoid of any fixed identity or self-existing nature. Seeing the sky through the “bamboo tube” of everyday awareness, it looks separate, discrete, but in Buddhism’s Big Mind the boundaries between self and other are dissolved in the experience of the empty sky itself. The elimination of that distinction and the recognition that all such dualistic perceptions are illusions offered an irrefutable rebuke to the sense of hierarchy fundamental to the social and political structures of the fifties and rendered meaningless the Cold War catchwords ofusandthem, allyandenemy. Other fundamental teachings of Buddhism were also apropos: the acceptance of the impermanence of all life provided a new context in which to examine the fear of death and suffering that were further intensified by the dlC?