Jack Kerouac’s character Japhy Ryder (the Gary Snyder representation) coined the term Dharma Bum. While Ray Smith (the Jack Kerouac representation) does not outright explain what exactly a Dharma Bum is, he drops a plethora of small details throughout the story. This is perhaps to say that a Dharma Bum cannot have just one explanation, but rather a collection of definitions and rationalizations.
Most Dharma Bums are religious, the ways of this religious wanderer are taken from Oriental scholars, practices in Zen, Buddhism, and the various mythologies of Japan, China, and India.
Kerouac, or Ray Smith, personifies the term through the use of a Bodhisattva, “meaning ‘great wise being’ or ‘great wise angel’” (Kerouac 12), that ornaments the world with his or her sincerity. This great wise being illustrates truth and the pracitce of kindness, two important values of the Dharma Bum. In the case of Kerouac’s Novel The Dharma Bums, his enlightened, angelic beings were often bohemians, a writer or artist who does not live to the conventions of society.
A so-called Dharma Bum is a “wanderer of the world in search of Truth, the True Meaning, or Dharma, to gain merit and be a Hero in paradise.” Most of this truth is found in observing the world that surrounds a Dharma Bum, and through this realization of what truth is, come inner peace and understanding.
The mindset and mentality of a Dharma Bum is “charity, humility, zeal, tranquility, wisdom, ecstasy.” One main goal of the Dharma Bum is to find happiness in solitude and freedom. Dharma Bums often feel most solitary in nature, where they can feel completely liberated from the confines of society, and achieve an inner happiness.
These wanderers live like bums, divine vagabonds, wearing old, worn-out clothing from secondhand stores like Goodwill. They are filthy dirty, but enlightened Dharma saints. Most outsiders see them as eccentrics, who drink tea, meditate, wander aimlessly through nature, and engage in adventurous sexcapades.
In relation to Jack Kerouac’s original coinage of the terms “Beat” and “beatitude,” a Dharma Bum and a Beat are synonymous with one another. Beatitude, according to Kerouac, meant a state of utmost bliss, the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, thinking in a Buddhist context.
Perhaps Kerouac’s notion of the Dharma Bum is just another type of Beat, a more earthly-centered, rural, religious Beat. Undoubtedly, a Dharma Bum also practices anti-materialism and pacifism just as a Beat would.
Kerouac’s term beatific meant happy and holy, two characteristics that can be fittingly used to describe, in short, a Dharma Bum.
Can many Beats also be classified as Dharma Bums?
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3 comments:
I totally agree with you that Dharma Bum does not just have one meaning. Almost like the term Bodhisattva or Beat, meaning is unique to each person. The idea of Dharma saints is an interesting one, it kind of echoes the link between Catholicism, Zen, Buddhism, and the Beats that Kerouac makes in this book. I think that many Beats strive to be a kind of Dharma Bum, but then again, if everyone can perceive the idea and definition of a “Dharma Bum” differently, then it seems like an almost insurmountable task to join the two terms (Beats and Dharma Bums) together to mean the same thing. Dharma Bums and Beats definitely seem to coincide often in the same people, but I wouldn't describe them as mutually exclusive, nor as the same identifier.
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Manana manana
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