Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3290 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Book jacket
Following the explosive energy of "On the Road" comes "The Dharma Bums" in which Kerouac charts the spiritual quest of a group of friends in search of Dharma or Truth.

Ray Smith and his friend Japhy, along with Morley the yodeller, head off into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude and experience the Zen way of life. But in wildly bohemian San Francisco, with its poetry jam sessions, marathon drinking bouts and experiments in "yabyum", they find the ascetic route distinctly hard to follow.

"A vivid evocation of a part of our time" New York Post

"A descriptive excitement unmatched since the days of Thomas Wolfe"--The New York Times Book Review

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Synopsis
"The Dharma Bums" appeared just one year after the author's explosive "On The Road" had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more cohesive story. The books follow two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.

Customer Reviews

Watery Buddhism and hippy ideals
The energy of this novel flows along like electricity when Ray Smith is hitch-hiking, drinking or bumming around Mexican backstreets. Kerouac writes feverishly and captures people, sights, sounds and smells so vividly that you really ache to experience them alongside him.

If only he'd stuck to this tried and tested recipe.

When Kerouac obsesses about Buddhism - the central and weakly rendered theme of this book - things lose their spark and his prose gets bogged down in inarticulate drivel. If the narrative had offered any true understanding of Buddhist teachings, I may well have embraced it more. But The Dharma Bums simply hand-picks elements from an ancient religion and turns them into a half-baked American excuse for sloth, self-indulgence and the worst kind of cultural conceit.

Witness how Japhy - the supposed prophet, genius and sage - uses the Tibetan practice of 'yabyum' (not even given a cursorary explanation in the text) purely to seduce as many girls as possible. Witness how Ray Smith seeks unparalleled purity but drinks, smokes and abuses drugs. The Buddhism portrayed in these pages is a Buddhism of convenience that anyone can dip into and out of whenever they please; that anyone can use to denounce the actions of another; that gets anyone out of difficult intellectual scrapes with a few mystic-sounding riddles...

Frankly, it began to annoy me and I suspect a true Buddhist would view this as a gross contamination of his/her core values. I almost laughed out loud when Ray Smith became so enlightened (by sitting in his mother's yard, unemployed for months) that he thought himself capable of miracles (because his mum's sore throat goes away) - but decides not to heal anyone else: "...because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared of all the responsibility." What humility!

What with the many passages of badly coined language and all these watery attempts at getting to the root of profound philosophical subjects, I found the novel ultimately to be childish and cringe-worthy.

But as I said at the start, when he's bumming around and chronicling the highways and byways of 1950s America, Kerouac's style is impeccable. That's why this offering is so amateur and polished by turns. I did enjoy it, but man - if you're going to preach, learn your subject!

American Buddhism
In this book Kerouac deals with his own unorthodox american Buddhism and that's Kerouac at his best. "Dharma Bums" is better than "On the Road", since the author has a lot more to express in this book.

Bloody great :D
Please don't expect an overview of Buddhism from Kerouac! This is not meant as an instructional manual.. However, if you enjoy a fantastically-paced, exciting novel from one of the 20th Century's most revered artists, look no further. Personally, I just cannot help but be moved by this book, be that in sadness or otherwise! Half the time I have a huge grin, the other a huge frown. In my opinion this is a much more entertaining read than 'On The Road', and I can't understand why it was not required reading at GCSE or A-Level. Go on, buy it!!