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FEATURE:
Buddha
August 16, 2002    Episode no. 550
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Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was one of America's best-known "Beat generation" writers and promoters of Buddhism. Read excerpts from a 1955 letter he wrote trying to explain Buddhist teachings, anthologized in THE BUDDHA: WRITINGS ON THE ENLIGHTENED ONE, a new "visual biography" edited by Tom Morgan and forthcoming in November 2002 from New World Library:

Photo of Graham and Lawton You sit again and close your eyes and cross your legs underneath you in the traditional rock-like & stalwart position for meditation initiated by the human sages of the East because of its unmovability and nerve-calming effect, though you might just as well be standing at a subway strap, and again you sink deep in a quiet Stop-Everything of your outside suffering form. You let it melt away, ignoring the dream of life for an examination of the mind itself that makes the dream appear, or in which the dream seems to appear.

Because there's nothing there but emptiness and essence, no figures, forms, shapes, pictures, you get scared and want to return to the life of the world...

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The final goal is unqualified happiness, the bliss that never dies.

Buddhahood is like a medicine, it will cure you of a hundred ailments all of which you will see were apparitions in your mind that you clung to because you failed to consider the Essence of it.

Even physical sicknesses can be cured, thanks to the practice of quiet slow breathing during meditation, which loosens the nerves in your stomach and relaxes the whole body and nerve-system like a soothing bath.

But the ailments of your thinking-mind, the general greed, anger and foolishness that overcome all living beings in their predicament of incessant need, endless wanting, endless not-getting, they too will be cured as you ascend the stages of Holiness in the Contemplation of Essence.

When you will know, remembering as if waking from a dream, the ailments in the thinking-mind (the brain, the thought-maker), they alone were the cause of Suffering, you will know the Knowledge of the Buddhas of Old.

One thing the Lord Buddha preaches: Suffering, and the End of Suffering.

One thing the Lord Buddha gives: the Path that leads to the end of Suffering.

This path is an ancient path trod by sentient creatures more numerous than the grains of dust in all the universes.

And in Truth, there is no path, no sentient creatures, no universes at all. Isn't this Bright Essential News the greatest thing to Know?

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