Helen Lane Dilg checks out the Mayahana Buddhist discourse that runs through this book in the following essay, "The Beat Generation and Buddhism:Thought, Practice and Faith in Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues." It is reprinted with permission from the American Religious Experience web site at http://are.as.wvu.edu, a rich and varied site worth many visits. Dilg is currently a History and Political Science major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She will be studying ethics as a Master of Divinity student at the University of Chicago Divinity School next year. She is originally from Houston, Texas.

IN HER TEXT "AMERICA: RELIGION AND RELIGIONS" Catherine Albanese emphasizes that the Beat Generation authors were integral to the importation of Buddhism into mainstream American thought. Literary critics and Beat commentators, however, often couple Buddhism with other general non- conformist trends in Beat literature or disregard it all together.

Contrary to these dismissals, a thorough examination of Jack Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" displays his earnest practice and understanding of Mahayana Buddhism. The two hundred and forty-two choruses of the work reveal Kerouac's conscious turning away from Catholicism to Buddhist belief, his earnest practice of meditation and resultant enlightenment, and his understanding of complex doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism.

Throughout the choruses, Kerouac's references to his personal religious background, Catholicism, serve to illuminate his belief in the
superiority of the Buddhist faith. Kerouac makes his Catholic upbringing evident through numerous references to aspects of the Christian faith. Allusions to the Virgin Mary. Moses), grace, and the hope of salvation intimate the poet's Catholic
background and world view, yet he frequently reveals his disdain for Catholicism.

Early in the collection he states that he has "had all I can
Eat / Revisiting Russet towns / Of long ago / On carpets of bloody sawdust". In denying the validity of the Catholic relic of the cross
(reduced to bloody sawdust), he sets a tone which persists throughout the work. In a later chorus, Kerouac explains that Catholicism first
took hold in slave communities, that according to Kerouac, would believe in anything ). His closing statement on the Catholic Church
states simply: "Buddhists are the only people who don't lie."

Buddhism, as opposed to Catholicism, was the obvious truth to
Kerouac. He expresses regret for not finding this truth earlier: "Importunate fool that I was, / I raved to fight Saviors / instead of listening to the Light -- still a fool.". Only now, in Buddhism "The Kingdom of the Mind, / the Kingdom has come," and only in Buddha has Kerouac found the "Successful Savior Abiding Everywhere in Beginningless Ecstatic Nobody."

This transcendental truth, Kerouac makes clear, can encompass Christ but is superior. He tells that he believes "in the sweetness / of Jesus / And Buddha -- / . . . And Otherwise / Santayanan / Everywhere" and in "No Self God Heaven / Where we all meet and make it, / But the Meltingplace of the Bone Entire / In One Light of Mahayana Gold, / Asvhaghosha's singing in your ear, / And Jesus at your feet, washing them."

Thus Kerouac presents Catholicism as plagued by lies, but he accepts Jesus as a part of the universal truth that is Buddhism. In doing so, he
consciously rejects his Catholic upbringing and embraces Buddhist belief.

"Mexico City Blues" encompasses much more, however, than a mere comparison of Kerouac's background with his new found faith.
Much of the work describes his encounters with truth through meditation. Kerouac's discussion of mediation can be separated into three areas: his reasons for embracing the practice, the practice itself, and his experiences of revelation and ecstasy through meditation.

In Chorus, the poet clearly states his desire to leave his life of recognition in America and to enter a life of contemplation in Mexico:

I'd rather die than be famous, . . .
I'd rather be in the desert sand,
Sitting legs crossed, at lizard
High noon, . . .
rather go in the high lone land
of plateau where you can hear
at night the zing of silence
from the halls of Assembled

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