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THE EMERGENCE OF BUDDHIST AMERICAN LITERATURE SUNY series in Buddhism and American Culture John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff, editors The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature EDITED BY JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE GARY STORHOFF Foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston and Afterword by Charles Johnson Cover art image of stack of books © Monika3stepsahead/Dreamstime.com Cover art image of Buddha © maodesign/istockphoto Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS ALBANY © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval systemor transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The emergence of Buddhist American literature / edited by John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff ; foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston ; afterword by Charles Johnson. p. cm. — (Suny series in Buddhism and American culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2653-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Buddhist authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American literature—Buddhist influences. 4. Buddhism in literature. 5. Buddhism and literature—United States. I. Whalen-Bridge, John, 1961– II. Storhoff, Gary, 1947– PS153.B83E44 2009 810.9’382943—dc22 2008034847 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 John Whalen-Bridge would like to dedicate his work on The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature to his two sons, Thomas and William. Gary Storhoff would like to dedicate his work on this volume to those who have taught him the Buddhist principle of the wondrous nature of everyday life: his wife, Linda; his daughter, Danielle; and his son, Wesley. CONTENTS Foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff PART I | Literature as Vehicle: Transmission and Transformation 1 The Emptiness of Patterned Flux: Ernest Fenollosa’s Buddhist Essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” 21 Jonathan Stalling 2 Gary Snyder’s Selective Way to Cold Mountain: Domesticating Han Shan 45 Yuemin He 3 John Giorno: Buddhism, Poetry, and Transgression 63 Marcus Boon 4 Buddhadharma and Poetry without Credentials 83 Michael Heller viii Contents PART II | Zen, Vajrayana, and the Avant-Garde: A Pluralistic Poetics 5 Finger Pointing at the Moon: Zen and the Poetry of Philip Whalen 103 Jane Falk 6 Keeping Vision Alive: The Buddhist Stillpoint in the Work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg 123 Erik Mortenson 7 Illumination Through the Cracks: The Melting Down of Conventional Socio-Religious Thought and Practice in the Work of Gary Snyder 139 Tom Lavazzi 8 The American Poetic Diamond Vehicle: Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman Re-Work Vajrayana Buddhism 155 Jane Augustine PART III | Widening the Circle: Buddhism and American Writers of Color 9 Buddhism, the Chinese Religion, and the Ceremony of Writing: An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston 177 John Whalen-Bridge 10 A Bridge between Two Worlds: Crossing to America in Monkey Bridge 189 Hanh Nguyen and R. C. Lutz 11 ‘Opening the Hand of Thought’: The Meditative Mind in Charles Johnson’s Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories 207 Gary Storhoff Afterword 229 Charles Johnson List of Contributors 243 Index 247 FOREWORD I am certain that writers can transmit the Dharma, and that by reading, one can become an enlightened being. And yet, when Tripitaka Tang and Monkey unrolled the scrolls of the sutras that the Buddhists gave them, the paper was blank. The pilgrims went back up the Silk Road and demanded the correct scrolls. The Buddhists exchanged those blanks for scrolls that had words written on them. They laughed at the fools who had the right, empty scrolls all along. And here’s a story of our own time: Sherdyl Motz, while on a gunboat patrolling the Soirap River, a branch of the Mekong, Vietnam, quiet in the starry night, invented breathing meditation. I myself invented Nikon meditation, as well as astral projection, entrance to former incarnations, awake dreaming, silence, solitary retreat- ing, sanghas, and many rituals. The platonic Dharma makes its way to anyone. It does not have to be in the form of words. And yet, some of us—scriptophiles—spend lifetimes writing. This book in your hands is a trove of the best we can do to put the Dharma into words. By the way, the Dharma emerged already in the nineteenth century to American writers, who called it Transcendentalism. This book is a gather- ing of some thinking and imagining that Buddhists are doing now. Won- derful—enough scholarship, stories, and poems to make a genre: Buddhist American Literature. While you can self-reliantly follow the Buddha’s path, it’s fun to read other people’s experiences and to listen to teachers. And they give you sign- posts along the way. MAXINE HONG KINGSTON ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation: brief excerpts from “E.F.F. The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry, Oct. 1909”; “Synopsis of Lectures on Chinese and Japanese Poetry YLAL MSS 43 Box 99 Folder 4217.” By Ezra Pound, from THE POUND ARCHIVE (Beinecke Library, Yale University), copyright © 2007 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University from the Ernest Fenollosa papers: “My Position in America; a manifest of mission” bMS Am 1759.2 (60); “Remarks on Japanese Art in General” bMS Am 1759.2 (84); and “Analysis and Synthesis” bMS Am 1759.2 (50). Reprinted with permission of John Giorno, Giorno Poetry Systems: brief excerpts from “Guru Rinpoche,” “Shit, Piss, Blood, Pus and Brains,” and the Introduction of “Cancer In My Left Ball.” Reprinted with permission of University of California Davis Library Department of Special Collections: brief excerpts from “Philip Whalen Letter to Gary Snyder of 8 July 1954” and “Philip Whalen Letter to Gary Snyder of 10 June 1957.” Reprinted with permission of Philip Whalen Papers, Special Collec- tions, Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library, Reed College, Portland, Oregon: brief excerpts from: “Gary Snyder Letter to Philip Whalen of 13 January 1960.” Reprinted with permission from the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: brief excerpts from “Notions about Teaching Classes Dealing with Zen Lineage,” from Box 13:14, BANC MSS 200/93 p Philip Whalen Papers. Reprinted courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Uni- versity Archives, Stanford University Libraries: brief excerpts from two xii Acknowledgments letters (11 September 1958 and 26 July 1960) in the Allen Ginsberg Collection (MO733). Special thanks to the Executors of the Philip Whalen Literary Estate for permission to quote from his work. Introduction JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE AND GARY STORHOFF BUDDHISM AND AMERICAN IMAGINED COMMUNITIES Postwar American writers rebelled in a variety of ways.1 Writers in the first twenty years after the war struggled against censorship laws and canons of taste, and court cases were fought about books dealing with sex in an explicit manner. Books such as Lolita and Catcher in the Rye were the site of censorship battles between librarians and church groups, not just because these books brought up sex as a subject, but also because they presented conventional tastes regarding literature, art, and morality as ridiculously provincial or as phony.2 Buddhist writers from this period such as J.D. Salinger, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, to name some of the most famous Buddhist popularizers of the 1950s, did both. They experimented with a kind of formlessness in which the work took on the qualities of a mind supposed to be freer from delusion than those against which that mind was being defined. The Glass stories, Snyder’s mixing of Poundian translation and indigenous song, and Ginsberg’s charming and elegant yawp from the rooftop were all forms of complaint against mainstream society, which was felt to be crassly materialistic, a society of people too selfish to appreciate the literary celebration of generosity. In the words of Hettie Jones, the Beats were interested in Buddhism as an “antimaterialist point of view” that was “very attractive to those of us who 2 John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff were disaffected with the organized religion we were brought up with” (Mortenson 7). Not all of the writing bore the marks of complaint, but, if the First Noble Truth is that everything in life is pervasively unsatis- factory, the writers most interested in Buddhism bore witness, through Buddhist-inflected stories and poems, to the most unsatisfactory dimen- sions of American life. To note that Buddhist American literature was rebellious is not very surprising, since this literature was surely born of the same conditions as other well-known works of the period.3 If Buddhism was spread through Asia by royalty and other elites, it served the needs of a different subset in America: the countercultural intelligentsia who found the pleasure palace of America wanting. If Buddhist references and convention- challenging aesthetic notions were a mark of the literary avant-garde, it is also true that literature itself was the avant-garde of the movement of Buddhism into America: ideas discussed by D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts were multiplied tenfold in the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Without this literary amplification, it is doubtful that Buddhism would exist as it does in the United States today, a country of three hundred or so metropolitan areas, each of which has practicing Buddhist groups.

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