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Title: The Zen of Anarchy
Author: James Brown
Language: en
Topics: Zen, Buddhism, Religion, Poetry,
Source: https://buddhistanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/the-zen-of-anarchy-japanese-exceptionalism-and-the-anarchist-roots-of-the-san-francisco-poetry-renaissance-by-james-brown/

James Brown

The Zen of Anarchy

The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and

the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance

In this article, I will describe Zen anarchism, a strain of American

political and religious thought that developed among Beat poets of the

San Francisco renaissance. Specifically, I will explore and attempt to

explain the particular historical formation called Beat Zen anarchism,

an aesthetic and political ideal that emerged from the Beat generation’s

dialogue with Japanese Buddhism. I will show how

Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Alan Watts, in particular, trans-

muted a Japanese exceptionalist critique of American rationality and

materialism explicit in the work of Japanese Zen writers, especially

D. T. Suzuki, into a radical, anarchistic critique of American cold war

culture. In the process of presenting Zen anarchism as an American

religious phenomenon, I call into question two important narratives

about American religious and political life in the twentieth century.

First, I suggest ways in which the emergence of Beat Zen anarchism

in the 1950s reconfigures common narratives of the American left that

tend to focus on Marxist-inspired literature and dissent. Second, and

more centrally, I hope to show how Beat Zen emerged not primarily

from an Orientalist appropriation of “the East,” as one might argue,

but rather from an Occidentalist, Japanese-centered criticism of

American materialism that followed from the complex legacy of the

World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Columbian

Exposition.

The San Francisco poetry renaissance includes a number of

poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Lew

Welch, among others, not discussed in the scope of this essay. As

Michael Davidson has suggested, the San Francisco poetry renais-

sance appears as much a myth—what he calls an “enabling fiction”—

as a historical reality since many of the poets and writers associated

with it had roots and artistic outlets outside of San Francisco. Indeed,

Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 19,

Issue 2, pp. 207–242, ISSN: 1052-

Religion and American

to photocopy or reproduce

article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and

Permissions website, at

http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:

10.1525/rac.2009.19.2.207.

RAC1902_03.qxd 9/17/09 12:20 PM Page 207

the two poets at the center of this essay—Philip Whalen and Gary

Snyder—were “absent from the scene in many of its crucial years,”

studying Zen both at home and abroad.

For Davidson, what holds

the idea of a San Francisco poetry renaissance together are a mythol-

ogized sense of place—Big Sur, City Lights Bookstore, the open road,

North Beach coffee shops—along with a communitarian aesthetic of

direct and emotionally heightened spontaneous address, sexual free-

dom and libidinous experimentation, an urban, cosmopolitan out-

look, a rebellious individualism with roots in nineteenth-century

American literature, a broadly anarchopacifist politics, and the piv-

otal event of the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955. To this, I would

add the broadly inter-religious sensibility and engagement with

Buddhism fostered, in part, by San Francisco’s geographic location as

a destination city for Pacific Rim immigration. Of the poets who par-

ticipated in the San Francisco poetry renaissance, Gary Snyder and

Philip Whalen pushed this general interest in Buddhism to its most

literal extent, both of them studying Zen in Japan under Japanese

masters, with Whalen becoming a priest at the San Francisco Zen

Center under Suzuki Roshi. For this reason, their engagements with

Zen Buddhism are the focus of this essay’s consideration of Zen, anar-

chism, and Beat poetry.

The Beat sense of the sacred was fostered, in San Francisco, in

a self-consciously anarchist milieu where openness to and dialogue with

both cultural and individual others were encouraged. This milieu, cen-

tered in its early years around the poet and anarchist activist Kenneth

Rexroth, who founded the San Francisco Anarchist Circle in the late

1940s, drew inspiration from European and American anarchist

thought and from an influx of Asian, especially Japanese, immigrants

and philosophers. Orphaned in 1918, Rexroth spent his teens travel-

ing the United States, meeting and befriending various radicals of that

decade, including Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman, Alexander Berkman,

and better-known progressives. His San Francisco Anarchist Circle

began as a postwar project to revitalize the old, European-American

anarchist tradition of holding communal, dance hall gatherings for

political education and entertainment. Hosting both first-generation

anarchists and a new, more mystical group of young poets and dis-

senters like Snyder and Whalen,

the Anarchist Circle met in a hall

in the Fillmore “to refound the radical movement after its destruc-

tion by the Bolsheviks” over the course of the previous two decades

of Popular Front radicalism. The circle helped to solidify the polit-

ical perspectives and personal relationships of the poets of the San

Francisco renaissance and also gave birth to the independent, left

libertarian radio station KPFA, which would provide an outlet for

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the West Coast anarchists, poets, and Buddhist convert-dissenters

of the 1950s. As Rexroth recalls, through the relationships forged in

the Anarchist Circle and its offshoot, the Libertarian Circle, “the

ideological foundations of the San Francisco Renaissance had been

laid—poetry of direct speech of I to Thou, personalism, [and]

anarchism.”

On the West Coast, in Rexroth’s telling, a libertarian tradition

strongly influenced by the cultural memory of the Industrial Workers

of the World remained operative throughout the Popular Front

decades of the 1930s and 1940s into the 1950s. Due to continuous,

anarchist propaganda emanating from the West Coast through two

decades of the Popular Front’s reign, by the mid-1950s, “It was no

longer necessary to educate somebody to make an anarchist poet out

of him. He had a milieu in which he could naturally become such a

thing.”

Much of this milieu, in fact, was of Rexroth’s making. In 1931,

Rexroth organized the San Francisco chapter of the communist front

John Reed Club, staging radical skits and poetry readings from

flatbed trucks. Ultimately, however, Rexroth broke from Communist

party lines due to what Michael Denning has called his “attachment

to the Wobblies”

and to his conviction that the communist Popular

Front was disconnected both from the working class and from the art

and tradition of poetry itself. In addition to hosting the San Francisco

Anarchist Circle, where many of the poets of San Francisco found a

congenial home for their brand of dissent, Rexroth was the driving

force behind the pivotal Six Gallery reading, which exposed the West

Coast scene to Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure,

Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen.

Rexroth’s left libertarian or anarchist

approach to cultural

and interpersonal exchange—an approach that he held was passed on

to the Beats though the anarchist and libertarian circles in San

Francisco—derived partially from his encounter with Martin Buber’s

I and Thou. Although contemporary religionists often overlook

Buber’s contribution to American interreligious thought, he was

among the most influential thinkers of the 1950s, directly shaping the

core ideas of the celebrity theologian Paul Tillich and the civil rights

leader Martin Luther King, Jr. According to Buber’s I and Thou, trans-

lated into English in 1937 and republished with a postscript in 1957,

an individual’s attitude toward the world is marked either by an

objectifying orientation that Buber called I-It or a genuinely

dialogical

orientation called I-Thou. This latter orientation, for Buber as for

Rexroth, was both personal and political. Personally, the I-Thou ori-

entation enabled one to cut through the day-to-day world and cre-

ate a space for genuine meeting between individuals. I-Thou was

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objectification’s opposite and required a space outside socially condi-

tioned hatreds and stereotypes. Politically, the I-Thou orientation, for

Buber, suggested the potential for a stateless society. In Buber’s

words, genuine I-Thou dialogue, practiced on a broad social scale,

rendered government unnecessary since it enabled those living in

community to “substitute society for State to the greatest degree pos-

sible, moreover a society that is ‘genuine’ and not a State in dis-

guise.”

In a community of genuine dialogue, which Buber admitted

would be a utopia, it would be possible to live without government

because individuals would mediate social relations directly, compre-

hending others in their whole humanness. Insofar as the San

Francisco poetry movement treated poetry dialogically and commu-

nally “as communication, statement from one person to another,”

Rexroth held, its poetry “has become an actual social force”

shaped

by the Bay Area’s “intensely libertarian character.”

Buber’s

emphasis on unmediated speech between person and person

guided Rexroth’s vision of the Anarchist Circle while it defied state-

sanctioned habits of objectification.

“I look back on the first reading of I and Thou as a tremen-

dous, shaking experience,” Rexroth recalled in his Autobiographical

Novel, an experience that provided “a foundation of both the ethical

and contemplative life.”

Ethically, Rexroth held, Buber’s philosophy

cut to the core of social life, since it presented a direct challenge to

the

state of humanity under government while defying the dichotomy

between individual and society at the heart of liberal political theory.

“Against individualism and collectivism,” Rexroth wrote, “Buber

advocates communism” of the kind that “can be paralleled with

dozens of ‘communitarian’ writers” from those dismissed by Marx

and Engels as “Utopian,” such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, to “the

Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries, [Alexander] Berkman,” and oth-

ers.

For Rexroth, religious mysticism, such as Buber’s, and anarchist

politics joined to produce a poetics of religious dissent. “In a

religious

age,” according to Rexroth, the contemplative poetry of the Beat

movement “would be called religious poetry,” but “[t]oday we have

to call it Anarchism” while understanding that “[a] fellow over in

Africa” might just call it “reverence for life.”

This reverence for life, in Rexroth’s poetry as well as in that of

the San Francisco poets who adopted Zen and anarchism as they

absorbed and shared Rexroth’s dialogical poetics and politics, stood

in stark contrast to the gross materialism of postwar society.

Rexroth’s 1953 poem “Thou Shalt Not Kill”—dedicated to the

recently deceased Dylan Thomas—expresses Rexroth’s personal dis-

gust with the cold war liberal consensus, a disgust he shared with the

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poets who gathered around his circle. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” opens

with a blunt accusation:

They are murdering the young men.

For half a century now, every day,

They have hunted them down and killed them.

They are killing them now.

At this minute, all over the world,

They are killing the young men.

The poem, a favorite among the Beats and one that Rexroth read

often, moves quickly to the accusative voice:

You,

The hyena with polished face and bow tie,

In the office of a billion dollar

Corporation devoted to service;

The vulture dripping with carrion,

Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,

Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;

The jackal in double-breasted gabardine. . . .

Summoning blood-soaked imagery reminiscent of the age of anar-

chist direct action (“I want to pour gasoline down your chimneys./I

want to blow up your galleries./I want to burn down your editorial

offices”), Rexroth’s poem rails against the “double-breasted” organi-

zation man, whose cold war liberalism both betrays his earlier spirit

of dissent and destroys the spirit of poetry personified by Dylan

Thomas, “the little drunken cherub.” “You killed him!” the poem

concludes as Rexroth’s voice, in one reading, quavers in rage, “You

killed him! In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,/You son of a

bitch.”

The most influential Buddhism in Snyder’s and Whalen’s

early contact with Japanese Zen—that of D. T. Suzuki—offered a cri-

tique of Western rationalism that paralleled the generalized mistrust

of the cold war consensus shared among the poets who began to con-

gregate in Rexroth’s anarchist circle and in North Beach coffee shops

in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those poets who adopted Zen did

so in large part because the critique of Western culture it offered con-

firmed their anti-authoritarianism and provided an alternative to

what they saw as the deadening effects of rationalism on the human

spirit, evident in postwar U.S. culture’s technocracy and alienation.

The Zen critique of Western and American culture that reached them,

meanwhile, was informed by the history and demands of the

Japanese state in Japan’s imperial contact with the rest of Asia and its

defensive stance against Western imperialism. As Robert Sharf has

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argued, “Zen was introduced to Western scholarship not through the

efforts of Western orientalists, but rather through the activities of an

elite circle of internationally minded Japanese intellectuals and

globe-trotting Zen priests, whose missionary zeal was often second

only to their vexed fascination with Western culture.”

Beat Zen, in

other words, began not with a Western appropriation of an Oriental

“Other” but in a historical context in which Zen missionaries, begin-

ning in the nineteenth century, offered to the West what they called a

New Buddhism (Shin Bukky

o) that developed from the nationalistic

needs of Meiji-era Japan.

Born of the threat that Japanese nationalism posed to Zen,

which Meiji nationalists considered a foreign religion, Meiji-era New

Buddhists sought to naturalize Zen as both inherently Japanese and

as the highest achievement of Asian and world civilization, one com-

parable to Western philosophical and religious achievements in

many respects and superior to it in others. Americans first encoun-

tered this Occidentalist Zen Buddhism when D. T. Suzuki’s teacher,

Soyen Shaku Roshi, presented to Westerners at the World’s

Parliament of Religions at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair a vision of

Zen as a universal, timeless religion. At once exemplifying an Anglo-

centric American celebratory discourse and opening Americans to a

progressive interreligious dialogue and interfaith conversion only

imagined by early nineteenth-century writers like Emerson and

Thoreau, the World’s Parliament of Religions incidentally offered to

Asian representatives a platform from which to deploy what James

E. Ketelaar has called “Strategic Occidentalism.” For Ketelaar, as for,

more recently, Judith Snodgrass and Richard Seager, Asian represen-

tatives presenting at the Parliament deployed Occidentalism—a

critical “othering” of the West and defense of Asian religion and cul-

ture—in reaction to the constraining Christo-centric plan of the

Parliament, in which Christianity and faith in a Christian God stood

at the top of an evolutionary hierarchy of belief. Framed within a nine-

teenth-century pseudo-Darwinian anthropology, “The Parliament,”

Ketelaar notes, “became for non-Occidental religionists in general

and the Japanese Buddhists in particular an arena within which

Christianity as a global force could be, in fact needed to be,

checked.”

In order to “check” Christianity, however, Asian representa-

tives like the Rinzai teacher Soyen Shaku used the very language of

science and modernity that rationalized the World’s Fair and the

Parliament while also helping Zen better to serve the modernizing

Meiji state.

Seeking to defend Zen both to the West and to Japanese

authorities, Soyen, like other New Buddhist clerics and philosophers

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in Japan, sought to relate Zen to terms available in European and

American liberalism. At the World’s Parliament of Religions, for

instance, Soyen adopted rationalist anticlerical critiques of religion

to criticize Christianity, related Zen to concepts in European

Romanticism, and sought parallels between Zen and Western empiri-

cism (such that, for example, meditation was offered as an entirely

empirical and experiential practice rather than a mystical one). He

criticized Western materialism while offering Zen as its more

advanced spiritual cure. Absorbing and transmuting the evolutionary

scheme of the World’s Fair, Soyen also explained the historical devel-

opment of Buddhism by employing a neo-Darwinian narrative that

served to valorize the Japanese nation as a protectorate of the most

advanced evolution of Buddhist philosophy. Indeed, by the time it

reconstituted its relationship to the Meiji state and to the West at the

Parliament with the aid of the New Buddhists, Zen was presented to

Westerners as “not a religion in an institutional sense at all” but

rather

an “uncompromisingly empirical, rational, and scientific mode of

inquiry into the nature of things” that also affirmed “Japanese spiri-

tual and moral authority”

in both Asia and the West.

The affirmation of this rhetorical authority at the Parliament

was matched by Japanese Mahayana missionary efforts outside the

Parliament proper. The first of such Buddhist missionary efforts in the

United States by Buddhists included the distribution of “tens of thou-

sands of pamphlets” on Mahayana Buddhism throughout Chicago

and unofficial meetings in bars, cafés, and churches and was so success-

ful that one Japanese writer claimed, “We have pacified the barbarian

heart of the white race.”

Generally pacified or not, the hearts of

enough Westerners accepted the missionary message of Mahayana

Parliamentarians like Soyen that the Parliament marks a decisive shift

in American religion and spirituality away from the Christo-centric

point of view that until then had almost exclusively informed it.

Shortly after Soyen Shaku spoke at the Parliament, the Hindu repre-

sentative Swami Vivekananda and the Indian Buddhist representa-

tive Dharmapala, among others, gave their talks, and Charles Strauss,

a Jewish New York banker, became “the first person to be admitted to

the Buddhist fold on American soil.”

Another convert to Buddhism

to emerge from the Parliament was Dyer Lum, a political anarchist

and uncle of the anarchist Voltarine De Cleyre who held that the law

of Karma implied the anarchist possibility of “the moral government

of the world, without a personal governor.”

Lum, who admired Paul

Carus’s pivotal The Light of Asia, would become the first Zen anarchist

in the United States and “probably the first American of European

descent to proclaim publicly allegiance to Buddhism.”

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While providing a context for such liberal and radical inter-

pretations of Zen in the United States as Lum’s, the ideological man-

ufacture of Zen’s spiritual and moral authority by New Buddhists like

Soyen, as Brian Victoria has detailed, also underwrote Japanese

aggression from the Sino-Japanese war to the two world wars that fol-

lowed. At the same time, it informed the language of Zen’s foremost

philosopher to the West, D. T. Suzuki, whose writings introduced

Gary Snyder to Zen, who influenced Philip Whalen’s poetic/meditative

practice, and who had an immeasurable influence on the countercul-

ture’s understanding of Buddhism, especially as related by Alan

Watts. Shortly after the Parliament, Soyen sent Suzuki, then his stu-

dent, to work with Paul Carus on translations of the Tao Te Ching and

Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. In this period of intense New

Buddhist Japanese exceptionalism on the part of his teacher, Suzuki

began his first major work in English, Outlines of Mahayana

Buddhism.

According to Victoria, Suzuki’s early writings on Zen con-

tinued the exceptionalist work of Soyen by bolstering the way of the

warrior and sanctioning war as an act of compassion that would lib-

erate the Japanese people and help spread the dharma. In Victoria’s

words, “By the end of the 1920s,” with the aid of Suzuki and others,

“institutional Buddhism,” including Zen, “had firmly locked itself

into ideological support for Japan’s ongoing military efforts, wher-

ever and whenever they might occur.”

As Kirita Kiyohide has shown, however, many of Suzuki’s

writings were deeply suspicious of the Japanese state’s appropriation

of Zen for war aims, especially during the Second World War, and of

the state itself as an entity. If one strain of Suzuki’s writings—that

emerging from the World’s Parliament and his early immersion in

New Buddhism—celebrated the uniqueness of Zen and Japanese cul-

ture, another strain, at odds with the demands of the state, empha-

sized what Suzuki saw as the centrality in Zen of individual

liberation. Whereas “Zen is concerned with the absolute individual

self,” the government, he wrote in 1948, “should cast such a pale

shadow that one begins to wonder whether it even exists at all.”

Toward the end of his life, in 1952, Suzuki took this strain of thinking

to its furthest extent, remarking at a symposium that “I think anar-

chism is best.”

What Suzuki brought to the table as he lectured in the

United States both early in the century and upon his return in post-

war years was a sensibility about Zen informed both by New

Buddhist Japanese exceptionalism and New Buddhist cosmopoli-

tanism. The former saw Zen as an exceptional gift of the Japanese

people to the world and the West as overly determined by its ratio-

nalistic materialism. The latter used Enlightenment individualistic

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language to propagate Zen as a universal, missionary religion whose

spiritually revolutionary aim was to liberate the individual both from

the cycle of birth and death and from his or her own cultural preju-

dices and allegiance to any state.

In explicating Zen to Western audiences, Suzuki chose to

focus attention away from the outward forms of Zen practice and to

emphasize, instead, the unique, transcultural experience of Buddhist

awakening in language that his American audiences could under-

stand. In one track of his thought, Suzuki deemphasized the nation-

alistic aspects of Zen for the specific purpose of bringing Zen to the

West, though he insisted that Westerners must practice sitting zazen to

the point of satori to have a genuine Zen experience. Zen must be

practiced as Zen, not, he insisted, as psychotherapy, as hallucinogenic

reverie, as parapsychology, or as any number of Western “alterna-

tives” to Zen. Paradoxically, while Zen was exceptionally Japanese, it

was infinitely exportable since the direct experience of satori tran-

scended culture. What was exceptional about Zen was both its innate

Japanese-ness and its brilliant, transhistoric relevance. The explicit

critique of Western materialism in Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese excep-

tionalism and its emphasis on transcultural individual liberation con-

firmed the individualist, left libertarian premises of Beat dissent

against cold war culture while giving Beat poets a contemplative

practice from which to criticize the West’s failure to present life as

really was.

Suzuki’s emphasis on the immediate, individual experience

of satori, or awakening, derived from his association with a second

wave of Japanese-centric philosophers, the Kyoto school. Founded, at

first informally, by Suzuki’s long-time friend Nishida Kitar

o, the

Kyoto school was intently interested in Western philosophy. The

Kyoto school philosophers’ interest in the West, like that of their New

Buddhist predecessors and teachers, tended to valorize the spirit of

Zen, and their comparisons between East and the West favored the

former and criticized the latter. In a letter to Suzuki written in 1911,

for instance, Nishida wrote that Westerners “are completely unaware

of what is closest to them, the very ground under their own feet. They

can analyze and explain all the ingredients in bread and all the ele-

ments in water but they can’t describe the taste of such bread and

water.”

To this “fakeness” or “artificiality” of modern Western ways

of knowing—which the Beats would also posit—Nishida attributed

the Enlightenment split between ego and self implicit in the Cartesian

dualism. To become completely aware of “the very ground under

their feet,” Westerners could not go by the artificial way of dualistic

logic and reason. Rather, they must, if they wished to break free of the

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ego delusion, go by way of zazen and satori, immediately experienc-

ing the awaking at the heart of Zen practice.

In the practice of a third wave of Zen teachers in America, the

view that Westerners had more philosophical hang-ups to overcome

than Japanese Buddhists led to a strict adherence to Japanese forms.

This outlook was exemplified by Suzuki Roshi, the founder of San

Francisco Zen Center, who increased the number of bows Americans

take after zazen from three to nine and who insisted that the ego delu-

sions of Americans were so entrenched that it might benefit American

Buddhists to follow more precepts than their Japanese counterparts.

For his part, however, D. T. Suzuki translated Zen into terms easily

assimilated to Western perspectives, emphasizing the naturalness of

Zen in an American context. In his 1934 An Introduction to Zen

Buddhism, reprinted in 1959 with a foreword by Carl Jung, for

instance, he assured his readers that

Zen aims at preserving your vitality, your native freedom,

and above all the completeness of your being. In other

words, Zen wants to live from within. Not to be bound by

rules, but to be creating one’s own rules—this is the kind of

life which Zen is trying to have us live.

The real restriction on human freedom and vitality was not formal

Zen but formal logic, which “has so pervasively entered into life as

to make us conclude that logic is life and without it life has no sig-

nificance.” Summoning a martial metaphor, Suzuki claimed that

“Zen wishes to storm this citadel” of rationalist “topsy-turveydom

and to show that we live psychologically or biologically and not

logically.”

In offering Zen as a liberation from the dominance of ration-

ality in the West, then, Suzuki affirmed some of the core values that

his students and readers in the Beat generation also affirmed: vitality,

freedom, biological connectedness, and psychological wholeness.

Simultaneously, he underscored Zen’s emotionality, as distinct from

rationality, which, he argued, found its most natural expression in lit-

erature: “Zen naturally finds its readiest expression in poetry rather

than philosophy because it has more affinity with feeling than with

intellect.”

If Zen would “storm the citadel” of Western ways of

knowing, it would do so from the heart and pen, not the rational

mind. Suzuki was careful to distinguish his sense of emotionality and

expressiveness from mere libertinism—in his words, “The libertines

actually have no freedom of will” since “they are bound hands and

feet” by craving and desire “before which they are utterly helpless.”

Nonetheless, a poet looking for a spiritual and philosophical sanction

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for an emotive, personally freeing, libertarian, and poetic assault on

the cold war’s regime of military-industrial expertise could easily

find such sanction in Suzuki’s work. Such a poet could also find a

path to universal compassion that would, if embraced by enough dis-

senters, change the world.

Suzuki’s vision of Zen as salvational for the West was echoed

by a convert to Buddhism, Dwight Goddard, who compiled a 1932

collection of Buddhist canonical texts in A Buddhist Bible. In his

intro-

duction to A Buddhist Bible, a book that prompted Jack Kerouac’s

interest in Buddhism after he found it in a library in San Jose,

California,

Goddard made clear that Buddhism generally offered

teachings of “highest promise” to the West. “In these days when

Western civilization and culture is buffeted as never before by fore-

boding waves of materialism and selfish aggrandizement both indi-

vidual and national,” Goddard wrote in his editor’s preface,

Buddhism seems to hold out teachings of highest promise. . . .

It may well be the salvation of Western civilization. Its

rationality, its discipline, its emphasis on simplicity and sin-

cerity, its thoughtfulness, its cheerful industry not for profit

but for service, its love for all animate life, its restraint of

desire in all its subtle forms, its actual foretastes of enlight-

enment and blissful peace, its patient acceptance of karma

and rebirth, all mark it out as being competent to meet the

problems of this excitement loving, materialistic, acquisitive

and thoughtless age.

For Goddard, who had “converted” to Buddhism while a

Congregational missionary in China in 1897, the Buddha was “the

greatest teacher of mankind,” and the gift of the Buddha’s Dharma

was “the greatest of all gifts.”

In Goddard’s view, Buddhism’s alter-

native “rationality,” a rationality of compassionate and loving fellow

service, prefigured a utopian end to American materialism.

Of Goddard’s compilation of Buddhist texts, Robert Aitken

notes that it began “a creative process of Americanizing Buddhism”

that manifested in Kerouac, Snyder, Philip Whalen, and others and

that created the conditions that “helped to establish a culture in which

the Zen Center of San Francisco could develop and flourish.”

Goddard himself, who financially supported several of the monks

who helped to translate the texts in his collection, sought to start a

monastic community—the “Followers of Buddha”—in Santa Barbara

National Forest. Aitken finds in Goddard’s efforts to bring Buddhism to

the West not an orientalist mindset but “a talented Yankee gentleman

fired with bodhicitta—the aspiration for Buddhahood—who bewil-

dered his conventional family and friends and worked a very lonely

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row quite single-mindedly.”

Goddard, who typed D. T. Suzuki’s

1932 translation of the Mahayanist Lankavatara Sutra, clearly shared

with Suzuki a strong sense of Buddhism’s particular competence to

save the West.

This competence, in Suzuki’s view, emerged both from

Buddhism’s perfection in Japan and its ability to evolve over time and

space. The doctrine of upaya, or skillful means, which enabled the

Buddha to enlighten his listeners by engaging them at exactly their

individual levels of understanding, applied to cultures as well as to

Buddha’s interlocutors in the sutras. Illustrating the upaya of

Buddhism in its historic development, Suzuki, throughout Essays in

Zen Buddhism: First Series (1949), Suzuki’s text primarily responsible

for inspiring the Beat Generation of Zen Buddhists,

argued for the

universality of the enlightenment experience, unencumbered by cul-

tural particulars, at the core of Buddhist practice. The purpose of Zen,

which “transmitted the essence of Buddhism,” “shorn of its Indian

garb,” was “to bring about a revolutionary experience, more or less

noetic, in the minds of the students.”

This revolution in knowing

would “exterminate all turmoils arising from ignorance and confu-

sion” and would appear “directly poured out from the inner region

undimmed by the intellect or the imagination.”

Zen practice would

liberate practitioners from the “intellectual nonsense” that veils the

reality of our genuinely enlightened natures and the “passional rub-

bish” that leads to craving. Such “accumulations” of intellectualiza-

tion and blind passion make us “groan under the feeling of

bondage.”

Once we “personally experience it through our own

efforts,” however, Zen, by “directly appealing to facts of personal

experience and not to book knowledge,” promises to return us to “our

original state of freedom.”

Since this immediate apprehension of

freedom from within knows no cultural bounds, Suzuki wrote, “Our

religious experience transcends the limitations of time, and its ever-

expanding content requires a more vital form which will grow with-

out doing violence to itself.”

In his narrative unfolding of Buddhism’s movement from

India to Japan and its absorption of Chinese Taoism along the way—a

narrative that had a palpable effect on Alan Watts’s work—Suzuki

demonstrated what he held to be Buddhism’s transcultural accessibil-

ity. “Bodhidharma,” who is said to have first brought Buddhism to the

Chinese, “taught his disciples to look directly into the essence of the

teaching of the Buddha, discarding the outward manners of presenta-

tion” while rejecting “the conceptual and analytical interpretation of

the

doctrine of Enlightenment.” In fact, Buddhists, for Suzuki, who adhered

too closely to culturally bound forms of Buddhist doctrine—those

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“literary adherents of the Sutras”—were actually enemies of

Buddhism who “did all they could to prevent the growth and teaching

of the Dharma.” As Indian Buddhism migrated, Suzuki argued, “there

was no other way left for Buddhism but to be transformed.” Further,

such transformation from one cultural context to another was impera-

tive so that Buddhism “could be thoroughly acclimatized and grow as

a native plant.” Indeed, it was “in the inherent nature of Buddhism”

that such grafting and acclimation “should take place.”

Republished in 1961 by Evergreen Press, the press that cut the

first commercial recordings of Beat poets and introduced the Beats to

the literary world in its 1957 “San Francisco Scene” issue of Evergreen

Review, Essays in Zen Buddhism demonstrates Suzuki’s own upaya or

skillful means. This upaya manifested itself in Suzuki’s strong appeal

to the tradition of American individualism and self-reliance. Culture-

bound intellectualism and rationalism, in Zen, were displaced

through personal effort unbound by the restraints of language, time,

and place. Though Zen was to be practiced with a Bodhisattva’s con-

cern for the benefit of all beings, the Bodhisattva’s vow to refuse

Nirvana until all beings could attain Nirvana must begin, Suzuki

held, with individual will and effort. “The reason why the Buddha so

frequently refused to answer metaphysical problems was partly due

to his conviction that the ultimate truth was to be realized in oneself

and through one’s own effort,” Suzuki wrote, “rather than through

philosophical abstraction.

Suzuki’s concept of “own effort” involved a conscious rejec-

tion of one’s cultural practices and prejudices. One comes to appre-

hend truth not through “an ordinary intellectual process of reasoning,

but [through] a power that will grasp something most fundamental in

an instant and in the directest way,” a power which we all “have after

all within ourselves.” To accomplish this grasping of truth “immedi-

ately without any conceptual medium . . . the sole authority in” the

Zen practitioner’s “spiritual life will have to be found within himself;

traditionalism or institutionalism will naturally lose its binding

force.” It was, Suzuki believed, “this spirit of freedom” that was con-

stantly “impelling Buddhism to break through its monastic shell,”

and in this affirmation of freedom Buddhism found itself again and

again “bringing forward the idea of Enlightenment ever vigorously

before the masses.”

In the act of bringing Zen before the masses,

Suzuki translated Zen into an American idiom that hit some of the

keynotes of American left libertarianism: a rejection of cultural condi-

tioning, institutionalism, and traditionalism; an affirmation of indi-

vidualism and radical self-reliance in the Thoreauvian vein; and a

language of revolutionary aspiration.

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The writing and talks of Alan Watts, the most accessible and

popular interpreter of Zen to the Beat generation, echo the individu-

alistic themes in Suzuki’s work. Watts, an ex-Anglican who studied

Suzuki prodigiously in his teens and twenties in his native England

and who was also familiar with Goddard’s volume,

gave talks at the

American Academy of Asian Studies in Berkeley along with Suzuki to

audiences that included Snyder and Whalen. Watts and many of the

Beats, including Whalen and Snyder, also attended Buddhist discus-

sion groups in Berkeley sponsored by the Pure Land Buddhist

Churches of America, at one of which Snyder and Watts first met.

Watts’s reach and popularity resulted largely from the left libertarian

KPFA, which broadcast Watts’s weekly show, “Way Beyond the West,”

adjacent to Rexroth’s broadcasts on the same station. Lecturing in this

anarchist context, Watts assumed Suzuki’s basic critiques and uses of

Western thought and extended them to an explicitly radical, left lib-

ertarian critique of postwar American culture. Like Suzuki, Watts

understood Zen as resulting from the contact between Indian

Buddhism and Chinese Taoism.

Emphasizing the Tao at the heart of

Zen, Watts related Zen Buddhism directly to individual liberation

from what he treated as the tyrannical and authoritarian nature of

Western theology. Unlike the Western God, “Tao,” Watts argued,

“does not act as a boss. In the Chinese idea of nature,” in fact,

“nature

has no boss. There is no principle that forces things to behave the way

they do. It [Tao] is a completely democratic theory of nature.”

Christianity offered a system of social relations reflected in the mod-

ern, antidemocratic workplace, Zen Buddhism, with the Tao at its

core, offered true democracy. This democracy, in turn, was parallel to

nature itself, which Watts called “a system of orderly anarchy.”

In Watts’ political cosmology, the Taoist heart of Buddhism

was “high philosophical anarchy,” since it implied that nature,

including human nature, should be trusted fully.

Nature—the Tao—

“doesn’t have a boss because a boss is a system of mistrust.”

The

system of mistrust that upheld the “boss” system inherent in Western

culture and theology, Watts argued, leads to a “totalitarian state.”

Combining elements reminiscent of Orwell’s description of an

authoritarian Communist England and of David Riesman’s criticism

of psychotherapeutic cold war conformism, Watts argued that in the

“boss” system of Western thought

everybody is his brother’s policeman. Everybody is watch-

ing everybody else to report him to the authorities. You have

to have a psychoanalyst in charge of you all the time to be

sure that you don’t think dangerous thoughts or peculiar

thoughts and you report all your peculiar thoughts to your

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analyst and your analyst keeps a record of them and reports

them to the government, and everybody is busy keeping

records of everything.

As a result of our ways of knowing in the West, Watts stated in the

opening minutes of a 1949 series of lectures for San Francisco’s pub-

lic TV station, KQED, “Our whole culture, our whole civilization . . .

is nuts. It’s not all here. We are not awake. We are not completely

alive

now.” Postwar American culture was not alive primarily because we

were “using science and technology, the powers of electricity and

steel, to carry on a fight with our external world and to beat our sur-

roundings into submission with bulldozers.” Our “religio-philosophical

tradition,” meanwhile, “has taught us to . . . mistrust ourselves.” This

mistrust of nature and the natural self Watts attributed to our faith in

original sin and our hyperactive reliance on reason and individual

will: original sin “has taught us as reasoning and willing beings to

distrust our animal and instinctual nature.”

A turn to the East could

revitalize this deadened animal instinct, returning us to the ground of

nature.

Like his teacher Suzuki, Watts believed that it was “charac-

teristic of Eastern philosophy to be based on experience rather than

ideas” and guided by “feeling” instead of rationality. The conception

of the East as “feeling” and the West as “thinking,” by all appearances

Orientalist, actually favored the East, both for Suzuki and for Watts.

To privilege rationality was to mar the natural world, to alienate one-

self from nature, and to create a society conceived in strictly authori-

tarian terms. Rationalism, in other words, offered a delusional and

innately inferior way of experiencing the universe. To posit that the

East experiences the world more directly and emotionally is not to

posit the view, Watts argued, “that there are people in the backward

worlds of Asia who think that the universe is ultimately nothing at

all.” Instead, the liberating awareness that the world was a direct

experience empty of those ideas that Westerners impose on it “repre-

sents complete spiritual freedom. Or you might say if you don’t like

the world spiritual, complete psychological freedom.” This freedom,

which Watts equated with satori or Zen awakening, “is the objective

of human life.” Without this freedom, Westerners would continue to

have “a fundamentally hostile cutting up attitude to life,” an “attitude

of the knife” that “gives us dead knowledge instead of living knowl-

edge” and that “kills things.”

Governance attuned to nature, Watts explained during his

KQED broadcast, would restore life to Western men and women. As part

of this restoration, the West—or at least those in the West who awakened

to their true, uninhibited natures—would adopt a self-organizing

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form of governance in which the individual person and the social

person naturally aligned. “These forms of Asian philosophy” such as

Taoism and Zen “want us as individuals to feel that we participate in

this great democracy of nature no longer as isolated individuals try-

ing to push it around, command it like monarchs or bosses.” Taoism

and Zen instead wants us to realign ourselves to nature’s “self gov-

erning state” and “self organizing pattern” in which “each one of us

is that entire pattern.”

Harmony between the individual, society,

and nature was at once a reaffirmation of the individual, in the sense

that one’s real nature was realized as identical to that of cosmos, and

a freeing of the individual from the delusion of the isolated ego. Thus

freed, one could more cooperatively engage the world without the

need for political governance.

Such voluntary cooperation between awakened, emanci-

pated individuals in a nonauthoritarian society echoes the individu-

alist socialist aspirations of anarchist and left libertarian thinkers

and

revolutionaries whose legacy Rexroth celebrated. Watts argued, how-

ever, that Zen served no such revolutionary function in Chinese or

Japanese culture. In his 1957 The Way of Zen, Watts suggested that Zen

served primarily as medicine in cultures where social convention was

integral to the consciousness of the practitioner. In societies domi-

nated by the principles of Confucianism, Zen merely eased “the con-

ditioning of the individual by the group.” Social conventions

themselves, though, were taken for granted in these societies, as

reflected, for example, in the formal strictness of the Japanese tea

cer-

emony. However, in contexts “where convention is weak” or “there is

a spirit of open revolt against convention,” Zen might serve less pal-

liative, more outright “destructive purposes.”

For his part, Watts

emphasized the need for destruction not of society itself but of the

authoritarian mechanism of the ego at the center of the West’s psychic

life. The proposal that the ego required decentering, as Watts’s cri-

tique of rationalism suggests, struck the very root of Western civic

life. Through meditation and awakening to the Tao, a society based on

the authoritarian principle of the paranoid ego terrified of losing

social control would make way for a society based “in the mutual

agreement of human beings.”

Although Alan Watts was critical of “lifestyle” Beats with

shallow interests in Eastern philosophy,

his Sinocentric criticism of

Western life, along with Suzuki’s sharp criticism of Western rational-

ism, shaped the counterculture in ways that Watts tentatively

accepted. For Snyder and Whalen, who pushed Suzuki’s and Watts’s

challenge to Western philosophy the farthest in actual, meditative

practice, Zen offered an alternative way of seeing and being in the

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world that could be productively enfolded with their left libertarian

thought. Of the six poets who read at the Rexroth-emceed Six Gallery

reading in 1955, two—Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder—thoroughly

embraced Zen Buddhism. Whalen, who practiced Buddhism in the

United States before traveling to Japan with Snyder in 1966, wrote

both Zen and anti-authoritarianism into his poems and eventually

became a Soto priest at the San Francisco Zen Center. Gary Snyder,

meanwhile, lived in Japan for twelve years between 1956 and 1968,

studying Zen in temples around the country and seeking the com-

pany of Japanese Dharma revolutionaries. For Whalen and Snyder,

contact with Zen constituted more than an alternative lifestyle or an

Orientalist appropriation of the East. It provided, instead, a stabiliz-

ing spiritual practice that grounded their anti-authoritarian critiques

both of American ways of knowing and of U.S. hegemony.

For Snyder, reading D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism was

a transformative experience, one that both converted him to Zen prac-

tice and changed the direction of his life when he found a copy of it

in a bookshop while wandering around San Francisco with Philip

Whalen in 1951.

Like Watts, what Gary Snyder found most com-

pelling in Suzuki’s writings was the way in which Suzuki related Zen

to Taoism.

Zen’s sedimented Taoism opened the way for Westerners,

alienated from nature, to tap a prerationalist connection to the natu-

ral. In a 1977 East West Journal interview, Snyder described his early

immersion in Chinese Buddhist ways of knowing in the Chinese

room at a Seattle museum. “The Chinese,” he said, “had an eye for the

world that I saw as real.” The Western eye, by contrast, failed to cap-

ture Snyder’s imagination: “In the next room were the English and

European landscapes, and they meant nothing.” In college, Snyder

adopted Marxism. However, after shifting his focus to American

Indian studies while an anthropology graduate student for one

semester at Indiana University, he came to discover “that maybe it

was all of Western culture that was off the track and not just

capitalism—

that there were certain self-destructive tendencies in our cultural tra-

dition.”

These self-destructive tendencies resulted in Western

humanity’s alienation from the very places they lived, from, in

Nishida’s words, the ground beneath their feet. Zen Buddhism, for

Snyder, offered a vehicle by which to re-tap the primitive sense of

place on which the very survival of the earth as we know it depended.

Realizing that Zen offered an invitation to a spiritual practice

more open to Westerners than he was likely to receive from the

“Paiute or Shoshone Indians in eastern Oregon,” Snyder left Indiana

University, where he began a degree track in anthropology, to study

Oriental languages at Berkeley in 1952 in preparation to study in

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Japan, a decision promoted by his pivotal encounter with Essays in

Zen Buddhism.

While in Japan, he discovered the very freedom in

Zen that Suzuki had promised: “when you go into the sanzen room,

you have absolute freedom.” This freedom, for Snyder, resulted from

the immediate awakening to the value of the present time and place

offered in zazen. Further, this freedom was connected, in Snyder’s

thought, to American republican traditions of individualism and self-

reliance, values that carried over from the republican tradition to left

libertarianism. “Americans have a supermarket of adulterated ideas

available to them, thinned out and sweetened, just like their food.

They don’t have the apparatus for critical discernment either,” Snyder

held. “The primary quality of that truth” that American thinking is

adulterated by “supermarket” consumerism is Americans’ “lack of

self-reliance, personal hardiness—self-sufficiency.” Though one could

misread Snyder’s revalorization of the spirit of self-reliance also

found in Emerson and Thoreau as a conservative reaction to postwar

America’s managed economy, for Snyder, lack of self-reliance was

akin to Marxian alienation. “This lack [of self-reliance],” in his

words,

“can also be described as the alienation people experience in life and

work.”

In Snyder’s view, late capitalism’s consumerist alienation

could be corrected with a new commitment to conscious work.

Drawing on the Zen axiom that the meaning of awakening is “chop

wood, carry water,” or just doing the labor at hand, Snyder argued

that “we damn well better learn that our meditation” in the West “is

primarily going to be our work with our hands.”

In Snyder’s political cosmology, the disalienation of labor

from the means of production aided by the contemplative awareness

offered in Zen practice would not only reawaken the West, but would

begin to solve the burgeoning environmental crisis created by con-

sumerism. Ecology was at the heart of Snyder’s Zen anarchism. The

cold war technocratic state, from Snyder’s perspective, was directly

responsible for the planetary ecological crisis, and that state should,

Snyder believed, be overthrown by an anarchistic order. “There are

two kinds of earth consciousness: one which is called global, the other

we call planetary,” he held. “Global consciousness” is “world-

engineering-technocratic-utopian-centralization men in business

suits who play world games in systems theory” while “planetary

thinking is decentralist, seeks biological rather technological solu-

tions,” and learns from traditional sources as well as “the libraries of

the high Occidental civilizations.” The latter, planetary consciousness

“is old-ways internationalism which recognizes the possibility of one

earth with all its diversity.” In contrast, “global consciousness” as

enforced by the burgeoning global capitalist order “would ultimately

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impose a not-so-benevolent technocracy on everything via a central-

ized system.”

The concept upholding this technocratic dystopia,

Snyder told the Berkeley Bard, was “the idea of a ‘nation’ or ‘country’

[that] is so solidly established in most people’s consciousness now

that there’s no intelligent questioning of it. It’s taken for granted as

some kind of necessity.” In contrast to nationalism, Snyder valorized

the “tribal social structure” as “one of the ways of breaking out of

that

nation-state bag.”

In other words, forwarding an anarchist conception of politi-

cal cooperation, Snyder proposed that the solution to the problem of

ecological crisis was less, not more, centralization. The ideal organi-

zation of society—local, spiritual, regional—would be driven by an

ecological consciousness that Snyder equated with “a political anar-

chist position: that the boundaries drawn by national states and so

forth don’t represent any real entity.” Instead of clinging to this fic-

tion, “people have to learn a sense of region,” surrendering the illu-

sion that “promiscuous distribution of goods and long-range

transportation is always going to be possible.”

Zen Buddhism’s abil-

ity to root the one meditating in the immediate place and present

moment would ground this turn from internationalism to localism

inspired by planetary concern in a renewed focus on community. Zen

meditation could underwrite this renewal because it could make one

aware of the intimate co-arising of self and other, of the unity of

organ-

ism and environment. “What we need to do,” Snyder believed, “is to

take the great intellectual achievement of the Mahayana Buddhists

and bring it back to a community style of life which is not necessarily

monastic.”

Broken free of the monastery, Zen would become what

Suzuki claimed it was inherently: “a birthright of everybody.”

Theoretically, this birthright, once embraced by the West, would help

to revitalize ways of knowing lost in the globalized consumerist

model of humanity with its attendant alienated and displaced labor.

This sense of respect for locally oriented labor informed by Buddhist

contemplation Snyder captures in his 1957 collection, The Back

Country, which moves the reader from the Pacific Northwest to Japan,

India, and back again. He draws attention along the way to truck driv-

ers, hitchhikers making their way “to the wobbly hall,” “dead men

naked/tumbled on beaches” in newsreels from the war, and the cycli-

cal, daily labor of Zen monks and of prostitutes alike. Alluding to the

anarchist influence behind his poetry of the 1950s collected in this

vol-

ume, Snyder dedicated The Back Country to Ken Rexroth.

True to this anarchist legacy, Snyder ultimately rejected

Marxism, which in his view was part of the “the whole Western tra-

dition” of millennial Protestantism. In place of what he viewed as

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Marxism’s essentially Christian utopianism, he emphasized the need

for immediate, inner revolution aided by Buddhist practice directed

toward anarchist models of social behavior. Shortly after his under-

graduate rejection of Marxism, he “found in the Buddha-Dharma a

practical method for clearing one’s mind of the trivia, prejudices, and

false values that our conditioning had laid on us,” beneath which lay

“the deepest non-self Self.”

The insight that Buddhism offered into

the nondual nature of self and other—this deepest non-self Self—

would complement and complete Western utopian traditions. As

Snyder argued in “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” pub-

lished in 1961 under the title “Buddhist Anarchism,” “The mercy of

the West has been social revolution” while “the mercy of the East has

been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both” in

order to affect “any cultural and economic revolution that moves

toward a free, international, classless world.”

Meditation—the

Eastern key to opening this world—affects social revolution insofar as

it attunes one to “wisdom,” or “the intuitive knowledge of the mind

of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and

aggressions.” This mind of love and charity expresses itself socially

both in the Buddhist notion of sangha—the interdependent commu-

nity of all beings—and in the theories of “the Anarcho-Syndicalists”

who “showed a sense for experimental social reorganization” and

who, Snyder reminds us, influenced the “San Francisco poets and

gurus” like himself who “were attending the meetings of the

‘Anarchist Circle’” with Rexroth.

Among those influenced by Buddhism and anarchism alike

was Philip Whalen, Snyder’s friend from Reed College in Oregon

who was exposed to Eastern philosophy through Vedanta first before

discovering Zen at about the same time that Snyder had. According

to Whalen, Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism “converted me” to Zen

Buddhism, and D. T. Suzuki himself “practically invented [Zen] for

the West.”

The aim of Whalen’s poetry in the years of the San

Francisco Renaissance was specifically, in his words, to protest

“against the government,” which “conducts iniquitous wars all over

the world” while laying down restrictive laws proscribing morality

and “talking about peace and saving people from communism.”

Asked in a 1972 interview about the roots of this spirit of antigovern-

ment resistance in his poetry, Whalen pointed, like Rexroth, to the

pre-Stalinist, left libertarian generation of the twenties who “were

already revolting against puritanism and against prohibition.” The

cold war version of this anarchist criticism was directed against

“those people in the Pentagon who are able to push buttons and make

catastrophic things happen” while “all we are able to push [as poets]

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is words.”

In language shot through with Zen metaphors, Whalen’s

Memoirs of an Interglacial Age (1960) and Scenes of Life at the Capital

(1970) show Whalen “pushing words” as weapons against the insti-

tutions of psychological constraint on the one hand and against U.S.

military hegemony on the other.

In Memoirs of an Interglacial Age, Whalen explores the limita-

tions of human consciousness, institutions, and language from a per-

spective shaped by Zen meditation. An early poem in the book’s

cycle, “Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis” (“A Hymn to the Chinese

Fathers”), playfully remarks on the Taoist spirit of Zen exactly as it

had been underscored by both Suzuki and Watts:

I praise those ancient Chinamen

Who left me with a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a

quick

splashed picture—bug, leaf

caricature of Teacher

on paper held together now by little more than ink

& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they know it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& concked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom

winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

This individual freedom and naturalness of the Chinese Taoist patri-

archs whose spirit Whalen, like Suzuki and Watts, saw as forming the

heart of Zen practice, is juxtaposed, in “A Reflection on My Own

Time,” with the dominance of social conditioning and the “lobotomy

knife” of cold war American life:

WHAT ideas? Not a brain in my head, only

“Education” & a few “idées reçues” (read

“conditioned reflexes”)

But necessary to open my small

yap

maybe just to say “ouch”

as the lobotomy knife slides

(“painlessly”, they say)

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In contrast to Zen’s Taoist-inflected naturalness, the “painless” lobot-

omy of conformity to the psychotherapeutic cold war state recalls

Watts’s criticism of the West’s “attitude of the knife” that “gives us

dead knowledge instead of living knowledge” and that “kills things”

while it enforces institutionalism and conformism.

The unyielding conditioning of culture and conformity

chases the speaker of Whalen’s poems even into his most private

reflections, as when, in “Self Portrait Sad,” he finds his revelry of

“unspeakable vices” haunted by the sense that the ego is an illusion

enforced by education:

Another damned lie, my name is I

Which is a habit of dreaming & carelessness

No nearer the real truth of any matter

In any direction myself bound & divided by notions

ACT! MOVE! SPEAK!

Huge—I’m a preta, starving ghost

Self-devoured

The hungry ghost, in Buddhist cosmology, has collected Karma so

corrupted that he is consigned to a realm in which he lives in perpet-

ual hunger with a bloated belly and a mouth the size of a pinhole.

Here, the poet becomes a preta because of habits and notions that, we

quickly discover, are informed by institutions of rationality. The

speaker, tired of “walking from one end of a teeter-board to the other”

trying to answer the question of who the “I” really is, resolves to “go

sit under a chestnut tree & contemplate the schoolhouse” in the cen-

ter of an open field. Sitting there, he recalls that

Mama said: “You don’t HAVE to believe EVERYTHING

they tell you

in school—think for yourself a little bit!”

The very record of the development of Western rationality held in the

library the speaker observes and in the schoolhouse next to it are seen

as constraints on the freedom the poet strives for while meditating

under a chestnut tree. Contemplating the schoolhouse library, he

notes, “The library: A house of correction.” The posture of meditation,

meanwhile, enables the poet to see through the ego-centrism of

Western knowledge and begin to “think for himself” from the posi-

tion of his true, awakened self.

Throughout Whalen’s work, the act and posture of medita-

tion sits as the real subject of the poetry. Of Memoirs of an

Interglacial

Age, he wrote, “This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving”

in Zen meditation, which “created a habit of hearing and seeing that

is the basis of poetry or is actually poetry” itself.

In his attempts to

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overcome the illusory Cartesian ego, with its associated post-Cartesian

disciplines—lobotomous psychotherapy and mass education—the

poet takes refuge in Zen mediation.

At Snyder’s urging, Whalen lived and studied Zen in Kyoto.

In Scenes of Life at the Capital, Whalen offers from his perspective in

Kyoto a more direct indictment of Western hegemony, one only sug-

gested in his earlier Memoirs. Scenes of Life at the Capital opens with

the

poet sitting in the Zen posture:

Having returned at least and being carefully seated

On the floor—somebody else’s floor, as usual—

Far away across the ocean . . .

From this transnational perspective—“Far away across the ocean”—

Western culture appears not merely coercive and ego-enforcing, as it

had in Memoirs, but utterly uncivilized:

The longer I think about it

The more I doubt there is such a thing as

Western Civilization. A puritan commercial culture

Was transplanted from Europe to U.S.A. in the 17th Century

American Indians were a civilized people

“Our main difficulty” in the West, the poem continues, is our “fear

and distrust of freedom,” and the various

Difficulties compounded by idea of “consent”

And theory of “delegated powers.”

Hire specialists to run everything.

But the powers they derive from us

Relieve these governors of all responsibility

Somehow become vast personal wealth—

Fortunes which must be protected from “license” and “the

violence of the mob”

In Whalen’s view from his adopted Japanese capital, we in the West,

having delegated our responsibility to government, “find our free-

dom diminished” and live “where now are only fraudulent states,

paint-factories/Lies and stinks and wars.”

America’s wars themselves, from the position of Whalen’s

meditative posture taken up across the Pacific, were fought solely for

capital:

Fifty years fighting the Bolsheviki

To maintain a 500% profit on every waffle-iron and locomotive

At 499% times are growing difficult, we must try to retrench

At 487

⁄

% lay off some of the newer employees the market

looks

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“Bearish” and 496%. SELL OUT while there’s still a change.

In order to boost profits back to 498%

A “presence” appears in Cambodia.

While such a critique would not have sounded unusual in 1971,

Whalen’s criticism of American hegemony stands out because it takes

place in a poem that presents itself as an extended session of medita-

tion. His outlook emerges from—or is presented as emerging from—

a spiritual ground that lends it the power of direct insight into the

nature of reality itself.

Sitting in zazen across the ocean, Whalen’s speaker comes to

the conclusion that the brutality of the “fraudulent state” infiltrates

the mentality of every American:

Almost all Americans aged 4 to 100

Have the spiritual natures of Chicago policemen.

Scratch an American and find a cop. There is no

Generation gap.

Whalen’s “Western Civilization rigid and tyrannical” which “teaches

necessity for objective examination” offers no revolutionary alterna-

tive to this state of affairs since it dominates the consciousness of

every

Westerner. Even “Mr. Karl Marx wrote a book/All by his lonesome in

the British Museum. (Shhh!),”

becoming the very image of the iso-

lated Western ego. More powerful than such “objective examination,”

limited by its cloistered intellectualism, is the idea of freedom

itself,

which appears not from the West in 1970 but in the East.

A few inches of adhesive tape seals the mouth

But it is hard to get rid of the idea of liberty

After forty years of war Asia still exists,

Not to mention the Viet Cong

And quite different from the plans of Washington

Or Moscow or the Vatican. . . .

Scenes of Life at the Capital closes with an affirmation of Japanese

ways

of knowing that disposes with the West entirely:

Japan is a civilization based upon

An inarticulate response to cherry blossoms.

So much for Western Civilization.

Japanese feeling and sensitivity to beauty, long emphasized as salva-

tional for the West in works of Japanese exceptionalism, when trans-

muted by Whalen’s antistatist meditation becomes a recipe for a

revolution in thought and perspective so total, Whalen hoped, that it

could end the basis of Western civilization entirely: its strangulating

rationality.

230 Religion and American Culture

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One might sensibly question the real political implications of

ideas such as those contained in the works of Whalen and Snyder, just

as one can imagine arguments that could be arrayed against anar-

chism in general. Can relevant political change result from internal,

psychic revolutions occurring first at the level of the individual, for

instance? Did the critique of Western rationality the Beat Zen anar-

chists adopted from Japanese exceptionalist work affect a cultural

transformation on any kind of scale that mattered in the lives of, say,

workers? Can an “inarticulate response” make change, or might sen-

timents of social justice be better, more fruitfully expressed through

an organ with a voice and the power to administer this justice, such

as a state? These questions deserve further elaboration in relation to

the Beat movement, which, in many ways, as others have noted, pre-

figured the New Left, but which also, as many of their critics at the

time

noted—including Watts—merely instituted a fashion and a lifestyle.

Just as compelling as these questions of power, voice, and reception,

however, is the question of what kind of lifestyle Watts, Snyder, and

Whalen advocated. After all, “the American way of life” during the

cold war was a lifestyle in itself, one that, as the Beat anarchists

pointed out, demanded imperialism and a terrifying level of material

consumption. As propagandists for an alternative, Whalen and

Snyder saw temporary success in the student unrest of the 1960s,

which was coupled with an explosion of alternative spiritualities that

may be read as either escapist or politically empowering. To this

extent, they did—or perhaps even outdid—the work of the Old Left

and Popular Front, circulating a popular literature that fomented

resistance against cold war consumerist capitalism.

According to the accounts of Popular Front historians

Michael Denning and Alan Wald, Popular Front radicalism emerged

in the 1930s when leftist intellectuals adopted various forms of

Marxism and looked to Soviet Russia as the vanguard of political

reform. This radicalism began to wane with the left’s disillusionment

with Stalinism in the 1940s, which led in turn to the “liberal consen-

sus” in the 1950s, with some old leftist values sedimented in popular

culture until a resurgence of Marxist radicalisms in the 1960s.

Michael Denning’s view, the “defeat of the Popular Front social

movement in the Cold War years” of the 1950s meant “the defeat of

U.S. social democracy” itself.

However, as Stephen Prothero has

argued, the Beats were “spiritual protesters” whose radical critiques

of American culture defied the 1950s consensus and linked the radi-

calism of the Old Left decades with that of the new. Further, Prothero

argues, Beat spiritual protest involved not just a negative rejection of

Western civilization but also a positive sense of “the sacralization of

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everyday life and the sacramentalization of human relationships”

that caused Zen Beats to demand social justice by reaffirming the

Buddhist concept of pratitya-samutpada, or interdependent origina-

tion, which recognizes the mutual dependence of all beings upon one

another.

According to Rexroth—whose immersion in the pre-Stalinist,

libertarian left of the 1910s and 1920s remained a keynote of his pub-

lic career as a poet and cultural critic—the Stalinist leftists of the

1930s

and 1940s were, by comparison to the country’s anarchists, elitist cul-

tural producers whose attempts to produce art as Communist propa-

ganda were belied by their very bourgeois identities in the nation’s

urban centers. The Beat generation, in Rexroth’s view, emerged only

after twenty years of nonauthoritarian, antistatist resistance to the

sta-

tist and thus ultimately conservative Popular Front. The pro-Stalinist

reds and their apologists “were all chairborne on a gravy train of

human blood,” Rexroth held. “American radicals” on both the Old

and New Left have been placed time and again “in the ridiculous

position” of “representing other people’s foreign offices”—whether

Moscow’s in the 1930s or Beijing’s in the 1960s—even as another

“dominant tendency in America,” the one with which Rexroth identi-

fied, has been “anarchist-pacifist . . . and religious in various ways.”

This tradition of anarchist pacifist religious sensibility Rexroth saw

embodied in the Beat poets, whose broadly anarchist and libertarian

politics outlasted the communist-inflected Popular Front decades of

the 1930s and 1940s.

Rexroth’s account of the emergence of the Beat movement

and its spiritual sensibility confirms Prothero’s analysis. It also

calls

into question Marxist-centric accounts such as those offered by

Popular Front historians who tend either to overlook or dismiss the

literary radicalism of the 1950s. This radicalism, in many respects,

was a fulfillment of the Popular Front that far outpaced in popularity

that generation’s search for an accessible radical literature. If one

goal

of the Popular Front was to reach the populace with its message, the

Beat moment in American literature and life suggests that Americans,

as readers at least, are far more amenable to libertarian and anarchist

visions of radicalism than Marxist ones.

As a cultural phenomenon and social movement, the Beat Zen

anarchist formation meets at one intersection between American reli-

gious and political history. Its outcome was a popular literature that

deployed Japanese exceptionalist criticisms of Western ways of know-

ing as an anarchist critique of cold war culture. The basis of this

critique—the idea that the Western emphasis on rationality was

socially and environmentally destructive—was informed for the Beat

232 Religion and American Culture

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poets Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder by philosophers like D. T.

Suzuki and Alan Watts, both of whom contrasted a holistic vision of

Zen awakening to Western rationalism. While the explanations and

interpolations of Zen by such writers as Watts, Snyder, and Whalen

might appear, on the surface, as orientalist appropriations of “the

East,” they were actually direct adoptions of Japanese criticisms of the

West. In staking their claims to Zen, in other words, Philip Whalen and

Gary Snyder—the Beat writers on whom this essay focuses—along

with Alan Watts, expressed the zeal not of cultural imperialists, as one

might suppose, but of converts to what they regarded as a superior

way of life.

In Orientalism, Edward Said suggested a future direction

for his research that deserves more attention than it receives. “Perhaps

the most important task of all” to emerge from his work, Said stated,

would be “to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to

Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from

a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective.”

The Zen-influenced anarchism that formed within the Beat movement

suggests one example of just such a libertarian alternative.

Notes

1. Offering a criticism of Beat Zen as Orientalist, in a recent dis-

cussion of tensions in the 1950s between Beat Zen Buddhists and Issei

and

Nisei Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, Michael Masatsugu, for instance, has

argued that “Beat Zen Buddhists, dissatisfied with Cold War U.S. society

and culture, viewed Buddhism as an alternative American religious

practice—an exotic Orientalist religious practice defined as outside and

often opposed to U.S. national culture” (425). This Orientalist

appropria-

tion offered Beats a way of responding to “tensions in bourgeois society

between authority and individual autonomy” (435). In the process of

adopting Zen, Masatsugu contends, “The Beats extracted Buddhism from

its long history and transformed it into a timeless essence that harked

back

to the solitary, monastic practice of ancient sages” (440). “While

poten-

tially producing greater appreciation of Japanese American Buddhist

reli-

gious practices and traditions,” Masatsugu continues, “the interest in

Buddhism among nonethnics also served to conflate Buddhism and

Buddhists with Asia” itself (451). See Michael K. Masatsugu, “‘Beyond

This World of Transiency and Impermanence: Japanese Americans,

Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early

Cold War Years,” Pacific Historical Review 77 (August 2008): 423–51.

This essay argues, by contrast, that Beat understandings of

Buddhism as a timeless, universal monastic religion equated with Asia

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itself and offering a liberation of the individual from the pitfalls of

cold

war consumerism and rationalism were adopted directly from Japanese

missionary Zen emergent from Meiji Zen’s Occidentalist criticism of

American and Western culture. In other words, the Beats who took Zen

seriously were, foremost, Occidentalist critics of cold war culture.

2. Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance: Poetics

and Community at Mid-century (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1989), 3.

3. Ibid., 28. See also page 26.

4. The San Francisco Anarchist and Libertarian Circles and their

relationship to the emergent San Francisco Renaissance are described in

Rexroth’s An Autobiographical Novel, rev. and expanded ed. (New York:

New Directions, 1991), 508–21.

5. Ibid., 235.

6. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American

Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 208.

7. By “anarchism,” in this essay, I refer to the theory that just,

personal relationships between individuals and groups are only possible

without government or other forms of coercive authority. The term

“libertarian,” which anarchists used to describe themselves early in the

twentieth century, has historically referred to this broad philosophy,

though more recently it has become associated with theories of limited

government more amenable to American conservatives.

8. Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 80.

9. Kenneth Rexroth, World Outside the Window: The Selected

Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Bradford Morrow (New York: New

Directions, 1987), 54.

10. Ibid., 60. In a personal e-mail, Snyder recalled reading Buber

back in the 1950s but did not connect Buber with anarchist politics. In

his

words, “I did read Buber back then, mid 50s, and recall that Kenneth

admired his work, but I never thought of it in connection with Anarchism

nor heard Kenneth say so.” Gary Snyder, “Re: Martin Buber and

Anarchists and Poets?” December 3, 2008, personal e-mail. In his written

accounts and interviews, however, Rexroth makes an explicit connection

between genuine dialogue and anarchist politics that might not have

been discussed directly in the course of Rexroth’s friendship with

Snyder

but that, Rexroth recalls, profoundly influenced his conception of the

Anarchist and Libertarian Circles and of poetry as direct address.

234 Religion and American Culture

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11. Rexroth, Autobiographical Novel, 511.

12. Rexroth, World Outside the Window, 94.

13. Ibid., 64.

14. For a further discussion of Rexroth’s poetic technique and

themes, along with an analysis of the shortcomings of his political

anar-

chism and use of Buber, see Ken Knabb, The Relevance of Rexroth

(Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1990), 88.

15. Kenneth Rexroth, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” from Howls, Raps,

and Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, Fantasy

B000000XBW, compact disc set, 1993.

16. Robert H. Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” History

of Religions 33 (August 1993): 3.

17. James E. Ketelaar, “Strategic Occidentalism: Meiji Buddhists

at the World’s Parliament of Religions,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 11

(1991): 44.

18. According to Snodgrass, Japanese and other Asian represen-

tatives at the Parliament were so circumscribed within Western limits of

discourse that their need to have “recourse to a Western authority—even

a dubious one—to validate things Japanese” meant that their Buddhism

was finally “not the religion of any Asian practice but the reified

product

of Western discourse.” See Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese

Buddhism

to the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003),

274, 85.

This analysis overlooks the Japanese context in which New Buddhists

had already begun, at home, to present Zen as a modern religion capable

of meeting the needs of a modern Japanese state. The modern, rational

Zen Buddhism that Soyen presented at the Parliament was as much a

product of Japanese imperialism and cultural assertiveness in Asia as it

was of the Christian biases of the Parliament. Further, as Ketelaar

notes,

the exotic “other” at the Parliament “was by no means merely a passive

object of the Parliament’s construction but was itself engaged in the

select

imaging of the Parliamentarian proceedings and their subsequent inter-

pretation.” See James Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 157. In other words,

Japanese Buddhism and Zen at the Parliament were actively constructed

products of Japanese discourse in which Japanese individuals with

agency outside of the West’s sanction explained their own religion in

terms Westerners could understand in the Parliament’s context.

Snodgrass’s analysis of the Parliament, it seems, promises to give

agency

to Asian Parliamentarians by emphasizing their Occidentalism, but then

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removes this agency by noting that their religion was, finally, just

another

Western construct.

19. Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” 5.

20. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 163.

21. For a description of the long-term effect of the Parliament on

Buddhism in America, see Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A

Narrative History of Buddhism in America, 3rd ed., rev. and updated

(Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 119–29.

22. Quoted in Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with

Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 65. For Tweed, Lum’s

deployment of Buddhism accorded with what Tweed calls the “rational”

type of Buddhist convert. Nineteenth-century rationalist Western

Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism, for Tweed, often share a progres-

sive “inclination to emphasize the spiritual significance of vigorous

moral action in the world” and a “concern to uplift individuals, reform

societies, and participate energetically in the political and economic

spheres” (136). In two poems—“Nirvana” and “The Modern Nirvana”

written for Benjamin Tucker’s short-lived periodical the Radical Review

(August 1877)—Lum linked Nirvana with an impassive forgetting of the

self that would clear the way for an embrace of all humanity, with the

practitioner of meditation “forgetting self that man alone may gain”

(261).

For a celebratory portrait of Lum’s life and philosophy, see

Voltarine de Cleyre, “Dyer D. Lum,” in Selected Works of Voltarine de

Cleyre: Pioneer of Women’s Liberation, ed. Alexander Berkman (New York:

Revisionist Press, 1972), 284–97.

23. Thomas A. Tweed, “‘The Seeming Anomaly of Buddhist

Negation’”: American Encounters with Buddhist Distinctiveness,

1858–1877,” The Harvard Theological Review 83 (January 1990): 90–91. I

have found no evidence that the Beats were aware of Lum. As Ketelaar

has noted, there were precedents in early Meiji Japan, when Buddhism

was outlawed by the state, for an anarchist and anti-authoritarian

inter-

pretation of the dharma. Before the New Buddhists rationalized

Buddhism to the state, Ketelaar argued, the practice of Buddhism itself

was “carnivalized,” disobedient, and potentially subversive in the eyes

the state such that one nativist critic of Buddhism could argue that the

priestly class itself, producing nothing and representing a spirit of

law-

less playfulness, created an “environment conductive to anarchy.” See

Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 39, 50–52.

236 Religion and American Culture

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24. Richard Hughes Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions:

The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1995), 159.

25. Brian Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997), 63.

For a detailed discussion of Suzuki’s deployment of the way of the war-

rior, see 97–113. For Suzuki’s postwar apologetics, see 147–52.

26. Kirita Kiyohide, “D. T. Suzuki on Society and the State,” in

Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism,

ed.

James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press), 65–66.

27. Letter quoted in William R. LaFleur, “Between America and

Japan,” in Zen in American Life and Letters, ed. Robert S. Ellwood

(Malibu,

Calif.: Undena, 1987), 73. Ellwood discusses Suzuki’s interest in

William

James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which Suzuki believed offered

Westerners the hope of sloughing off their cultural trappings in order

experience directly the heart of Zen practice.

28. Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, 230–31.

29. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

(New York: Grove Press, 1964), 63–64.

30. Ibid., 117.

31. Ibid., 86.

32. Robert Aitken, “Foreword,” in A Buddhist Bible, ed. Dwight

Goddard (New York: Beacon, 1994), vii.

33. Goddard, A Buddhist Bible, xxxii.

34. Ibid., 6, 9.

35. Aitken, “Foreword,” viii.

36. Ibid., xvii.

37. Houston Smith and Phillip Novak, Buddhism: A Concise

Introduction (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Novak and Smith call

Essays in Zen Buddhism “the fountainhead of what was to be a prodigious

outpouring of Zen” in the United States (152).

38. D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press,

1961), 37.

39. Ibid., 32.

40. Ibid., 28.

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41. Ibid., 18, 24.

42. Ibid., 48.

43. Ibid., 111–15.

44. Ibid., 61.

45. Ibid., 72–75.

46. Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, 186–87.

47. Smith and Novak, Buddhism, 153. Michael K. Masatsugu dis-

cusses the Beat presence at BCC meetings in “‘Beyond This World of

Transiency and Impermanence,’” writing that, “In the fall of 1955, Beat

poets and writers, including Ginsberg, Whalen, and Kerouac, began to

participate in the group after Snyder, who had joined months earlier,

brought them to meetings” (443).

48. As Watts wrote in his autobiography, “I had learned from D.

T. Suzuki” and others “that Zen is basically Taoism—the water-course

way of life. . . .” Alan Watts, In My Own Way (Navato, Calif.: New World

Library, 2001), 251.

49. Alan Watts, “Identical Differences,” 1964 lecture by author,

on Alan Watts Live, Shambhala SLE 15, tape recording, 1991.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. 4 × 4 by Watts: Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, Seattle:

Unapix/Miramar, Inner Dimension, 1995, videocassette.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 142–53.

58. Ibid., 147.

59. See Alan Watts, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen (San Francisco:

City Lights Books, 1959).

60. Smith and Novak, Buddhism, 153.

61. Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, 213.

238 Religion and American Culture

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62. Gary Snyder and William Scott McLean, The Real Work:

Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979 (New York: New Directions), 94.

63. “In the middle of Nevada, on old Interstate 40,” Snyder related

in a 2002 interview for the public radio show Commonwealth Club, “there

was a period of about five hours where nobody would give me a ride. As I

stood there in the middle of the sagebrush flats, I was reading through

chapter of Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, and I hit on

some

phrases that turned my mind totally around. I knew that I wouldn’t last

[graduate school in] Indiana, and that I would soon be heading in the

other

direction back toward Asia, but I had to complete my short-term karma.

I did finish out that semester and then went back to the West Coast.”

com-

monwealthclub.org, “Gary Snyder & John Suiter, In Conversation—May 15,

2002,” http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-05snyder-

suiter-speech.html (accessed January 8, 2009).

64. Snyder and McLean, The Real Work, 10.

65. Ibid., 96.

66. Ibid., 126.

67. Ibid., 10.

68. Ibid., 25.

69. Ibid., 16.

70. Ibid., 17.

71. See Gary Snyder, The Back Country (New York: New

Directions, 1968), 128.

72. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold; Technical Notes and Queries to

Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (New York: New Directions, 1969), 114.

73. Ibid., 92.

74. Ibid., 106.

75. David Meltzer, ed., San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets

(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001) 343.

76. Philip Whalen, Off the Wall: Interviews with Philip Whalen

(Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1978), 57–61.

77. Philip Whalen, Memoirs of an Interglacial Age: Poems (San

Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1960), 49.

78. Ibid., 22.

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79. Ibid., 33.

80. Ibid., 35.

81. Ibid., 49.

82. Philip Whalen, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder: Two Modern

San Francisco Poets Discuss and Read from Their Works (Hollywood: Center

for Cassette Studies, 1970–1979?), 10154, tape recording.

83. Philip Whalen, Scenes of Life at the Capital (San Francisco:

David Meltzer and Jack Shoemaker, 1970), 1.

84. Ibid., 16.

85. Ibid., 26.

86. Ibid., 34.

87. Ibid., 37.

88. Ibid., 41.

89. Ibid., 73.

90. Strong representatives of this consensus narrative, by now

generally assumed, include Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes

American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press,

1992), whose 1961 account of Roosevelt-era Communism and the con-

sensus that followed generated enough interest in radicalism at the

height of the “consensus” era to call into doubt the very hypothesis the

book was proposing; Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (Garden City,

N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), who codified the cold war consensus hypothesis

for future historians from a highly presentist perspective in 1976, when

the proposed consensus seemed to be crumbling; and Richard H. Pells,

The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the

1940s

and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Alan Wald’s and Michael

Denning’s corrective accounts, which extend the definition of the left

Popular Front sympathizers and, thus, suggest a continuity of radical

leftist thought into the consensus era, still take a Communist/Marxist-

centric perspective, mentioning anarchism in passing but focusing on the

age of the Soviet sympathy and Rooseveltian statism as definitive for

left-

ist history. We gain an even more complete picture of the twentieth-

century left by adding anarchist thinkers to the rolls of social

dissidents

to whom these latter authors rightly called attention. See Denning, The

Cultural Front, and Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of

the

Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2002).

240 Religion and American Culture

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91. Denning, The Cultural Front, 11.

92. Stephen Prothero, “On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement

as Spiritual Protest,” The Harvard Theological Review 84 (April 1991):

214.

93. David Meltzer, “Kenneth Rexroth (1969), Interview,” in San

Francisco Beat, ed. Meltzer, 235.

94. For a brief, conversational account of Rexroth’s confronta-

tion with the state-authoritarian Communist movement during the

Popular Front decades, see his interview with David Meltzer in San

Francisco Beat, ed. Meltzer, 364.

95. In his overview of literature on Buddhism in America, Peter

Gregory distinguishes between Buddhist “sympathizers” and “convert”

Buddhists. The distinction between sympathizer Buddhists and practicing

converts is complex, however, as Gregory notes. D. T. Suzuki spent years

studying and practicing temple Zen but was primarily interested in a

philosophical practice. This essay does not address who among Suzuki,

Snyder, Whalen, or Watts better qualifies as a sympathizer or “convert.”

By such a standard, Philip Whalen, who adopted a full-time practice at

the

San Francisco Zen Center, becomes a convert, and Suzuki, though an

“immigrant Buddhist,” appears more like a sympathizer. Part of this

essay’s underlying argument is that deploying national and racial cate-

gories to define “legitimate” religious practice is unfruitful and

ultimately

unproductive to religious and cultural dialogue. If, as Gregory notes,

“for

Americanists and Buddhologists alike,” the study of Buddhism in

America “raises questions of what it means to be a ‘Buddhist’ and what

means to be an ‘American’” (233), for an Americanist looking globally it

raises the question of what it means to be a cosmopolitan (in the old,

anti-

nationalist sense of the term) within the limiting constraints of

nationalist

ideologies. See Peter N. Gregory, “Describing the Elephant: Buddhism in

America,” Religion and American Culture 11 (Summer 2001): 233–63.

96. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 368.

ABSTRACT This essay explores the political origins and implications of

Beat Zen anarchism, a cultural phenomenon located in the intersection

between American anarchist traditions and Zen Buddhism in the San

Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Focusing on the writings of D. T. Suzuki,

Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, it shows how Beat Zen

emerged not primarily from an Orientalist appropriation of “the East”

but

rather from an Occidentalist, Japanese-centered criticism of American

materialism that followed from the complex legacy of the World’s

Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. In

The Zen of Anarchy 241

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staking their claims to Zen, in other words, Philip Whalen and Gary

Snyder—the Beat poets on whom this essay focuses—along with Alan

Watts expressed the views not of cultural imperialists, as one might

sup-

pose, but of converts to what they regarded as a superior way of life.

The Beat adoption of Zen intersected with a broadly libertar-

ian and specifically anarchist social milieu in San Francisco that con-

gregated around Kenneth Roxroth’s Libertarian Club and Anarchist

Circle. The individualist, anti-statist, and anarchist political

outlooks

of Beat Zen anarchists were directly confirmed by the writings of D. T.

Suzuki, who presented Zen as a practice of personal liberation from

cultural conditioning. Suzuki’s rhetorical approach—which treated

Japanese Zen as both a pinnacle of Asian civilization and a key to the

liberation of Western humanity from its stifling and destructive

rationalism—was informed by Meiji-era Japanese nationalism and

exceptionalism and by the universalism that Buddhist missionaries

brought to their explanations of Zen to Westerners. Arguing that Beat

Zen poets, in adopting Buddhism as it was presented to them, were

foremost Occidentalist rather than Orientalist in outlook, this essay

concludes that the Beat Zen anarchist cultural formation suggests a

libertarian alternative to Orientalism and also reconfigures common

conceptions of American radical literary history as primarily Marxist-

inflected.

242 Religion and American Culture

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