The Dharma Bums
Ray Smith rides the freights up the California coast reading the Diamond Sutra and falls in with Japhy Ryder, a logger's son who reads Chinese, climbs mountains and means to start a rucksack revolution of Zen lunatics. Poetry readings in a Berkeley cottage, a Matterhorn ascent and a summer alone in a fire lookout on Desolation Peak test how much of the Buddhism survives contact with the rest of his life. Kerouac's follow-up put Gary Snyder on the page and did as much as any book to carry Zen into American counterculture.
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- continues ↑ On the Road
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