My mother gave me Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums for my 17th birthday. I started reading it many times, and I remember getting to Japhy Ryder hopping around the High Sierras in his jockstrap. I don't remember much beyond that.

You know, I never finished that book, and though I read but a few chapters into his tale, Kerouac inspired me to pick up the poems of Gary Snyder (Turtle Island) and Edward Conze's translations of Buddhist texts. More importantly, I came to value my landscape, spending as much time as I could in the ancient and rolling Appalachians and the Piedmont. Twenty-five years ago, somewhere on the Fall Line, on a granite cliff along a river, skipping school, I carved an image of the Buddha under a slight overhang, Kerouac's Dharma Bums tucked in my knapsack along with Conze's Buddhist Scriptures. I carried Kerouac's book around a lot, along with a copy of his haiku from City Lights Press.

At some point, in university, I guess, I quit carrying the book around, quit trying to be a beat-come-lately in Ronald Reagan's America. I left home. I spent a long time in Asia. Never committing to the dharma, but never straying too far from the path. Then, I returned home and helped to care for my mother as she passed from this world.

Since the day my mom gave me that book, among all the different things I've read - the sutras, the Chinese mountain hermit poems, Schopenhauer, the Asian art books, Peter Matthiessen, Basho's haiku, parts of the Pali Canon, Kenneth Rexroth, Shinran - well, these things I've read, I think, because Mom gave me the Dharma Bums for my birthday. And I laugh because I was probably led to chanting the nembutsu by the image of Japhy Ryder hiking in nothing more than a jockstrap and his boots. Mom would be laughing, too.

I still have my copy of Conze's Penguin paperback. I don't know what became of the black Signet edition of Kerouac's book. I guess I should find a copy and finish it up, now that more than a quarter-century has passed. Though I know it ends, I still don't know how.

Find a copy in a library near you by going to Worldcat.
http://worldcat.org/oclc/23051682

The Dharma Bums displays Kerouac as the spiritual wanderer, surely inspiring many including myself. The writing is superb as always and resonating with the San Francisco Renaissance, filled with not just great characters but great artists. Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) is the most memorable to me, as he and Kerouac scour the country's beauty, desolation and subculture, carrying with them rucksacks with Zen poetry and sutras, which would later change the lives of many.

…my favorite Kerouac novel!