American Heritage

American literature, knowingly, consciously or not, represents an awakening to the same truths elicited and elucidated by the Buddha. American literature represents an organic awakening, quietly on a leading edge. American literature has a point. American literature will be what saves us. American literature is the nation's most important work.

It comes from quiet corners, folks different as Dickinson, Melville and Kerouac. Include Lincoln and Hemingway in its spirit and many others. Certainly it merges with the poetry of England, sharing the same language and tradition, but American has been bolder, more explicit, and maybe finds its realizations more crucial, more vital.

Buddhism, by which we refer to as a system of thought, is a necessary reaction to a commercial culture constantly revolving around a hyper constant market economy. (Buddhism is at least turning off the TV and thinking on one's own, a dismissal of the illusions offered behind each product.) Its noble truths wait amidst obvious signs of the great decay cannibalizing unregulated market place of self-based wants, needs and desires, weary, exhausted, played-out.

Melville's Ahab is a symbol of many things. In him we find economic greed leading to plundered resources, a heightened sense of self as something distinct, therefore wronged, therefore needy, therefore vengeful. His is a steady path to destruction. Melville had seen the industry up close. His great book was oddly not very popular (joke) with a public pressed into believing in the sanctity of forwarding economic fortunes and the subsequent 'trickle down' of the day. Look at what's going on the Gulf of Mexico today. Thanks, Captain Ahab. You really served us well.

Emily Dickinson waited quietly until she realized the main impetus behind her work. Her 'Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--In Corners--till a day The Owner passed--identified--And carried Me away--' It was not a selfish entity writing her poems, but one vigorously opposed, a 'deadly foe,' to the habitually self-assured illusions of the world of the economic and social intercourse the more selfish entities press upon us. Words were her deeds, and while of course she died, never to come back, the deeds of her words, oddly enough, are quite with us today, as teachings.

Kerouac came along years later, armed himself with good books he found for free (what he could afford) at the San Jose Public Library, not that he ever had much of a problem finding and reading literature in an industrious fashion. Buddhism is explicit for him. In similar fashion to Melville's Ishmael, if not for Melville himself, Kerouac grew successful at creating a product, therefore an economic entity. (Hey, we all need to make a living.) The subsequent popularity and stress was not the best thing for such an open and vulnerable thinker too kind not to say no to intruders, in true Buddhist fashion. (well, yes and no.) Still, we can be very gratitude for Kerouac's careful scholarly presentation of the noble truth into a reading mainstream; the work he leaves behind is a solid building block, a foundation.

Industrial revolution, slavery, robber barons, factory conditions, child labor, the Native American, countless issues came home to roost in the new country, and the nation's minds couldn't help but try to responsibly consider them down to the core. To a tuned ear, Lincoln's writings and speeches present a Christianity stripped down to a Buddhist core. A house, that which is beyond self, cannot stand against itself, cannot allow itself to be swept up in selfish considerations. There are deeds, good ones and bad ones, and they have consequences. That is Buddhist to the core. Through the test defined by him at Gettysburg, on through The Second Inaugural's putting away of selfish passion to embrace an enemy as a brother, Lincoln reeks of Buddhist thought, not that there is much of a record of him reading such texts. Interesting that great minds reach a similar conclusion. Perhaps it's not so odd that a man considered 'a baboon,' a country bumpkin, would, left to his own devices start to think in a grand and radical way, and take his position as an opportunity to present a great vision. He sheltered hatred for no one, having been humbled in life. He was a resourceful man, invented things, made use of useful things to a higher aim.

Twain, Dreiser, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, in them one can read the same argument about self and illusions. They speak to a nation growing ill on its own excesses. They bring us individual struggling with mindfulness and sometimes reaching it, becoming oddly and beautifully liberated, like Huck with his dignified friend Jim going down a big river, selfish illusion off on either bank, Buddha himself loving rivers as a way of illustrating his lessons.

Of course, this is not to say that any effort outside America, a floating imaginative place anyway, a creation of our minds, will not have the same tendencies. Rather, similar, which leads one to think that a great writers has an intuitive feel, a balance that is not far removed from the truths of Buddha. Chekhov, Saramago...

So we have the organic movement now, and get quite a bit better with consciousness, yoga, meditations. We'll come to plant non-competing plants in between our amber waves of grain as a way of handling weeds, as Monsanto's once helpful chemical offerings don't work anymore. We won't place our retirement investments in hands concerned only with profit's Tower of Babel. We'll buy into that which is healthy for all of us.