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PARTISAN REVIEW
299
GINSBERG:
I learned most of my sense of prose from Kerouac. A little
from Burroughs, mostly from Kerouac. Both poetry and prose.
Kerouac is like
the
great unacknowledged poet. You know, he has
one great book of poetry out, called
Mexico City Blues,
that Grove
Press reissued in 1970, and he's got several manuscripts of poetry,
unpublished. He's got one called
Pomes All Sizes,
and then there is
another manuscript of scattered poems, things he published in little
magazines, like LeRoi Jones's
Yugen
in '59, that have now been
collected and Ferlinghetti's gonna publish.
INT:
Eventually City Lights'll bring this out?
GINSBERG:
This year, I think. Yeah, I'm supposed to write a little
prefatory note describing uh ... his stroke of genius.
INT:
Yeah. I've never been sure of the religious part of what's called
the Beat philosophy, just what the source of this was.
GINSBERG:
Goddard's
Buddhist Bible,
which has now been reissued, and
available, which is like a great compilation of Buddhist texts, Lanca–
satara Sutra, Suragama Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Sutra of the Sixth
Patriarch, Bodhisatva's Vows, Four Noble Truths, Theory of Inter–
dependent Origination. Kerouac and Cassady and other people were
reading in that in 1950 around San Jose, when Kerouac was living
with Cassady. Cassady was at the time hung up on Edgar Cayce,
ideas of reincarnation, so Kerouac, always impressed by Cassady's
intuitions, went back to the sources, went back to the original Oriental
texts, which he found in this one compilation, the
Buddhist Bible,
which he studied real hard. So that Kerouac then began writing on
Buddhist matters, and he had a great unpublished thousand-page
manuscript called
Some of the Dharma,
which
is
Buddhist meditations,
haikus,
philosophical reflections, quotes from Suragama Sutra, little
poems all sizes. Then I had a sort of mystical experience in 1948, as
I mentioned, relating
to
Blake, which specifically was an auditory
illumination, you could call it an auditory epiphany, hearing Blake's
voice - and at the same time a visual illumination of light per–
meated the universe, and a heart epiphany of the ancient of days,
the father of man being present everywhere, in everybody always. So,
in other words, I had a cosmic vibration breakthrough. Kerouac had
one in the fifties, which he describes in his Sutra Scripture,
Scripture
of the Golden Eternity,
a little pamphlet put out in Newark by
Corinth Books, in which he describes sitting and doing breathing
exercises and suddenly fainting in his back yard - with his eyes
closed, sitting and looking at the sun, with a golden light coming
through his eyelids, realizing that this golden eternity is the permeat–
ing suchness of the entire universe. Burroughs always has had a pre-
