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The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

James Brown
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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 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 suppose, but of converts to what they regarded as a superior way of life.

The Beat adoption of Zen intersected with a broadly libertarian and specifically anarchist social milieu in San Francisco that congregated 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 Marxistinflected.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 207 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2009

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References

Notes

1. Offering a criticism of Beat Zen as Orientalist, in a recent discussion 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 appropriation 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 potentially producing greater appreciation of Japanese American Buddhist religious practices and traditions,” Masatsugu continues, “the interest in Buddhism among nonethnics also served to conflate Buddhism and Buddhists with Asia” itself (451). See Masatsugu, Michael K., “‘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): 423–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

This essay argues, by contrast, that Beat understandings of Buddhism as a timeless, universal monastic religion equated with Asia 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. Davidson, Michael, The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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. Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 208 Google Scholar.

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

9. Rexroth, Kenneth, World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Morrow, Bradford (New York: New Directions, 1987), 54 Google Scholar.

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.

11. Rexroth, , Autobiographical Novel, 511 Google Scholar.

12. Rexroth, , World Outside the Window, 94 Google Scholar.

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 anarchism and use of Buber, see Knabb, Ken, The Relevance of Rexroth (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1990), 88 Google Scholar.

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. Ketelaar, James E., “Strategic Occidentalism: Meiji Buddhists at the World's Parliament of Religions,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 11 (1991): 44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. According to Snodgrass, Japanese and other Asian representatives 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 Snodgrass, Judith, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 274 Google Scholar, 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 interpretation.” See Ketelaar, James, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 157 Google Scholar. 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 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 Google Scholar.

21. For a description of the long-term effect of the Parliament on Buddhism in America, see Fields, Rick, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, 3rd ed., rev. and updated (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 119–29Google Scholar.

22. Quoted in Tweed, Thomas A., The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 65 Google Scholar. 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 progressive “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 de Cleyre, Voltarine, “Dyer D. Lum,” in Selected Works of Voltarine de Cleyre: Pioneer of Women's Liberation, ed. Berkman, Alexander (New York: Revisionist Press, 1972), 284–97Google Scholar.

23. Tweed, Thomas A., “‘The Seeming Anomaly of Buddhist Negation’”: American Encounters with Buddhist Distinctiveness, 1858–1877,” The Harvard Theological Review 83 (January 1990): 90–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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 interpretation 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 of the state such that one nativist critic of Buddhism could argue that the priestly class itself, producing nothing and representing a spirit of lawless playfulness, created an “environment conductive to anarchy.” See Ketelaar, , Of Heretics and Martyrs, 39, 50–52Google Scholar.

24. Seager, Richard Hughes, The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 159 Google Scholar.

25. Victoria, Brian, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997), 63 Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of Suzuki's deployment of the way of the warrior, see 97–113. For Suzuki's postwar apologetics, see 147–52.

26. Kiyohide, Kirita, “D. T. Suzuki on Society and the State,” in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, ed. Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 65–66 Google Scholar.

27. Letter quoted in LaFleur, William R., “Between America and Japan,” in Zen in American Life and Letters, ed. Ellwood, Robert S. (Malibu, Calif.: Undena, 1987), 73 Google Scholar. 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 to experience directly the heart of Zen practice.

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

29. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 63–64 Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 117.

31. Ibid., 86.

32. Aitken, Robert, “Foreword,” in A Buddhist Bible, ed. Goddard, Dwight (New York: Beacon, 1994), vii Google Scholar.

33. Goddard, , A Buddhist Bible, xxxii Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., 6, 9.

35. Aitken, “Foreword,” viii.

36. Ibid., xvii.

37. Smith, Houston and Novak, Phillip, Buddhism: A Concise Introduction (New York: HarperCollins, 2003)Google Scholar. 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. Suzuki, D. T., Essays in Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 37 Google Scholar.

39. Ibid., 32.

40. Ibid., 28.

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, 186–87Google Scholar.

47. Smith and Novak, Buddhism, 153. Michael K. Masatsugu discusses 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 Suzuki”, D. T. and others “that Zen is basically Taoism—the water-course way of life… .” Watts, Alan, In My Own Way (Navato, Calif.: New World Library, 2001), 251 Google Scholar.

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. 4x4 by Watts: Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, Seattle: Unapix/Miramar, Inner Dimension, 1995, videocassette.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Watts, Alan, The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 142–53Google Scholar.

58. Ibid., 147.

59. See Watts, Alan, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959)Google Scholar.

60. Smith, and Novak, , Buddhism, 153 Google Scholar.

61. Fields, , How the Swans Came to the Lake, 213 Google Scholar.

62. Snyder, Gary and McLean, William Scott, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979 (New York: New Directions), 94 Google Scholar.

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 a 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 at [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. So I did finish out that semester and then went back to the West Coast.” commonwealthclub. org, “Gary Snyder & John Suiter, In Conversation—May 15, 2002,” http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-05snydersuiter-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 Snyder, Gary, The Back Country (New York: New Directions, 1968), 128 Google Scholar.

72. Snyder, Gary, Earth House Hold; Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (New York: New Directions, 1969), 114 Google Scholar.

73. Ibid., 92.

74. Ibid., 106.

75. Meltzer, David, ed., San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001) 343 Google Scholar.

76. Whalen, Philip, Off the Wall: Interviews with Philip Whalen (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1978), 57–61 Google Scholar.

77. Whalen, Philip, Memoirs of an Interglacial Age: Poems (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1960), 49 Google Scholar.

78. Ibid., 22.

79. Ibid., 33.

80. Ibid., 35.

81. Ibid., 49.

82. Whalen, Philip, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder: Two Modern San Francisco Poets Discuss and Read from Their Works (Hollywood: Center for Cassette Studies, 1970–1979?)Google Scholar, 10154, tape recording.

83. Whalen, Philip, Scenes of Life at the Capital (San Francisco: David Meltzer and Jack Shoemaker, 1970), 1 Google Scholar.

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 Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, whose 1961 account of Roosevelt-era Communism and the consensus 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; Hodgson, Godfrey, America in Our Time (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976)Google Scholar, 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 to Popular Front sympathizers and, thus, suggest a continuity of radical leftist thought into the consensus era, still take a Communist/Marxistcentric perspective, mentioning anarchism in passing but focusing on the age of the Soviet sympathy and Rooseveltian statism as definitive for leftist history. We gain an even more complete picture of the twentiethcentury 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 Wald, Alan, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

91. Denning, , The Cultural Front, 11 Google Scholar.

92. Prothero, Stephen, “On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest,” The Harvard Theological Review 84 (April 1991): 214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93. Meltzer, David, “Kenneth Rexroth (1969), Interview,” in San Francisco Beat, ed. Meltzer, , 235 Google Scholar.

94. For a brief, conversational account of Rexroth's confrontation with the state-authoritarian Communist movement during the Popular Front decades, see his interview with Meltzer, David in San Francisco Beat, ed. Meltzer, , 364 Google Scholar.

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 categories 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 it 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, antinationalist sense of the term) within the limiting constraints of nationalist ideologies. See Gregory, Peter N., “Describing the Elephant: Buddhism in America,” Religion and American Culture 11 (Summer 2001): 233–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96. Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 368 Google Scholar.