Dharma Bums is for the hiker/outdoorsman, the aspiring buddhist sage, and the lover of beautifully woven syntax. Ray thumbs his way across the continental U.S. two, almost three times. In his travels, he meets hobos, family, friends, yabyum partners, Zen Lunatics but mostly he discovers a love for the essence of nature and the power of it's awesomeness. Ray overcomes some personal demons with the help and guidance of Japhy Ryder. Eventually, he decides to take a post as a fire watcher on top of Desolation Peak for a 3 month stretch. Ray encounters everything with the peace and pensiveness of a modern monk.

I read this in college for a class on Beat Literature and had to breeze through it in order to keep up with the massive reading load. It was great the first time but I was unable to really capture the essence of the book and enjoy it to it's fullest. I decided to read it again as a fun summer read and I finally got a chance to go at it with a highlighter. I have found some gems, some new life mantras and love the book ten times over after the second time.

This book is not for everyone, though it could be life changing for some. I gave this book a 4 because I think it has the potential to inspire many people but if you've ever read any Kerouac, you know that he deals in very long sentences that give the book an feeling of being "out of breath". It could discourage others from enjoying it's mysticism.

ტრადიციულად, ეს წიგნიც ძალიან ნელა წავიკითხე, მაგრამ სულაც არ ვნანობ. ყოველ იმ წუთას, როცა წიგნს ვშლიდი, მედიტაციაში, ამერიკის გზატკეცილებზე, მთებსა და ბუდიზმში ვიძირებოდი. მოკლედ იდეალურად გრძნობ და იღებ სიამოვნებას იმ გარემოსგან, რომელიც კერუაკმა აღწერა. აქვე მინდა აღვნიშნო, რომ ერთ-ერთი საუკეთესო მეორეხარისხოვანი პერსონაჟები არიან ამ წიგნში, რომლებსაც ოდესმე შევხვედრივარ.

The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road.

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia, to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950's.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز ششم ماه فوریه سال2016میلادی

عنوان: ولگردهای دارما؛ نویسنده: جک کروآک؛ مترجم: فرید قدمی؛ تهران، روزنه، سال1392، در312ص، شابک978943344313؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

ژان-لوئی کرواک رمان نویس، و شاعر «آمریکایی فرانسوی تبار»؛ در روز دوازدهم ماه مارس سال1922میلادی در «لوول، ماساچوست» به دنیا آمدند، و در همان‌جا بزرگوار شدند، سپس در دانشگاه «کلمبیا» و در رشته ی فوتبال تحصیل کردند؛ در دانشگاه با «آلن گینزبرگ»، و «ویلیام اس باروز»؛ آشنا شدند، و این سه تن اعضای مرکزی و بت شکنان ادبی «نسل بیت» گردیدند؛ از آثار نام آشنای «کرواک» می‌توان به «در جاده = در راه (سال1957میلادی)» اشاره کرد؛ ایشان در سال1969میلادی بر اثر خونریزی داخلی درگذشتند

قهرمان اصلی رمان «ری اسمیت»، در سالهای میانی دهه سوم زندگی، برای دستیابی به خودشناسی تمرکز می‌کند؛ و به باور بسیاری «ری اسمیت» در واقع همان «جک کرواک» است؛ زیرا که خود نویسنده نیز، دست به سفرهای بسیاری زده، و سبک سفرهای ایشان نیز، همانند سفرهای «ری اسمیت» است؛ «ری» در یک سفر زمستانه، به «کارولینای جنوبی» میرود، و در هر شرایط آب و هوایی، به خویشتنبانی می‌پردازد؛ او سرسختانه نظم خود ساخته‌ اش را، در حیات وحش «سیرا مادره»، در جنگل‌ها، پشت واگن‌های قطار، و حتی در کوه‌های «دسولیشن» نگهداری می‌کند؛ در خلال سفرهایش، با «جافی رایدر»، یکی از فراگیران مکتب «ذن»، و علاقمند به زندگی در طبیعت، آشنا می‌شوند؛ «ری» و «جافی» -در واقعیت «گری اسنایدر»، دوست نزدیک «کرواک» و شاعر آمریکایی- یک رابطه ی دوستانه محکم را، بر اساس تجربیات دو طرفه، و عشق مشترک به فلسفه ی «بودایی»، شعر، و زندگی در کمال سادگی، آغاز می‌کنند، و کمی بعد، با همراهی «هنری مورلی»، که فردی غیرعادی به نظر می‌رسد، به ماجراجویی در کوهستان‌ها می‌پردازند؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 05/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 13/11/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

consistently one of my favorite reads. i've bought this book three times now and i still haven't been able to hold on to it. the kerouac estate will forever be the recipient of my hard earned dough.

i have to say, it's one of my top ten. not for its far-reaching insights, kerouac's intimate style, or it's lively presentation of a man who was the embodiment, precursor, exemplification, and antecedent to all those to follow dubbed 'heads' or less acurately 'hippies,' but for it's depiction of a man struggling to find his path, at times the buddhist, the christian mystic, the skeptic, the empty vessel practicing za-zen, just sitting, yet ever changing, ever evaluating.

kerouac's exenstentialist struggle (and as you read the rest of the books that roughly make up the dulouz legend, which deptict his adventual failure to synthesis the sum of his experiences into one unified self) will always be the cause of my returning to this book. for me dhamra bums represents the beginning of his struggle. re really hasnt begun to struggle. not like in Big Sur. here he's still young and idealistic. hasn't been poisened by an excess of thinking. He's putting thought into action.

i'll always turn to this book anytime i'm traveling, exploring new spaces, trying something new, making a change, or just plain sleeping in a tent for a while. great book. its honest simplicity is always welcome.

i just went to the Sierras and read this book again- the big surprise to me upon opening it up in my sleeping bag Day 1 was that Kerouac starts DBums in Santa Barbara and heads to the Sierras and i thought, "wow, this will be great! that is the trip i am making right now!"

and maybe 20 years ago when i was less judgemental about white boys and how the they believed every thought they had was a pure fucking gold nugget the world can't possibly live without was less offensive to me-- BUT now it's like DB split and became two stories for me this time- 1) the moments of Kerouac prose that bring every second of life alive- i mean some are truly musically breathtaking--and 2)the paranoid twaddle of a child-man who is uptight, uncertain about his place in the world, hung up on his mother, afraid to do the dirty work that having a soul requires, priveleged without self-awreness of that fact, and espousing tons of buddhist blather like a fountain that both stops up and gushes at incalcuable intervals. I never knew for how long i could enjoy it before i'd get some man-child hives from it. And since i've stopped feeling sorry for most white men and their pathetic attempts to get out of their spiritual/social/perosnal responisbilities, i might be just harshing on my usual post WWII literary buzz, but i don't think so...

I still love Kerouac for having an ear for language that is part whimsical, part hummingbird, part jazz and part latin mass and mothertongue but as a man he tried to write about Buddhism but ended up revealing the sad posturing of an unformed masculine self. he was idolizing the western ideal of man though he massgaed it into some Buddhist monk lifestyle and stuck some orientalist wrapper around it and called it Zen. he is eternally hung up and Dharma Bums really isn't about Dharma, the wheel of suffering, it's about small men and big mountains.

دقیقا یک سالو یک روز پیش این کتاب رو شروع کردم
الان تموم شد ۱۱ سپتامبر ۲۰۲۰ تا ۱۲سپتامبر ۲۰۲۱
و یه سالو واقعا لذت بردم
خوشحالم که الان کوه میرم و یکمی سعی میکنم از زندگیم لذت ببرم
آخرش تنها چیزی که برام میمونه همین خاطره های لذت بخش تو طبیعت بودنه

So many people I trust and respect love Jack Kerouac. They consistently praise his work to me, recommend books that I should read and even buy me his books, hoping I'll love him like they do, but try as I might I still haven't found what they find in Kerouac's work.

But I do try. Every couple of years I crack out another one of his books that I've started and never finished (which is all but The Dharma Bums and Mexico City Blues), and start reading it again. I rarely get very far.

I did get through The Dharma Bums, though, and I actually enjoyed the read.

I liked it, but I didn't love it, and I think I've finally pinned down why -- the characters. I just didn't care about them, and I know Kerouac wanted me to since they were himself and all his friends.

I dug their Buddhist-Beatnik-Zen pursuits, and I've even engaged in most of their behavior (which might be another reason so many people get me to read Kerouac), but even that connection couldn't overcome the slight annoyance I felt for them all. There were times when I liked them -- enough to keep me reading at least -- but I mostly felt bored by them, and that same feeling greets me whenever I read a chapter or two of any of Kerouac's work.

I wish it were different (and I will keep trying with him because someday it might take), but for now the best I can hope for is to like his work. I can't love it, and I don't think I can venerate him like so many others do. At least not yet.

And maybe never.

I was super into Kerouac in college – which I supposed is the time in one’s life where you are supposed to be into Kerouac. Re-reading “On the Road” in my thirties might not have been my best idea, because it served only to show me how drastically my perspective on things had changed in a decade, and how Jack’s freewheeling madness might have been occasionally beautiful, but it had also had tragic consequences I couldn’t ignore. I thought about putting his books away for good, but I found I couldn’t because of how strong an impression he had once left on my young mind. Kerouac’s books are like my first tattoo, a very silly tribal dragon on my shoulder (this was years before Steig Larsson’s books, for the record): I’ll never get that covered up, because it’s nice to have a reminder that there was once a version of me who thought that was the most bad-ass thing… like, ever!

And I kept thinking about “The Dharma Bums”. I was not interested in Buddhism yet the first time I read it (Buddhism was my dad’s thing, and you know how when you are nineteen, nothing your parents do is cool…), but now, after a decade of studying Soto Zen, I wondered what I’d make of Jack’s attempt at meditation practice… I came across this gorgeous untitled poem he wrote for his first wife:

“The world you see is just a movie in your mind
Rocks don’t see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it, nobody listens,
They’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off.
I will try to teach it but it will be in vain,
S’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.”

Clearly, he’d understood SOMETHING, he’d had SOME insight. He’d actually written a biography of the Buddha in 1955 (it wasn’t published as a book until about ten years ago, and which I now I have to read to satisfy my completist curiosity)! So I figured I could revisit “The Dharma Bums”, in the full knowledge it wouldn’t be the book I read fifteen years ago because I am not the person I was fifteen years ago.

After the unexpected success of his novel, Ray Smith wants respite from his sudden fame and popularity. He takes off to California where Japhy Ryder, a fellow writer deeply immersed in Zen Buddhism, takes him under his wing. Ray and Japhy discuss Buddhism and poetry, go mountain-climbing and party hard. He eventually gets a gig as a firewatcher, on a lonely mountain peak in Washington State, and plans on using this isolation to deepen his meditation and attempt at reaching satori.

The novel is fairly episodic, and the pace much less frenetic and disorienting than in “On the Road” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Knowing his books are heavily autobiographical, I often have the urge to give Kerouac the benefit of the doubt: it is possible that he never met genuinely intellectually or spiritually curious women (wince). It is possible that the guys he hung out with and idolized were really good dudes in person (eyeroll) and that the filter of his pen distorted them. But whatever might have happened, the people in the book are often rather repulsive. The best parts are almost always when Ray is alone on the mountain or hopping trains across the country, trying to find a good place to meditate. The way Kerouac wrote about nature, the landscapes he took in, the way food and water tasted on his journey, well it makes me feel like travelling and it makes me hungry. I don’t even like blueberry pie, but the way Ray enjoys it, it seems like the most delicious thing on earth and now I want some.

The Beats were much more interested in what they referred to as Buddhist anarchism (which is kind of a hodgepodge mix of cherry-picked Buddhist practices and ideas and proto-hippie philosophy and lifestyle), as opposed to actual Buddhism: so it’s not really surprising that both Ray and Japhy play very fast and lose with oversimplified interpretations of things like the Precepts, meditation practice and so on, and use words like bodhisattvas, bhikkus and satori willy-nilly. I think their hearts were in the right place, but that a complete lack of experienced guidance and discipline made their earnest and ambitious efforts very scattered and vain. There is no doubt that promising chicks enlightenment experiences through tantric sex was an effective pick up method in 1950s Frisco, but I don’t think either one of those guys knew the first thing about Vajrayana tantra (neither do I, for the record, but I’m pretty sure it’s not what’s going on in the book)... In fact, it comes off as super sleazy! I get that this was when Buddhism was just starting to become an interest in the West, but I can’t help but feel that someone who spend years studying Zen in Japan, as Japhy claimed to have done, ought to know better… Kerouac was also never really able to polish off the Catholicism he was brought up on, and it tinted his spiritual studies.

I think the redeeming grace of this book is really the musical cadence and vividness of the prose, and the self-awareness. You can say a lot of bad things about Kerouac, but its undeniable that he knew how to string a sentence together with all the energy and rhythm a musician uses to play a solo. There are times when I had to just stop reading for a moment, to savor the word-riff he had just thrown at me. As for the self-awareness, it is very clear that Ray/Jack knows he’s not monk-material, that he’s flawed and that it seems unlikely he’ll ever be able to really get over the hurdles that hinder him. But he keeps trying. To be fair, that’s an incredibly important aspect of Zen – perseverance. It’s a shame that his efforts were so misguided, and that he so often hung out with people who brought out the worst in him.

“The Dharma Bums” keeps the 4 stars rating I’d given it before, despite the fact that it made me much sadder this time around than it had fifteen years ago. I will be driving by Lowell, Massachusetts, next month, and I think I might make a small detour to go pay my respects to Jack: he doesn’t hold the place he had in my heart when I was in college, but I can’t help thinking about him with a certain tenderness.

Hmm. Will make you want to climb a mountain and participate in a "yab yum", so that's something!

2,5 Sterne

Ich mag ja sehr wie Kerouac schreibt. Das liest sich so süffig, flockig weg, als würdest Du mit nem Kumpel quatschen.
Die anfänglichen Szenen sind toll. Wie die Jungs auf das Matterhorn krabbeln und in der Natur unterwegs sind.
Die Episode mit dem LKW Fahrer gefiel mir ebenfalls sehr gut.
Es ist wie in „on the Road“- man ist dauerunterwegs. Nur hier läuft es sich schnell tot.
Viele Fragestellungen drehen sich um den Buddhismus und wie dieser mit dem christlichen Gedankengut vereinbar ist.
Ein paar Partys und Orgien werden gefeiert. Man ist gern nackt.
Sagen wir mal so: ich bin ab der Hälfte des Buches gedanklich abgesprungen, weil es mich inhaltlich nicht mehr interessiert hat.
Das hat halt keinen Plot. Die Figuren sind bis auf wenige Ausnahmen, die vorkommen, viel zu blass. Die Frauen eh nur Sexpüppchen, mehr Raum bekommen die nicht. Bei Mutti zu Weihnachten spielen die Übernachtungen auf der Veranda ne größere Rolle als alles andere. Kurzum, er hätte sich einiges klemmen können. Das Buch ist zu lang oder man muss schon Hardcore-Fan von dem Lifestyle sein.
Ja Naturbeschreibungen sind Bombe. Das ist aber wie mit Katzenvideos. Für ein Ohhh!

I remember never really seeing eye to eye with Kerouac's 'On the Road', it was a book I only managed to drag myself through thanks to a dogged stubbornness. And I still think it's one of the most overhyped novels of the 20th century. This however was a slightly more positive kettle of fish. Actually, forget the fish, going by what's mostly eaten here it's more like salami, cheese, and crackers.

I have to say not all of The Dharma Bums went down well with me, but I still quite liked it anyhow, especially when the narrator Ray Smith (a fictional Kerouac) takes in the stunning scenery, and there's plenty of that. From Oregon, California and South Carolina, to Texas and briefly Mexico, he simply doesn't keep still. At times the narrative had me all fidgety, where I felt like getting up and going for a walk in the woods, not that I'm likely to find any in the parisian suburbs, apart from the odd tree here and there. But it's a book that really makes you want to escape the city and the hustle and bustle of life. I wondered whether Chris McCandless took inspiration from Kerouac before going off into the wild.

Smith and his new chum Japhy Ryder, ex- logger, mountain climber, college graduate, Oriental scholar, and seer of visions, are not your average Americans, they would rather go awandering, carefree, and refuse to be consumers of all the stuff that makes everyone else tick. Most of the time they are trying to learn to meditate in Buddhist style, their new goal nothing less than total self-enlightenment, the satori of the Zen masters of Japan and China. Smith concentrates hard on attaining self-enlightenment. He meditates daily in all weathers behind his mother's house during a winter visit and with persistence keeps at his self- imposed discipline in the wilds of the Sierra Madres, in hobo jungles, beside train tracks, and, finally, on the mountaintop fire lookout Desolation Peak.

In his often vivid descriptions of nature one is aware of an exhilarating power that seems to run through his body, and again when he creates the atmosphere of lively gatherings for drinking, talking, and horsing around in the simple but stylized dwellings of his Pacific Coast friends: there are rough wooden shacks in the forest, and sagging old houses on side streets. Here when the entire cast of characters do appear in the one place we are presented with that refreshing blend of naivety and sophistication that seems to be this author's forte. And for a book generally about withdrawal and solitude it was rather quite lively and full of zest.

I couldn't see what the fuss was about. Maybe some books should be read when one is in puberty. I can't wrap my head around the arrogance, the narcissism, the pretention of this book. Maybe I don't get it, to be honest, I hardly finished it. Is is supposed to be an ode to simple life, a hymn to nature? I don't see it. I see pretentious little pricks getting drunk and living off other people's labor, while preaching them about the drudgery of their lives. Maybe I'm too old for this.