I don't study such things as Buddhism or Buddhist thought, but I do study American countercultures.
Well, to start with, the Beat Movement was perhaps the last literary avant guard in America, the entire lot of them would fit in your living room. It was not - as is frequently assumed - some sort of mass movement, that would follow with the hippies (i.e. baby hipsters). The few, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac (a very conservative Catholic who described the movement thus: It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty? - that does not sound real zen to me, its sounds, as it is, very Catholic), Neil Cassady (Dean Moriarty), and Gary Snyder.
But, as its one of the few entries that Wiki has right, I will quote from there.
Beatnik is a media stereotype that borrowed the most superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s to present a distorted (and sometimes violent), cartoon-like misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction.
In "Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation" Kerouac spoke out against this distortion of his ideas:
The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.
Now they did read some Buddhist thought, again from Wiki: In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of Kerouac's immersion into Buddhism. In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993-95.
He chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma Bums, set in California and published in 1958.
Wow, they actually went to libraries and read books, perhaps the last group to do so. It was Gary Snyder - who got real into it, took Graduate Level Asian languages and culture at Berkeley, went to Japan, studied there, and came back to the US to become one of the founders of the environmental/ecology movement.
For him: Independently, a number of the Beats, such as Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them. He, in fact, became a practitioner, spending most of the period between 1956 and 1968 in Japan, studying Zen first at Shokoku-ji and later in the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto under Oda Sesso, working on translations with Ruth Fuller Sasaki, then finally living for a while with a group of other people on a small, volcanic island. His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition (with its roots in Tang Dynasty China) and enabled him to take on certain professional projects while he was living in Japan.
Snyder decided not to become a monk and planned eventually to return to the United States to 'turn the wheel of the dharma'. He was married from 1960 to 1965 to another American poet, Joanne Kyger, who lived with him in Japan.
During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). (This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s.) Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things.
Ever the participant observer, during his years in Japan Snyder not only immersed himself in Zen practice in monasteries but also was initiated into Shugendo, a form of ancient Japanese animism, (see also Yamabushi).
That does not sound like a misuse at all. Sounds pretty serious. It ain't looking at pictures at any rate, its full immersion in the tradition. He might have got some of it wrong - and does anyone ever get it perfect? - but I don't think they were misusing it.
The hippies, Allen Watts and Ram Dass in particular might have taken bits and pieces from it (as they did with everything) but that is not the fault of the Beats.
