#dharmabums

The little Saint Teresa bum was the first genuine Dharma Bum I'd met, and the second was the number one Dharma Bum of them all and in fact it was she, Japhy Ryder, who coined the phrase. Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods with her father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woman of the woods, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when she finally got to college by hook or crook she was already well equipped for Ms early studies in anthropol­ogy and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of Indian mythology. Finally she learned Chinese and Japanese and be­came a scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. At the same time, being a Northwest girl with idealistic tendencies, she got interested in old fashioned I.W.W. anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old worker songs to go with her In­dian songs and general folksong interests. I first saw her walk­ing down the street in San Francisco the following week (after hitchhiking the rest of the way from Santa Barbara in one long zipping ride given me, as though anybody'll believe this, by a beautiful darling young blonde in a snow-white strapless bathing suit and barefooted with a gold bracelet on her ankle, driving a next-year's cinnamon-red Lincoln Mercury, who wanted benzedrine so she could drive all the way to the City and when I said I had some in my duffel bag yelled "Crazy!") —I saw Japhy loping along in that curious long stride of the mountain climber, with a small  knapsack on her  back filled with books and toothbrushes and whatnot which was her small "goin-to-the-city" knapsack as apart from her big full rucksack complete with sleeping bag, poncho, and cookpots. She didn't look like a Bohemian at all, and was far from being a Bohemian (a hanger-onner around the arts). She was wiry, suntanned, vigorous, open, all howdies and glad talk and even yelling hello to bums on the street and when asked a question answered right off the bat from the top or bottom of her mind I don't know which and always in a sprightly sparkling way.

"Where did you meet Ray Smith?" they asked her when we walked into The Place, the favorite bar of the hepcats around the Beach.

"Oh I always meet my Bodhisattvas in the street!" she yelled, and ordered beers.

It was a great night, a historic night in more ways than one. She and some other poets (she also wrote poetry and translated Chinese and Japanese poetry into English) were scheduled to give a poetry reading at the Gallery Six in town. They were all meeting in the bar and getting high. But as they stood and sat around I saw that she was the only one who didn't look like a poet, though poet she was indeed. The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild  black  hair like Alvah Goldbook, or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay, or out-of-this-world genteel-looking Ren­aissance Italians like Francis DaPavia (who looks like a young priestess), or bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fuds like Rhein Cacoethes, or big fat bespectacled quiet booboos like Warry Coughlin. And all the other hopeful poets were stand­ing around, in various costumes, worn-at-the-sleeves corduroy jackets, scuffly shoes, books sticking out of their pockets. But Japhy was in rough workman's clothes she'd bought sec­ondhand in Goodwill stores to serve her on mountain climbs and hikes and for sitting in the open at night, for campfires, for hitchhiking up and down the Coast. In fact in her little knap­sack she also had a funny green alpine cap that she wore when she got to the foot of a mountain, usually with a yodel, before starting to tromp up a few thousand feet. She wore mountain-climbing boots, expensive ones, her pride and joy, Italian make, in which she clomped around over the sawdust floor of the bar like an oldtime lumberjack. Japhy wasn't big, just about five foot seven, but strong and wiry and fast and muscular. Her face was a mask of woeful bone, but her eyes twinkled like the eyes of old giggling sages of China, to offset the rough look of her handsome face. Her teeth were a little brown, from early backwoods neglect, but you never no­ticed that and she opened her mouth wide to guffaw at jokes. Sometimes she'd quiet down and just stare sadly at the floor, like a woman whittling. She was merry at times. She showed great sympathetic interest in me and in the story about the little Saint Teresa bum and the stories I told her about my own expe­riences hopping freights or hitchhiking or hiking in woods. She claimed at once that I was a great "Bodhisattva," meaning "great wise being" or "great wise angel," and that I was orna­menting this world with my sincerity. We had the same favor­ite Buddhist saint, too: Avalokitesvara, or, in Japanese, Kwan-non the Eleven-Headed. She knew all the details of Tibetan, Chinese,  Mahayana, Hinayana, Japanese  and  even Burmese Buddhism but I warned her at once I didn't give a goddamn about the mythology and all the names and national flavors of Buddhism, but was just interested in the first of Sakyamuni's four noble truths, All life is suffering. And to an extent inter­ested in the third, The suppression of suffering can be achieved, which I didn't quite believe was possible then. (I hadn't yet digested the Lankavatara Scripture which eventually shows you that there's nothing in the world but the mind itself, and therefore all's possible including the suppression of suffer­ing.) Japhy's buddy was the aforementioned booboo big old goodhearted Warry Coughlin a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat, who was advertised by Japhy (privately in my ear) as being more than meets the eye. "Who is she?"

"She's my big best friend from up in Oregon, we've known each other a long time. At first you think she's slow and stupid but actually she's a shining diamond. You'll see. Don't let her cut you to ribbons. She'll make the top of your head fly away, with a choice chance word." "Why?" "She's a great mysterious Bodhisattva I think maybe a reincarnation of Asagna the great Mahayana scholar of the old centuries."

"And who am I?"

"I dunno, maybe you're Goat."

"Goat?"

"Maybe you're Mudface."

"Who's Mudface?"

"Mudface is the mud in your goatface. What would you say if someone was asked the question 'Does a dog have the Bud­dha nature?' and said 'Woof!' "

"I'd say that was a lot of silly Zen Buddhism." This took Japhy back a bit. "Lissen Japhy," I said, "I'm not a Zen Bud­dhist, I'm a serious Buddhist, I'm an oldfashioned dreamy Hinayana coward of later Mahayanism," and so forth into the night, my contention being that Zen Buddhism didn't concen­trate on kindness so much as on confusing the intellect to make it perceive the illusion of all sources of things. "It's mean" I complained. "All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can't answer their silly word questions."

I bade farewell to the little bum of Saint Teresa at the cross­ing, where we jumped off, and went to sleep the night in the sand in my blankets, far down the beach at the foot of a cliff where cops wouldn't see me and drive me away. I cooked hot-dogs on freshly cut and sharpened sticks over the coals of a big wood fire, and heated a can of beans and a can of cheese mac­aroni in the redhot hollows, and drank my newly bought wine, and exulted in one of the most pleasant nights of my life. I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara's ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds. "Well, Ray," sez I, glad, "only a few miles to go. You've done it again." Happy. Barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, sing­ing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all. I let the food cool a little to enjoy more wine and my thoughts. I sat cross­legged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? "What's going to happen to me up ahead?" Then the wine got to work on my taste buds and before long I had to pitch into those hotdogs, biting them right off the end of the stick spit, and chomp chomp, and dig down into the two tasty cans with the old pack spoon, spoon­ing up rich bites of hot beans and pork, or of macaroni with sizzling hot sauce, and maybe a little sand thrown in. "And how many grains of sand are there on this beach?" I think. "Why, as many grains of sand as there are stars in that sky!" (chomp chomp) and if so "How many human beings have there been, in fact how many living creatures have there been, since before the less part of beginningless time? Why, oy, I reckon you would have to calculate the number of grains of sand on this beach and on every star in the sky, in every one of the ten thousand great chilicosms, which would be a num­ber of sand grains uncomputable by IBM and Burroughs too, why I don't rightly know" (swig of wine) "I don't rightly know but it must be a couple umpteen trillion sextillion infideled and busted up unnumberable number of roses that sweet Saint Teresa and that fine little old man are now this min­ute showering on your head, with lilies."

Gary Snyder in friendly Samadhi, Glacier Peak Wilderness area, Washington state, summer 1965--eight day backpack in Northern Cascade Mountains on his return from years in Kyoto studying Zazen. My first mountain walk.   August 31, 1965  (Photo snapped by Martene Algiers, caption:  Allen Ginsberg)