Beat Zen: Kerouac's Creative Misreading Of Buddhism

In November 1957, Kerouac finished The Dharma Bums, which echoed previous On The Road, laid him the significant position of the Beat Generation about the path of faith.However, different with the BG cultural of the book On The Road, the latter is saturated with more eastern religious thought, especially the content of Buddhist thought. It changed from a individual story that original recorded several rebellious young people pursuing personal spiritual exploration to a story of a revolution that tried to influence group in the search for a Buddhist utopia. The former was intent on recording some"special" alternative life, while the latter aimed at expanding it to a wave of "backpack revolution" deliberately or even in a planned way, the idea it expanded had been reflecting upon the American youth later, and even the Post-Beat writers, as a symbol, a universal truth. The accession of Buddhism covert the spirit of BG to a kind of deceptive religious spirit. Surveying the development and predicting the living space of Buddhist in America in the perspective of Kerouac is a research method from points to surfaces.From the experience of Kerouac that went from faith to abandon, we can see how Buddhism, as a kind of typical Oriental culture, went through "accept - misreading,absorption, use". This is also what we used to say, the problem of Domestic appropriation that Buddhism faced in its spreading to other countries.This paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction that briefly introduces the background of Kerouac's contact process and his study process of Buddhism, in which I set out a roughly lists of the subject research situation at home and abroad about Kerouac and Buddhism, and defined the approximate scope of study,research methods and theoretical support of this paper. The second chapter guided by the related knowledge of Comparative Literature Imagologie and the methods of Variations studies. in which I discussed the understanding of Buddhist terminology of Kerouac,analyzed the problem of Domestic appropriation of literary image. In the third chapter, I combed the journey of Kerouac's faith with Buddhist, excavated and summarized the process of Kerouac's absorption of Buddhist developmentally. The fourth chapter based on the basis of historical materials, in which I discussed the way of Kerouac's practice that is thither indulgence. Sexuality, collapse spirit and wrong way of Zen meditation led him to his belief crisis on the road of the thorns. In the fifth chapter, first of all, I gave a clear meaning of "misreading" and creative misreading, and analyzed of the reasons why Kerouac produced the formation of Beat Zen in two aspects of subjective and objective.Finally, used the Harold bloom's theory of misreading, to mine the several meanings of the "creative misreading" of Beat Zen of Kerouac.