Meat, Buddhism and Salvation

Bent Sørensen Meat, Buddhism and Salvation. The beat-poet and novel writer Jack Kerouac sought in a period of his life and in his writings to combine and unite Buddhist cessation of the existence of the flesh through Nirvana with a Catholic-Christian inspired yearning for the cessation of sin and guilt. The form of salvation Kerouac read into Buddhism was a cessation of suffering, and his concept of Heaven is a mixture of a Christian Paradise and a Buddhist non-place of non-existence, Nirvana – a condition Kerouac sometimes seems to have envisioned he could inhabit while still living here on Earth. The article shows how Kerouac's life influenced by alcoholism influenced his poetry together with a special hybrid form of Buddhism, and the article includes examples of his poems.