(this is a new on-line course offered by me privately and not available at Keio University as my other two on this site)

See syllabus & podcasts here

The 1960s counter culture or “hippie” movement in the United States and Europe is well known and documented in popular media. What is less known are the group of writers, poets, and artists, called the Beats or the Beat Generation, who gave birth to this movement through their works in the 1950s. What is even less known is the powerful influence Buddhism had on many of these artists as well as the lineage of Asian and Western Buddhists who predated these Beat artists in transmitting Buddhism to the West.

This course (now adapted to a series of podcasts talks) will introduce the pre-World War II movement of Buddhism to the West and its initial influence on Western literature and art. The core of the course will examine the Beat movement of the 1950s and Buddhism’s influence on it through such seminal figures as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginsberg—all of whom at one time were serious Buddhist practitioners. We will trace their work in the 1950s and how it played a seminal role in the birth of the counter culture movement—envisioned by Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums and culminating in the poetic style of Bob Dylan. We will also look at the essential influence of Buddhism on this movement, including new understandings of literary form & style, reconsiderations of the role of drugs and psychedelic experience, and the birth of socially engaged Buddhism in the West.

Hosts: We are two “dharma bums” who for the last decade plus have been hiking the hills and beaches of historical Buddhist Kamakura, Japan discussing at length Beat literature, Buddhism, general spirituality and tantric spirituality both in the East and West as well as enlightened social change.

Jonathan S. Watts was born in 1966 and became heavily influenced by the Beats and the Counter-Culture Movement growing up in the United States. After graduating Princeton University in 1989, he became a “dharma bum”, leaving the U.S. to live in Indonesia, Thailand, and Japan for the past 30 years as a socially engaged Buddhist. His books include: Rethinking Karma: The Dharma of Social Justice; This Precious Life: Buddhist Tsunami Relief and Anti-Nuclear Activism in Post 3/11 Japan; Lotus in the Nuclear Sea: Fukushima and the Promise of Buddhism in the Nuclear Age; and Buddhist Care for the Dying and Bereaved.

Darrin Mortson is Canadian and completed his MA in Religious Studies at McGill University, focusing on the comparison of the dialectics of Nagarjuna with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. He has travelled extensively, often hitchhiking, in North and Central America, Asia, and Europe. He now teaches at Mejiro University in Tokyo, writes about modernist literature, and has published such essays as “The Wake of Indra: Finnegans Wake and Buddhism” and “Between Shift and Shift: The Long Encounter of Yeats’ A Vision and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”. His newest work “‘Down in a Bhud Mess’: Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa, and Buddhism” is the focus of the first podcast.