The Beats found in the Asian religions of Zen Buddhism and Taoism that which they could not find in the traditional, creed-based religions of the Western world. In Zen and the Beat Way, a collection of his radio talks, Alan Watts describes this difference between the religions of the East and of the West:

The great Asian ways that I am speaking of do not, strictly speaking, have any creeds. They do not involve belief. That is to say, they do not involve committing oneself to certain positive opinions about life. Almost to the contrary, they abandon ideas and opinions because what they are concerned with is not ideas, not theories, but experience; experience in the sense almost of sensuousness, for instance, as they say, you drink the water and know for yourself that it is cold. So, it is knowledge rather than faith that they are concerned with.(5)

It is quite obvious why the Beats would eschew Western religions like Christianity and Judaism and turn to Zen and Taoism. In the two Asian religions, there is no code of moral conduct; instead of prescribing a set of rules that are in accordance with the will of God, Zen and Taoism give one "principles of action" that are conducive to the discovery of the spiritual knowledge and enlightenment that lies at the heart of the two traditions. Watts also says that, through Zen and Taoism, the mind is liberated from "enchantment by social convention." (Watts 8). While most Western religions typically adhere to conventional societal rules of conduct and morality, the Eastern traditions show that "the rules of a society, of language, of conduct are not identical with the laws of God ... the laws of nature, the processes of nature." (Watts 8). Zen and Taoism make clear the distinction between convention and reality.

These qualities of Zen and Taoism are clearly suited to the lifestyles of many of the Beat artists. In religions such as Christianity and Judaism, they found many rules that declared their behavior immoral and oppositional to the religions. However, in Eastern religion, they found no such thing, no moral codes or standards to conflict with the way they chose to live their lives. In fact, in those religions' rejection of conventional societal rules, they found support for their own revolutionary and antiestablishment ways. However, Zen and Taoism did supply the Beats with a sort of structure in their lives. As stated above, the religions supplied them with the principles of action that would lead to further enlightenment and spiritual fulfillment, thus giving them some minimal guidlines about how they should live their lives. This spiritual path was often quite necessary for the Beats to follow; many turned to Zen and Taoism for balance and peace when it otherwise seemed that their lives were in absolute chaos.

Zen and Taoism also served as ways the alter one's conciousness:

"The disciplines of Taosim and Zen are supposed to change our conciousnesss in such a way that we no longer feel that we're an isolated unit locked up within a bag of skin. Instead, we actually experience the fact that our real self - the real us - is everything that there is; that all reality is concentrated and expressing itself at the point known as our personal organism." (Watts 41)

This, too, fits into the Beats frame of thought. The Beats, in many ways, attempted to transform their conciousness, to "derange the senses". Although these attempts often took the form of drug use, especially hallucinogenics such as yage and LSD, religion also played a great part in their endeavors.

Spontanaety of action - another trait often associated with the Beats - is also a part of Taoism. Watts speaks of the Chinese philosophy of wu wei, which means "not forcing things ... action in accordance with the character of the moment." (47) Watts states that "to follow the Tao is to learn the art of doing exactly what you feel like doing. At the same time it is wu wei - it does not force, it does not impose." (50) The Beats surely espoused this practice of non-forcing. Rather than forcing themselves to do what would be societally expected of them, the Beats allowed themselves to follow both the flow of the world around them and the flow of their own desires. They acted spontaneously, doing precisely what they wanted to when they wanted to, yet still attempting to not force anything - even something that they themselves wanted. The community of artists, writers, and other people who all adopted this way of life allowed for each of the participants to fully practice these things; if they had been alone in conventional society, they would have found it much more difficult to throw off the shackles of convention. The Beats, together, created an environment in which this could be done.

At the end of his book, Watts skillfully sums up what is at the heart of both the Eastern religion and of the Beat Generation:

…civilized man tends to be in a state of chronic worry and fear and anxiety, because he is always confronted not with the simple actuality of what is happening before him but with the innumerable possibilities of what might happen. And since, because of this, his emotional existence tends to be in a chronic state of anxiety and tension, he increasingly loses the ability to relate to the concrete world as it manifests himself in the actual present in which he lives. He becomes so tied up inside that, as it were, the channels of his sensibility become blocked. He gets a kind of neurological sclerosis, a kind of inability to give himself permission to be spontaneous, to be alive with full joyous abandonment. Thus, the more civilized we become, the more stuffy we get. And, therefore, the need arises for various ways of liberating ourselves from society, for entering what the Indians call vanaprastha, the life of a forest dweller. Because when a person reaches a certain point in life when he says, "I have had enough of all this. I am simply tired of making life not worth living, by constantly living through the horrors of what might happen, for the sake of efficiency and membership in the community. Let me just get away from it all for a while and find out what the score is for me, myself. I am tired of being told what I ought to believe. I am tired of being told how I ought to see, how I ought to behave, how I ought to feel. Let me find out for myself who I really am." (97)

index - background: the beat generation - beat meets east - beat zen, beat tao - bibliography

1999, by j.r. aponte