Word: buddhism
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...same time, Marlon Brando, adenoidal and inarticulately glowering, careered through adolescent daydreams astride a Harley-Davidson. From the perspective of the late '60s, the old rebellions and spontaneities seem as touchingly quaint as the shock they elicited at the time. Kerouac's vision was compounded of Buddhism, booze (of all bourgeois things) and a chaotic lowlife that he worked into exuberant underground literature. When he wrote of casual sex or marijuana, they were still exotic and forbidden fruits. At the end, he was living in geriatric St. Petersburg, Fla., dutifully looking after his ailing mother...
Despite such Western overlays, the influence of Buddhism on the intellectuals remains strong. It holds that temporal life is only an "ocean of sorrows" and that the intellectual should avoid involvement in it. As a result, attentisme (waiting) is a popular posture. It is a detached resignation at least partly rooted in the belief that the nation's destiny is controlled by outside forces-the French after World War II, the Americans and the North Vietnamese in the present conflict-and that the individual is powerless to bring about change. It also reflects despair over the lack of alternatives...
...Unless Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other sects are supplemented by, merged into or replaced by a great One Religion, sectarianism will continue to divide the world and communities into self-centered groups, isolate peoples, use sectarian prejudices for political advantage, and stimulate conflict which is deadly dangerous in the atomic-space...
...earlier America seemed to have many eccentrics, such as Johnny Appleseed and Thoreau, both of whom heard "a different drummer." The Boston Brahmins produced Eleonora Sears, a ferocious walker who once hiked 110 miles nonstop. Mrs. Isabella Gardner shocked Beacon Hill by practicing Buddhism, drinking beer and strolling down Tremont Street with a lion. Until he died in 1957, "Silver Dollar" Jim West was Houston's favorite millionaire. He owned 30 cars, lived in a $500,000 castle, often wore a pistol and a diamond-studded Texas Ranger's badge. He lugged his own butter to expensive restaurants...
...life enacted in unanalyzed violence. The analysts are always there, narrating the actions of others. Sometimes we see bright and uncomfortable close-ups of their faces (usually minus the tops of their heads) as they clinically pick apart and piece together the puzzle of Vietnam. Paul Mus, Professor of Buddhism at Yale, lounges in his living room chair beside a hi-fi speaker and Oriental trinkets and dramatically recreates his contact with Ho. Meanwhile, back where everything is what it is, Ho exhorts a loving crowd to keep the faith...