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with nothing distinctive about it to indicate from whence it came, and if it disappeared whither it went. They realized very clearly, that they, at last, had acquired their own wonderful Mind, a Mind that was Permanent and Indestructible.
     
    Further on, when we compare the description of Ananda’s enlightenment in the Shurangama with Kerouac’s description in The Dharma Bums, we see why he said his long quotes from the Sutra were the heart of the biography:
     
    Suddenly it seemed that all the trees of the Jeta Park, and all the waves lapping on the shores of its lakes, were singing the music of the Dharma, and all the intersecting rays of brightness were like a net of splendor set with jewels and over arching them all. Such a marvelous sight had never been imagined by the assembled holy devotees and held them all in silence and awe. Unwittingly they passed into the blissful peace of the Diamond Samadhi, that is, every one immediately listened to the intense and mysterious roar of silence, the entire multitude of twelve hundred and thirty three, and upon them all there seemed to fall like a gentle rain the soft petals of many different colored lotus blossoms—blue and crimson, yellow and white—all blending together and being reflected into the open space of heaven in all the tints of the spectrum. Moreover, all the differentiations of mountains in their minds, and seas and rivers and forests of the Saha-suffering world blended into one another and faded away leaving only the flower-adorned unity of the Primal Cosmos. In the center of it all, seated on pure lotus, they saw the Tathagata, Already-Thus, the Pearl and the Pillar of the world.
     
    The point in the Sutra where Manjusri exhorts Ananda in the inward-turning contemplative practice may very well underly Kerouac’s purported method of direct stream-of-consciousness writing, which he may be considering to be the nondiscriminating mind flowing with the nondual emptiness forms of the world.
     
    “Ananda, should reverse your outward perception of hearing and listen inwardly for the perfectly unified and intrinsic sound of your own Mind-Essence, for as soon as you have attained perfect accommodation, you will have attained to Supreme Enlightenment.
    “This is the only way to Nirvana, and it has been followed by all the Tathagatas of the past. Moreover, it is for all the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas of the present and for all in the future if they are to hope for Perfect Enlightenment. Not only did Avaloki-Tesvara attain Perfect Enlightenment in long ages past by this Golden Way, but in the present, I also, am one of them . . . but for laymen, this common method of concentrating the mind on its sense of hearing, turning it inward by this Door of Dharma to hear the Transcendental Sound of his Essential Mind, is most feasible and wise.”
     
    A few pages on, Kerouac sets forth an ethic he clearly aspired to follow himself: “The Four Precepts are: 1. Wake up, cease sexual lust, sexual lust leads to multiplicity and strife and suffering. 2. Wake up, cease the tendency to unkindness toward others, unkindness is the murderer of the life of wisdom. 3. Wake up, cease greediness and stealing, you should look upon your own body as not being your own but as being one with the bodies of all other sentient beings. 4. Wake up, cease secret insincerity and lying, there should be no falsehood in your life, there is no hiding anything in a shattering dewdrop.”
    Here, Kerouac marks an interesting resonance with Jesus: “Elated and believing, perceiving the serenity, the moral earnestness, the sweet reasonableness of the Master, more and more disciples joined the Brotherhood. Of his Twelve Great Disciples, 500 years before Christ and His Twelve, the Blessed One said: ‘Save in my religion the Twelve Great Disciples, who, being good themselves, rouse up the world and deliver it from indifference, are not to be found.’”
    Near the end of the book, Kerouac introduces the final