nothing is true:
william burroughs and buddhism
James Grauerholz
William S. Burroughs at rest in the side-yard of his house, 1991. Photo: Allen Ginsberg. © 2010 The Allen Ginsberg Estate. All rights reserved
William Burroughs was not a Buddhist: he never sought or found a “teacher,” he never took refuge, and he never undertook any bodhisattva vows. He did not consider himself a Buddhist, nor, for that matter, did he ever declare himself a follower of any one faith or practice. But he did have an awareness of the essentials of Buddhism, and in his own way, he was affected by the Buddha-dharma.
From his earliest childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1920s, Burroughs was alienated and repulsed by the personal and social hypocrisy that he could not help but perceive around him, even at the age of eight or ten. He was terribly shy, and frightened of the other children, but at the same time defiant in his own beliefs and inclinations ― including his homosexual attraction to some of his classmates. A sense of being fundamentally “different” from the others marked his childhood, and never left him.
Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”; the young William Burroughs said, “Other people are different from me and I don’t like them.” His response was to develop an obsession with weapons and self-defense, which lasted all his life. William sometimes affected a self-image exemplified by the lyrics of a blues song of the 1920s, which he often quoted in later years: “I’m evil, evil as a man can be/ I’m evil, evil-hearted me.” But his heart wasn’t really in it, all this evilness; there was within him some bedrock of decency that always stopped him from elaborating himself fully in that direction.
In his twenties Burroughs saw a series of psychoanalysts in the hope that it might allow him to break free of the psychic constraints and self-defeating reflexes that he felt as a lifelong curse. Then when he was thirty, in New York, Burroughs met Kerouac and Ginsberg, and after a period of several months during which he was conducting his own “lay analyses” of his new friends, his recently developed addiction to morphine began to take the place of his analytic efforts. He had abandoned all faith in psychiatry by the age of forty-five, but long before that he had concluded that the Freudian model of “cure of neurosis through recuperation of primordial trauma” was overrated.
By 1949, Burroughs was living in Mexico City with Joan Vollmer, a bright young woman with whom he felt a deep kinship despite his essential homosexuality. Joan was killed accidentally in 1951 when William fired a shot from a pistol at a glass she had placed on her head. Within three years he was living a life of squalid excess in Tangier, still struggling to understand how this had happened.
Burroughs felt he was defending his Self not only from outer opponents, but also from an inner enemy: the Ugly Spirit, as he called it. He felt that he was literally “possessed” by aninimical, invading personality with its own will that was quite contrary to his best interests. And in his efforts to understand his shooting of Joan, he could proceed no further than to see an eruption of the Ugly Spirit in that rash, drunken act.
His letters from Tangier to Kerouac and Ginsberg were a lifeline for Burroughs. In the series of letters he wrote to his friends from 1953 to 1955 we find references to yoga and Buddhism, probably in response to the enthusiasm Ginsberg and Kerouac relayed in their own letters to him (now lost) for the Eastern traditions they had recently discovered. (Ginsberg had been inspired to look into Zen Buddhism after seeing some Chinese paintings in the New Y ork Public Library in April 1953, and Kerouac had found Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible in the San Jose, California, library in 1954.)
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