c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ When Allen Ginsberg chanted”Hare Krishna”during a classic”Firing Line”TV episode, host William F. Buckley simply sat back and looked amused. When Ginsberg chanted monotonous Buddhist prayers during his popular poetry readings across the country, some audience members assumed it was just part of an outrageous acts that also included political harangues and uninhibited verse descriptions of bodily functions.

But for Ginsberg, the well-known beat poet who died Saturday (April 5) at age 70, religion was integral to his life and poetry _ from his earliest days as a writer, when he and fellow beat writer Jack Kerouac studied a book of Buddhist scriptures Kerouac had found somewhere.”I think a lot of people just humored him,”said Ginsberg’s biographer, Michael Schumacher, after a memorial service for Ginsberg Monday.

Casual observers, said Schumacher, thought Ginsberg’s religious activity”was just Allen being Allen,”a phase no more spiritually significant than Picasso’s blue period.”But with Allen, it was so real, it was such a part of him.” In fact, Ginsberg, Kerouac and other beat authors began exploring Eastern religions in the 1950s, long before doing so became countercultural chic.

Even the term beat, used to describe the generation of writers, painters and other artists who came of creative age in the late 1950s, had religious roots, according to Kerouac, who maintained it was a shortened form of”beatific.” Of that generation, however, it was in Ginsberg that the religious spirit ran deepest.

During a visit to India in the early 1960s, priests tried to evict him from Hindu temples, assuming he didn’t belong, and he would respond by kissing the priests’ feet, recalled fellow poet Andy Clausen. The priests then assumed he must be Hindu if he knew the ritual, said Clausen.

Ginsberg began formal training under Tibetan Buddhist gurus around 1970, and became himself a highly regarded teacher of meditation, spending months each year at Buddhist centers in New York, Colorado and Michigan.

Yet, if Ginsberg is to be described as a religious poet, he would never be confused with John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Along with”On the Road”author Kerouac and other beat writers, Ginsberg foreshadowed the sexual revolution and anti-establishment protests of the next decade, when he became a hero of the counterculture. Often writing under the influence of drugs, Ginsberg denounced government policies, wrote candidly of his homosexuality and gained fame when his poem”Howl”was subject to censorship attempts.

Religion was seldom his overt subject matter but religious themes _ sometimes traditional, more often unconventional _ wove through much of his poetry.

And spiritual practices helped shape his poetry, said Schumacher, author of”Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg”(St. Martin’s Press). Ginsberg often wrote long,”breath-length”lines of poetry, and this fit naturally with the techniques of breathing meditation that he was practicing.

The Buddhist emphasis on the”good heart,”or compassion, also prompted his protests against the Vietnam War, the CIA and other targets, said Robert Thurman, head of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. For Ginsberg, Buddhism was not an”elite teaching”but a motivation to work for”the good of all humanity,”Thurman said.

And fellow poet Clausen said he was always amazed at how Ginsberg would indulge the many strangers who tried to strike up conversations with the celebrity at the supermarket and elsewhere. Clausen attributed such patience to Ginsberg’s spiritual discipline.

Gelek Rinpoche, Ginsberg’s guru for about the last eight years, said Ginsberg was a gifted teacher of meditation.”He was a father figure to me,”said Gelek, director of Jewel Heart, a Buddhist Center in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Gelek recalled that during a poetry class taught by Ginsberg at Jewel Heart in the late 1980s, the poet noticed that his guru’s mind had wandered, and asked what he was thinking about.

Gelek, somewhat sheepishly, admitted he was pondering how to avoid the fate of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, then enmeshed in scandal.”He said, `Be open, keep nothing hidden,'”said Gelek.”That’s great advice, and I’ve been taking it ever since.” At the four-hour memorial service Monday at the New York Shambhala Center _ where Ginsberg also taught poetry and meditation _ Gelek led extensive Tibetan chants for Ginsberg.

The service drew hundreds of mourners, including novelist Kurt Vonnegut, poet and playwright Imamu Amiri Baraka, singers Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson, and composer Philip Glass.

In a tribute to Ginsberg’s Jewish roots, a Kaddish, or funeral prayer, was also recited.

In fact, just as Kerouac described himself as a”Catholic mystic”despite his long practice of Buddhism, Ginsberg also retained much of his religious heritage.

He was compared to a Hebrew prophet in his denunciations of the powerful. And the poem regarded by many of his critics as his finest was”Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg,”a lament for his mother, who died in a mental hospital in 1956:.”… and I’ve been up all night, talking,

talking, reading the Kaddish aloud,

listening to Ray Charles blues shout

blind on the phonograph

the rhythm, the rhythm _ and your

memory in my head three years after.” MJP END SMITH