Wake Up by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online Page A

a hunter, was actually a religious hermit, or Rishi, a Sage, a Muni. The Prince soon surmised this as soon as the transfer of clothes was effected. “This garment is of no common character! It is not what a worldly man has worn.”
    He wandered on, deep in earnestness. Late in the day he grew very hungry. In the tradition of old, vowed to homeless-ness, he begged his first meal from door to door among the village grass huts. Having been a prince he was used to the best dishes that royal chefs could prepare, and so now when these offerings of humble food met his educated palate he instinctively began spitting it out. Instantly he realized the pathetic-ness of this folly and forced himself to eat the entire bowlful. Whatever was given to him in charity, though it may be wretched, should never be despised. The religious life dedicated to the search for the highest peace, having the one savor of reality, was seasoning enough indeed. Having cast off worldly ties of the heart and thinking mind, it was no time to be tied to the tasting tongue. Having eaten the humbling, the dreary meal, downcast yet joyful, he who had worn garments of silk and whose attendants had held a white umbrella over him, walked on in rags in the burning sunshine of the jungle solitude.
    He made inquiries and roamed along looking for the famous ascetic, Alara Kalama, whom he’d heard so much about, who would be his teacher. Alara Kalama expounded the teaching called “the realm of nothingness,” and practiced self-mortification to prove that he was free from his body. The young new Muni of the Sakya clan followed suit with eagerness and energy. Later, to his disciples, he recounted these early experiences of a self-mortifyer. “I fed my body on mosses, grasses, cow-dung, I lived upon the wild fruits and roots of the jungle, eating only of fruit fallen from the trees. I wore garments of hemp and hair, as also foul clouts from the charnel house, rags from dust heaps. I wrapped myself in the abandoned skins and hides of animals; covered my nakedness with lengths of grass, bark and leaves, with a patch of some wild animal’s mane or tail, with the wing of an owl. I was also a plucker out of hair and beard, practiced the austerity of rooting out hair from head and face. I took upon myself the vow always to stand, never to sit or lie down. I bound myself perpetually to squat upon my heels, practiced the austerity of continual heel-squatting. A ‘thorn-sided-one’ was I; when I lay down to rest, it was with thorns upon my sides—I betook myself to a certain dark and dreadful wood and in that place made my abode. And here in the dense and fearsome forest such horror reigned, that the hair of whomsoever, not sense-subdued, entered that dread place, stood on end with terror.” For six years with Alara Kalama and later the five mendicant hermits near Uruvela in the Forest of Mortification he who would become the Buddha practiced these useless and grisly exercises together with a penance of starvation so severe that “like wasted withered reeds became all my limbs, like a camel’s hoof my hips, like a wavy rope my backbone, and as in a ruined house the rooftree rafters show all aslope, so sloping showed my ribs because of the extremity of fasting. And when I touched the surface of my belly my hand touched my backbone, and as I stroked my limbs the hair, rotten at the roots, came away in my hands.”
    Finally one day in trying to bathe in the Nairanjana he fainted in the water and almost drowned. He realized that this extreme method of finding salvation was just another form of pitiful ignorance; he saw it was the other side of the coin of existence that on one side showed extreme lusting, the other extreme fasting; extreme luxurious concupiscence and senseenervation on the one hand, dulling the heart of sincerity, and extreme impoverished duress and body-deprivation on the other hand, also dulling the heart of sincerity from the other side of the same