George Poulos

Hey guys! George here with another quick book review.

This one is The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

This is my favorite Jack Kerouac novel for sure. (My second favorite is probably Desolation Angels. I also remember really enjoying Maggie Cassidy. Meanwhile, On The Road, his most famous novel, never really stuck with me).

The Dharma Bums is fundamentally a spiritual adventure novel.

It is a “novel”, but I always like to note that Kerouac is in fact writing about real events that happened in his real life. He just happens to change the name of characters and cities, which is something I assume he did in order to protect people’s privacy.

Which I totally get—I personally feel hesitant to refer to specific people in my life when publishing writing. On the one hand, I know we’re all gonna be dead soon, but on the other hand, I would like to respect people’s privacy while we’re here.

But I digress. I really loved The Dharma Bums, and it was an impactful book on my own spiritual journey as well.

The book is more or less an account of Kerouac’s rather insane truth-seeking adventures. It’s nothing like what you’d probably imagine when you think of someone on a Buddhist or meditation path.

I don’t know about you, but at the time of reading this book, I imagined that being on a Buddhist or meditation path meant giving up all the joys of the world and becoming a monk in robes. I thought it meant living a boring life.

This book, for me, served the purpose of blowing that misconception out of the water. While monk robes and renunciation is one way to do it, it’s certainly not the only way, as evidenced by Kerouac in this novel.

His style is more like wild and crazy, partying, truth-seeking, deep thinking, meditating, traveler.

While I’m not necessarily endorsing or recommending the lifestyle portrayed in his novels—in fact, Kerouac died at age 47 due to complications from long term alcoholism, and this is where our paths stray a bit; at the time of writing this, I’m approaching two years of sobriety—but reading about it is sure as hell a riot and a good fun time.

And if I stop and think about the unfolding of my own spiritual path, which is deeply steeped in a lifestyle of meditation and Buddhism, despite being nearly two years sober, this path has brought me on some wild and crazy (but perhaps not reckless) adventures, such as my month in Guatemala. And surely there are more adventures to come.

Anyways, at the time of reading this book, my mind was just cracking open to things like meditation and Buddhism, but I still had adversity to going deeper, because I didn’t want to give up fun.

The Dharma Bums, then, served the purpose for me of making me realize, “Ohhhh. You can be a meditator and have a wild, fun and adventurous life!”

(In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel like going deep on a path of meditation makes it more likely to have a wild, fun and adventurous life. My meditation path was the thing that brought me to Guatemala to have that amazing month. I’ll write about that trip soon, if I haven’t already).

So those are some of my thoughts on The Dharma Bums and the role it played in my own spiritual journey!

If you’re looking for a spiritual adventure novel, I definitely recommend checking this one out. It’s also written in Kerouac’s wild stream of consciousness prose style—some of it, his descriptions of various scenes or spiritual contemplations, will leave you breathless.

Buy the book here.

See you soon,
George Poulos