"...These literary encounters define a lineage of sorts in the transmission
of Buddhism to America--from Thoreau, who in 1844 in the Transcendentalist
periodical The Dial published Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's translation
from the French of the Lotus Sutra (the first time a Buddhist sutra
appeared in English); to Dwight Goddard, a former American missionary to
China who founded the Followers of Buddha in 1934; to Jack Kerouac, the
Beats, and the writers of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance; to
today's American Buddhists, many of whom were brought up in other
traditions and who first learned of Buddhism by reading The Dharma Bums.



...Among Americans brought up in other traditions, Buddhism remained for
the most part a literary and intellectual enterprise until the sixties and 
seventies.... Against this backdrop, the Beats can be appreciated as
transitional figures constructing a 'middle way' between the early era of
armchair Buddhism and contemporary Buddhist practice, which usually
involves a formal setting and study with a teacher. In an America short on
English-language texts and English-speaking teachers, the Beats helped to
foster the interest that would support the subsequent establishment of
dharma centers and sanghas, or communities.... The Beats had
succeeded in picking up the thread of the Transcendentalists' interest in
the wisdom traditions of the East and in nature and began to weave it
seamlessly into the fabric of American life.


In the winter of 1953-54, Jack Kerouac sought out a copy of Thoreau's
Walden and was so inspired by its discussion of Indian philosophy,
especially the Bhagavad Gita, that he was prompted to read other Hindu
scriptures. However, like Thoreau's Transcendentalist colleague Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who once described the Gita as "the much renowned book of
Buddism," Kerouac apparently had some difficulty discriminating between the
Hindu and Buddhist traditions. When he went to the library in search of
Hindu holy books, Kerouac picked up instead an English translation of
Ashvaghosa's fourth-century The Life of the Buddha. A few months
later, while visiting friends Neal and Carolyn Cassady in California,
Kerouac ensconced himself in the San Jose Library, where he became
entranced by Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible (1932), an anthology
of Buddhist scriptures. Soon he was devouring everything he could find on
Eastern religions, including the Vedas, Patanajali's Yoga Sutras,
and writings by Lao-Tzu and Confucius. But Buddhist sutras, especially those
included in Goddard's A Buddhist Bible, remained Kerouac's favorite
Asian texts.



 Kerouac's reading of Walden and, later, of Buddhist teachings, 
  clearly marked a new era in his life, but it also marked a new era in 
  the life of the nation, since Kerouac's awakening to Buddhism stirred 
  similar searches in other members of the Beat Generation and in the 
  hippies of the sixties, thus helping to bend postwar counterculture 
     eastward. Just as Kerouac, in a mood of desolation over a lost love 
     and a large pile of unpublished manuscripts, had turned to Thoreau and 
     to Buddhist texts, many young people disenchanted with Cold War 
     America and the atomic age ushered in by World War II sought solace in 
     Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958). In turn, The Dharma 
     Bums soon proved itself capable of marking new eras in individual 
     lives, thus sparking something of "the rucksack revolution" of 
     wandering "Zen lunatics" that it had prophesied.
    

     
     Unlike the Transcendentalists, whose Asian religious interests 
     remained largely textual, Kerouac translated his intellectual 
     curiosity about Buddhism into actual practice. In the mid-1950s he 
     chanted the Diamond Sutra (his favorite Buddhist scripture), 
     meditated daily, and attempted for months at a time to live the 
     ascetic and celibate life of a Buddhist monk....


     
     ...For many years Kerouac's treatment of Buddhist themes was actively 
     discourated by editors and colleagues.... This resistance to Buddhist 
     material proved so strong that Kerouac's two works that deal most 
     extensively with Buddhism, Wake Up and Some of the 
     Dharma, have yet to be published, more than 25 years after the 
     author's death.

     
     Not surprisingly, the West Coast Beats came to Buddhism earlier and 
     more easily. Asian immigration was both more longstanding and more 
     sustained in California than in New York. The discovery of gold at 
     Sutter's Mill in 1848 had lured thousands of Chinese to the States, 
     and by 1853 San Francisco boasted its first Chinese temple. Japanese 
     immigrants did not begin to arrive in significant numbers until the 
     1890s, but shortly after the turn of the century important Japanese 
     Buddhist teachers such as Nyogen Senzaki and D.T. Suzuki arrived in 
     the United States. At least one future Beat, Japanese-American Albert 
     Saijo, actually studied with Nyogen Senzaki, with whom he had been 
     interred at the Heart Mountain camp for Japanese nationals and 
     Japanese-Americans during World War II. This Japanese and Chinese 
     presence contributed to a climate that was conducive to introducing 
     Buddhist influences into the culture at large."




[from BIG SKY MIND: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, Carole
Tonkinson, ed. (New York: Riverhead Books; published by The Berkley
Publishing Group; 1995)]