Buddhist Audio Books

With Allen Ginsberg in Kalimpong (1962)

Our first meeting with a person often seems of special significance, especially in retrospect.This was certainly the case with my first meeting with Allen Ginsberg, which took place in Kalimpong, a small town in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, in June 1962. Allen was on his first visit to India, and had been touring the holy places of Hinduism and Buddhism and making friends with Indians of all classes and creeds.I had lived in India for more than fifteen years, of which the last twelve or more had been passed in Kalimpong, after I had spent two years in South India as a wandering ascetic and a year in Benares studying Pali and Buddhist philosophy. In 1957 I had established, on the outskirts of Kalimpong, a small monastery which was already well known as a centre of interdenominational Buddhism, and it was in the sparsely furnished sitting room of this monastery that Allen and I had our first meeting.

Allen had already published 'Howl' and 'Kaddish' and was probably the most outstanding – certainly the best known – of the Beat Poets, but of all this I then knew nothing. Though I had read and written poetry from an early age, and was still reading and writing it at intervals, I was quite unaware of the more recent developments that had taken place in this field, whether in Britain or in the United States. In any case, my tastes were traditional rather than modernist, and it is doubtful if I would have felt much sympathy with the attitudes of the Beat Generation, at least so far as these were expressed in literature. Be that as it may, the fact that I knew nothing of the Beat Poets, and that Allen Ginsberg was not even a name to me, meant that when the slouching, dirty, dishevelled, hirsute figure appeared unexpectedly on my verandah one afternoon I could meet and greet him simply as a fellow human being.