Like them he was a visionary both cheerful and prophetically angry, with a mind reaching beyond religious and anti-religious formulations, decrying hypocrisy and narrowmindedness. His later work in which buddhist references abound, might be labelled as the poetry of doha , songs of spontaneous realization in the buddhist tradition begun in ancient India and greatly expanded in Tibet. Trungpa did not introduce Allen Ginsberg to the innate qualities of this tradition. He declared that Allen was his poetry teacher. Ginsberg's poems are great pile-ups of things symbolic in themselves.
Art enacts the widest possible view, analogous to the sky or space.
The continual integration of this view into Euro-American thought marks a major historical shift with lasting consequences, a move toward the actuality of an enlightened society. Copyright 1997 by Jane Augustine , all rights reserved. Any commercial use or republication requires the written permission of the author.