Nomad Codes

and vanquish, integrate and control.
    The grizzled bearded visage of “Maha Jerry” tells us something right off the bat: the question of psychedelics and American Buddhism remains intimately bound up with the collective spiritual narrative of a particular generation of Americans. Though American Buddhism sprouted from seeds planted long before the emergence of “the ’60s,” the dharma rode to relative prominence on the same countercultural wave of mindexpansion that thrust Timothy Leary into the limelight. Indeed, if there had been no Pranksters, no acid tests, no “instant nirvana,” it is hard to imagine that places like Green Gulch would exist at all. Buddhism in America first hit its stride in the context of countercultural spirituality, and it is simply impossible to understand countercultural spirituality without taking psychedelics into account. Indeed, such understanding is probably impossible without taking psychedelics, period.
    The legitimacy of psychedelic spirituality is a vexing question, especially given the ideas of authenticity and illusion that play such a pivotal role in the spiritual assessment of drugs. Anthropologically speaking, though, it’s hard not to see the question of legitimacy as anything other than a mechanism of cultural power through which religious institutions and lineages define and police their borders. As we now know, psychedelic substances, not to mention other psychoactive drugs, have played a profound role in the history of the human spirit. We may never know what materials composed the soma praised in the Vedas or the punch that gave the Eleusinian Mysteries their mystical zap, but its a pretty safe bet that something more than watery oatmeal was being quaffed. Psychoactive plants are even more fundamentally linked to those ancient indigenous practices rather loosely described as “shamanism.” The religious culture of pre-Buddhist Tibet, for example, was part of a huge shamanic complex that stretched throughout Eurasia and included, in its more northern stretches at least, the ritual use of the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria .
    In any case, psychoactive drugs must be featured prominently in any catalog of what Mircea Eliade called humanity’s “technologies of ecstasy”—a tool-kit of altered states production that includes dancing, drumming, fasting, fucking, and physical ordeal. But in the 1960s, in a culture that had swept its mystical and ecstatic traditions under the moldering carpet of mainline Christianity, there was little to no context for the experiences such technologies helped produce. While one can certainly explore psychedelic space as a “modernist,” looking to art and science for models, some people found that only mystical language and occult images could frame their chemical illuminations. Many Westerners turned, in particular, to Eastern religion, partly because the Orient has long been an imaginal zone where Westerners scamper when they want to escape the prison of scientific materialism. The “Eastern turn” also makes phenomenological sense. LSD could send serpentine energy shooting up your spine, or thrust you into apocalyptic mandalas, or vibrate the world into an energetic void. At the same time, drugs could also unveil the simple, immanent “Zen” of the ordinary world: a leaf, a breeze, or, as in Aldous Huxley’s famous mescaline tale from The Doors of Perception , a fold in one’s trousers.

    Drugs and dharma were themselves only a few of the ingredients in a heretical countercultural stew that included free love, astrology, street protests, long hair, anarchism, electric guitars, an active press, Carlos Castaneda, and Hindu iconography. From the perspective of serious Western Buddhists with Eastern teachers, not to mention the roshis and lamas who themselves arrived in the 1960s and ’70s in order to found institutions, the freak scene must have seemed, in its eclectic mania, almost as wild and fierce as Tibet seemed to the Indian missionaries of the eighth century. In a sense, the counterculture was America’s own fractured shamanism, seething with untamed energies and magical phantasms. By taking root within this intensely vibrant culture, the Western dharma was able to make the transition from a marginal pursuit of intellectuals and cultural mavericks to the influential if constrained mass phenomenon it is today. While those roots may have been inebriant-free, the soil they found was psychedelic, and its