If, like me, you went to a boys-only Catholic high school run by fugitive fascists who managed to evade Nuremberg's gavel, then you'll always be thankful for the band of likeminded brothers with whom you consorted and resisted. Along with friends I'd made before high school, I met a circle of guys with distinctly counterculture leanings, a loose fraternity united by the somewhat complementary interests of Progressive Rock, martial arts, Eastern philosophy, illicit substances, and texts central to all of those pursuits. Among its virtues, our group functioned as an underground lending library. Books made the rounds, consumed as vital ingredients in an ongoing conversational soup, vetted then passed from one kid to the next.

I can still see those softcovers peeking out of blazer pockets, dog-eared and venerable with rapidly acquired wabi—Eugen Herrigel's slim gem, Zen in the Art of Archery, with its grumpy bowman rendered in charcoal; an equally thin, equally potent classic by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception; Tom Wolfe's joyous Hippie odyssey, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, with what I now realize is an LSD-dosed sugar cube unwrapped from its psychedelic cellophane; and that raven on Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan still looks right through me.

Along with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Frank Herbert, other classics I remember circulating were Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell, and Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But among the great books I read in high school no thanks to my high school, Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums is one to which I fondly return.

For a kid who made The Way of Zen by Alan Watts his Bible and who made Steely Dan's "Bodhisattva" part of a daily soundtrack, a book called The Dharma Bums needed no additional recommendation (little did I know that Alan Watts was a character!) In Hinduism, dharma denotes the most fundamental truth, the very way of the universe, while in Buddhism it refers more specifically to Buddha's teachings which constitute the path to enlightenment. As for the bums, they range from legendary Taoist hermits and Buddhist masters to the book's characters to some other breed of "Zen Lunatic."

The Dharma Bums followed one year after what would be Kerouac's most successful novel, On the Road, and like its much -lauded precursor transposes Kerouac, his friends, and his experiences onto a fictionalized canvas. Much the same as Sal Paradise in On the Road, Ray Smith, the narrator, is Kerouac. Other notable characters are Japhy Ryder, a wonderfully charismatic recasting of poet Gary Snyder and really the star of the tale; Alvah Goldbook, stand-in for poet Allen Ginsberg; Arthur Whane as aforementioned author, scholar, speaker and seeker Alan Watts; and, at the heart of so much of the Beat Generation's operation, Cody Pomeray as Neal Cassady, the "mad for life" icon immortalized in On the Road as Dean Moriarty and later as himself in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the continuously talking driver of the Merry Pranksters' bus Furthur.

While both books share nearly identical casts, their tones—their vibes—differ dramatically. On the Road relentlessly propels the reader on a manic quest for sensation—blaring Jazz sax solos, quarts of beer, marijuana cigarettes, hurtling cross-country in a jalopy. It's a mindset reflected in the writing style itself. The Dharma Bums has a mellow vibe, a meditative pace, and for that reason and others, I've always greatly preferred it. Yes, there are some wild parties with jugs of wine and even Yab-Yum, a rarefied practice of Tantric Buddhism blending meditation and sex. But the book luxuriates in forms of meaningful quiet. "Finding Nirvana is like locating silence," Ray muses at one point.

In the search for Nirvana, Japhy takes Ray on a hike up Matterhorn Peak in California's Sierra Nevada—no bacchanal at 12,285 feet! It's there that Japhy deals Ray a diamond dose of
old-time dharma: "When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing." That's been a personal touchstone since the day I read it.

Ray hops freight trains to travel, an extremely austere, sometimes dangerous and often lonely activity where a day's highlight might be sharing tinned sardines and conversation with a lifelong hobo. (Indeed, the book starts with Ray jumping into a gondola in L.A. en route Santa Barbara and later encountering "a thin old little bum." These peripatetic down-and-outs are an American variety of "dharma bum.")

There's also a quiet in the book that hearkens back to Thoreau's Walden: at the end of the story, inspired by Japhy Ryder, Ray spends a summer of practically monastic solitude as a fire lookout atop Desolation Peak in Washington's North Cascade Mountains.

I've always found The Dharma Bums to be a relaxing read, a book full of warmth and hope and camaraderie and wisdom. And how could a kid in high school (let alone one as hateful as mine) not love a paragraph like this one?

See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway , all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

For that matter, how could anyone not like a paragraph like that? I still do….

I'm so thankful for those guys back in high school who passed the books around. And in fulfillment of Ray Smith's vision, I've wandered thousands of miles with my rucksack, up and down mountains, alone and in the company of my friends. I see now that all of us have always been Dharma Bums.