In the fifth chapter of On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac writes: ‘The waves are Chinese but the earth is an Indian thing’. His words provide further evidence that when describing Nature, mid-twentieth-century American writers habitually evoke non-Euro-American philosophical and spiritual frameworks. In the same spirit that Bowles turned to Sufism to explore the relationship between the human and the desert landscape, and that Church and Salinger drew on Pueblo and Taoist thought, Kerouac emphatically asserts that the ‘waves’ and the ‘earth’ are the province of older and more venerable philosophical traditions than those that were dominant within his contemporary Cold War American society. This chapter will explore the portrayals of Nature in the seminal ‘Beat’ writings of Kerouac and of his close friend and confidant, the poet Allen Ginsberg. The two men maintained a long and detailed correspondence between 1953 and 1956 – a period when both produced some of their best-known works. Their letters reveal that during these years, Kerouac and Ginsberg were studying translated Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy, and simultaneously endeavouring to bring these Eastern texts into conversation with their own co-created, countercultural ‘Beat’ philosophy. This chapter will therefore suggest that, despite Kerouac's apparent privileging of Native American philosophy by attributing it to the more tangible and robust ‘earth’ in this sentence from the final section of On The Road, it was his sustained study of ancient Chinese thought that had a significant and lasting influence on the literary depictions of Nature in his and Ginsberg's work.

There have been a number of scholarly studies on the influence of Eastern thought on the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but not a proportionally large volume given the amount of criticism that both writers have attracted. Of these studies, all deal with the influence of ‘Buddhism’, and in many cases view Buddhism as a secondary or complementary presence, rather than as a primary philosophical influence. It is worth noting that Kerouac and Ginsberg often use the terms ‘Buddhism’, ‘Zen’ and ‘Taoism’ somewhat interchangeably across their writings.