Rick Fields, 57, Poet and Expert on Buddhism

Rick Fields, 57, Poet and Expert on Buddhism

By NICK RAVO
Published: June 11, 1999



Rick Fields, a journalist, poet and leading authority on Buddhism's history and development in the United States, died on Sunday at his home in Fairfax, Calif. He was 57.


The cause was lung cancer, said Helen Tworkov, a longtime friend and the editor in chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, a magazine that Mr. Field helped found in 1991 and that he had worked for as a contributing editor.


Mr. Fields wrote several books, the best known of which is ''How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America'' (Shambhala, 1981).


The book traces Buddhism's origins in the United States from Chinese railroad workers and American transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau in the mid-19th century, to Japanese immigrants on the West Coast at the turn of the century, to the writer Alan Watts and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg in the 1950's, to the mass popularity of Zen Buddhism and the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism in the 1960's and 70's.


In a revised edition of ''How the Swans Came to the Lake'' that was published by Shambhala in 1991, an additional chapter details the fast growth of and broadening interest in Buddhism in the 80's and early 90's.


''Rick Fields was one of our foremost interpreters of Buddhism for Americans,'' said Robert A. F. Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and the nation's pre-eminent scholar on Tibetan Buddhism.


Mr. Fields started his journalism career at the Whole Earth Catalog in 1969. In recent years, he was editor of Yoga Journal and a contributing editor of New Age Journal. He had previously founded the Loka Journal and was editor in chief of the Vajradhatu Sun, which later became the Shambhala Sun. He was also a teacher for several years at the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo.


His other books include ''Code of the Warrior'' (HarperCollins, 1991), ''The Awakened Warrior'' (Tarcher, 1994), ''Chop Wood, Carry Water'' (Tarcher, 1984), ''The Turquoise Bee-Love: Poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama'' with Brian Cutillo (HarperCollins, 1994) and ''Instructions to the Cook; A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life That Matters,'' with Bernard Glassman (Bell Tower, 1996).


Born Frederick Douglas Fields in Queens, he was a track star at Andrew Jackson High School and attended Harvard University. He was expelled from the university in 1964, his wife, Marcia, said, after an illicit off-campus liaison with a Radcliffe College student.


''The dean told him he was a danger to Western civilization,'' Mrs. Fields said.


After college, Mr. Fields, who was raised as an atheist, drifted to New York and became friendly with Ginsberg and the poet Gary Snyder. Shortly afterward, he moved to California and became part of the Zen centers in San Francisco and later in Los Angeles.


In the early 70's, he developed an interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Since 1973, he had been a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and other teachers in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.


In addition to his wife, he is survived by his parents, Al and Reva Fields, of Keene, N.H., and his sisters, Laura Jawitz of Madison, N.H., and Joanna Bogin of New Hartford, Conn.


Mr. Fields's most recent book, published in 1997 by Crooked Cloud Projects, consists of poetry dealing with his cancer. He spent much of his final five years grappling with the subject from a Buddhist perspective.


''I don't have a life-threatening disease,'' he said in an interview with Ms. Tworkov in Tricycle in 1997. ''My life is threatening my disease, in that it is keeping the disease from taking over. I have a disease-threatening life.''


Photo: Rick Fields (Nancy Cohen)