Obituaries - June 13, 1999

* Rick Fields; Authority on Buddhism in America

Rick Fields, 57, a journalist, poet and authority on the history of Buddhism in the United States. Fields wrote several books including “How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America.” In it, Fields traces the religion’s roots from Chinese railroad workers in the last century to beat poets like Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s to its broadening interest today. Born in the borough of Queens in New York City, Frederick Douglas Fields was a track star in high school. He was kicked out of Harvard, reportedly for sleeping with a Radcliffe girl. He began his journalism career at the Whole Earth Catalog in 1969. In recent years he was an editor and regular contributor to alternative publications including Yoga Journal, New Age Journal and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. He was also a teacher for many years at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo. It was there that he formed a friendship with Ginsberg, the school’s co-founder. In a 1997 interview with Helen Tworkov, editor of Tricycle, Fields came to terms with the fact that he would die but he never accepted cancer. “I don’t have a life-threatening disease, he said. “I have a disease-threatening life.” Tworkov recalled Fields as being a “charming, smart and funny” man. His last book of poetry, titled “F. . . You, Cancer and Other Poems,” was published last year. On June 6 in Fairfax, Calif., of cancer.