Introduction 1

[This is a draft of the Introduction to Encountering Buddhism in

Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, eds. L. Normand and

A. Winch, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 9-30]

Introduction

Lawrence Normand

The nineteenth-century origins of Buddhism in the West

In the twentieth and twenty first centuries ‘what non-

Buddhist Westerners think they know about Buddhism consists

largely of cultural stereotypes, many of which originated with

the Victorians’ (Franklin, 2008, p. x). This Victorian

Buddhism was far removed from the faith practised daily by

millions of Buddhists in Asia yet it proved to be foundational

for what Americans and Europeans came to understand Buddhism

to be.

The Buddhism that fascinated the British and Americans in

1900 can be defined with some precision. In the course of the

nineteenth century, European scholars were sent Buddhist

manuscripts of several Buddhist traditions by British colonial

administrators in various parts of Asia, including Nepal,

Ceylon, and Burma. These manuscripts, collected in several

European learned institutions, were translated, edited, and

interpreted, part of the process of creating what will be

called in this Introduction ‘modernist Buddhism’. The so-

Introduction 2

called Oriental Renaissance, dated by Schwab from 1680 to

1880, consisted, like the European classical Renaissance,

firstly of ‘the history of the recovery of texts’ of several Asian

religious and philosophical traditions then ‘in the domain of

substantive knowledge […] the recovery of the doctrines’ (Schwab,

1984, p. 27). Two results flowed from this: firstly, Buddhism

for nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans was a religion

that was located in texts rather than in the practices,

rituals and beliefs that constituted Buddhism in its

homelands; and secondly, Buddhism was defined and interpreted

by Westerners within the context of Western imperial dominance

and its assumption that Europeans had a right to judge the

cultures of subject peoples. For British and American

Protestants, it was congenial to encounter Buddhism primarily

as a textual object, since they looked to Biblical texts to

define their religion, and indeed the Buddhism developed in

the west was deeply marked by Protestant assumptions (Schopen,

1997, pp. 12-14). Western text-based Buddhism regarded

Buddhism as practised in Asia as a degenerate version of a

once pure original. For T. W. Rhys Davids, a leading British

scholar, Tibet’s religion was ‘corrupt Buddhism’ and Tantric

Buddhism was even worse (Almond, 1988, p. 95). ‘Western

scholars […] thus played a key role in bringing knowledge to

Buddhism to the West’ (Harvey, 2013, p.423). They tended to

define Buddhism as rational and non-supernatural, and to

denigrate contemporary Asian Buddhist actualities of ‘faith,

devotion, miracle, story-telling’ as well as belief in ’the

Buddha’s presence in his relics’ (Obeyesekere, 1995, pp. 60,

Introduction 3

62). The rejection of ‘faith, devotion, and miracle’ made

western Buddhism at best ‘half true’ (ibid., p. 60). The

Buddhism that literary writers encountered around the turn of

the twentieth century was thus a Protestant-inflected, complex

intellectual abstraction: it ‘emphasized the authority of the

individual in religious matters rather than that of creeds,

texts, officials, or institutions’, it affirmed ‘”science”’,

and it showed ‘an always fierce advocacy of religious and

political tolerance’ (Tweed, 2000, p. 61).

British and American responses in the nineteenth century

to this recently-defined religion were located between ‘a

polarity of assimilation and rejection’ (Almond, 1988, p.

130), and this continued into the twentieth century. Although

Protestant America and Britain were inhospitable territory for

Buddhism to take root and flourish, in practice there were

elements of the religion that appealed to the dominant

Protestantism of the Anglo-American world: the Buddha was

imagined as being like Jesus in his historicity and reforming

impulse, his morality, compassion, and sanctity; the truths of

Buddhism, like those of Protestant Christianity, could be

found in a few founding texts of the tradition; and spiritual

advancement was to take place in an individual’s inner

experience not through priests or corrupt institutions.

‘Protestant’ Buddhism’s authoritative texts were those of the

Pāli canon of the Theravāda Buddhism of south-east Asia,

including Ceylon (Sri Lanka) then under British control, and

it amounted to ‘a rational, psychological, and ethical system

of life’ (McMahan, 2012, p. 161).

Introduction 4

Buddhist Hybridity

The quest of western scholars for origins and

authenticity is problematic, for not only is Buddhism’s entire

evolution one of transnational exchange and hybridity (Becher

and Gombrich, 1984), but the quest for untainted origins is

itself an Orientalist fantasy. Buddhist traditions have

constantly been recreated through processes of hybridity as

they adapted to national and local contexts. From its first

appearance in the West, Buddhism was partial and impure. Like

the Buddhisms of other countries, western Buddhism has been

‘less the inevitable unfolding of a distinct and self-

identical entity and more […] the dynamic process of

borrowing, conflict, and interaction between and within

traditions’ (Lopez, 2007, p. 3). The discoveries of European

scholars were disseminated from the late nineteenth century in

scholarly publications, and numerous popular accounts of

Buddhism were also published. But many Britons and Americans

discovered Buddhism in a wilder, impure way through Theosophy,

a popular late-Victorian hybrid religion that claimed to

discover the common religious truths hidden deep within

several religions, associated itself with science, especially

a Darwinian notion of individual spiritual evolution, and

depended on spirit communication. The writings of its

charismatic leader, Helena Blavatsky, were supposedly inspired

by spiritual communications with Mahatmas, great souls,

located in Tibet. Buddhism had prime position in Theosophy’s

mixture that also included Hinduism, Spiritualism, and

Introduction 5

Mesmerism. Buddhism with a Theosophical spin appeared in A. P.

Sinnett’s influential Esoteric Buddhism of 1883 (Sutin, 2006,

p. 174). While the Buddhism of Euro-American scholars was

rational, ethical, and intellectual, that of Theosophy was

irrational, esoteric, and romantic. Theosophy challenged

rationalism ‘by admitting the occult into the making or

worldly relations’, and making a powerful appeal to ‘creative

thinkers and intellectuals’ in the decades before and after

the turn of the twentieth century (Viswanathan, 2000, pp. 19,

5). Different western Buddhisms served different western

purposes. The different, even contradictory, versions of

Buddhism, and responses to it, first fashioned in the

nineteenth century have persisted to the present: the

determination to align science with Buddhism, and prove this

religion’s deep rationality, demonstrates a continuing

rationalist response; while the desire to see in Buddhism the

power to release spiritual power and creativity demonstrates a

romantic one. Western Buddhism is always an adaptation or a

hybrid or both.

The making of Buddhist modernism

European-formed Buddhism spread not only in Europe and

America but also in the Asian countries whence the materials

originated. In defining Buddhism’s ‘original’ form, Western

notions had a prescriptive dimension, and Asians found

themselves judged, and often found wanting, by European

standards of what constituted proper religion. An Asian

reaction rapidly emerged to these colonial and orientalist

Introduction 6

revisions, and in response Asian Buddhisms underwent processes

of reform and nationalization. From the start modernist

Buddhism had centres of origin in Asia. The hybrid Buddhism

formed by T. D. Suzuki, the most influential Buddhist

moderniser, emerged from Japan, was published in the United

States, then flowed back to Japan to energise the emergence of

that country’s own Buddhist modernism. From the late

nineteenth century modernist Buddhism was being generated in

Asia, in reaction to western Orientalism, as well as in the

West. ‘Modern Buddhism’ was, and is, an Asian phenomenon as

much as a European one (McMahan, 2008, p. 6).

The emergence of modernist Buddhism has been complex,

with flows and counter-flows of influence running from East

and West and mutating in the process. It was during what

Robertson calls ‘the “take-off period” of contemporary

globalization, lasting from about 1870 to about 1925, when the

shift towards a “single world” was firmly established’

(Robertson, 1993, p. 2) that western Buddhism was formed and

entered into global flows of influence. Euro-America’s version

of Buddhism is variously labelled ‘modern’, ‘modernist’,

‘new’, ‘Western’, or ‘Protestant’. The ancient religious

tradition assumed various forms that reflected western needs

and became a shifting, amorphous part of liberal, pluralist

western culture. These complex developments have been analysed

in David McMahan’s major study, The Making of Modern Buddhism

(2008), and, according to McMahan, the gradual emergence of

western Buddhism has been the result of processes that emerged

in the Enlightenment, developed through Romanticism and

Introduction 7

colonialism, and continued to expand in the rich cultures of

modernity in combination with science, ecology, psychology,

philosophy, and postmodernism, and continue to the present

(see also Clarke, 1997). Along the way many features of

traditional Asian Buddhism were discarded: deities, divination

rituals, worship of images and relics, merit making, and more.

Key doctrines were radically altered, including reincarnation,

karma, and non-self, and in their place appeared themes that

responded to the demands and values of modern westerners, such

as the self, creativity, the environment, the rejection of

dogma and institutions, and indeed the rejection of the idea

of religion as such. The result is Buddhist modernism, a new

form of the religion with its own beliefs and practices, and a

metalanguage that has come to be understood globally (McMahan,

2008, p. 259). It is with various forms of modernist Buddhism

that twentieth-century writers and intellectuals have engaged.

The features of modernist Buddhism have been summarised

by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. as follows: the individual is the

centre of attention, not the Buddhist community (sangha); the

present moment is the privileged standpoint, and history and

tradition disappear; Buddhism is compatible with advanced

scientific knowledge; and, importantly, the central practice

of modernist Buddhism is meditation. By placing meditation as

the central Buddhist activity, Buddhist modernism becomes, in

Lopez’s words, ‘above all an experience’ (Lopez, 2002, p. xl).

Suzuki, for example, took certain Zen motifs, sheared them of

their ‘social, ritual, and ethical context’, reframed and

developed them in Romantic terms to make them appeal to

Introduction 8

twentieth-century Europeans and Americans (McMahan, 2008, p.

125). From German and English Romanticism he took the idea

that humans are in deep harmony with nature, and combined it

with the notion of Zen’s supposedly spontaneous insights to

suggest that this harmony could be accessed and the

human/nature division overcome.

The Parliament of the World’s Religions

1893 was a crucial year in the appearance of modernist

Buddhism in the West when, as part of the Chicago World’s

Fair, a Parliament of the World’s Religions was staged.

Representatives of several world religious traditions

travelled round the globe to put the case for their religion.

Representatives of Buddhism and Hinduism shaped their

presentations to challenge the power of the West’s modernist

discourse of religion, and in so doing, turned Orientalist

discourse against itself. The Parliament of World Religions

represented a critical moment in what Franklin calls the

‘counter invasion’ of Asian religions into America and Europe.

Asians presented their religion as equal, and even superior,

to Western Christianity. This process - what Foucault calls

the formation of a reverse discourse (Foucault, 1984, pp. 100-

2) – involved the ‘oriental participation in Orientalism’

(Snodgrass, 2009, p. 66) as Asian speakers deployed western

accounts of religion to refashion and re-present their own

religion for American consumption. These refashioned Asian

religions would constitute what those religions would be in

the West (and parts of Asia) in the next century. Two

Introduction 9

examples, the first concerning Advaita Vedāntism and the

second Mahāyāna Buddhism, will serve to illustrate this

modernising process.

Hinduism was recuperated as a ‘modern religion’ from its

denigration by European colonialists as idolatrous and corrupt

by Swāmi Vivekānanda, scholar and religious organiser. Richard

King (1999, pp. 118-42) explains how Vivekānanda selected one

of many strands of Hinduism, the philosophy of Śankara (c.

eighth century CE), and presented it as ‘the central

philosophy of Hinduism’ (ibid., p. 136). Its later Advaita

version provided westerners with an idea they found appealing,

that a person’s authentic self, atman, is part of the ultimate

reality of Brahman. The analogy of atman/Brahman with soul/God

made the notion assimilable to Christianity. This Westernised

version of a Hindu tradition met the conditions of a ‘modern’

religion in being removed from its Indian history and context

and focussing on the personal spiritual experience of an

individual, Indian or American, without priestly or

institutional interference. In 1897 Vivekānanda founded the

Vedānta Society of the United States, and established his

modernised Hinduism as one among several Asian religions that

was to flourish in the West.

Vivekānanda played religious politics when he also laid

claim to Buddhism as part of the more ancient tradition of

Vedānta. Accordingly, the ‘Buddha becomes a member of the

Vedānta tradition, merely attempting to reform it from within’

(ibid., p.136), and Buddhism is subordinated to neo-Vedānta to

become part of its universal religious outlook. According to

Introduction 10

King, ‘Buddhism is not a form of Vedānta and Vedānta is

certainly not a form of crypto-Buddhism’ (ibid. p. 138), but

the idea of Buddhism’s being a part of Hinduism made Advaita

Vedānta seem the superior spiritual tradition. Buddhism was

once more mixed with alien elements, this time neo-Vedānta, a

hybrid that was to appear in the twentieth-century as

‘perennial philosophy’.

Vivekānanda’s ultimate claim for revisionist Vedānta -

that its essence represented the ‘Universal Religion’ of the

future’ (ibid., p. 140) - was also the ultimate claim made by

Sōen Shaku, leader of the Japanese delegation at the

Parliament. Judith Snodgrass has demonstrated how Sōen Shaku

set out to present Japanese Mahāyāna Buddhism as being

compatible with ‘the latest developments in Western

philosophy’ and science (2009, p. 49). This appropriated

Protestant Buddhism’s emphasis on the Buddha’s supposedly

rational, humanist teaching, and rebuffed its claim that

Mahāyāna Buddhism (including Japanese versions) was a later

corruption of Buddhism akin to Roman Catholicism. The Japanese

delegation in Chicago argued for a startlingly different idea

of the Buddha ‘as dharmakāya […] the absolute reality that

transcends the multitude of forms in the phenomenal world

[and…] the underlying reality upon which all phenomenal

existence depends and is produced of’ (ibid., p. 53), and they

overcame the denigration of the Mahāyāna by presenting it as

compatible with contemporary Western philosophical idealism.

T. D. Suzuki later built on the Japanese delegation’s success

when he fashioned a version of Zen Buddhism that claimed

Introduction 11

supremacy over not just other versions of Buddhism but over

Christianity itself. Suzuki’s enormously influential Outlines

of the Mahāyana (1907) presented ‘the familiar

deinstitutionalized, deritualized, philosophical expression of

Shin Bukkyō [the “new Buddhism” of Japan] as a universal

religion’ (Snodgrass, 2009, pp. 61-2). Elsewhere he declared

Zen Buddhism to be ‘the essence of Buddhism’ (ibid., p. 65).

In this process of drastic selection and de-historicisation we

see the same strategy as Vivekānanda’s of producing an

abstract system of ideas that lays claim to universal truth.

Suzuki’s accounts of Zen, published through the twentieth

century, have profoundly influenced Americans’ and Europeans’

understanding of Buddhism. In 1893 the Japanese delegation’s

version of Mahāyana Buddhism was designed to appeal to

Americans as ‘positive, self-reliant, and life affirming’

(ibid., p. 55): ‘the Mahāyana is the teaching of the Buddha;

Eastern Buddhism is not pessimistic or nihilistic; although it

is a religion of self-reliance, people are not left unaided;

Mahāyana offers a non-interventionist system of moral

retribution, is rational, is compatible with science, and […]

“philosophical thought in this twentieth century runs parallel

to Mahāyana Buddhism”’ (ibid., p. 61). This version of

Buddhism was a long way from the nineteenth-century

Protestant, ethical humanist Buddhism of European scholars.

The force of religious modernism has been felt worldwide

throughout the twentieth century, transforming Buddhism, and

other religions, into a matter of private experience.

Introduction 12

Literature and Buddhism

This volume’s account of the encounter of literature and

Buddhism is historical; it does not explore literature’s

encounter with the latest phase of Buddhism’s transformation

into postmodern forms. Literature has been an important place

where the influence of (modernist) Buddhism in twentieth-

century western culture has been registered, enacted,

imagined, and tested; and literary form and language have

changed in response to Buddhist ideas and practices. In the

twentieth century Buddhism has ‘helped give expression and

substance to a sense of deep cultural crisis and to loss of

faith in the West’s idea of progress in scientific

rationalism, and to a need for new modes of representation’

(Clarke, 1997, p. 101). It has also offered resources for

radical re-imaginings in a century of spiritual crisis.

Buddhism in literature is never pure or simple; rather, it is

partial, stereotyped, distorted, and always used for some

particular purpose.

Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia

Writers responded to Buddhism from its first fitful

appearance in Europe in the late eighteenth century, and

established poetry and fiction as places where Buddhism could

make a difference (Lussier, 2011). Sir Edwin Arnold’s 1879

narrative poem The Light of Asia transformed Buddhism’s

reception by presenting a moving, persuasive account of the

Buddha’s life and message that fascinated readers in Britain,

the United States, and worldwide for around fifty years. The

Introduction 13

book sold between half a million and one million copies in the

United States (Tweed, 2000, p. 29), and in Britain went into

30 editions in the six years after 1879. Arnold’s poem was an

instant sensation, and initiated the sub-genre of the life of

the Buddha that includes Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha (1922), and

Jack Kerouac’s Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (1955; publ.

2008). Those aspects of Buddhism that are sympathetically

received by Europeans and north Americans are those that, in

Snodgrass’s words, make ‘skilful use of the rules controlling

the production and circulation of truth’ (2009, p. 46).

Arnold’s huge success sprang from his skilful accounts of

alien Buddhist beliefs, including reincarnation and nirvana,

in terms that were assimilable by Victorian readers. He

excluded the Buddha’s miracles, for instance, thus avoiding a

topic of fierce debate in Victorian Christianity; and he

represented nirvana, the most vexatious concept for the

Victorians in its suggestion of the extinction of individual

identity at death, not as nihilism but as continuation within

a larger whole: ‘The Dewdrop slips / Into the shining sea’

(Arnold, 1879, p. 220), lines that were assimilable to the

pantheism of evolutionary thinking, and that became the most

quoted of the poem (Franklin, 2008, p. 45). Arnold’s Buddha

seems reassuringly like Jesus in his love for the world, and

his power to conquer death, his ‘vast embracing love’ (ibid.,

p. 210), and his sympathy for the poor, whose salvation

depends on good deeds. He is like a Victorian Protestant in

his combination of spiritual interiority and manliness (‘He

must make good his skill in martial arts / Against all suitors

Introduction 14

who should challenge it’: ibid., p. 31). This Buddha is, in

Elizabeth Harris’s words, a figure of ‘romance, heroism,

compassion and absolute goodness’, and he presents ‘a

romantically appealing interpretation of the Four Noble

Truths, just as they were entering Western consciousness’

(Harris, 2006, pp. 97, 96). The poem accurately summarised

some key Buddhist ideas, including dharma, karma, the wheel of

existence, the four noble truths along with the noble

eightfold path, four stages of the path to nirvana, and the

five precepts for lay people following a Buddhist life. It was

precisely Arnold’s poetic ‘power to evoke’ and his blurring of

doctrinal ambiguities that made his poem so influential

(ibid., p. 100). After Arnold’s sympathetic account of the

Buddha and his pathway to salvation, ‘the contours were

changed for anyone writing about Buddhism’, according to

Harris, with growing sympathy for Buddhism being matched by

sharper attacks by Buddhism’s enemies who emphasised its

‘nihilism and the prevalence of demon cults’ in its Asian

homelands (ibid., pp. 100, 101). The Light of Asia not only

served as a source for the Buddha and his teaching, it also

demonstrated how the resources of literature could transform

ideas and doctrines into the emotionally-charged dimensions of

narrative, atmosphere and form, and make it possible to think

and experience ultimate questions of existence, human purpose,

and salvation in another way. Instead of existence functioning

according to Christianity’s system of sin and redemption,

existence for Buddhism is a system of karma and reincarnation

(Franklin, 2008, p. 123) in which all human beings are capable

Introduction 15

by their own efforts of reaching the bliss of nirvana in this

life and beyond.

Arnold’s direct treatment of the Buddha’s life was

exceptional. Elements of Buddhism more often found their way

into literary texts indirectly and combined with other ideas.

Although Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1900) included a Tibetan

Buddhist monk’s quest for nirvāna as a central theme, it has

been seen as turning away from the ‘sympathetic

identification’ of a poem like Arnold’s The Light of Asia and

taking up ‘a colonialist and antagonistic position’ towards

the orient (Al-Dabbagh, 2010, p. 53). Early twentieth-century,

British modernist writers rejected the imperialism of an

earlier generation that included Conan Doyle, Kipling, and

John Buchan; and Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce were

among those who ‘lacked sympathy with Empire and at most

wished to destroy it’ (Childs, 2007, p. 1). In their work the

religions of colonised countries received sympathetic, albeit

complex, responses. D. H. Lawrence’s responses to Buddhism are

‘representative of the modernist relationship to Buddhism’,

according to Franklin (2008, p. 196): in his writing he

enacted a ‘significant incorporation of certain Buddhist

concepts’, while struggling to ‘rationalize nirvana and

anatman [non-self] to his conceptions of individualism and

desire’ (ibid.). Similar struggles to Lawrence’s - between

assimilation and rejection - are characteristic of many

writers in the first half of the century who tried to

comprehend Buddhism.

Introduction 16

At one extreme of rejection is George Orwell’s overt

hostility to Buddhism from his position as a colonial police

officer in 1920s Burma. Writing in 1936, he recalled the

hatred directed at him by the Burmese, particularly the ‘young

Buddhist priests’ who were ‘the worst of all’: ‘there were

several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed

to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer

at Europeans’ (2001, p. 18). Although Orwell detested both the

oppression of the British Empire and the Burmese monks who

were oppressed, he fantasised ‘that the greatest joy in the

world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s

guts’ (ibid., p. 19). Unsurprisingly, in Burmese Days (1934)

the characters’ Buddhism is merely self-serving. Orwell’s

loathing extended to the increased European and American

sympathy for Asian cultures, and, writing in 1943, he

condemned the attraction of ‘a touch of Oriental mysticism’ as

an intellectual affectation that carried no cost, and

denounced ‘the mythos of the peaceful, religious and

patriarchal East to set against the greedy and materialistic

West’ (ibid., p. 196), seeing it as leading to Fascism or

pacifism. The mythos that Orwell derides did indeed shape some

literary responses to the Orient, but other early twentieth-

century literary writers were serious in their engagement with

Asian cultures.

Two such writers not discussed elsewhere in this volume,

T. S. Eliot and Hermann Hesse, explored the rich oriental

resources that had become available through decades of

scholarly western effort, Eliot at university, Hesse through

Introduction 17

independent study, and both sought in Buddhism’s alien world

of meaning fresh resources for Western cultural renewal. They

share an intense sense of the crisis of western modernity and

its debilitating effects on the individual cut adrift from

traditional sources of meaning and value, a crisis ‘deeper and

more pervasive than the crisis of faith associated with the

Victorian era, one in which the loss of Christian belief’ led

‘to a spiritual vacuum’ (Clarke, 1997, p. 131). Eliot and

Hesse were deeply influenced by modernist Buddhist ways of

imagining reality, and gave them imaginative and emotional

life in their writing; and they are historically important as

major transmitters of Buddhism into American and European

culture.

T. S. Eliot’s study of Indic religions at Harvard in

1911-13 gave him a profound understanding of Buddhism and

Hinduism which ensured that he always felt their strangeness.

Their influence on his poetry and drama is pervasive but

elusive. Eliot wrote that the value of studying Indic

philosophy was in the challenge it posed to traditions of

Western ways of thinking, ‘of trying to erase from my mind all

the categories and kinds of distinction common to European

philosophy from the time of the Greeks’ (REF). He also alluded

to the effects that Indic philosophy had on his ‘sensibility’

(the capacity for feeling and perceiving). Explicit references

to Buddhism in his oeuvre are sparse, and The Waste Land

(1922) is unusual in referring in ‘The Fire Sermon’ to a sutta

in the Pali canon, also known as ‘The Fire-Sermon’, in the

word ‘burning’ (Warren, 1896, pp. 351-3).1 There the Buddha

Introduction 18

addresses monks about the power of the six senses (the five

senses plus the mind) to entrap them in samsāra, the ongoing

suffering of ordinary existence. There is no simple Buddhist

idea here, but the Buddhist word ‘burning’, combined with

quotations from Augustine’s Confessions (398 C. E.), suggest

an unspecific anguished spiritual state:

To Carthage then I came

Burning, burning, burning, burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

Burning (Eliot, 1969, p. 70).

The full import of the sutta, however, is hidden in the poem’s

hinterland, and Eliot’s quotations from ‘The Fire Sermon’,

according to David Moody, serve only to indicate ‘our

remoteness from it’ (Moody, 1992, p. 30).

The more significant Buddhist influence on Eliot may be in

matters of form rather than ideas; in particular, the form of

meditative experience. When Eliot studied Indic philosophy at

Harvard he was also practising meditation. To quote Moody

again, who puts it remarkably strongly, Eliot ‘not merely

studied [these scriptures] but had personally experienced

them, so they possessed him and penetrated to the level below

consciousness’, and, Moody continues, they emerged from there

into his poetry (ibid., p. 29). Cleo McNelly Kearns suggests

that The Waste Land as a whole manifests what might be called

meditative form as it moves through a series of dissonant and

Introduction 19

fragmented images to brief moments of focus and understanding

and then returns to further dissonance. The form of Four

Quartets may also register the impress of meditative

experience, realising ‘extremely subtle concepts such as that

of shunyata or divine emptiness’ (Kearns, 1994, p. 83). In

‘Burnt Norton’ this notion of emptiness is evoked in a

narrative of past actions that were not performed:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind (Eliot, 1969, p. 171).

And yet the non-action of opening the door into the rose

garden is not thereby null. The non-garden is full of echoes

that the poet follows until he has a visionary moment of

fullness, brilliance, and meaning:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty (ibid., p.

172).

This may be understood in terms of language which makes the

pool full of water real even as it is said to be unreal;

language represents a non-action that the reader experiences

as both empty (a possibility that never occurred) and full (a

glittering pool in which a lotus rises to the surface). In

Introduction 20

this way (and possibly others) Eliot gives poetic realisation

to Buddhist ‘emptiness’ as both empty (a non-action) and full

(a meaning). Like the Saussurean sign, or the flow of language

that produces meaning, Buddhist sūnyatā is both empty and

full; it consists, like language, of what may be called

‘matter-energy-mind’ (Hauck, 2009, p. 42). Eliot is one of the

few twentieth century writers with such penetrating

philosophical understanding and personal experience of

Buddhist thought.

Eliot, however, came to reject modernist religion,

including modernist Buddhism, which puts de-traditionalised,

de-ritualised personal experience at its core. Religion, for

Eliot, was a complex matter of what Kearns calls ‘the sum

total of the ritual, cultic, and related social practices of a

given society’ (Kearns, 1994, p. 80). Something of Eliot’s

stance towards Buddhism can be gauged from a sardonic remark

he made to I. A. Richards in 1930: ‘…some such study [of Indic

religion] (as far as one can) is I believe profitable, as

getting outside of one’s own skin or jumping down one’s own

throat’ (Eliot, 1996, p. 218). Both are impossible but if they

were possible the world would change and the self would

vanish.

Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha (1922), published in English in

1951 entered the unofficial canon of 1960s counter-culture,

and has often been read– mistakenly – as being, like Arnold’s

The Light of Asia, a tract in favour of Buddhism. The novel

takes the cultural crisis of the West as the starting point

for its hero’s spiritual search. Hesse, born into the Swabian

Introduction 21

Protestant Pietist tradition, lost his faith and sought

alternative spiritual resources in Chinese and Indian

religions (Stephenson, 2009). He felt acutely the spiritual

emptiness of modern life, writing in the autobiographical

sketch, Life Story, Briefly Told (1926), that ‘a life simply

in the present, in the modern and most modern, is unbearable

and meaningless’ (Hesse, 2001, p. 5); and he believed that

‘the life of the spirit is made possible only by constant

reference to what is past, to history, to the ancient and

primeval’ (ibid., p. 5).

Siddhartha narrates the search of two young Brahmin men

for enlightenment in the distinctly modern, western form of

‘release from the Self’ (ibid., p. 38). Hesse’s ‘most

pronounced trait’, according to Hsia, was ‘individualism’

(Hsia, 2009, p. 155), and that drives the plot. Govinda

encounters the Buddha, is converted, and lives as a Buddhist

monk for the thirty years; Siddhartha, while accepting the

Buddha’s teaching as true, rejects the efficacy of any

teaching by words and doctrine, and turns instead - echoing

Hesse’s Protestant Pietism (Stephenson, 2009, p. 5) - to

personal experience and inner illumination in his quest,

combining sensuality and intellect, and depending on his

‘inner voice’ (Hesse, 2001, p. 44) as sole authority.

Siddhartha’s eventful, sensual life ends with a return to his

spiritual quest.

It was only after psychotherapy with Jung in 1921 that

Hesse was able to write an ending for the novel that created

‘a space within […] in which God’s voice can be heard’ (Hsia,

Introduction 22

2009, p. 149). Hesse creates a hybrid enlightenment for

Siddhartha which blends Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, and

Romanticism. Siddhartha listens to the sound of a river and

discovers that his ‘wound was healing, his pain was

dispersing; his Self had merged into unity’ (Hesse, 2001, p.

94). The self discovered here is, in Stephenson’s words,

‘equivalent to Atman, to Tao, to Buddha-nature, to God’ (2009,

p. 141). Govinda, on the other hand, even after his years as a

Buddhist monk, still feels ‘restlessness’ (Hesse, 2001, p.

97). The novel ends with Govinda recognising in Siddhartha a

wisdom equal in power and serenity to that of the Buddha:

‘this smile of Siddhartha […] was exactly the same as the

calm, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps gracious, perhaps

mocking, wise, thousandfold smile of Gotama, the Buddha […] It

was in such a manner, Govinda knew, that the Perfect One had

smiled’ (ibid., p. 102). When Siddhartha preaches the truths

he has discovered through his self-fashioned wisdom to

Govinda, his hybrid beliefs trump Govinda’s Buddhist ones.

It is ironic, given the novel’s reputation as Buddhist,

that just before he started writing it in 1919 Hesse stated

his distance from Buddhism- ‘‘I knew of no religion from which

I was further removed’ - although he admitted that there was

‘a grain of truth hidden in this, which I first recognised

somewhat later’ (ibid., p. 10). He identified with the Buddha,

in nineteenth-century fashion, as ‘certainly a Protestant’,

like himself, who was ‘in opposition to his own church just as

he is to every other, since his nature constrains him to

affirm becoming above being’ (p. 10). In 1921, after finishing

Introduction 23

the novel, he wrote that ‘Siddhartha is the result of my

liberation from Indian thought’ (Stephenson, 2009, p. 129).

Despite the novel’s misreading as pro-Buddhist by many western

(and Indian) readers (Murti, 2009, p. 281), it is a more

accurately described as an energetic, sceptical dialogue with

Buddhism. Hesse’s personal quest is reflected in Siddhartha’s,

and so Western concerns shape the novel. Hesse has also been

accused of writing with an Orientalist outlook, with Siddartha

as the active, energetic western self, and Govinda and other

Indians as ‘Kindermenschen’ (child-people) (ibid., p. 276).

Hesse effects a cultural mistranslation of Asian beliefs into

dominant western dominant terms, to ‘convert the complex

religious tradition of Buddhism into a mystical, romantic

Protestantism’ (Stephenson, 2009, p. 143). But his strong

cultural mistranslation of Buddhism into his fiction

illustrates the ‘borrowing, conflict, and interaction between

and within traditions’ (Lopez, 2007, p. 3) that literature’s

encounter necessarily produces, and it is by means of

mistranslation that Buddhism becomes readable and relevant for

western readers.

Eliot’s and Hesse’s responses to Buddhism can stand as a

models of how later twentieth-century writers were to use

Buddhism: the focus is on the individual self, it is the

individual who experiences the crisis of European and American

culture as a hollowing-out of the self, and it is to the

individual (not social or political entities) that possible

renewal of the culture is directed. For Eliot it was the force

of Buddhism’s otherness that provided the possibility of

Introduction 24

critique and renewal. Eliot’s Harvard professor, and editor of

an influential anthology of writings from the Pali canon,

Henry Clarke Warren, wrote in terms similar to Eliot’s that

his attraction to Buddhism derived from the ‘strangeness of

the intellectual landscape’:

All the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates

assumed and not argued about, have always seemed so

strange, so different from anything to which I have been

accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking in

Fairyland. Much of the charm that the Oriental thought and

ideas have for me appears to be because they so seldom fit

into Western categories (Warren, 1896, pp. 283-4).

Eliot, like Hesse, struggled to incorporate Buddhist thinking

and feeling. Hesse’s ineradicable Protestant sense of the

individual’s necessary freedom to discover his or her own

salvation produced both his attraction and resistance to

Buddhism. Eliot and Hesse enacted serious engagements with

Buddhism; and it was only after 1945 that other writers on

both sides of the Atlantic followed them in starting to

imagine how they might leap into and inhabit the Buddhist

‘intellectual landscape’.

Before 1945 only a few Euro-Americans converted to

Buddhism. After 1945 there were more westerners practising

Buddhism, and after the 1960s those numbers rapidly increased

on both sides of the Atlantic. Those Buddhists provided a new

source for understanding what western Buddhism might be:

instead of being located solely in books, it now became

visible as what its adherents believed and practised. The

Introduction 25

situation changed again in the 1970s when Asian teachers

flowed into Europe and north America providing teaching and

spiritual guidance from first-hand contact with traditional

Asian sources, although necessarily adapted along modernist

lines. In twenty years after 1945 Buddhism in the West

decisively moved from texts into the world.

The self, emptiness, meditation.

Like the Buddhism of Victorian British and American

scholars, so the Buddhisms of the twentieth (and twenty-first)

century have been, and continue to be, shaped and defined to

satisfy contemporary social needs. The tension between

naturalising Buddhism to a culture’s familiar forms and

struggling with its otherness to gain new understandings has

been present since the first western encounters. Cultural

mistranslation of aspects of traditional Buddhism has been the

way to produce powerful new ways of re-imagining reality. The

problem of the modern self, for instance, has been a site of

significant encounter between western and Buddhist ideas

through the twentieth century, and is a central concern of

this book. In the play of Buddhism’s assimilation and non-

assimilation to the West, Buddhism’s rejection of a permanent,

real self has long been a sticking point. In twentieth-century

European and the American societies, the effort has been to

‘mold, reshape and indigenize Buddhist teaching and practices

to the needs of the autonomous individual’ (Baumann, 2012, p.

127). D. T. Suzuki’s influence has been decisive here, and his

version of the self in Zen has had enormous cultural influence

Introduction 26

in literature and beyond. Its success lies in its being a

radically modernist, hybrid cultural mistranslation that

embodies western preoccupations. His notion of the deep self

is appealing because it looks like the Freudian or Jungian

unconscious, and as such it seems to reverse fundamental

Buddhist ideals of absence of self and emptiness (McMahan,

2008, p. 131).

The greatest error, according to traditional Buddhism, is

‘that a permanent, eternal, immutable, independent self

exists’ (Lusthaus, 2002, p. 538). Instead, Buddhism presents

the radical contingency of persons and all other things

through the concepts of non-self (anattā; also translated as

no-self, or not-self) and emptiness (sūnyatā). The terms ‘non-

self’ and ‘emptiness’ do not signify ‘void’ or ‘vacancy’ but

rather that there is no thing, including a person, that has

‘self-nature’ or ‘metaphysical essence’. In the Mahāyāna

tradition the existence of everthing is dependent from moment

to moment on all those things that constitute it and connect

with it and give it form and energy; and everything is

dependent on everything else. A person is constituted by five

aggregates (skandha, Sanskrit, literally ‘heap’: form,

feelings, perception, volition, consciousness) that, working

together in process, constitute a person. There is no idea of

a ‘soul’, as in Christian belief. The larger but related

concept of sūnyatā or emptiness has been helpfully, if

awkwardly, translated as ‘the flow of matter-energy-mind’

(Hauck, 2009, p. 42); understood in this way, the term does

not imply that things (including people) are empty in the

Introduction 27

sense of void or vacant, but rather that they are empty in the

sense that there is no single core or essence in which they

subsist. Far from implying voidness or vacancy, then, sūnyatā,

as the flow of matter-energy-mind, is actually a plenitude or

fullness; and, crucially, as such is open to change. This is

the source of Buddhism’s soteriology. Steven Collins

summarises the significance of this for western thinking:

The western tradition, in its religion, philosophy,

politics and many other areas, has given a specific and

privileged status to the concept of the person, both

descriptively and normatively. There really are such

entities, individuated and continuous; and they are worthy

of a kind of respect and moral evaluation qualitatively

different from that accorded to any other part or

inhabitant of the natural world. […] Buddhism, on the

other hand, denies that the words person or self denote

anything ultimately real. They are only of use in picking

out certain aspects of the conventional world of human

experience (1985, pp. 475-6).

At its most radical, Buddhism affirms that ‘No “bedrock”

existence, so to speak, can be found – even Nirvāna – but

fully knowing and accepting this gives one, so to speak, a

bedrock’ (Harvey, 2013, p. 118). The notion of ‘non-self’,

therefore, presents a profound challenge to the ways of

thinking and imagining the person, especially in the

individualistic twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which

has been met by literary writers, if at all, in different

ways.

Introduction 28

Perhaps Buddhism’s greatest influence on twentieth-century

literature lies not so much in ideas as in literary form. The

experience of reading has been transformed to bring it nearer

to meditative apprehension. A defining feature of modernity,

according to Anthony Giddens, is ‘the reflexivity of modern

social life’, which ‘stands in direct opposition to

[tradition]’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 109). Reflexivity is evident

in both literary and religions modernisms, as well as

opposition to their respective traditions. In the case of

Buddhism, tradition has been located on the other side of the

globe and thus easy to ignore. Literary modernism generally

downplays the regimen of realism that requires the real world

to be represented, and it opens the possibility of meaning by

means of displaying and manipulating language, an instance of

a reflexive turn to language and its expressivity in

intonations, sounds, figurality, and shaping (Bell, 2007, p.

00). Meditative practices have affinities with modernist

literary practices. They similarly do not aim to reproduce the

real world in the mind of the meditator; they make a reflexive

turn to the medium of the body, especially the breath, and to

the flow of images that appear in the meditator’s mind, all of

which may be taken by the meditator to be expressive.

Individual (as opposed to traditional group) meditation is

perhaps the epitome of modernist religion in its

internalisation of individual religious experience. Although

meditation has a history and a tradition, they are disregarded

in favour of the subjective experience it offers. To the

familiar Western triad of states of consciousness – waking,

Introduction 29

sleeping, dreaming – in the second half of the twentieth

century Buddhism has added meditation as a new state of

consciousness and source of knowledge. Early twentieth-century

modernism persisted in trying to express the numinous in

language: Joyce aimed for an ‘epiphany’ through the calculated

organisation of language, Woolf attempted to suggest the flow

and interpenetration of experience, and Beckett seemed to

point to a realm of ultimate significance even if an empty

version of Christian spirit. Several chapters in this volume

demonstrate the influence of Buddhist meditative experience

and non-dual thinking on innovations in literary form.

The questions that writers have raised in their

encounters with Buddhism include that of personal authenticity

in an alienating modern world; the ultimate reality of the

physical world as conveyed through science; the nature and

potential of human experience, and the possibility of

experiencing it; and questions of moral action in a world

without God. The idea of ‘religion’ itself is a product of

modernity which transformed a traditional, socially embedded

practice into an intellectual object that could be isolated

and examined rationally. The category ‘religion’ was also

created ‘partly “in order to” show what modernity was leaving

behind’ (Robertson, 1993, p. 5). And so, in another case of

reverse discourse, ‘religion’ also has the potential to

critique modernity, since ‘positive subscription to the idea

of religion has largely constituted, in varying degrees, a

critique of modernity itself’ (Robertson, 1993, p. 5). The

chapters of this book explore Buddhism’s influence in

Introduction 30

twentieth-century literature in terms of cultural critique,

form, content, aesthetics, and ethics and in so doing suggest

something of its significance for literature and the culture

at large.

Erin Louttit’s chapter on Olive Schreiner, writing in

South Africa, shows the global reach of western Buddhism by

the end of the nineteenth century. Schreiner’s response to

Buddhism, Louttit argues, was a deeply-felt ‘internalised

Buddhism’ that enabled her to re-imagine vexed ultimate

questions of life, death, and immortality in a remarkably

independent and coherent way. Schreiner disregarded the

exoticism and sensationalism which often characterised

Buddhism in contemporary culture, and absorbed it into her

fiction in a serious way. Louttit shows that Schreiner thought

of death not as an end but as part of a larger ‘natural

order’, and that for her nirvana was not, as some Victorian

experts argued, extinction but an impersonal continuation. The

modernity of Schreiner’s response to Buddhism is highlighted,

though it is possible also to see the influence on her of

Victorian ideas, such as spiritual evolution. Louttit’s subtle

reading of ‘A Buddhist Priest’s Wife’ shows the story’s form

registering the influence of Buddhism, and its formal

innovations as anticipating modernism.

Lawrence Normand’s chapter explores a case of non-

assimilation of Buddhist influence. By the 1930s Buddhist

influence had penetrated into popular as well as elite

culture, supported by Britain’s colonial connections, so much

that James Hilton could have a popular success with Lost

Introduction 31

Horizon and its myth of Shangri-La. Normand argues that this

utopia is, like the hybrid religions in Victorian romances,

formed from a set of cultural clichés around Tibet. Auden and

Isherwood’s high modernist play The Ascent of F6 parodies Lost

Horizon’s central action of the hero converting to Shangri-

La’s quasi-Buddhism as a cure for existential and historical

ills, and dismisses the notion that the East can cure the

West’s ills. What becomes evident is that Auden’s popular

Buddhist-related sources, most notably C. G. Jung, are

strongly marked by religious modernism in their focus on

individual psychology, making a political engagement with

Buddhism to address western concerns unfeasible.

The theme of the potential in Buddhism, in this case Zen,

for social and political dissent is explored in Manuel Yang’s

chapter on what he calls the ‘radical conviviality’ of Henry

Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton. Yang uses

‘conviviality’ as a way of describing the material

affiliations among these three; in addition it denotes the

shared ideological opposition to industrial capitalism’s

oppression and dehumanization, and the value of the Zen-

related aims of interdependence and autonomy. Yang argues that

these writers, who have different relations with Zen,

nevertheless find resources there for furthering their

radical, social dissent. Miller uses language ‘for the sake of

fullness of life, irreducible to any sign or symbol’; Rexroth

aims to sacralise ‘everyday reality’; and Merton responds

positively to Miller and Rexroth’s sense of ‘living

experience’. D. T. Suzuki’s version of Zen emerges as a major

Introduction 32

influence on all three. Such Suzuki statements as ‘Whatever

teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one’s own mind’,

enable these writers’ political radicalism and the American

individuality that they displayed to a high degree.

The shaping of e. e. cummings’ prosody by Buddhist ideas

is the theme of Erin Lafford and Emma Mason’s chapter. Often

dismissed by critics as sentimental or vaguely religious,

cummings is a superb and purposeful craftsman of rhythm and

sound that aims to produce in the reader powerful intuitions

and experiences that are akin to Buddhist meditation. For

Lafford and Mason the shaping and inducing of a reader’s

experience is what cummings’ poetry is aiming for. In the

1940s cummings read a number of books on Indic religion and

spirituality that, the authors argue, shaped a poetic practice

that ‘grounds and locates the reader in syntactical moments of

presence, clarity, surprise and love’. Suzuki and Heidegger

were two authors in cummings’ library who extended his

thinking of being: for cummings being is ‘moment-by-moment

unfolding or falling into existence through relations with

others’. In a fine reading of an intricate late cummings poem

– through its syllables, sounds, and pattern on the page,

rather than any conceptual structure – the reader’s experience

of becoming part of the poem is sensitively described.

James Patrick Brown traces the intricate connections of

Zen’s influence from its appearance in the United States at

the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, to its textual

versions written by Suzuki from 1907, through the mediation of

Alan Watts and Kenneth Rexroth (a key figure here as in

Introduction 33

chapter 3), particularly in Suzuki’s ‘acclimatized’ Zen that

he fashioned for the Western pubic. These influences resulted

in the developed anarchist, ecological political thinking of

Snyder that ultimately depended on Zen meditation to guarantee

‘the intimate co-arising of self and other, of the unity of

organism and environment’; and Whalen, who combined ‘Suzuki’s

Zen and American left libertarianism’ in poetry that explores

the limits of ‘consciousness, institutions, and language from

a perspective shaped by zazen’. The radical politics of these

Beat poets derive, Brown argues, from the fusion of Suzuki’s

‘strategic Occidentalism’ and American values of vitality,

individualism and love of nature. The political traction

achieved by these writers depended on the historical

possibility by mid-century of their conversion to the

alternative mental world offered by Suzuki’s Zen.

In chapter 6 Bent Sørensen also explores struggles

against the oppression of post-1945 America, this time not in

term of political oppression, like that identified by Beat

writers discussed in chapters 3 and 5, but in terms of the

religious oppression of the Roman Catholic church. Sørensen

takes Jack Kerouac’s pervasive guilt as a starting point for a

case study of Kerouac’s attempts to replace it with Buddhism

and Buddhist-inspired immersion in madness and movement. The

central twentieth-century Buddhist theme of the desired loss

of self is what impels Kerouac’s valorisation of madness and

movement in his lightly-fictionalized autobiographical novels,

and Sørensen analyses the impasses that resulted for Kerouac

in each: ‘the mad ones promise much by way of liberation of

Introduction 34

mind and body’ but ‘they ultimately succumb to silence and

death’. Kerouac’s revulsion at carnality, vivid in his poetry,

causes his Buddhist attachments ‘to falter and Kerouac’s voice

to slip back towards old, ingrained Catholic tropes’. For

Kerouac residual Catholicism could not be eradicated by the

wisdom of The Diamond Sutra; and ironically for a writer

generally considered a proponent of Buddhism, Kerouac is shown

to have tried hard but finally only partially succeeded in

assimilating Buddhism into himself and hence his fiction.

In chapter 7 Andy Wimbush solves a conundrum that has

teased critics for years, namely whether Beckett was

influenced by Buddhism. Beckett tried to throw critics off the

scent by denials, declaring ‘I know nothing about Buddhism’.

Wimbush for the first time confirms that Beckett did indeed

have such knowledge, discovers a range of textual sources that

supplied it, including the nineteenth-century biologist Ernst

Haeckel, and analyses their influence on How It Is. The title

raises the question of theodicy, or God’s justification of

existence, and the novel interweaves several ‘just so’

stories, including evolution, Hinduism, Buddhism. In a bravura

reading that shuttles between text and sources, Wimbush shows

how Beckett’s Dantean world of suffering and degradation owes

much to Haeckel’s account of a visit to Ceylon where he

witnessed shocking cruelty to animals, the motive for which he

attributed to the doctrine of reincarnation. Beckett’s hero

has glimmerings of Buddhist awakening as Schopenhauer

conceives of it, but fails to act. Wimbush argues that the

novel requires the reader to recognise it as an ethical

Introduction 35

challenge to action: ‘the challenge is to question all the

just-so stories, religious, scientific and political, and

replace retributive justice with transgressive compassion’.

Questions about the self dominate Bidhan Roy’s chapter on

Christopher Isherwood. Roy, perhaps surprisingly, associates

Isherwood with Buddhism through the heterogeneous group in

intellectuals in California in the 1940s committed to Asian

religious traditions found in the so-called perennial

philosophy. Also important is the reminder that both Buddhism

and Hinduism ‘have long histories of hybridization’ in

medieval India as well as 1940s California. Roy investigates

perennial philosophy’s syncretic belief system similar,

offspring of the now defunct Theosophy, promulgated by Aldous

Huxley, and shows that its notion of Buddhism as a ‘lower

gate’ to mystical union suited to practical, non-philosophical

minds lends itself to fictional realisation by Isherwood

better than the ‘higher gate’ of Vedanta suited to

metaphysical and speculative minds. Isherwood theorised the

‘problem of the religious novel’, including the impossibility

of describing mystical experience. A subtle analysis of A

Single Man demonstrates Isherwood’s using and exceeding the

protocols of realist fiction to point to a state of oneness

beyond the individual self that is Buddhist rather than

Vedantic. Questions of reading are relevant here, since,

according to Huxley, the aim of such use of language is ‘to

incite action rather than serve as a substitute for it’; and

in this sense the novel is indeed religious.

Introduction 36

In Sarah Gardam’s chapter on Maxine Hong Kingston, the

world of American Chinese immigrant beliefs and storytelling

traditions are brought to the fore. Hong Kingston’s The Woman

Warrior is representative of her writing in the influence it

owes to Mahāyāna themes and sutras, registered ‘structurally,

stylistically and thematically’: narration that is poised

ambivalently between autobiography and fiction; themes of

compassion; and questioning what is real and unreal. Gardam

traces connections between Hong Kingston’s stories and Chinese

traditions of Pure Land Buddhism with their metaphysics of

emptiness and their sutras’ fantastical evocations of

beautiful heavenly realms. Bodhisattvas are central figures in

these stories for their heroic exploits that model the woman

warrior; and stories are valued for providing ‘experiential

knowing [rather than] conceptual, abstract, theoretical

explanations’. Gardam argues that Buddhism’s influence is

diffuse but pervasive in Hong Kingston’s purpose of turning

religious abstractions back into the material form of stories.

Elena Spandri locates Iris Murdoch’s fiction within the

western philosophical tradition as well as in her own

philosophical aims. Buddhism for Murdoch was a humanism,

containing nothing resembling the Christian supernatural, and

shorn of its mythical reincarnation and nirvana. For Murdoch,

Spandri argues, Buddhism was significant as part of her

‘intellectual and artistic search for new ethical and

epistemological foundations of both personal identity and

social life.’ It is difficult to locate because (as with T. S.

Eliot) it is ‘deeply woven into the rhetorical grain of her

Introduction 37

writings’. The Sea, the sea sets into action Murdoch’s notions

that ‘persons’ must be retained as ‘independent centres of

significance’ but persons that are conceived in modern terms

as being ‘depersonalized and inter-subjective’; and that

persons’ enlightenment depends on their escaping the

illusionistic power of their fantasies. Murdoch’s strategy in

her fiction, Spandri argues, is carefully thought through

Buddhism, and Murdoch is enabled by that engagement to reach

the ‘post-romantic, post-modern, yet not post-human aesthetic

of compassion’ that this novel displays.

The last chapter is Sean Miller’s on Buddhism and quantum

theory, in which he investigates the remarkable popularity of

the books that present parallels between Buddhism and quantum

theory. Buddhism’s compatibility with science has been part of

Buddhist proselytising since the late nineteenth century, and

has actually increased in recent decades from the publication

in 1975 of Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Miller claims that this

writing is best understood as a form of literature that

depends on a certain ‘rhetorical stylistics’ for its

persuasiveness: ‘parallelism’ is a crucial component of this

stylistics, as well as ‘imaginative parataxis’.

Decontextualised ideas are selected from both realms to

suggest an equivalence that is ‘ultimately arbitrary’ and

disguises ‘an epistemological gap’. Miller analyses the

motivations of scientists and Buddhists, most recently the

Dalai Lama, in creating this discourse in political and

ideological terms. Uses of Buddhist concepts like ‘emptiness’

make their appeal to readers not just because they appear to

Introduction 38

describe the physical world but because they also evoke the

particular social order of consumerist capitalism.

1 Warren translates the Pali word as ‘on fire’ rather than ‘burning’.

For a modern annotated translation of the sutta see Gethin, who does

translate the Pali word as ‘burning’, Gethin, 2008, pp. 222-4.