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"Like some recent philosophers of the West, I needed to
turn myself toward the East in order to find guides and
basic principles of method. . . . I followed the teaching
of masters for whom a daily practice—in fact,
yoga—was what could help awaken or reawaken and
discover words and gestures carrying another meaning,
another light, another rationality."
Luce
Irigaray, Between East and West
"The true artist, monk, and scientist
are not searching to grasp knowledge as object, but rather
as event."
Arthur
Zajonc, Catching the Light
-
The topic of the following volume, Romanticism
and Buddhism, has a relatively short history worth
brief consideration relative to the intellectual and
spiritual energies expressed in the epigrams by Luce
Irigaray and Arthur Zajonc. Like Irigaray, my open and
broad inquiry emerged from a coincidence of particular
practices and theoretical interests where the fissures
cut into consciousness by culture re-fuse division to
"reawaken and discover words and gestures carrying
another meaning." Like Zajonc, my experience of
"knowledge" as dynamic "event" (where "Events in Time"
issue forth from the space between "a Pulsation of the
Artery" [Blake, M 29.2; E 127]), fleeting though
it might be, united the personal and professional in
ethical commitments (the "pleasure" of knowledge
Wordsworth evokes in the 1802 "Preface" to Lyrical
Ballads and in language quite compatible with
Zajonc [606]). The experience evoked by Irigaray and
Zajonc occurs at the spacetime coordinates termed self
and represents the continuum where "knowledge [is an]
event" through which consciousness "reawakens" to
"another meaning, another light, another rationality."
This sounds to me as good a description of
"enlightenment" as any other, and what Irigaray and
Zajonc voice fits well with the definitions of
enlightenment current at the beginning of the Romantic
period and conveniently codified by Dr. Johnson in
1756: "To quicken in the faculty of vision," "to
furnish with encrease [sic] of knowledge," and "to
illuminate with divine knowledge" (239). At the
beginning of the last intensive phase of encounter
between Buddhism and the west during the Romantic era
(afterward those relations shift from encounter to
mutual interaction), sufficient refinement of western
enlightenment epistemology had occurred to provide
western philosophy with a glimpse of eastern views of
enlightenment. For example, Shantideva in his famous
treatise The Way of the Bodhisattva describes
enlightenment (in terms rather close to Irigaray and
Zajonc and easily conversant with Johnson's
Dictionary) as the state where "beings like
myself discern and grasp/That all things have the
character of space," the spacetime where "the truth of
voidness" resides within and issues forth from "the
chasms and abysses of existence" (159).
-
The transference (or perhaps sublimation) of
energies generated through the glimpse of these far
shores was easily accomplished, since Romantic
descriptions of enlightenment offered by, for example,
Blake (in The Four Zoas) and Shelley (in
Prometheus Unbound) converge with those found in
Buddhist texts emerging in European languages for the
first time across the nineteenth century. This
coincidence of forms of enlightenment as
self-annihilation ripples through all the works in this
volume. The genesis of this collection, then, began
with seemingly simple questions asked of myself (and
occasionally others), and the works appearing in this
volume represent answers offered by insightful and
engaged colleagues: "What's going on with Buddhism
during the Romantic period? Can and should academic and
spiritual practices be unified and interrelated,
thereby helping heal an artificially conditioned
alienation common within the increasingly corporate
academy?" My answer began through merging meditative
and devotional practices with pedagogical and service
commitments, where William Blake's "proverb of hell"
served as the ethical foundation for them all: "The
most sublime act is to place another before you"
(36.17).
-
Around the same time I first asked the question,
admitted the motive, and sought to move theory into
practice, I met Timothy Morton at the 1995 North
American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR),
and across the next two years and several conferences,
whether in Baltimore or Bloomington, our conversations
often swirled around coincident personal histories and
shared academic affinities within the broad area of
"Buddhism and Romanticism." When I was asked to review
John Rudy's Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry
of Self-Emptying (SUNY, 1996) for Romantic
Circles, my sense of growing community and
commitment created broadened possibilities, and in a
preliminary attempt to put academic flesh on the
intuitive bones, I proposed a special session at the
2001 NASSR conference in Seattle, where Tim Morton and
John Rudy were joined by Louise Economides in the
initial articulation of the issues and authors grappled
with through this volume. When I began to receive the
essays for this volume, I had two other significant
encounters that pushed the work toward its present
ripeness. At the moment when the following essays began
to arrive, Norman Dubie kindly offered me an
autographed copy of his most recent collection of poems
(Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, which includes
the stunning "Shambhala" [48-53]), and I asked whether
he might want to submit a poem for the volume, given
his long-term practice of Tibetan Buddhism and its
rippling presence in past poetry. After explaining his
exhaustion from his poetic past labor, he said he would
consider it but that I should not be overly hopeful.
However, within forty-eight hours, he stunned me when
he read the first iteration of the opening poem for
this volume on my answering machine. As I moved into
the editing for the volume, I re-encountered Dennis
McCort's Going Beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of
Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen Buddhism, and
Deconstruction and immediately wrote him to request
an essay. Initially, he indicated that, with the
exception of an essay on Kafka, he had no work prepared
for such an undertaking, and with a sense of loss, I
wrote to say that Kafka might fall too far outside the
temporal range of the volume. But within forty-eight
hours, having been haunted by the intersections such an
essay promised, I wrote him again and asked for the
essay, and I am thrilled he agreed to join this
"visionary company." Rather than rehearse the elements
easily discerned from the essays themselves, the
remainder of this introduction will provide a context
within which readers can explore the resonances at work
in the essays themselves as they connect to broader
historical and cultural developments mapped in
subsequent sections of this introduction. At the
outset, readers of this introduction should know that I
have cast an intentionally broad textual net (of Indra
perhaps), drawing upon works from the two primary
vehicles of the dharma—the Hinayana and
Mahayana—as well as the three major
languages—Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan—by
which the major sutras were disseminated across
southeast, central, and northern Asia and through which
the teachings of the Buddha returned to India and
subsequently flowed into western consciousness.
II. The Emergence of Buddhism into Romantic
Europe
-
Although I have traced elsewhere the punctuated
phases of encounter leading to the emergence of
Buddhism into western consciousness during the Romantic
Age, I will nonetheless provide a brief historical map
to provide a better context within which to read the
essays that follow (Lussier 1-27). The temporal range
Raymond Williams adopted for European Romanticism,
approximately from the birth of Blake to the death of
Wordsworth (30-2), actually coincides rather well with
the textual emergence of Buddhism into western
consciousness. Across this period, the religion
originating with the enlightenment of the historical
being named Siddhartha Gautama evolved from initial
western views of a philosophy operating "under the
imputation of atheism" (Fields 47) practiced by
"Idolaters" (Polo I.219) through the publication of
travel narratives recording specific encounters, of
summative histories of eastern religions that, for the
first time, clearly distinguished Buddhism from
Hinduism, and finally of the most important canonical
works, beginning with the Lotus Sutra. These
developments flowed from the related activities of
colonialism and empiricism now extended to the world
through the application of categorical imperatives
energizing its own form of enlightenment in its second,
Romantic stage (Brown 38-46). The outward movement of
Europeans across the trans-Himalayan and southeast
Asian regions generated an influx of manuscripts and
books, creating a counterflow of textual materials
collected and catalogued on site and subsequently
transmitted to European centers of oriental learning,
where they were translated, collated, and edited. This
dimension of the orientalist project led directly to
the flowering of the dharma in Europe during the
nineteenth century.
-
Both within the application of practices now termed
"Orientalism" during the period and within the academic
analysis of those practices in the influential work of
Edward Said and his progeny, Buddhism has remained
somewhat hidden from scholarly view, and several
historical confluences help account for this relative
absence. First, as scholarship has long established,
long before the moment of heightened contact with
Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century, the
religion of the Buddha "had ceased to exist on the
subcontinent" (Batchelor 232), being virtually
eradicated as a practice within India "by the
fourteenth century" (Lopez 53) and quite difficult to
discern through the sparse architectural remains in
northern India and Nepal. This same problem was equally
true for the widely diverse sculptural presences of the
Buddha and other deities dispersed across the continent
in Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, China, Japan,
Nepal, Siam, Tibet, and elsewhere, since revered
figures often "morphed" through cultural contact and
appropriation (the best example would be the
transformation of the Bodhisattva of Infinite
Compassion, Avalokiteśvara, into Kuan-yin in
Chinese and Chenrezig in Tibetan forms). Second,
following "the close of the first stage of encounter,
one defined primarily by spiritual colonialism, Japan
and China closed their borders to the disruptive
Europeans and its Jesuit shock troops" (Lussier 6), and
the arena of encounter shifted to the subcontinent and
also involved different European nationals, with the
England, France, and Russia replacing Italy, Portugal
and Spain at the vanguard of contact. Third, as the
preceding list of countries confirms, the two major
Buddhist traditions—the vehicles of
Theravāda (Pāli for "the way of the elders")
and Mahāyāna (Sanskrit for "the great
vehicle")—were "split" across national colonial
lines among England, France, and Russia, again
rendering attempts at a summative view extremely
difficult (Keown 300, 167). Fourth, the textual body of
the dharma was equally scattered across vast
geophysical spaces and spread across numerous
languages, although those primary to the emergence in
Romantic Europe of the major sutras and commentaries
defining the canonical literature were Pāli,
Sanskrit, and Tibetan. Ironically, then, the textual
body of Buddhism was itself a type of counterflow as
well, since the dharma returned to northern India
through the agency and agents of British authority in
Calcutta and often returned along the same paths (e.g.
through Darjeeling to Calcutta) through which it was
dispersed from its homeland. The process of emergence
was quite slow, unfolding with deliberation shaped by
complexities, yet by the end of the nineteenth century,
Buddhism had not only achieved status as a world
religion within the west's sociology of knowledge but
had even begun to exert a strange attraction on its
occidental other.
-
The contradictions inherit in England's relations
with India and its northern neighbors can clearly be
discerned in the complicated history of Warren
Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, who expressed
his admiration for the "great originality. . . [and]
sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction" of
Indian mythology and culture in his preface to Charles
Wilkins's 1785 translation of The Bhagavad-Gita
(Allen and Trivedi 171) yet who was later put on trial
for the supposed exploitation and abuse of "his power
over the Indian people in Bengal" (Allen and Trivedi
37). Ultimately, in spite of scathing attacks mounted
by Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the
House of Lords, Hastings was acquitted of all charges
after a decade-long impeachment trial, but his
influence directly impacted policies subsequently
pursued by the East India Company. However, even before
his impeachment trial, Hastings initiated contact with
the high lamas in Tibet through the diplomatic mission
undertaken by the Scotsman George Bogle to the Teshoo
Lama (Panchen Lama in current parlance), and as Kate
Teltscher suggests, the effort "was as much textual as
commercial or diplomatic" and was motivated by
Hastings's hope to "imprint on the hearts of our own
countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence"
such texts might engender (Teltscher 94, 95). However,
the hope of establishing long-term relations between
Calcutta and Lhasa ended somewhat abruptly when the
Panchen Lama and Bogle died "at nearly the same time,"
which, in the words of Captain Samuel Turner, created
"almost insuperable difficulties in the way of
re-establishing our intercourse with Tibet, at least
for some considerable time to come" (Turner xvi).
-
As most critics of Oriental scholarship acknowledge,
the prime mover of the eventual resolution of Buddhism
from Hinduism in the European mind was certainly the
towering presence behind the Oriental Renaissance, Sir
William Jones, although his immediate interests upon
arrival in Calcutta in 1783 were the Indian legal
system and Hindu mythology (Cannon 194-6; Franklin
84-120). Jones shared Hastings's "respectful and
sympathetic response to Hindu culture," for example
beginning the study of Sanskrit almost immediately
after his arrival, and through these studies Jones
generated considerable "cultural empathy" for Indian
literature and culture (Franklin 118, 120). In his
first year of residency, Jones founded the two most
conspicuous vehicles, the Asiatick Society of Bengal
and its influential journal, through which Buddhism
emerged into European knowledge, a point easily on
display in the first issue of the journal, which
included materials on Buddhist practices in Ceylon and
Tibet. As a result of Jones's efforts, "the nascent
field of Oriental philology" began to discover "certain
linguistic, historical, cultural, and social
continuities between the Orient and Europe" (Makdisi
110), yet the influx of materials also created, as
Nigel Leask has documented, "anxieties about the Other"
(2) that emerge in a broad range of writing across the
Romantic period itself.
-
In spite of his Sanskrit studies, Jones never
clearly differentiated Buddhism from Hinduism, since he
continued to see the "Sage of the Shakyas" as "the
ninth incarnation of Vishnu" (Fields 47), and Buddhism
remained somewhat submerged in the literature and
mythology of India until the second decade of the
nineteenth century, when two individuals with radically
different agendas, Brian Houghton Hodgson and Alexander
Csoma de Körős, codified the canonical
literature embedded in Sanskrit and Tibetan and
transmitted manuscripts and texts to centers of
oriental scholarship in Calcutta, London, and
Paris. Known respectively as the "fathers" of
Himalayan and Tibetan Studies, Hodgson and de
Körős provided the linguistic and textual
materials necessary for the translation and
interpretation of major Buddhist works.
-
The motives of Hodgson were clearly colonial; he
obtained a "special license" to enter Haileybury, which
"had been founded in 1806 as a college to educate
future civilian employees of the East India Company,"
through the intervention of James Pattinson, then
director of the Company itself (Waterhouse 1-2), and
during his residency he was befriended and mentored by
Thomas Robert Malthus and completed studies by earning
"honours in Bengali, Persian, Hindi, Political Economy
and Classics—though failing in Mathematics"
(Waterhouse 3). Although initially selecting Calcutta
for his residency, Hodgson was promoted to Assistant
Resident for Nepal shortly after his arrival and
transferred to Katmandu, where he remained for almost
twenty years, where the study of Buddhism became "his
first interest," and where he encountered "the scholar
Amritanada" (Waterhouse 4, 5). Hodgson began to collect
Sanskrit manuscripts during this period, leading to the
publication of his most influential "Sketch of
Buddhism" (a work that cast long yet problematic
shadows across the nineteenth century), yet his
motivation was not any religious interest in the
religion of the Buddha (he often expressed ambivalence
in his own published works); rather he sought "to
gather materials that would make it possible for
others, specifically the members of the Asiatic Society
in Calcutta, to conduct such an investigation" (Lopez
52). Across his lengthy and distinguished, although
somewhat controversial, career, Hodgson accumulated 423
works, and as Donald S. Lopez, Jr. indicates, this
textual cache contained "the most important sūtras
and tantras of Sanskrit Buddhism, works that in India,
and in translations into Chinese and Tibetan, were
among the most important in the history of Buddhism"
(55). In Stephen Batchelor's assessment, "Hodgson's
contribution to Buddhist studies was not his
scholarship; his importance lies in having provided the
scholarly community with hitherto unknown Buddhist
texts" (238). These works were transmitted to a variety
of entities and individuals, including the Library of
the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Royal Asiatic
Society, but most importantly, Hodgson sent 59 works to
Eugene Burnouf, who succeeded his teacher
(Léonard de Chézy) to the first academic
chair of Sanskrit in Europe at the Collège de
France in Paris (Batchelor 239).
-
While Hodgson's motives were clearly colonial, the
efforts of Alexander Csoma de Körős were
decidedly "Romantic," since his was a search for
linguistic and cultural origins, rather than colonial
gain: "I cheerfully engaged in the study of it
[Tibetan], hoping it might serve me as a vehicle to my
immediate purpose, namely, my researches in respect to
the origins and language of the Hungarians" (Csoma,
"Preface" vl). Born in the small Transylvanian village
of Körős and trained in philology and
enlightenment epistemology by Eichhorn and Blumenbach
at the University of Gottingen (where he joined two
friends in an oath to seek the origins of the Hungarian
peoples), Csoma undertook his "epic journey" in
February 1819, one of the most arduous ever pursued
outside of "official" sponsorship (Lussier 16-9). As
his biographer Hirendra Nath Mukerjee relates, he left
his small village "before the snows [melted and] only
lightly clad as if he intended merely taking a walk,"
with only "a stick in his hand and a small bundle" of
food and paper under his arm (15, 16). After almost two
years of travel, primarily on foot, Csoma arrived at
the Kashmir border with his meager financial resources
exhausted and was offered letters of introduction and
supplemental funds by William Moorcroft, a murky,
mysterious "agent of the East India Company intent on
securing influence in central Asia as a means of
thwarting the southward advance of imperial Russia"
(Batchelor 235) in the opening phase of what later
became known, in Rudyard Kipling's apt phrase, as "The
Great Game" (Hopkirk 20-3).
-
Csoma arrived at the Zangla Monastery in June 1823,
where he entered Tibetan Studies with the head lama,
Sangye Puntsog, who identified Skander Beg (the name
Csoma used upon entering the subcontinent) as "a
European. The first one, the very first one[,] to reach
that place" (Terjék vii). More importantly for
the emergence of Buddhism, the source used to teach
Csoma Tibetan was nothing less than "the great
compilation of the Tibetan Sacred Books, in one hundred
volumes . . . styled Ka-gyur" (Csoma Tibetan
Studies 175), placing him in contact with the
entire Buddhist canon preserved in Tibetan. After
seventeen months of intensive study, Csoma headed for
Calcutta to seek the publication of an astonishing
group of completed works, including the first
Tibetan-English Dictionary, a Tibetan Grammar
in English, and the massive Mahavyutpatti
(which offered nothing less than a discursive map of
the entire "psychological, logical, and metaphysical
terminology of the Buddhists" [Csoma Tibetan
Studies 20.397]). This last compilation included
discussions of the most important works in the history
of Buddhism, including "The Four Noble Truths"
(Buddha), "The Middle Way" (Nagarjuna), "The Way of the
Bodhisattva" (Shantideva), and the "Lamp for the Path
of Enlightenment" (Atisha), and although the
publication of this work was long delayed, Csoma drew
upon his summation in numerous articles published in
the major periodicals of oriental studies. Across the
next nine years, Csoma often returned to Tibet to
continue his studies and finally died on March 24, 1842
in Darjeeling while seeking to enter Lhasa for the
first time. Unlike Hodgson's involvement in colonial
machinations, Csoma remained aloof from such activities
(for example, he never sealed a single letter in his
long residency in the Indian subcontinent), earning the
respect of those indigenous to the region, and "On 22
February 1933, Csoma was officially canonized as a
bodhisattva in the grant hall of Taisho Buddhist
University in Tokyo" (Batchelor 237). As Murkejee
notes, this was "the highest praise a man can get in
Buddhist terms" (74), since the term bodhisattva
(Sanskrit for "enlightenment being") designates one who
strives for enlightenment for the sake of all sentient
beings, rather than one working toward individual
release from the wheel of reincarnation (and this
difference defines the chief doctrinal departure
between, respectively, the Mahayana and Hinayana
vehicles in Buddhist practice).
-
Once the work of Csoma was joined to the work of
Hodgson, the majority of elements necessary for the
full flowering of the dharma in European thought were
in place, since Eugene Burnouf, the recipient of some
of Hodgson's manuscripts and aware of Csoma's research
publications, was simply the "man best equipped to make
sense of them" (Batchelor 239). Burnouf had completed a
major study of the other linguistic thread within which
the Buddhist canon was preserved (Pāli) and
published a dictionary of the language in the 1824.
Once his work was supplemented by that of George
Turnour, who published a summation of "the Buddhist
literature of Ceylon, and who composed in the sacred
language of that island, the ancient Pali" (Lopez 54)
in 1834, the linguistic pieces were in place. As a
preliminary move to publishing major translations of
the sūtras, Burnouf published a definitive history
of Buddhism in India in 1844 (a work exerting massive
influence across the second half of the nineteenth
century), and although Burnouf died before it could
appear, his translation of the Lotus Sūtra,
published in 1852, became "the first full-length
translation of a Buddhist sūtra from Sakskrit into
a European language" (Batchelor 241).
-
Burnouf's Introduction à l'historie du
Buddhisme Indien offered "the prototype of the
European concept of Buddhism" (Batchelor 239) and
quickly became "the most influential scholarly work on
Buddhism in the nineteenth century" (Lopez quoting Max
Müller), first influencing Arthur Schopenhauer and
through post-1844 editions of his masterwork The
World as Will and Representation subsequently
influencing Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner
among others. As Schopenhauer admits, his knowledge of
Buddhism was incomplete, and his emphasis on "will" and
"representation" underwrote his "misreading or
misprision" (Bloom 3), thereby skewing his
understanding of Buddhist concepts like "empty
nothingness" and "nirvana." Yet, through his specific
misunderstanding of these concepts, he found them
provocative and important, since both concepts were
compatible with a mindset where "subject and object no
longer exist" (Schopenhauer I.412).
-
Of course, this eradication of dualism lurks at the
core of most European Romanticism's refinement of
enlightenment epistemology. For this reason, the shift
in ethical thought one finds in Nietzsche, where the
major problem for philosophy and society alike was not
the battle against "sin" (a resistant element from the
eclipsed theological episteme that preceded the
emergence of enlightenment epistemology) but against
"suffering," finds its roots in Schopenhauer's
reception of Buddhism:
Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than
Christianity—it has the heritage of a cool and
objective posing of problems in its composition, it
arrives after a philosophical movement lasting
hundreds of years; the concept "God" is already
abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the
only really positivistic religion history has
to show us . . . it no longer speaks of "the struggle
against sin," but quite in accordance with actuality,
"the struggle against suffering." It has
already . . . the self-deception of moral concepts
behind it—it stands, in my language,
beyond good and evil. (Nietzsche 129)
The language Nietzsche draws upon—"cool and
objective" and "positivistic"—shows its
enlightenment epistemic roots, yet the hammering
philosopher's view that all suffering results from "the
self-deception of moral concepts" intersects both
Buddhist and Romantic theories of self and society.
III. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and
Romanticism
-
The issue of suffering and its causes, the focus of
Nietzsche's salutary comments about Buddhist thought,
functions as "the very foundation" (Gyatso 1) of both
Hinayana and Mahayana forms of Buddhist practice yet
equally operates in foundational ways within a broad
range of Romantic thought as well. As Ken Jones
suggests, the tradition of "inconceivable liberation"
embedded in most Buddhist traditions (a term borrowed
from the Vimalakirti Sutra) and "modernity's
humanistic project of social emancipation are
complementary" (xvi), and numerous Romantic thinkers
across both its periodic term and national traditions
were motivated to develop an engaged form of
philosophic praxis that strove to transform both
physical and metaphysical reality. Perhaps confirmed
through my admittedly all-too-brief historical survey
of Buddhism's direct emergence into European awareness
during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
anyone seeking direct "influence" between Buddhist
thought and practices and those developed within the
full range of Romantic thought will quite likely only
experience historical disappointment, since the canon
of the sutras was simply not available until the second
half of the nineteenth century. (Indeed, I have
considered this aspect of the topic in two other works,
one appearing in the electronic journal Literature
Compass and the other included in the collection
Interrogating Orientalism[s].) After all, even
Sir William Jones (who was primarily responsible for
launching what Raymond Schwab termed the "Oriental
Renaissance") had still not clearly differentiated
Buddhism from Hinduism by his death, and such
discernment awaited the work published in Jones's
influential journal (e.g. by Csoma, Hodgson, and H. H.
Wilson among others) and the translation of texts
arriving into centers of European orientalism via a
strong colonial counterflow of materials. And so, this
last section will only gesture at the deeper resonances
between the broad terms of "Buddhism" and "Romanticism"
by focusing on the nature of suffering and the degree
to which the pursuit of enlightenment, either in its
eastern or western forms, delivers freedom from that
suffering.
-
Buddha's elaboration of the role of suffering was
offered seven weeks after his enlightenment, although
it took the pleas of "the two highest gods in the realm
of samsara [illusion], Indra and Brahma" (K. Rinpoche
13) to overcome the Buddha's initial reticence
regarding his ability to teach those "who live in lust
and hate" (Bodhi 48, 70). The Buddha's "first formal
teaching [took place] at a place known as the Deer
Park, in Sarnath near Varanasi, India" (K. Rinpoche
13), and this opening sutra stands at the foundation of
all Buddhist vehicles and canons:
Just as one who stands on a mountain peak
Can see below the people all around,
So, O wise one, all-seeing sage,
Ascend the palace of the Dhamma.
Let the sorrowless one survey this human breed,
Engulfed in sorrow, overcome by birth and old
age.
(Bodhi 71)
Prompted by Brahmā Sahampati, the enlightened
Buddha turned the first wheel of the dharma in order to
expound the four noble truths to only "five of his
former ascetic companions" (Keown 71), and these truths
are based on the recognition that all sentient beings
aspire to achieve happiness by overcoming
suffering:
1. The truth of suffering ("birth," "decay," and
"death")
2. The truth of the origins of suffering
("craving")
3. The truth of cessation of suffering ("fading
away," "extinction of craving")
4. The truth of the path beyond suffering ("The Noble
Eightfold Path": "right understanding, right thought,
right speech, right action, right livelihood, right
effort, right mindfulness, right
concentration")
(Kornfield 28-31)
Commentaries on these concepts literally fill
monastic libraries (east and west), but a condensed
discussion should provide transition to analogous
insights resonating with Romantic literature.
-
Buddhist literature proposes a tripartite structure
to the suffering associated with samsāra
(Sanskrit: Pāli, "flowing on"), "the cycle of
repeated birth and death that individuals undergo"
(Keown 248). At a fundamental level, all sentient
beings share the painful experiences of birth,
sickness, old age, and death, and it was precisely
Siddhartha Gautama's early encounter with these four
universal "ties of life" (Carus 13) that propelled him
from his luxurious existence and onto the path of the
dharma (Carus 13-25). At a secondary level, the
suffering of change emerges through recognition that
the temporary relief provided by short-term pleasures
eventually undergoes change as well, giving rise to
subsequent suffering through the form of grasping at
such pleasures. Finally, the third level of suffering
of conditioning "refers to the bare fact of our
unenlightened existence . . . under the influence" of
ignorance of these noble truths (Gyatso 54). This last,
broadest view of suffering is directly connected to the
tendency of individuals to grasp as fixed and immutable
"the impermanent nature of reality" (Gyatso 54-5), an
existential misprision that relentlessly generates
on-going suffering through the ego's willed ignorance
of and resistance to dependent origination
(interdependent versus independent existence). Once the
first three "truths" are recognized and embraced, then
meditative practice would work to re/cognize mind's
relationships with itself and all others, therein
leading consciousness into nirvana, the state of
freedom beyond all suffering inscribed within cyclic
existence.
-
Once suffering as boundary condition is perceived
and once the role ignorance plays in maintaining
suffering is unveiled, the crucial question shifts to
the possibility of cessation and the "nirvana"
experienced in that cessation. Can one achieve
liberation from suffering and what method best assures
such cessation? Within Buddhist practice, cessation
emerges with the recognition of the impermanent nature
of all things, all thoughts, all selves, hence the
tendency to focus on śūnyatā
(Sanskrit: Pāli,
sūññattā), "emptiness or
nothingness" (Keown 282) in some forms of analytic
meditative practice. The robust literature surrounding
the Prajñā-pāramitā
Sūtras (The Diamond Sutra and The
Heart Sutra) pursues precisely this "perfection of
insight/wisdom" (Keown 218) and "consists of
thirty-eight different books, composed in India between
100 B.C. and A.D. 600" (Conze xxviii). Both works are
associated with teachings undertaken by Shakyamuni
Buddha on Vulture Peak in the sixth century B.C.E., and
both aim at nothing "less than the total extinction of
the self" (Conze xxix).
-
As well as being one of the first works directly
translated into a European language from Sanskrit,
The Diamond Sutra, which literally translates as
"diamond-cutter," also "has the distinction of being
the oldest printed book [and] was completed by Wang
Chieh on May 11, 868 [CE]" (Conze 75). This work traces
the shift of emphasis from individual cessation to the
bodhisattva dedication to relieve universal suffering
at all levels of existence (from a Hinayana to a
Mahayana interpretation), a view apparent in the
following response Buddha offers to a query by Subhuti:
"As many beings as there are in the universe of beings,
comprehended under the term "beings"—egg-born,
born from a womb, moisture-born, or miraculously born;
with or without form; with perception, without
perception, and with neither perception nor
nonperception—as far as any conceivable form of
beings is conceived: all these I must lead to Nirvana,
into that Realm of Nirvana which leaves nothing behind"
(Conze 16). This refinement of the four noble truths
establishes an "ethos of otherness" wherein "the most
sublime act is to place another before you" and also
provides insight into the divergent paths taken by
Hinayana and Mahayana forms of practice.
-
While The Diamond Sutra offers an elaborate
and extended refinement on the first turning of the
wheel of dharma, The Heart Sutra presents the
negative dialectics associated with the Buddhist view
of "emptiness" in a condensed (and hence dense)
formulation, rendering the conception
(śūnyatā) perhaps the most
difficult concept for the initial reception of Buddhist
thought in Romantic Europe, due to its seemingly
paradoxical path to knowledge. Early in the work, the
bodhisattva Avolokitesvara volunteers to explain "the
bodhisattva's Heart of Perfect Wisdom which is the
Universal Womb of Wisdom" (Kornfield 135) and offers
the following phrase: "form is emptiness and the very
emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form,
form does not differ from emptiness" (Conze 86). This
complex view of the emptiness of forms and forms of
emptiness leads to articulate the mantra that stands at
the "heart" or "core" of the wisdom leading to
enlightenment precisely because it points "beyond":
"Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi, Svaha!"
("Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O
what an awakening, all hail!" [Conze 113]). As Paul
Williams suggests, the terms of this mantra point to
"the Abhidharma [Sanskrit, "higher doctrine"]" wherein
is critiqued "the claim to have found some things which
really, ultimately exist," and for those who strive "to
practice these teachings in meditation and life the
requirement of completing letting go [going beyond
altogether] . . . is an extremely difficult one [and]
very frightening" (48).
-
Not surprisingly, the German revolution in Romantic
philosophy at the beginning of the Romantic period,
inaugurated with Goethe and Kant and extending through
the Schlegels and Novalis to Hegel, elaborated a
similar view of required complementarity capable of
moving beyond polar opposition. The realization of
freedom within the Kantian configuration of
consciousness as the experience of "unity in the
existence of appearances" (Kant 393) arguably
provides within late eighteenth century European
philosophy the strongest analogue to diverse Buddhist
descriptions of enlightenment and certainly requires
the necessity of thinking of the self "both a
'phenomenon' and as 'noumenon'" where perceived
complementarity requires "a kind of negative
consciousness" (36-7). Romantic literature is replete
with aesthetic examples of this philosophical tenet,
whether in Coleridge's recognition of "the one life
within us and abroad" ("The Eolian Harp" [28.26]) or
Shelley's insistence that subjectivity itself is
defined by the "unremitting interchange" ("Mont Blanc"
[98.39]) between mind and matter. In its rethinking of
European enlightenment epistemology, Romantic thought
began to grapple with both metaphysical
complementarities and cultural relativities, where the
"vital nothingness" discovered at the foundation of
both consciousness and cosmos necessarily requires a
process of self-emptying to confront the reality of
subject as "egoless participant" (Rudy [2004] 20). As
Dennis McCort has rigorously argued (see as well
his essay included
here), the German Romantic tradition offered "the
brilliant if brief climax of the long spiritual
development of a world view that was heterodox, though
in no way opposed, to the predominantly rationalist
outlook of the preceding and following eras" and strove
to make, in August Schlegel's phrase, a "commitment to
everything" (21, 23) that would lead to
"self-realization" through negative dialectics and
self-annihilation. Of course, dialectical thought in
all its varied vehicles can only lead to G. W. F.
Hegel, and as Timothy
Morton's thoughtful and energetic analysis of
Hegel's somewhat conflicted reception of Buddhism
attests (see below), the very element of emptiness
resisted so strongly by Hegel subsequently becomes the
very ground of analytic critique for the philosophical
inheritors of European Romantic philosophies and
practices, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Bohr,
Derrida, Foucault, Heisenberg, and beyond (Plotnitsky
7-13, 249-60).
-
Hegel provides an appropriate transition back to
Romanticism's version of enlightenment, which is
described briefly above and by which the age modifies
prior forms of epistemological enlightenment prevalent
during the eighteenth century. Certainly, as this brief
discussion indicates, great accord can be found between
emergent forms of Romantic thought and practice and the
four noble truths and the perfection of wisdom derived
from The Diamond Sutra and The Heart
Sutra. As the essays in this volume attest, the
elements within the German expression of Romanticism
provide strong resonance with emergent Buddhism, where
writers like Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group "are
seen as 'enlightening the Enlightenment about itself
and saving it thus'" (Chaouli 44). This saving of the
Enlightenment involved the eradication of crippling
dualism within western thought, a philosophical move
conversant with the similar strategy, deployed against
binary structuration, pursued much later by
deconstruction in general and Derrida in particular
(McCort 167-8). Such refashioning of enlightenment
epistemology lead Friedrich Schlegel to insist, in
1800, that "in the Orient we must seek the highest
Romanticism," and, in 1803, to coin the phrase
"Oriental Renaissance" to characterize the reception
accorded the explosion of materials arriving in Europe
from Asia (quoted in Batchelor 252).
-
One can see the German version of this "highest
Romanticism" in the writing of numerous authors. For
example, in August Wilhelm Schlegel's 1808 Vienna
lectures, he argues for a "commitment to everything"
later summed up in Novalis's arresting image of
"being": "All being, being per se, is nothing
but a being-free—a hovering between extremes"
(McCort 23, 24). As Dennis McCort forcefully argues,
Novalis "holds the self, conceived as an autonomous
entity, to be relatively unreal," with the self
functioning as "dialectical oscillation rather than
discrete entity" (McCort 167), where the poet's view of
self exists in relational rather than essential terms:
"The seat of the soul is to be found there where inner
world and outer world touch. Where they interpenetrate,
it is in each point of the interpenetration" (quot. by
McCort 31). German Romantic thought sought to overcome
the "human drive for fixity . . . that must, finally be
relinquished if man is to realize what Nietzsche, in a
moment of neo-Romantic illumination, called 'the
transvaluation of values,' that is, the equal and
absolute value of everything" (McCort 23).
-
In both Norman Dubie's
poem and Louise Economides's
essay, Blake is seen as a crucial mediating figure
for the volume's concerns, and Blake has often, through
his robust and extended critique of enlightenment
epistemology, offered direct connections to Buddhist
thought, as Allen Ginsberg makes clear in poems and
essays (Ginsberg 282-4). To make his connections
apparent, Ginsberg points directly to Blake's analysis
of "the changes of Urizen" in The Book of
Urizen, where each age offers "torment," "harrowing
fear," "craving," "terror" and leads to states of
"dismal woe" (74-76). Blake's Urizen offers a
severe critique of "the 'rational' pursuit of a self"
(McCort 31) through Urizen's illusory vision of
"solitary" existence (a sovereign self) and his desire
for a reality "without fluctuations" (Blake 71).
Blake's antidote to this severe diagnosis occurs rather
late in the canon and involves "self-annihilation,"
with the poet proposing in Milton that "the Laws
of Eternity [require] that each shall
mutually/Annihilate himself for others good" (139.36).
Blake's view here clearly intersects the position
articulated by the Buddha, where "the annihilation of
self is the condition of enlightenment" (Carus 4) yet
equally connects with his articulation of an ethos of
otherness expressed as early as The Book of
Thel: "everything that lives,/Lives not alone, nor
for itself" (5.26-7).
-
As John Rudy has previously argued, initially
through Wordsworth and more recently through other
English Romantics (e.g. Blake, Coleridge and Keats),
the cultivation of meditative quiescence in the
indwelling of Romantic poetry led directly to the
implosion of "all potential dualism between self and
other" and yielded as its by-product an experience of
"the soul's greatness" through "its ability to
eliminate itself" (Romanticism 40, 78-9), and
here he traces a similar
process through Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."
In similar ways, the poet John Keats offers an
analogous form of the "no self" state (Sanskrit:
"anātman") within Buddhist thought. For Keats, as
argued in the oft quoted letter to Richard Woodhouse
(27 October 1818)—wherein he stands against the
"Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime"—the poet
argues that "poetical Character itself . . . has no
self," since "it is everything and nothing," and he
then argues further that the poet "is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no
identity . . . he has no self" (501). Thus, both Keats
and Novalis as Romantic authors "inaugurated a certain
sense of authorship and, at the same time, in the very
same breath, announced the author's imminent demise"
(Bennett 55), a view clearly intersecting several
strands of argument pursued in all the essays in the
volume.
-
Certainly, when exploring the varied types of
suffering evoked by Romantic writers, the movement from
"sin" to "suffering" is manifest repeatedly. The
period's most overt evocation of an eternal state of
suffering, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, precisely positions the origin of
that suffering in a willed act of an "independent" self
who has forgotten the "reality" of dependent
origination. In one of the text's endlessly fascinating
nuances, the residual of this knowledge lurks in the
crew's "superstitious" belief that albatross and
weather are connected (I forgo further commentary here,
since I have treated it in more extensively elsewhere).
The Byronic mode of Romanticism, as represented by
works like Childe Harold, The Giaour, or
Manfred, maintains relentless focus on suffering
and its subsequent re-inscription through relentless
and remorseless self-consciousness (the
"self-anatomizing gaze" shared by the Cenci family in
Shelley's drama) when the temporary satisfaction of
transient pleasures collapses. The "fullness of
Satiety" that occurs through running "Sin's long
labyrinth" simply leaves Harold "sore sick at heart"
(26). The moment that the Giaour realizes that his
actions have caused the death of his beloved Leila, he
becomes enclosed in "a life of pain" (90), leading to
"the grief of years," as he compulsively replays the
event (even on his death bed), while for Manfred, his
existential state is defined by "Grief" and "Sorrow"
that accompanies his inability to achieve
"forgetfulness" and "self-oblivion" (125, 128, 129).
What Byron's major characters seek yet achieve not is a
form of self-forgetting affiliated with
"self-annihilation" termed by Geoffrey Hartman
"anti-self-consciousness," since "it is consciousness,
ultimately, which alienates them [Romantic artists]
from life and imposes the burden of a self which
religion or death or a return to the state of nature
might dissolve" (51). Like Blake, Percy Shelley finds a
middle path beyond these ultimately restrictive
possibilities, the "perfect symmetry" of seamless
interconnectivity between Promethean mind and alterity
itself.
-
The type of self-overcoming suggested by Hartman is
most prominently displayed in Percy Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound, a work that intersects the
concerns offered in Blake's The Four Zoas but
which pursues its aims in a Hellenic rather than
Hebraic mythic framework. Yet the work of Shelley that
most presages suffering as vehicle of self-realization
is "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills," which
offers an extended poetic analysis of "the deep wide
sea of Misery" we share but which culminates with the
realization that shared "love . . . heals all strife"
(118.365). For both Byron and Shelley, the Promethean
mode provides a vehicle for exploring "suffering,"
"pain," and "agony" (Byron 15.6; 16.9-10) founded in an
ethos of otherness, where the attempt to assuage "the
sum of human wretchedness" leads to relentless
"torture" (Byron 16.18, 37). In Shelley's more
compelling and extended treatment, the bound Titan
offers, following the recollection of his curse against
Jupiter (where he wishes for infinite suffering for the
usurping god), a stunning renunciation that enacts a
form of self-annihilation grounded in his own version
of an ethos of otherness: "words are quick and
vain;/Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine./I
wish no living thing to suffer pain" (Shelley
218.303-5). Here Shelley opposes hate with love, a
position seen in Blake's earlier argument from The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell and elsewhere that
"everything that lives is Holy" (45).
-
In both Romantic and Buddhist forms,
self-annihilation functions as antidote to the cultural
reification of an illusory spectre of identity, an
essential and sovereign self, that continually creates
all the suffering experienced in the world. Of course,
this is precisely the truth of suffering resident in
the inaugural teaching of the fourth noble truths at
the foundation of all Buddhist systems. What the
"highest Romanticism" discovers beyond the self is,
simply put, everything and nothing. With some shared
affinities established, although by no means exhausted,
I invite readers to plunge into the works that follow,
since each work in the volume argues in different yet
interrelated ways for a shared view in Buddhism and
Romanticism of forms of suffering created by the self
and of the freedom from suffering found in
self-annihilation. Emptiness resides in plenitude and
solitude, the problematic path for Buddhists and
Romanticists alike.
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