romantic dharma

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters

Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and indi-viduals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biog-raphy, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, pol-itics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor, and their contemporaries.

The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and edi-tor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing procedures, and history of science.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN:Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne SchmidColeridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. BarbeauRomantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. KitsonByron, edited by Cheryl A. WilsonRomantic Migrations, by Michael WileyThe Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew SchneiderBritish Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark SchoenfieldWomen Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome SaundersBritish Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn LedbetterRomantic Diasporas, by Toby R. BenisRomantic Literary Families, by Scott KrawczykVictorian Christmas in Print, by Tara MooreCulinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie DrewsReading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto GabrieleRomanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. PeerPoetics en passant, by Anne JamisonFrom Song to Print, by Terence HoagwoodGothic Romanticism, by Tom DuggettVictorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise PennerPopulism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. CarsonByron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. SchmidtPoetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira WoloskyThe Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette CozziRomanticism and Pleasure, Edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert

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Royal Romances, by Kristin Flieger SamuelianTrauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by David DowlingPopular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. SimmonsBeyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by Ashton NicholsThe Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel RobinsonRomanticism and the City, by Larry H. PeerColeridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory LeadbetterDante and Italy in British Romanticism, Edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul DouglassRomantic Dharma, by Mark S. LussierJewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840, by Michael Scrivener

FORTHCOMING TITLES:

Robert Southey, by Stuart AndrewsPlaying to the Crowd, by Frederick BurwickRegions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab

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Rom a n t ic Dh a r m aT h e E m e rge nce of Bu ddh ism

i n t o Ni n et e e n t h- Ce n t u ry Eu rope

Mark S. Lussier

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ROMANTIC DHARMA

Copyright © Mark S. Lussier, 2011.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2011 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–0–230–10545–4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lussier, Mark. Romantic dharma : the emergence of Buddhism into

nineteenth-century Europe / Mark S. Lussier. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) ISBN 978–0–230–10545–4 (hardback) 1. Romanticism—Europe. 2. European literature—19th century—

Buddhist influences. 3. Buddhism—Influence. 4. European literature—19th century—History and criticism. 5. Europe—Intellectual life—19th century—Sources. I. Title.

PN750.5.L87 2011809�.93382943—dc22 2011005479

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: September 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

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To my teachers, past, present, and future Jeff Cox, Zachoeje Rinpoche, and Marcia Lussier

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Con t e n ts

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

1 Enlightenment East and West: An Introduction to Buddhism and Romanticism 1

2 The Strange Case of Alexander Csoma de Körös 29

3 Romanticism’s Four Noble Truths 55

4 Inner Revolution: The Luminous Mind of Enlightenment 83

5 Selfhood and Self-Annihilation in Blake’s Milton 113

6 The Romantic Book of Living and Dying 147

Afterword Beyond Compulsion: Toward a Pedagogy of Compassion 177

Notes 189

Works Cited 207

Index 225

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Ack now l e dgm e n ts

I owe thanks to many people for the completion of this project and its appearance through Palgrave Publishers. First, of course, I thank Marilyn Gaull, the series editor who is the feistiest and best friend a scholar could have in complicated times. Second, I hold two people at Palgrave Macmillan close to my heart for their compassion, generosity, and patience across the process: the senior editor Brigitte Shull, and my editorial assistant Jo Roberts. I would also like to thank Subhadra Srinivas for her sensitive and insightful copy editing and Rohini Krishnan and the team at Newgen Publishing and Data Services, Chennai. Third, I thank my beloved colleagues who have responded to the project at various stages, and I remain deeply grateful to Alan Bewell, Dan Bivona, Ron Broglio, Jeffrey Cox, Stuart Curran, Angela Esterhammer, Joel Falflak, Tim Fulford, Michael Gamer, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Sonia Hofkosh, Kevin Hutchings, Greg Kucich, Tilar Mazzeo, Anne Mellor, Peter Otto, Alan Richardson, Kate Rigby, Richard Sha, Ayanna Thompson, Dan White, and Paul Youngquist. And last, as always, I thank Marcia for her careful proof-reading and insightful commentary, for always her peaceful demeanor, for her sound intelligence, and for her on-going endurance.

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P r e face

The extinction of self is salvation; the annihilation of self is the condition of enlightenment.

(The Buddha)

I come in Self-annihilation & the Grandeur of Inspiration.

(The Blake)

Romantic Dharma explores the entry of Buddhist knowledge into European awareness and the shared intellectual and ethical affini-ties connecting Western and Eastern forms of enlightenment epis-temology after the Romantic revolution. As well, the work reflects the entwinement of both within a complex reception nexus defined by present research into these issues, which has brought colonial operations to the foreground of critical judgment regarding Oriental studies in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The final complexity for the project connects my own reception of Buddhist texts and its practices to academic judgments and duties, establishing through this personal connection a synchronic rather than diachronic dimension to this study, one discussed shortly in this preface and later in the closing chapter on pedagogy and mentoring within Tibetan Buddhism and collegiate-level higher education (especially in gradu-ate experience). Romantic Dharma has thus a well-defined lineage from which it flows, like most works to emerge from the study and practice of Buddhism, and must include a dimension of “experience” that acknowledges the troubling complicities of Western intrusions and anxieties but that insists upon the relevance of present practice. Unlike most classically nation-bound expressions of this tradition, the lineage for my project is grounded in “an international Buddhism that transcends cultural and national boundaries” (Lopez Bible xxxix). This might be viewed as somewhat problematic, in that my experience and practice of Tibetan Buddhism reflects an “ahistori-cal and textualized Buddhism” established in “a trans-cultural [and] trans-historical” context” (King 148, 248).

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The exilic presence of actual Tibetan monks and lamas residing and teaching in the West inverts a process at work throughout the long encounter between Eastern teachers and Western students. Donald J. Lopez, Jr. identifies the significance of this fact for recent Tibetan Buddhist reception historically (and within his own studies) and pro-poses that disclosing this critical presence “seemed somehow more moral” (Curators 285) relative to the post-World War Two diaspora suffered by Tibetan culture and religion through Chinese conquest. This event brought high lamas and its highest learning into the West, a colonial casualty near the “end of colonialism” during the second half of the Twentieth Century. Hermeneutic dangers remain present, and Lopez’s historical analysis of western figures who studied “at the feet of lamas” (e.g., Desideri and Csoma) concludes with an examination of his own relationship with “my lama,” one prompted by the critique offered by “‘Participant’ anthropology” by Pierre Bourdieu (Curators 287). Romantic Dharma figures against this ground, which is strewn with inner and outer obstacles but one traversable nonetheless. I will operate in this frame of mind, although finally my relationship to the subject never asserts the primacy of objectivity, since to do so would be dishonest in the face of my practice and the romantic transfor-mation of enlightenment epistemology. Subject and object, in both Buddhism and Romanticism, posit a zone of contact between cosmos and consciousness as the place where identity is formed and where, under the right conditions, is lost.

Both my Buddhist teachers (Za Choeje Rinpoche and His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama) have played crucial roles in the articulation of my concerns in the following chapters and define a part of its the critical lineage. As well, my own teachers in Romanticism, especially Jeffrey Cox, have helped shape that lineage. However, this work equally emerged through the play of synchronici-ties rather than the administration of empowerments, the transmis-sion of meditative techniques, the instruction of specific texts, and the rigorous of graduate-level mentoring. As I discuss in Romantic Dynamics, Carl Jung defined a synchronicity as “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state” (Jung 25). F. David Peat notes that the “essence of a synchro-nicity is that the particular pattern has a meaning or value for the individual who experiences it” (25) in the active zone between inner and outer events and who connects convergent streams of informa-tion into broader meaning and significance beyond discrete knowing to the experience of consciousness as event. Romantic Dharma, like

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Romantic Dynamics, f lows from the coincidence of the directed and the accidental as they converge to shape the event of the text and its thought, confirming again my sense that to dismiss such coincidence of events is to ignore a hidden yet relevant dimension of criticism itself (Lussier Dynamics 10–12).

This synchronistic lineage connects my practice of Tibetan Buddhism and my exploration of its full emergence into Europe dur-ing the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My attempt to span personal and professional commitments might seem an uncritical pro-cedure, but notable theoreticians have pursued precisely such paths of inquiry and with similar intent, as the brief reference to Lopez con-firms.1 Notably, Luce Irigaray’s recent work explores an analogous approach to that generating this study:

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 daily prac-tice—in fact, yoga—was what could help awaken or reawaken and dis-cover words and gestures carrying another meaning, another light, another rationality. (Between East and West 6)

The move toward integration of the personal and professional also reflects a drive to articulate an integral model expressive of my experi-ence of “knowledge as event” (Zajonc 343). This view, offered in an interdisciplinary study on “the entwined history of light and mind” (Zajonc 9), is both appropriate to one focus of Romantic Dharma (forms of enlightenment) yet intersects more recent critical devel-opments associated with Alain Badiou, who has argued that “self-belonging is constitutive of the event” (Being 507) in which one is impli-cated and from which one can no longer be critically dissociated.

The actual study in my house, where Romantic Dharma took its final form, reflects these complementary concerns and connects “events as knowledge” on both sides of this investigation but realized spatially—on one side, bookshelves, desk, and computer, and on the other side altar, candles, incense, and cushion—and spiritually—the pursued energies of one flow without impediment to energize the other. The Tibetan thanga that graces the cover of Romantic Dharma hangs directly above the altar in my meditation space and aptly cap-tures the personal and professional synchronistic threads evoked in this preface. The thanga arrived in my hands when I had launched my dedicated practice of Tibetan Buddhism, and a close friend, upon discovering this new-found dedication to the dharma, produced

P r e f a c e

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the thanga, offering it as a gift by saying “this was clearly meant for you.” Given my practice, I next asked what seemed like a rather straightforward and obvious question: “I wonder what’s going on with Buddhism in Romantic Studies?” As it turns out, “everything” was the answer. At the time (in 1990), I had no hint of the future sig-nificance that this unique object held for my professional life twenty years later, but the project before you was very much the product of such moments of synchronicity.

The thanga was anonymously produced near the end of the eigh-teenth century, and its selection here as the visual point of entry reflects, in hindsight, several concerns discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow. First, the thanga was created at the moment when awareness of Buddhism in the West began to circulate through the major centers of Orientalism in India and Europe and when Europeans began to gain access to Asian regions in which Buddhism was omnipresent. Second, such Tibetan thangas traditionally serve as mediation vehicles and strive to inculcate in practitioners methods of visualization to imagine the realization of those represented attri-butes experientially. Third, this particular thanga is a representation of Amitabha (The Buddha of Infinite Light), a deity at the spiritual core of all practices dedicated to the transmutation of individual energies from one life to the next. Amitabha mediates the state of individual karma to determine the conditions for subsequent rebirth, the debt and its payment. Finally, the Buddha of Infinite Light conceptually occupies a pivotal place in palliative practices in both their Tibetan (phowa) and Western (hospice) forms, a role directly connected to my altruistic and academic commitments and practices. Thus, the thanga functions as an objective correlative for both the project’s inspiration and the form that inspiration takes critically, in that it speaks directly to the scholarly concerns regarding the arrival of Buddhist knowledge to the West, the teaching and mentoring activities undertaken within the academy, and the personal commitment to embody in thought and practice engaged forms of Buddism and Romanticism alike. In this sense, the thanga encourages, through its contemplation, a state longed associated, in my mind, with William Blake’s proverb from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The most Sublime act is to set another before you” (E 36).

During this book’s formation, other synchronic events occurred to shape its foundation and structure. In the last decade, for example, I have had the good fortune to teach summer courses in Florence, Italy, and one year while pouring over research regarding the first wave of European encounters with and reception of Buddhism, I had taken

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the #7 bus from the traffic circle in front of St. Mark’s Cathedral to the hilltop town of Fiésole. I had tickets for an evening operatic performance of “Turandot,” which was staged in the town’s Roman amphitheater and set in the Forbidden City of Peking, rendering the work a form of encounter between East and West through Giacomo Puccini’s musical treatment of the ultimate triumph of love. With additional time on my hands, I ascended the Western hill overlooking the town to explore a church perched on it, encountering to my sur-prise the subterranean layer of a modest museum at the Saint Francis monastery (the church from which Girolamo Savonarola descended into the city to promote the cultural cleansing of decadent Florentine society, leading to a bonfire of the vanities that included paintings by Botticelli and others). Quite unexpectedly, the last two rooms of this modest museum offered a stunning collection of statuary venerating bodhisattvas and saints in various Buddhist traditions gathered dur-ing the first intensive stage of encounter, spiritual colonialism, that defined Eastern and Western forms of theological practices. This dis-covery was rather startling, given the harsh measures Catholic priests (and especially Franciscans) lavished on such “idols” from the East during their penetration into China, India, and Japan and the inevi-table cool reception of Europeans in these Buddhist countries (dis-cussed in the next chapter).

That same year (and shortly after my hilltop discovery in Fiésole), I traveled from Florence to London, England to deliver a paper (“European Romanticism and the Rise of Tantric Buddhism”) at the2003 Interdisciplinary nineteenth-century Studies conference, whose theme was “local and global” issues and relations. The topic of my paper—the role that the development of the first Tibetan-English Dictionary and the first grammar of Tibetan in English played in the introduction of Buddhism to European scholars during the Romantic period—crystallized the first historically oriented phase of this proj-ect.2 I still remained slightly apprehensive about my talk. While the conference program included dear friends and university colleagues, the majority of those present were professional acquaintances and strangers to the project and its concern for the integration of scholarly and spiritual endeavors. My paper focused primarily on the travels of the intrepid Hungarian scholar Alexander Csoma, from the small vil-lage of Körös (on the Eastern frontier of Europe), and his thoroughly Romantic quest to locate the linguistic origins of the Hungarian lan-guage and people. Strangely enough, Csoma sought these in Tibet and the lands beyond the high Himalayas, and his passage took him through major and minor outposts of the “great colonial game”

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played in the trans-Himalayan regions between England, France, and Russia in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.3 My short summation of Csoma’s activities closed with a remarkable event—his formal recognition as a bodhisattva, literally “a being who is ori-entated toward enlightenment” (Keown 36), by Japanese monastic scholars a 100 years after his death, a point that generated rather lively discussion during the session’s question and answers (discussed in greater depth in chapter two).

The paper, in spite of my uncertainty, was well received, yet after the session I remained filled with palpable relief and manic energy. With several friends, I escaped from the conference for lunch and a rapid passage through the British Museum. Near the end of our visit, I found myself quite accidentally alone, strolling slowly through the Asiatic wing of the museum. As I stood contemplating a solid gold, eighteenth-century Tibetan statue of Chenrezig (the Buddha of Compassion), I realized that one of the strange, unexpected outcomes of the intermittent yet nonetheless relentless (and occasionally ruth-less) policies pursued by the British colonialists was the presence of the statue before me. Ironically, without British pillaging, the statue I contemplated would have quite likely been melted down to feed the coffers of communist China after the 1950–9 invasion of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army, which brought Tenzin Gyatso (the current Dalai Lama) into exile in northern India and which thereby created the conditions bringing my root lama and beloved teacher, Zachoeje Rinpoche, into the West to take up residence in the Sonora Desert. Hauntingly, for a Romanticist, the object of contemplation brought reflection to a clash between two dominant ideologies on either end of the historical poles of the period at the core of this book. The communist Chinese were alleged prompted by the presence of the individuals working within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, fore-runner of the CIA), which sought to locate uranium deposits in the Himalayan mountains, staging a conflict between the early Romantic ideology of democracy (represented by the United States) and the late Romantic ideology of communism (represented by China).4

As these thoughts passed through me, I unwound my mala (its 108 beads represent the teachings of the dharma offered by the Buddha) and began to chant silently the most beloved mantra in Tibetan Buddhism, Om Mani Peme Hum (Hail, Jewel in the Lotus), which stands at the heart of my own practice and which praises Chenzezig, the venerated deity at the core of Tibetan Buddhism. At that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a Native American man also standing in front of the glass case, and when I turned toward him,

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I noted that he too chanted the mantra of compassion, the sandal-wood beads of his mala slipping continuously through his fingers. We greeted one another, and to our mutual surprise, discovered that we both were from Arizona and both practicing Tibetan Buddhists. Without further speech, we bowed to one another and slowly contin-ued our isolated passages through the room, but as I contemplated another statue, this time an image of Manjushri (The Buddha of Wisdom), my fellow practitioner returned to my side and said, hand-ing me a ring with the compassion mantra inscribed upon it, “I’ve felt the need to offer this ring to someone all day, and I am abso-lutely sure that the ring was meant for you.” He turned and, without another word, slowly drifted through and finally from the room to continue his own passage through the museum.

This project, then, emerged from several such spots of time and prompted my critique of the view that contact between Buddhism and the West, in terms of the entry of the dharma into European conscious, exploded during the period termed Romanticism and thereby occurred earlier than some past scholarship suggested. Given Buddhism’s and Romanticism’s energetic practices focused on enlightenment (albeit in radically different forms), the moment to contemplate historical contacts and shared affinities between this new “Oriental” knowledge and Europe’s own form of enlightenment epis-temology seems both auspicious and necessary. From this perspective, the summative analysis offered by Rick Fields that until “the end of the nineteenth century . . . no real exchange between the European mind and Buddhism [had occurred]” (25) needed revision. The chap-ters of Romantic Dharma argue, in different ways, that the translation of major texts of what we now term Buddhism was generated during the first blossoming of the “Oriental Renaissance” (Schwab 11–14) at the beginning of the Romantic age, indeed prompting Friedrich Schlegel’s famous phrase that “We must seek the supreme romanti-cism in the Orient” (quoted in Schwab 69). The initial f lowering of the dharma followed across the opening half of the nineteenth cen-tury and was virtually concluded by the end of the century.

The emergence of Buddhism as a world religion resulted from an application of enlightenment principles shaping the intellectual background of the eighteenth century, and in Stephen Batchelor estimation, “three interconnected factors” created the conditions for Buddhism’s “birth” in the West: “. . . the emergence of the rationalist Enlightenment, the decline of religious authority and the consolida-tion of colonialism” (Awakening 231). Romantic thought provided the first severe critique of the enlightenment’s wholesale endorsement

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of reason and rationality (calculation) as the sole plumb line by which to measure value, using those very principles as the vehicle to extend knowledge beyond self-imposed confines. Thus, another form of syn-chronicity, this one scholarly rather than personal, equally defines the parameters of this study, since the knowledge of what specifi-cally shaped the process of enlightenment emerging from the teach-ings of the Buddha arrived in Europe precisely at the moment when Romanticism began to articulate a second stage of enlightenment epistemology, one that transformed important elements of eigh-teenth-century enlightenment thought into an actively “engaged” form of that epistemology conducive for the emergence of Buddhist thought through the recognition of shared affinities.

In her masterful The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzama argues that of the world religions encountered by the enlightenment-oriented colonial mind, Buddhism offered the stron-gest challenge to Christian hegemony as the only other “universal” world religion (144), a position echoing initial assessments of Europe’s spiritual colonialists several centuries earlier. Oriental scholarship had established the dharma of the Buddha as centuries older than Christianity, which raised “the disturbing suspicion that Buddhism could have influenced Christianity” (140), and like Christianity, Buddhism was a universal religion with a coherent yet diverse and widely dispersed body of thought and practice operating in “trans-national and supraethnic” ways (138). Buddhist dharma was virtually extinguished in its homeland of India long before the Portuguese and British colonial enterprises arrived to the sub-continent, and its dispersal across diverse languages and countries throughout Asia ren-dered it exceedingly difficult to discern the full sweep of its influences. As the study of Buddhism extended across the entire nineteenth cen-tury, one further concern became equally apparent; Buddhism could and would exert enormous counterinfluence as its linguistic body, the sutras, were translated and transported from the hot zones of cross-cultural contact to the cool, rational centers of contemplative scholarship in northern India and European capitals.

Any extended examination of Romantic Oriental scholarship (and its scholars) encounters individuals and institutions with varied motives striving to gather and synthesize nebulous traces of Buddhism across the spectrum of semiosis intent on the construction of a unified body of sacred texts into a scripture analogous to The New Testament. The problem, of course, was that no essential and unified religious canon for Buddhism existed in the East, and as Philip C. Almond argues, “what we are witnessing in the period from the later part of

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the eighteenth century to the beginning of the Victorian period in the later half of the 1830s is the creation of Buddhism” (12). By the time of William Wordsworth’s death (1850), “Buddhism . . . had come to exist, not in the Orient, but in the Oriental libraries and institutes of the West, in its texts and manuscripts, at the desks of the Western savants who interpreted it. It had become a textual object, [one] defined, classified, and interpreted through its own textuality” (13). The most pronounced impetus toward codification was the dawning recognition of the “sheer” scale of those practicing and professing Buddhism: “But it was only in the 1820s that the sheer enormity of the numbers of adherents . . . became evident to the West” (Almond 12). However, as the next chapter confirms, this view of Buddhism as akin to yet nonetheless a threat for Christianity resurrects earlier views that emerge during the intermittent stages by which Buddhism made its passage into the West.

Both the resemblance of Buddhism to and its divergence from Christianity was a critical and cultural constant across the punctuated phases of encounter, and the return of this view through the systematic consideration offered by enlightenment methods in the Oriental schol-arship in Romantic Europe is no surprise. In terms of resemblance, the interpretation voiced by the Royal Society member John Stewart, in 1777, suggested that the Tibetan form of Buddhism appeared to be “a corrupted version of Enlightenment Deism” (quoted in Almond 13), given its tendency to categorize discrete constituents of consciousness in exhaustive and empirical ways. As Phillip Olson (in The Discipline of Freedom [153–74]) and Dennis McCort (in Going Beyond the Pairs [165–75]) argue, a number of parallel methodological tendencies exist between the particular approach of Immanuel Kant and a broad range of German Romantic writers, on the one hand, and the sec-ondary works of Buddhist scholarship known as the Abhidharma, on the other.5 Yet only one generation deeper into Oriental scholarship, Francis Buchanan dismissed the importance of such shared affinities in an early contribution to the journal Asiatick Researches (1799): “However absurd the tenets of this religion may be, yet as influenc-ing the conduct of so large and proportion of mankind, it becomes an object of great importance in the history of the human race” (quoted in Almond 12). In Buchanan’s argument, the scale and scope of the practice of Buddhism across the East demanded attention, while the actual “tenets [and methods]” could and should be dismissed, an atti-tude reflecting a prior age of historical encounter but also defining a new stage of “British writers consciously and unconsciously [articulat-ing] their anxieties about the [Eastern] Other” (Leask 2).

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Once scholars gathered the crucial manuscripts and texts to aid in the “creation” of Buddhism, codified them into a canon, synthesized them into learned articles and books, and disseminated this work throughout Europe, the disparaging view of Buchanan and others gave way to the recognition of a wide range of shared views between Eastern and Western forms of enlightenment as practiced at the time. This process was inaugurated with the identification and collection of primary materials that flowed, via Calcutta (Kolkatta), to major cen-ters of Oriental scholarship in Europe to be translated from the Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan languages, which formed the three major lin-guistic bodies of the dharma. Thus, what we now term “Buddhism” emerged through the activities of what Donald S. Lopez pointedly terms “curators of the Buddha,” a phrase designed to highlight the role European scholarship played in constructing “an historical pro-jection derived exclusively from manuscripts and block prints” and raising the question not “of the ethics of scholarship but of the log-ics of representation” (Curators 7, 11). However, before such activi-ties can be fully mapped, a better understanding of the periods of punctuated encounters between Buddhism and the West must ensue to assure the best possible foundation for the deeper engagements between Eastern and Western modes of enlightenment thought dur-ing the Romantic Age.

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C h a p t e r 1

E n l igh t e n m e n t E a st a n d West:

A n I n t roduc t ion t o Bu ddh ism a n d

Rom a n t icism

Your own self is your master; who else could be?

(Buddha, The Dhammapada)

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage

(Kant, What is Enlightenment?)

Critical Coincidence

The first half of this chapter’s title offers a binary (“East” and “West”) at the core of concerns explored below yet also echoes the famous assessment of shared affinities between Eastern and Western approaches to the healing of psychological suffering offered by Alan W. Watts, one of the leading figures in the translation of Eastern men-tal approaches into Western terms and strategies in Psychotherapy East and West. The first term, “enlightenment,” and the short epigrams by Buddha and Kant also point to the convergence of philosophical forms of mental liberation pursued within the two large terms in the second half of the title (“Buddhism” and “Romanticism”). The con-fluence of historical and philosophical concerns binding those terms is worth intensified attention by scholars working in Romantic stud-ies for several reasons. This examination of the broad contours of interaction between “Buddhism” and “Romanticism” during the late

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R o m a n t i c D h a r m a2

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moves from historical encoun-ters through linguistic engagements to intellectual and spiritual resonances. The temporal range for European Romanticism adopted here from Raymond Williams, roughly extending from the birth of William Blake to the death of William Wordsworth (Williams 30–2), coincides rather well with the historical emergence of Buddhism into Western consciousness, when Europe’s knowledge of the religion originating with Śākyamuni’s enlightenment evolved beyond early views as a religion of “Idolaters [with] many minsters [sic] and abbeys after their fashion” (Polo I.219) and toward the later view as a “phi-losophy . . . under the imputation of atheism” (Fields 47).1 Before this intensive phase of encounter, Buddhism, for even the most educated, well-read, and well-traveled Europeans, remained a somewhat dis-sonant presence within the sacred literature of Hinduism (e.g., Sir William Jones) and presented severe difficulties to separate its ana-lytic structures, meditative practices, and ethical presumptions from its site of origin in India (Batchelor, Awakening 231–3).

As Philip Almond, Stephen Batchelor, Rick Fields, Richard King, Donald Lopez, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Raymond Schwab exhaustively demonstrate in a group of exploratory works spanning two generations of research, the completion of Buddhism’s long passage into Western consciousness was achieved via increasingly intensified phases of punctuated encounter, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century and coming to final fruition “in the 1840s after the arrival of the Sanskrit and Pāli canons” (Schwab 24), after Eugene Burnouf published his definitive L’Introduction à l’historire du buddhisme indien in 1844 (Batchelor, Awakening 240), and after H. H. Wilson’s summative lecture on “Buddha and Buddhism” before the Royal Asiatic Society in 1854. The gradual emergence of the dharma flowed from a coincidence of energies as colonial functionaries in the trans-Himalayas and Indian subcontinent applied enlightenment epistemic techniques to an unruly body of practices and texts. Comparative enlightenment epistemologies fueled both the East India Company and the British governmental structure that supplanted it, and these two operations meet in the drive to establish economic monopoly and territorial dominion. These economic and colonial authorities acquired a massive amount of textual materials in little-known languages and that were gathered in the East and transmitted to the West, and these works required the dedicated efforts of Oriental scholars across Europe to cross those linguistic barriers, in the process bringing Buddhism into focus during the last stages of historical Romanticism.


E n l i g h t e n m e n t E a s t a n d W e s t 3

The culmination of these efforts ignited an “Oriental Renaissance,” to quote the phrase Raymond Schwab adopted from Edgar Quinet (11), and phrased in this way, the complexities of this topic come quickly into view, involving colonial encounters, enlightenment prac-tices, Orientalist scholarship, and Romantic reception. The outward movement of colonialism took the form of both “transcontinental European empires [and] multinational trading companies [like the East India Company]” (Outram 8–9). In all spheres of colonialism, the outward movement, especially into India, returned people as well as commodities to the homelands in Europe, and “with the coming of Britain colonial rule over increasing parts of India, the number of Indians who made the journey to Britain would [continue to] expand” (Fisher 49). These “counterflows” (Fisher 1) formed a prominent by-product of colonial operations and established pathways for the sub-sequent flow of knowledge about cultural and religious practices. In the 150 years prior to the Romantic era, Oriental manuscripts and texts entered Europe at an ever-escalating rate through economic and colonial contacts, and “the emergence of the academic study of Buddhism in Europe and America [must be placed] within the con-text of the ideologies of empire” (Lopez, Curators 2).

The returning flow of information that was established during the period immediately prior to Romanticism became “a canal . . . [con-necting] thought and history” and through which passed “a torrent of narratives and accounts that nearly defied imagining” (Schwab 2, 25, 28). As Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi suggest, this type of concep-tual counterflow began almost immediately to exert considerable force within colonial homelands, thereby not only highlighting the necessity of exploring “the different role the ‘Orient’ played [in Europe]” (41) but also tracing the broader reception accorded to Buddhism within its art and philosophy across the second half of the nineteenth century. This reception reached its zenith with the 1879 publication of Light of Asia, Sir Edwin Arnold’s epic-scale poetic depiction of “the life and character [and] philosophy of that noble hero and reformer, Prince Gautama of India, the founder of Buddhism” (xix).

Through the application of categorical and comparative imperatives energizing its own form of enlightenment philosophy, European colo-nial movements outward assured a corresponding inward counterflow of textual materials collected, catalogued, and transmitted to Europe and thereafter translated and codified within centers of Oriental studies in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, igniting a process that arguably extends to our own day, as the pan-global recognition of



His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama confirms.2 On the linguistic tide briefly mapped above, Buddhism flowed into Western consciousness, like a lotus floating westward on a stream toward the sunset. Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan manuscripts and texts then just emerging into European knowledge and languages allowed Western scholars to differentiate Buddhism from Hinduism, and by the end of this same periodic range (ca. 1850), Buddhism had assumed the status of a world religion within the Western enlighten-ment’s evolving sociology of knowledge, although only first appear-ing in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, in 1801 (Lopez “Ambivalent Exegete” 53).

The pan-European Romantic movement—at least defined by a somewhat arbitrary temporal span of 100 years—could hardly be described as uniformly monologically, but for this work, the “Romantic” writers referred to reacted against those stif ling ele-ments within the West’s materially driven enlightenment episte-mology, “the rationalistic theory of knowledge” (Cassirer 114) that entraps intellection through reliance on “reason as the system of clear and distinct ideas” (Cassirer 95) and that established reason as the primary hermeneutic faculty mediating inner and outer experience. Stephen Batchelor, Richard King, and Tomoko Masuzawa identify the drive of enlightenment forms of scientism as crucial both to the development of religious studies generally and to the establishment of Buddhism as a world religion specifically. The solidification of world religions within the West was concretized by the end of the nineteenth century and, as King argues, “was constructed upon a foundation of readily identifiable Enlightenment convictions” (47), a view embedded rather deeply in all forms of Orientalism. Through such “Orientalist scholarship, [which] had been discovering, edit-ing, and translating literary treasures of some of the most power-ful nations known in history,” European colonial powers asserted “control” over these countries and their literatures, which “no longer seemed to possess the power and the prerogative to repre-sent their own legacy apart from this scholarship” (Masuzawa 17). Batchelor offers a similar assessment, suggesting that the slow emer-gence of understanding giving rise to “Buddhism” depended on three elements; “throughout the course of the eighteenth century three interconnected factors were gestating that would give birth to what we know as ‘Buddhism’ . . . the emergence of the rationalist Enlightenment, the decline of religious authority and the consoli-dation of colonialism” (Awakening 231). The development of this ideology during the eighteenth century came after China and Japan



foreclosed on European entry into and operations within their prov-inces a century earlier, with some notable exceptions. Thereafter, the vanguard of encounter shifted to central Asian countries such as Nepal and Tibet impinging upon British colonial rule in India.

In opposition to the enlightenment view, which placed at its foundation a sovereign subject defined by “individuality” (Seigel 4) engaged with an objective world (with dualism as its analytic core), the Romantic pursuit of enlightenment endorses “self- annihilation” (Blake Milton 44.2) as the vehicle of “anti-self-consciousness” (Hartman 52), approaching the realization of the state of “negative capability” defined as the experience of “no identity” (Keats 492, 501) that for these writers becomes the “fulfillment and [re]awakening of [Western] Enlightenment” epistemology (Brown “Romanticism” 38). Given that Buddhism long recognized the sovereign self as the primary impediment to enlightenment (as implied by the verse from the Dhammapada above), the epistemological connection between a broad range of Romantic writers and Buddhism becomes apparent, with Western thought arriving through a circuitous cognitive route at the same insight (as implied by the epigram drawn from Kant’s What is Enlightenment?), since the “so-called self occurs only in relation to the other” (Hayward and Varela 246). Buddhism and Romanticism share the recognition “that the human mind was its own trap” (30), to borrow Dennis McCort’s apt phrase, and strive “to convert [this trap] into an energy finer than intellect” (Hartman 48), a mental energy requiring an “unlearning” that re/cognizes the dualism of subject/object relations. Thus, Romanticism arrives at the same insight located in Buddhist thought “that our ordinary egocentric consciousness is a limited and impoverished consciousness without foundation in ‘reality’” (Watts 128). This recognition becomes an analytic vehicle capable of deconstructing what Blake termed the specter of selfhood by dismantling the “categorical structures of the delusive binarist mind” (McCort 34), a particular critique of the self undertaken intensely by several German Romantic writers. Novalis proposed that the self resides “where inner world and outer world touch,” a construct leading to the recognition that “the self, con-ceived as an autonomous entity, [is] relatively unreal” (McCort 167). Friedrich Schlegel, another member of the Jena group, pushes this view further still, arriving at a psychic state in which “antinomies” must be “understood as dynamic, transparent, mutually interpene-trating phases of the illumined consciousness” (McCort 34).

The case argued here, then, is not one of direct influence or par-allel development, since most Romantic writers manifesting this



coincidence of philosophical thought could not know with any specificity “anything about Buddhism . . . because no information on the subject was available in Europe” (Batchelor Verses 46). While Batchelor here actually overstates the case, as subsequent analysis will confirm, his sense that writers such as Coleridge and Keats could come to analogous conclusions from within Western epistemic modes identifies the trajectory along which Romantic Dharma argues its case. While the deep doctrines of Buddhism antecede Romanticism by some 2,300 years, the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reaction to “the basis of selfhood in Western [enlightenment] cul-ture” (Seigel 5) moved in complementary directions to Buddhism’s commitment to uproot a sovereign self as the cure to collective suf-fering. Thus, the argument launched here remains somewhat elusive, the development of critical coincidence without direct “influence” at different temporal moments and only made apparent through direct cultural encounter (thus another form of synchronicity). Buddhism comes into critical resolution precisely at the historical moment when evolving Romantic views of enlightenment come into confluence with those already present in, and just then emerging from, Eastern elabo-rations of enlightenment embedded in works such as The Lotus Sutra (the first canonical work of Buddhism translated into a European language from Sanskrit). Tantalizing hints of this view were equally embedded in Hindu literature as well, as exemplified in the famous translation of the Bhagavad-Gita by Charles Wilkins (in 1783), the first work of Sanskrit translated into a European language. While Buddhism’s textual emergence into European understanding was somewhat slower than other world religions (due to the geopolitical and linguistic dispersion of the dharma across vast distances and into numerous languages widely separated from its source), its “positivistic” and “objective” (Nietzsche Twilight 129–130) approach to spiritual practice, once discerned, easily interacted with the evolving Romantic form of enlightenment epistemology that strove to supplant mechani-cal and dualistic views of intellection during the nineteenth century.3 Hopefully, the juxtaposed epigrams capture the convergent views of enlightenment within the philosophy and practice of Buddhism and Romanticism that this assay seeks to illuminate. In both its Romantic and Buddhist guises, self-annihilation serves as the primary path to enlightenment, thereby establishing inner revolution as the necessary boundary condition for all successful outer revolutions, a position long associated with Romantic writing published in the wake of the French Revolution and its varied by-products.



Such a shared fundamental principle would quite likely predict, if not predicate, the presence of other affinities, yet when seeking such connections in what initially seemed the most relevant body of criticism, published research concentrated on colonial conditions and their solidification into imperialism during the nineteenth cen-tury, I found little work directed toward illuminating this important phase of cultural encounter. Arguably, this critical “blind spot” first occurred in Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, which established a tightened focus on certain geopolitical zones of the Orientalist project—therein solidifying into hegemonic critical influence—and which continued in most subsequent Orientalist and colonialist stud-ies post-Said.4 Within most discussions focused on colonialism and Orientalism, the sutras and commentaries flowing into Europe from Asia generally and from the trans-Himalayan region and the Indian subcontinent specifically, form a significant discursive and critical absence within those collective practices termed “Orientalism,” as they relate to Romanticism.

In recent work focused more narrowly on colonial entanglements during the Romantic era, few direct connections are made between the terms “Buddhism” and “Romanticism.”5 While the encounter between Buddhism and European Romanticism certainly manifest structurally Said’s description of the Occidental striving to contain the Oriental through the projection “of power, of domination, [and] of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said Orientalism 5), Buddhist dharma itself, once translated and circulated, revealed its own “narratives of emancipation and enlightenment” (Said Imperialism xxvi) capable of resisting enclosure by Western enlightenment epis-temology precisely by manifesting its rational principles and proce-dures (systematic organization and analysis) as the very foundation for the exploration of individual experience (spiritual practice). After Buddha and Berkeley alike, “the human and the natural share the same absence of origin and essence, the same bodilessness, the same lack of density and mass, the same inaccessibility to conventional logic and intellect” (Rudy Wordsworth 6). Further still, the dharma began to exert considerable counterinfluence in Europe and America. Michael J. Franklin makes a similar point in relation to Sir William Jones’s exploration and reception of Hindu texts, with Orientalism often operating “as a cultural counter-sphere” capable of undermin-ing “classical orthodoxy and Eurocentric prejudice” and thereby challenging “Western assumptions concerning the automatic cultural superiority of the colonizing power” (Jones 84–5). This resistance



resulted in a body of texts and practices adopted and adapted by phi-losophers and poets in the second half of the nineteenth century and, in its Tibetan and Zen forms, established that strong presence in the West that continues to this day.

Given that renewed contact between Buddhism and Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century brought to a dramatic climax the second, intensive phase of encounter (interpenetration rather than encounter defined subsequent relations), the absence of critical atten-tion might seem strange, yet historical conditions themselves help account for the discursive absence of Buddhism within Romantic studies concerned with colonialism, imperialism, and Orientalism. After all, the particular focus of Sir William Jones, the man most responsible for inaugurating the “Oriental Renaissance” that swept through Europe and the United States across the nineteenth century, was on Muslim law and Hindu mythology (as evidenced by the flow of translations and poetic adaptations that occurred in the wake of his arrival in Calcutta). As Rick Fields observes, in How the Swans Came to the Lake: “If Jones had wanted to converse with Buddhist scholars, as he had with Brahmins, he would have had to go north to Tibet or south to Ceylon, Siam, or Burma” (46). Although Jones’s surface knowledge of Buddhism kept it firmly within the broad mythic frame-work of Hinduism (he continued to see the “Sage of the Shakyas” as “the ninth incarnation of Vishnu” [Fields 47]), he nonetheless estab-lished in his first two years in India the primary vehicles for the sub-sequent flowering of Buddhism into Western consciousness, creating the Asiatick Society of Bengal and its influential journal. The impor-tance of the latter to the articulation of Buddhist work for European scholars can be seen in the journal’s premiere issue, which included “fairly reliable reports [on Buddhist texts and cultures] from Ceylon and Tibet” (Fields 47).6

Other historical conditions also rendered it difficult to gain a summative knowledge of Buddhism, difficulties deeply embedded in the complex geopolitical and cultural history of India and adja-cent nations for a millennium prior to Jones’s assumption of judicial authority in Calcutta. First, the teachings of the Buddha “had ceased to exist on the sub-continent” (Batchelor Awakening 232) and had been virtually eradicated from its homeland of India “by the four-teenth century” (Lopez 53). Second, as Buddhism came into con-tact with other cultures, revered figures often “morphed” through appropriation and transmutation, since Buddhist dispersal had always been accompanied by accommodation of receptive bodies of prior knowledge and local practices. The most visible example might be the



transformation of the bodhisattva of compassion Avalokiteśvara into Kuan-yin in China and Chenrezig in Tibet (accompanied by a shift in gender in the former). Third, after Buddha’s parinibbānna (Pāli), his passage into “nirvāna” (Skt.) after his death, two major approaches to Buddhist practice emerged from “the first Buddhist council, held three months” thereafter (Bodhi 6): the Therevāda, (Pāli for “the way of the elders”) and the Mahāyāna (Sanskrit for “the great vehicle”), which focused respectively on individual versus collective liberation (Keown 300). Finally, the primary languages of the dharma were sub-sequently translated into national languages and their subdialects in the countries wherein Buddhist practice was established, which were widely dispersed throughout the Asian continent. Thus, long before the second phase of encounter during the Romantic era, the eradica-tion of Buddhism as a practice within its birthplace made it extremely difficult to discern, since its material traces resided in sparse archi-tectural ruins and sculptural figures in northern India, and similar objects of veneration scattered across China, Japan, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam. These architectural and sculptural traces took even longer to identify, only brought to light by Alexander Cunningham, who “secured the development of archaeol-ogy in India through the establishment of the Archaeology Survey” in 1861 (Schwab 42). The textual body of the dharma was, as well, dispersed across vast geophysical spaces and spread across numerous languages, although those primary to the emergence of the major sutras within Romantic Europe were Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan.

The textual body through which Buddhism emerged into European consciousness, then, was itself a counterflow of books, manuscripts, and texts, with the dharma often returning to northern India through the same paths by which it had initially disappeared from its original location. Agents and the agency of British authority in Calcutta (the eastern seat of economic and political control exerted by the East India Company; current Kolkata) were prime players in the process and quite often pursued these ends with mixed motives difficult to categorize easily. Unlike the Islamic law and Hindu mythology that first occupied the attention of Jones, where a body of unified texts awaited scholastic scrutiny and cultural assimilation, the major treatises of Buddhism required on-site collection of widely varying manuscripts and texts subsequently transmitted to centers of Oriental philology for translation. Only then could scholar- adventurers com-pare canonical works received from numerous sources across vast geographical and linguistic divides and place them within a uni-fied semiotic framework. The process of emergence was quite slow,



unfolding with deliberation shaped by complexity. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Buddhism was not only known in the West but had begun to exert a strange attraction on its Occidental Other. In order to place the intellectual coincidence of Buddhism and Romanticism in proper context, I will undertake a brief summary of the phased encounter, which can thereby establish the shifting cul-tural conditions that created an environment conducive for the flow-ering of the dharma in nineteenth-century Europe.

Initial Encounters between Buddhism and the West

The process of encounter between Buddhism and the West was a slow one, with initial encounters projected as far back as the Eastern con-quests of Alexander the Great and made more complex by Buddhism’s exile from India through several phases of Islamic conquest. Buddhist doctrine and texts, originally recorded in Pāli and Sanskrit, were sub-sequently disseminated via the circulation of Buddhist sages and sub-sequent translation projects throughout Asia, moving northward into China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet and southeastward into Bali, Bhutan, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The theological colonialism of Catholicism inaugurated the long encounter leading to Romanticism, and the first recorded contact between a European and a “Buddhocratic government” (Batchelor Awakening 93) official occurred at the invitation of the Mönge Khan, who invited all reli-gious leaders (including Pope Innocent IV) to send representatives to the Karakorum court in May 1254.

The occasion was straightforward; the Khans sought presentations from all the world’s religions to assess that they would endorse to stabilize interior relations across their sprawling empire. As Stephen Batchelor indicates, “Both Christian and Buddhists had similar motives for being there: to persuade Mönge Khan—at the time the world’s most powerful man—to convert to their religion” (Awakening 82). This first “attempt at interfaith dialogue” (90) brought into Asia the Franciscan friar William of Rubrick, who bore the ideological banner of Christianity in the dialogue and whose authority rested on two papal bulls that challenged the mundane and spiritual authority of the Mongols. However, after only eight months and (given his papal charge) predictably intolerant behavior earning few converts, he was expelled for urging, in a report to Louis IX, that Europe wage “war against them [the Khans]” (91). Mönge Khan ultimately con-verted to Mahāyāna Buddhism in its Tibetan form. With the death of



Mönge, his younger brother, Kublai, assumed authority and assured “the rise of Tantric Buddhism” (Drew 185) by investing political authority to Sakya Pandita, a high Tibetan lama who through this “investment” of authority established the presence of Buddhism in Mongolia to this day and secured the Buddhocratic structure of the Tibetan government (a structure only ended by the Chinese occupa-tion in 1959). Thus, Sakya Pandita, who translated numerous sutras from Sanskrit into Tibetan, is not only a crucial figure for the “renais-sance of Buddhism in Tibet” (Davenport 2) through the exchange of scholars and scholarship between India and Tibet but a mediat-ing figure chiefly responsible for the dispersion of the dharma into northern Asia.7

One of the critical synchronicities from which Romantic Dharma emerged is located in the confluence of the historical encounter between and the critical examination of Orientalism undertaken by John Drew’s pioneering work India and the Romantic Imagination and its chapter-length discussion of “Coleridge: ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Rise of Tantric Buddhism.” Drew’s exploration of the histori-cal period at the foundation of the poem, the political and theologi-cal intrigue unfolding within the Karakorum court of the Khans in the thirteenth century, provides solid groundwork to establish his-torical connections between Buddhism and Romanticism reflected in Coleridge’s poem, since its cultural setting coincides with the opening of the first phase of systematic and intensive encounter. Drew offers the most tantalizing traces of potential overlap between Buddhism and Romanticism and aptly describes the counterflow of information from the circumference to center of colonial endeavors. The textual dynamic of counterflow provides the critical context within which to understand the linguistic and textual paths by which Buddhism emerged fully into European consciousness, since the process “was concerned above all with texts” (Lopez 52).8 For Coleridge’s “frag-mented” “Kubla Khan,” the evocation of the Orient flows directly through the Occidental work Purchas’ Pilgrimage (1614), which Coleridge evokes in the work’s preface, but other works as diverse as The Works of Marco Polo, Cook’s narrative of his second voyage, the works of Thomas Burnet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night have also been identified as subsources by relentless scholarly attention after Jonathan L. Lowes’s famous study The Road to Xanadu (Milligan 36–41, 128 n. 18). When these direct influ-ences are supplemented by the poet’s knowledge of poetic works pub-lished by Jones and the scholastic codification of Oriental work in his newly launched Asiatick Journal, convergent literary and linguistic



currents are established that feed those fluid and fleeting impressions of “the Tarter court” (Drew 194) that dominate the dreamscape of Coleridge’s opiated vision of Xanadu (Drew 194–201; Milligan 36–45). More important for this study, Drew persuasively argues that Coleridge was aware, “as few in his time were[,] of . . . the Buddhist lamas of Tibet” and even suggested “the image of the Dalai Lama” as the epitome of “the incarnate Buddha” (Drew 224).

While contact between Europeans and Buddhism was rather spotty after Friar William’s departure from Karakorum, spiritual colonialism, which placed Catholic countries on the frontline of con-tact, intensified during the next 300 years and defined the first inten-sive phase of contact. This spiritual endeavor reached a momentary crescendo in the middle of the sixteenth century with the arrival of Francis Xavier in Goa in 1549, who sought “to evangelize the newly acquired territories of south India” (Batchelor Awakening 161) that were placed under Portuguese authority after the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 (when Pope Alexander VI literally divided the world between Portugal and Spain into zones of Catholic control). Unlike the fail-ure experienced by Friar William, Xavier experienced considerably more success in the conversion of people to Christianity in India, and Xavier’s experience, on first contact with Zen Buddhists (in 1549), seemed to offer the promise of further conversionary opportuni-ties, although founded on a mistaken perception of strong intersec-tions between spiritual commitments and practices in Buddhism and Christianity. In a curious case of meconassaince (misrecognition), the Shingon monks with whom Xavier came into contact (and know-ing of his arrival from India) mistook his Christianity “for a form of Buddhism unknown in Japan,” while the in-depth study of Ch’an (Zen) through Dogen’s works convinced the Jesuit to conclude that Buddhism might be a mutated “form of Christianity” (167).

Although a short span of shared intellection and mutual trust ensued, this quickly collapsed as misrecognition gave way to better knowledge and eventually to open hostility, especially after Xavier explained the Trinitarian foundation of Catholicism, which was ridiculed by the monks. Nonetheless, Xavier’s spiritual force was considerable, and he achieved notable converts during his two-year residency in Japan, including to the shock of monks the Zen master Kesshu. In 1551 Xavier returned to Goa and prepared to augment his theological gains by seeking entry into China, yet when he sought entry to the mainland, imperial authorities denied him access (quite likely due to reports of recent success in India and Japan). He died on a small island off the Canton coast in 1552. Other Jesuits, notably



Matteo Ricci (in Peking) and Christovao Ferreira (in Kyoto), assumed the mantle and continued the Jesuit mission: in the former, one can discern shadows of those shared attributes that come into coincidence in the nineteenth century; in the latter, one finds the most infamous early European convert to Buddhism (Batchelor Awakening 169–83; Cieslik 1).

While initial misrecognition seemed to disclose shared affinities between Buddhism and Christianity, the Jesuits, including Xavier, ultimately viewed the former as “a vulgar idolatry inspired by the devil” (Batchelor Awakening 171), a statement echoing the views expressed earlier by Marco Polo, and perceived it as the primary obstacle to its own theocolonial aims in the East. The formidable Ricci arrived in Goa in 1578 and settled at the new Portuguese outpost of Macao in 1582. He perfectly embodied the Jesuit ideal achieved during the Renaissance: he was thoroughly versed in the arts and sciences; he was gifted in the acquisition of languages and dialects; he was totally dedicated to papal authority, and he was physically capable of with-standing the rigors of spiritual colonialism. After his five-year stay in India, Ricci entered China in 1583 and achieved fluency in Chinese after almost twelve years of arduous study, and he then crafted a book of maxims “drawn from various classical authors and from the church fathers,” which he offered as a gift to “a prince of the Ming ruling house who was living in Nanchang” (Spence 3).

Ricci plunged deeply into both “the Confucian classics” and Buddhist doctrine, coming to conclude that their shared views of “non-self and transparency” led analytically to “nihilism” (Batchelor Awakening 171), a view made more interesting in that the first full presentation of these concepts within Europe unfolded through the circulation of a Tibetan document across the entire span of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries that defied the best efforts at translation by Oriental philologists in Russia and France. He also drafted a book explaining the mnemonic technique of the “memory palace,” a mental edifice erected through creative visu-alization of “images” made popular during the Renaissance, writ-ten in fluent Chinese, which he presented to Jiangxi, the head of an empowered family “at the apex of Chinese society” (Spence 5–6). This technique found fertile ground, especially given that the practice of Buddhism itself already involved an analogous process of creative visualization in contemplative meditation. This use of the creative imagination, as it came to be known in Romantic Europe, forms a significant element of mental discipline later connecting the prac-tice of Buddhist and Romantic modes of enlightenment. Ricci also



adopted, somewhat surprisingly, a policy of relative tolerance regard-ing indigenous spiritual practices, an approach later taken up by the British in India during the administration of Warren Hastings.9

Even as Ricci lay dying in Peking, the Portuguese Christovao Ferreira set sail for Asia, and following his arrival in 1600 to Goa, he undertook a period of study in philosophy and theology required by those selected as spiritual warriors in the competition for colonial hegemony that began to develop between Catholicism and Protestant countries entering the arena (i.e. England and Holland). Upon com-pletion of his studies, Ferreira was transferred to Macao, where he was ordained and assigned to the mission in Japan. Within seven years of his arrival in Japan, Ferreira had a masterful command of Japanese, but the Japan within which Ferreira operated was vastly different from that experienced by Xavier. Beginning in 1614 the Jesuits experienced escalating persecution from the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate (Cieslik 2–7), who were also pursuing trade agreements with the Dutch. He ultimately became procurator for the Jesuit mis-sion in 1620 and leader of the Japanese Diocese in these repressive times, lamenting that “the reasons the shogun gives for the perse-cution, namely, the interests of the state . . . [were fed] by the Dutch heretics” (quoted in Cieslik 7). Ferreira’s view unveils another aspect of this first phase of contact, since the efforts directed from Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome faced increased competition as spiritual gave way to economic colonialism. Across this time frame, “Christianity was increasingly perceived as a potentially subversive movement [in Japan]” (Batchelor Awakening 178), and the ruling shogun finally suppressed Christianity by strict enforcement of a previously unim-plemented 1608 edict. Ferreira was arrested in 1633, apostatized (following five hours of torture), and eventually changed his name to Sawano Chūan, an act that sent shockwaves through Catholic missions in Asia and Europe alike and that helped compromise the legitimacy of Christianity in Japan and beyond. The appearance of Ferreira’s/Chūan’s anti-Christian A Disclosure of Falsehoods (Kengi-roku) three years later offered a point-by-point refutation of Christian doctrine, and with his death in 1650, the 100 year engagement between Catholic colonialism and the far east drew to a close. The third shogun, Iemitsu, in 1639, began to more intensely enforce the earlier expulsion edict, and shortly thereafter Japan and China simply closed its borders to all Catholic countries and its Jesuit shock troops. The zone of contact thereafter shifted increasingly to the Indian sub-continent and its trans- Himalayan region, with England, France, and Russia primarily replacing Portugal and Spain at the vanguard



of contact as enlightenment modes of economic colonialism replaced those driven by theological modes of conversion.

Most relevant to subsequent discussion in the last section of this and the heart of the next chapter focused on Alexander Csoma de Körös, the Jesuits had already moved into Tibet, establishing an early mission in Guge. By 1628, the Jesuit missions had penetrated as far as Shigatse before being expelled “on the advice of the 10th Karmapa” (Batchelor Awakening 190). This closed state of affairs continued into the opening decades of the eighteenth century, as geopolitical realignments among China, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet solidified the negative view toward European intrusion into numerous regions throughout the Asian theater of operation, a situation that shifted somewhat with the arrival of the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri to Lhasa in 1716. Desideri’s journey to Tibet anticipates in several details the journey later undertaken by Csoma. However, unlike Csoma, who sought on his own to seek the origins of the Hungarian language and people in central Asia, Desideri received his charge directly from the papal authority of Clement XI and actually made it to the city of the Dalai Lamas. Upon his arrival to Lhasa, the Jesuit was presented to Lhazang Khan, who instead of expelling him encouraged his culti-vation of Tibetan (and for reasons precisely parallel to the interfaith conference arranged by Mönge Khan in 1254). Within nine months the intrepid Desideri had completed an exposition of Christianity in Tibetan and immediately thereafter took a six-year plunge into the canonical elaborations of Tibetan Buddhism entitled Kangyur and Tengyur (Tibetan translations of the Buddha’s sutras and major Indian commentaries on those sutras, respectively). Ironically, as Stephen Batchelor notes, “Desideri never realized that what he was studying was Buddhism” (193), and more ironically still, the geopoli-tics of Europe, rather than overt hostility from indigenous political and religious regimes, disrupted Desideri’s mission and returned him to Rome in 1728, with his record of contact remaining undiscovered until 1875 and unpublished until 1904. By this time actual Tibetan texts began to circulate among European capitals of Oriental scholar-ship (ca.1710–1834), including St. Petersburg, and Russian imperial-ism began to play an enhanced role in the next phase of Buddhism’s slow emergence into European consciousness.

British Entanglements with Tibet

To open the eighteenth century, the Vatican formally prohibited Ricci’s practice of relative tolerance for indigenous religious practices,



which had become the accepted approach as the activities pursued by Desideri indicated. Once missionaries began to ridicule Chinese customs and values and even destroy statuary and other idols, the Confucian Manchu emperor simply closed China’s border, thereby concluding the spiritual colonial phase of Europe’s relationship with countries where Buddhism was prominent and widely practiced. Spiritual colonialism drew to a close once the states of China and Japan barred entrance to visitors from Catholic European countries, a development cited by Kant in his utopian Project for a Perpetual Peace, which acknowledged the wisdom of “the Chinese and Japanese, whom experience has taught to know the Europeans [and] wisely refuse their entry into the country” (Manuel 175). However, alternative paths of encounter developed rapidly throughout the trans-Himalayan regions of northern India (where British and Russian interests pursued eco-nomic and territorial, rather than the impure mixture of economic and spiritual colonialism) and the southEastern coast of India and the island of Ceylon (current Sri Lanka) and beyond (where Britain faced growing Dutch and French competition in the increasingly important countries of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and numerous island groups across in the South Pacific). Well before Sir William Jones arrived in India, British colonial authorities were already responding to various “internal and external pressures” emerging from administrative strategies of containment and control, especially as these pressures were applied by Russian imperial efforts directly north of the regions under British control.10 As well, one can detect an easing of tension in colonial relations with independent states such as Nepal and Tibet, and only one decade prior to the arrival of Jones, first contact between Tibet and the British government in Bengal (The East India Company) was inaugurated by the third Panchen Lama (then known as “the Teshoo Lama”), who was acting at the time as Regent for the very young Dalai Lama.11

On March 29, 1774, Warren Hastings received a poorly trans-lated letter from the Teshoo Lama seeking to resolve a border dis-pute that erupted in 1772 and that brought British military force to the borders of Tibet. A Bhutanese “desi” or lord named Zhidar (one of the Lama’s subjects) created the conflict when he attacked the autonomous country named Cooch Behar. When he invaded this “small state on Bengal’s northern borders,” Zhidar unwittingly cre-ated the conditions that turned the British colonial gaze northward and that led, ultimately, to the expansion of “British influence in the Himalayan region” (Teltscher “Lama” 91). The complexities involved



in and evolving out of this communiqué require quoting it at some length:

I have been repeatedly informed, that you have engaged in hostilities against the Dêh Terria, to which, it is said, the Dêh’s own criminal conduct, in committing ravages and other outrages on your frontiers, gave rise. As he is of a rude and ignorant race, past times are not des-titute of instances of the like faults. . . . Nevertheless his party has been defeated, many of his people have been killed, three forts have been taken from him, and he has met with the punishment he deserved. It is evident as the sun, that your army has been victorious . . . should you persist in offering further molestations to the Dêh Terria’s country, it will irritate both the Lama and all his subjects against you. Therefore, from a regard to our religion and customs, I request you will cease from all hostilities against him; and in doing this, you will confer the greatest favour and friendship upon me.12

As Kate Teltscher notes, the deposed Raja of Cooch Behar, appeal-ing for and receiving “military assistance from the British,” ceded by necessity the “sovereignty of the state to the East India Company” in exchange for direct intervention in the conflict (Teltscher Road 16–7). With the British success in defeating Zhidar came the potential threat, from the Tibetan point of view, of further northward expan-sion, upon which the Panchen Lama sought to foreclose through his function as “mediator” (Turner xi). The letter, while self-effacing and humble, while graceful and loquacious, while filled with solicitude and salutation, also conveyed the implied threat of overt hostilities and widespread rebellion in its view that British failure to suspend military activity would rouse the resistance of “both the Lama and all his subjects against you” (Turner xi).

Following receipt of the letter and an extremely short period of considered reception, the Governor-General “presented the Panchen Lama’s letter to the Bengal Council the same day” (Teltscher Road 19), Hastings and the Council responded with a letter requesting that a delegation led by the Scotsman George Bogle be received in Lhasa to formalize relations. After initial rejection, Hastings’s offer was finally accepted, granting British access to Bhutan and Tibet. Upon his arrival to Desheripgay, Tibet, on October 12, 1774, George Bogle became “the first British traveler to enter the region” (Teltscher “Lama” 91), and he remained with the Teshoo Lama for almost seven months (returning to Bengal on April 8 of the fol-lowing year). Again as noted by Teltscher, Hastings certainly had



imperial reasons for the mission, since he was “motivated by a desire for information, the kind of empirical evidence favored by theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment. The mission was both an exercise in reconnaissance and an intellectual project” (Teltscher “Lama” 94). Yet Bogle and Hastings both viewed the delegation as functioning beyond purely venal colonial aspirations, since Hastings argued that the mission “was as much textual as commercial or diplomatic” and further hoped to “imprint on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence” (quoted in Teltscher “Lama” 94, 95) through such texts. Bogle shared this view of indigenous literature and culture as well, an attitude articulated much later in a letter to his brother, when he expressed his aspirations to provide “to the whole world an Account of a Country hitherto little known” (quoted in Teltscher “Lama” 95).

While Bogle’s narrative offered an enlightened and generous appraisal of the Teshoo Lama, another narrative of similar mission, written by Captain Samuel Turner, very much highlights the colonial imperatives at work in the background during the second British mis-sion to Tibet. While Bogle and the Lama established a warm personal relationship, the machinations of Turner achieved material advantages for the East India Company and the British government in Calcutta:

I have obtained the Regent Chanjoo Cooshoo’s promise of encourage-ment to all merchants, natives of India, that may be sent to traffic in Tibet, on behalf of the government of Bengal. No impediment, there-fore, now remains in the way of merchants, to prevent their carrying their commercial concerns into Tartary. (Turner 374)

The appendices attached to Turner’s Narrative are equally illumi-nating of the somewhat contradictory aspects of his first delegation, since within these attachments one can see the play of a more familiar colonial agenda. The first appendix offered “views taken on the spot” (Turner “Title Page”) compiled by Lieutenant Samuel Davis, which assessed the military, political, and social conditions defining Tibetan cultural processes and which, therein, provided the type of intelli-gence sought by the government in Calcutta. As well, in a summation offered by the naturalist Robert Saunders (“Observations Botanical, Mineralogical, and Medical”), one can clearly see the type of calcula-tion of material resources at the core of colonial endeavors across the Indian subcontinent in its older guise. Indeed, Saunders’s tables of commodities (Turner 381–4) are organized by Tibetan imports and



exports with its surrounding countries and foreground items such as “gold dust, diamonds, pearls, coral, musk, and wool” (Turner 381).

Strangely, given the rather successful outcome of the first mis-sion, the collapse of colonial pretensions was occasioned by a personal situation (another synchronistic incident). All narratives, letters, and reports agree that during his seven-month stay at Desheripgay, George Bogle developed a warm and close relationship with the Panchen Lama based on mutual respect, which clearly clashed with the view of Tibetan lamas as “little better than shamans of superior dignity” voiced by the Scottish doctor John Bell—who much earlier had accom-panied a Russian delegation through Mongolia and China (Teltscher “Lama” 100). Bogle’s attitude much more closely resembled that to be pursued by Jones, and as Turner reported, “Mr Bogle so ingrati-ated himself into [the Teshoo Lama’s] confidence, as to be intrusted [sic], some time after, with considerable remittance in money, for the purpose of building a temple and a dwelling house, for the accommo-dation of his votaries to Bengal” (Turner xv), which was accomplished by 1779. The hope of establishing permanent ties between the gov-ernments of Bengal and Lhasa ended somewhat abruptly, once Bogle returned to India. When the Panchen Lama agreed, several years later and after long solicitation, to visit the Emperor of China, he actually invited Bogle to join him in Peking (quite likely hoping to use British influence as a buffer against Chinese control), yet the potential long-term relationship, founded upon the personal rather than colonial, collapsed in a curious synchronicity:

Unfortunately, however, the death of the Lama [upon arriving in Peking] and that of Mr. Bogle, which happened at nearly the same time, clouded this fair prospect, and completely frustrated every expec-tation which had been formed. I am sorry to add too, that events, of a much more recent date, have concurred to throw almost insuperable difficulties in the way of re-establishing our intercourse with Tibet, at least for some considerable time to come. (Turner xvi)

With these two deaths, the hopes for establishing formal relations with Tibet collapsed just as Turner predicted, and although during the period that British contact with Tibet was lost, British author-ity continued already-established “political relations with Nepal” (Marshall 60, 452). The relations of these countries (Nepal and Tibet) erupted into war in 1792. Thus, more particular knowledge of Tibet as the repository of Buddhist texts would await the efforts of



a solitary figure, Alexander Csoma, who compiled and published the first Tibetan-English dictionary with the help of the Asiatick Society, which was founded by Sir William Jones the same year as Csoma’s birth.

From Orientalism to Romanticism

The pace of literal and intellectual contact between Europeans and Buddhist practices and texts quickened “with the arrival of English civil servants in Calcutta around 1780,” and this British authority (shortly to shift from the East India Company to the Crown) under-stood that “languages would be the key to dominion” (Schwab 33). However, language itself would also provide a vehicle for instability in the passage from colonialism to imperialism, an insight emerging from the exportation to Great Britain of Indian culture and Hindu literature in the form of aesthetic, cultural, historical, philological, philosophical, and poetic works by Sir William Jones. When Jones was appointed to the judgeship that carried him to India, he had already seen service on the subcontinent and welcomed the oppor-tunity to escape “the seemingly insoluble problems of England” and to seek his “wealth” in a locale allowing him to combine “law and Oriental studies” (Cannon Oriental Jones 194). Yet somewhat sur-prisingly, Jones’s thinking from the beginning of his relocation indi-cated a “startling [additional] motivation” (Cannon 194) for one so deeply embedded in the colonialist enterprise—one actually linked to his endorsement of the “Enlightenment principle of association” and the application of “new scientific techniques” (Franklin Jones 84, 120) to the language and literature of India. Jones’s arrival created the conditions shifting Orientalism into a phase not solely governed by crass commercialism but newly expressive of a positive passion for “the dynamism and diversity of Indian culture.“13 As well, his approach to legal revisions sought to “establish a system whereby legal disputes in India would be adjudicated by Indian laws” (Weir 21). This relatively benign form of colonialism would collapse with the trial of Hastings and the expansion of a conversionary ideology there-after. However Jones was inspired by an intuitive “cultural empa-thy” (Franklin Jones 120) ignited during his initial engagement with Indian literature (even before mastering Sanskrit) and informed by a “respectful and sympathetic response to Hindu culture” (Franklin Jones 118). As Garland Cannon suggests, Jones thought “he could



really serve people . . . [and] serve humanity, a goal [that required] his return to Orientalism” (Cannon 194, 195).

Cannon’s summation reflects the argument that Jones mounted at the end of his essay “On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” which was appended to his volume of Poems (1777) prepared prior to his arrival to India:

If the principle writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed with the usual advantages of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our places of education, where every branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be open for specula-tion; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind; we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate.14

The statement indicates the presence of materials already catalogued in libraries as a result of prior counterflows of indigenous materials to the homeland, asserts the importance of further study of such works for a better understanding “of the human mind,” and expresses the hope that such materials will provide “a new set of images and simili-tudes [that] future poets might imitate.” Of course, the enlighten-ment roots of Jones’s education shine through these hopes, and they indicate his frame of mind upon arrival to Calcutta five years later.

In spite of such motives, which upon occasion eerily echo the sense of “white burden” articulated late in the Romantic period and codi-fied across the Victorian Age (the specific shift from Romantic to Modern modes of Orientalism), Jones remained embedded in the power structure of the colonizer and implicated in the imperial pro-cess as “a scholar and judge in the Hastings administration in Bengal” (Makdisi 106). His primary function, through his judiciary activities, literally established Jones as its arm of law. Yet, even as Jones “put his knowledge of India directly to work for Hastings and the East India Company,” his assimilation and imitations of Hindu poetic subjects and forms created “an ‘excess’ of knowledge that served no immediate administrative purpose” (Makdisi 106–7) and that shaped a significant current of the counterflow that impacted a broad range of British Romantic writing in its second generation, as Nigel Leask (2–12), Saree Makdisi, and others have analyzed in detail.



The arrival of Jones made official a type of administrative revalua-tion reflective of an essential change, one that pursued the accumula-tion of cultural rather than economic commodities to be transported to Britain (Makdisi 108–9). One of Jones’s first acts, the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and its influential and widely dissemi-nated journal the following year, created vehicles for the intellectual and scholarly pursuit of ideas, rather than material goods, and in the process, through its journal, created a linguistic and textual counter-flow through which Buddhism—as a distinct body of thought and practice from Hinduism—slowly emerged into European conscious-ness. As Franklin argues with considerable force, Jones ingeniously applied the comparative dimension of enlightenment thought and methods to forge direct connections between Indian and European languages and their cultural and literary forms, crafting through this research a mechanism by which the colonized “subject” provided a vehicle to critique the abundant colonial abuses “of British oppression in India” (Cannon 194):

Orientalism might operate as a cultural counter-sphere to attack clas-sical orthodoxy and Eurocentric prejudice. . . . The appropriation of Indian culture as opposed to Indian loot would not only help reform of colonial administration, but also question Western assumptions concerning the automatic cultural superiority of the colonizing power (Franklin Jones 84–5).

Jones’s notion, again noted by Franklin, “was in many respects a rev-olutionary idea,” since such a view would recognize “that servants of colonial power might prove moral agents of administrative reform and cultural renaissance” (Franklin Jones 118). The arrival of Jones crystallized a rather dramatic shift in Britain’s view of the Orient (as metonymized by India), a shift from one paradigm (the development and economic exploitation of the East) to another (the understanding and intellectual importation of the East). Makdisi argues in similar fashion, proposing that “the romantic period marked a transitional moment between . . . opposed sets of colonial projects” (Romantic Imperialism 101). As discussed in the following chapter, the “transi-tional moment,” especially as embodied in the institutional establish-ment of the Asiatic Society, proved crucial for the “re-emergence” of Buddhism from European centers of Oriental scholarship.

Given such a change in imperial administrative direction, the engagement with and representation of indigenous materials across the Indian subcontinent cannot be reduced, as Edward Said seems



to propose in Orientalism, to a problematic “form of antihumanism” (Otterspeer 195). Said’s influential text proposes that the primary ideological aspect of Orientalist practice reifies “the sense of Western power over the Orient” (46), yet this view becomes untenable relative to the emergence of Buddhism itself, which capably exerted a broad counterinfluence in Europe across the nineteenth century. Quite clearly, given the paucity of attention paid to Buddhism in most critical analyses of historical Orientalism from Said to the present, this aspect of Orientalism needs additional scholarly attention, especially since it coincided with shifts in British imperial goals and the explosive emer-gence of Romanticism: “The relationship between the Orient and Romanticism is less a local and temporal one than an essential one” (Schwab 482). Furthermore, unlike almost all other Eastern religions and systems of thought, Buddhism has cast long shadows across the West, even—in the case of Tibetan Buddhism—finally establishing a significant presence within it.

Jones himself seems to propose using Indian literary and cultural forms in a deconstructive fashion to critique British imperial preten-sions and intentions (expressive of a deconstructive element as one dimension of modern Orientalism itself), and as Leask has argued, “the internal and external pressures determining and undermining such representations are more various than Said’s thesis will allow” (2). Indeed, in Franklin’s assessment, Said, in ignoring the dynamic and far-reaching alterations inaugurated by Jones, actually places under erasure “co-operative process and the rich opportunities it presented for transculturation” (Franklin Jones 119). This very trans cultural exchange—linguistically driven and textually embodied—demarcates a significant shift in the British view of the Orient.

In the solid assessment offered by Peter J. Kitson, “Jones’s Orientalism did not simply impose a colonialist discourse upon India, facilitating British administration. It also partially fostered Indian nationalism by helping in the process of liberating its writing from Brahman control” (Fulford and Kitson 16). In the apt expression offered by Tzvetan Todorov, “It is only through talking to the Other (as opposed to issuing orders), that the Other is granted a subjectivity comparable to the Self” (quoted in Teltscher High Road 92). Jones, and to a lesser extent Warren Hastings (immediately prior to his trial and ultimate acquittal before parliament), seemed to embody this new dialogic relationship and provided physical mechanisms to bring the Other home through the counterflow of textual translations, appropriations, and transmutations. Equally relevant to this discus-sion of the emergence of Buddhism into the West, again as proposed



by Kitson, is that this “new system of British imperialism appears to have been emerging at roughly the same time as what we know as Romanticism began to appear” (13), and those direct epistemic changes converge with “a major overhaul in imperial policy” (Makdisi 110) adopted by Hastings, who “was no puppet of Church and State” (Weir 25).

At this time, Russia emerged as England’s chief competition in the Great Game unfolding in trans-Himalaya, eclipsing waning French influence. Russian colonial motivations derived from the deathbed vision of Peter the Great of global dominion: “From his death bed, it was said, he had secretly commanded his heirs and successors to pur-sue what he believed to be Russia’s historical destiny—the domination of the world. Possession of India and Constantinople were the twin keys to this, and he urged them not to rest until both were firmly in Russian hands” (Hopkirk 20). Knowledge of this provocative inspira-tion circulated widely in Europe, and like Great Britain, Russia strove to extend its influence in the region, while also solidifying its influence in Mongolia. The expansionist-oriented Catherine sought to honor Peter’s hopes, and in 1791, she “carefully considered a plan to wrest India from Britain’s ever-tightening grip” (Hopkirk 21). While colo-nial, economic, and political relations between England and Russia intensified in the regions north of India, the East India Company continued to function as the primary economic engine in the region. However, faced with mounting debt and internal challenges to the “virtual monopoly [on India’s] commerce” (Hopkirk 24) it enjoyed at the beginning of the Romantic age, “the directors faced ever- mounting debts and the perpetual threat of bankruptcy” (Hopkirk 25) after the turn of the century. The Company’s long-established prag-matic practice of “toleration of the indigenous religious and cultural practices of the subcontinent” shifted under the influence “of the Evangelical movement in the 1790s,” with the corporation adopting “a newly hostile stance towards Asian religions” (Franklin Jones 223), a reaction no doubt motivated by continued intellectual drift toward theological relativity implicit within European enlightenment’s “gen-eral programme of demystifying both religion and the religions” (Yolton 447). Such attempts at objectivity required an intellectual and ethical “relativity to local [religious] conditions” in order to further the quest for “an unwritten moral code common to all humanity” (Hampson 106), an implicit motive within comparative religion in the nineteenth century. The evolving nature of colonialism itself created altered linguistic demands, since attention shifted to languages—Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan—located on the northern and southern fringes



of British colonial control, and this linguistic shift of emphasis became the material source for those semiotic streams down which Buddhism continued to flow into Western knowledge.

The Instance of a Fragment

The punctuated and intermittent path by which knowledge of Buddhism crystallized in European consciousness is best captured, in my view, through the tale of a solitary textual fragment that circulated within learned centers of Oriental learning for over 100 years before receiving a definitive translation in 1831. This tale can serve as a transi-tion to the following chapter’s intensified focus on Alexander Csoma de Körös, who provided the translation. The tale also shows Russia’s entry as a key player in the “great game” of colonialism, demonstrates the circulation of textual materials to major centers of Oriental scholar-ship, and thereby functions as a metonymy for much of the discussion in this chapter. On July 4, 1832, H. H. Wilson, then secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, introduced the translation to members in order to highlight the work of a remarkably Romantic figure, Alexander Csoma, at the linguistic forefront of Tibetan Buddhism’s transmission/translation into English, although the humble scholar was a Hungarian national (Csoma, Tibetan Studies, 9–12). As Wilson’s brief remarks recount, the history of the fragment (an appropriate state of textuality as a symbolic connection to Romantic form evoked by “Kubla Khan”) unfolded across some of the terrain mapped previously.

The extremely difficult yet visually beautiful script had first entered European hands when the Eastward movement of Peter the Great’s colonial forces encountered sacked temples and ruined monasteries, and Ivan Licharov, Peter’s envoy, was dispatched to assess the situation (Batchelor Awakening 226–8), since the enlightenment czar hoped to discover gold in these newly occupied territories. However, the fantasized city of gold materialized as the abandoned “Buddhist tem-ple of Ablaikit,” and Licharov returned with only a few trinkets and a few loose pages of script in an unknown language (Batchelor 227). Since the script proved indecipherable to Peter’s Imperial Librarian, the first page of the loose bundle was shipped to the German philolo-gist J. B. Menke, without notable results, and the page returned to St. Petersburg. His curiosity now piqued, and perhaps fueled as well by the vision revealed on his deathbed, Peter sent the page to Abbé Bignon in Paris, who confirmed the text as Tibetan with the help of Etienne Fourmont (who was cataloguing a steady flow of central Asian manuscripts and texts transmitted to the Academie des Inscriptions).



Fourmont offered a preliminary Latin translation of the fragment, aided by a poor Tibetan-Latin dictionary compiled by the Capuchin priest Domenico de Fano, and returned it to St. Petersburg. At that point, Peter ordered the collection of additional Tibetan manuscripts and books, a command that went unheeded after his death in 1725. And yet the manuscript in question actually continued its slow cir-culation through the major European centers of Oriental knowledge (Csoma Tibetan Studies 13–5).

In 1747, a full generation after earlier attempts to translate it, this peculiar work received another translation by one Herr Müller (not to be confused with the late nineteenth-century Oriental scholar Max Müller) in Commentatio de Scriptus Tanguitics, which severely criti-cized Fourmont in the process. Müller proposed that the Commenatio offered marginal improvement and revealed it benefited from “the double aid of a Tangutan priest . . . and a Mongol student” working in the Imperial College in St. Petersburg (Wilson “Remarks” 9). Antione-Augustin Giorgi followed with further corrections of the page, which he appended to his Alphabetum Tibetanum (a copy of which was given to Csoma by William Moorcroft before his entry into Tibet), but the French sinologist Abel Rémusat, writing later during the Romantic period, found “nothing to admire” in all prior efforts, since neither “interpreters and commentators” had completely cracked the code of Tibetan and therefore lacked the proper frame of reference within which to place the enigmatic content of the fragment (Wilson “Remarks” 10; Batchelor Awakening 227–8).15 Without such a code and context, these scholars were ill-prepared to recognize, even after a century of concentrated effort, that the scrap of text encoded the first European appearance of the interrelated concepts of compassion and transparency placed at the foundation of all Buddhist systems.

As mentioned above, the point of Wilson’s presentation was to introduce not only the translation but the translator, the remarkable Csoma, who lived modestly in an almost monk-like state in the base-ment of the Asiatic Society and served as its occasional cataloguer and librarian. Batchelor has now identified the translated fragment as part of the Sutra on the Adherence to the Great Mantra, a Tibetan translation of a now lost Sanskrit “discourse by the Buddha Vairocana on the use of mantras to reach enlightenment” (Batchelor Awakening 229). Csoma’s translation, although revisited by scholars East and West, nonetheless retains its linguistic integrity:

Ignorant men do not know that all these (doctrines) have been thus explained by Chom dan das (the supreme [One]), the knower of all



and possessor of all, who in remote ages, through compassion for all [sentient] beings, addressed his mind to meditation upon the affairs of animate existence. The ignorant do not perceive the moral significance of moral things. It has been distinctly taught (by the Buddha) that the essential principle of morality is the non-entity (or transparency) of matter. (Csoma Tibetan Studies 12).

During the strongest phase of spiritual colonialism, such concepts were held in disdain by Xavier and other Jesuits. However, in the European intellectual context of enlightenment epistemology, the reception of these views had concord with George Berkeley’s exami-nation of phenomena and noumena, and he presents this position in his opening argument for “Of the Principles of Human Knowledge,” suggesting that “the existence of an idea consists in being perceived” (Turbayne 23). The Berkeley position crystallized in his phrase that “esse is percipi” and asserted that “[it is not] possible they [objects of sensation] should have any experience out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them” (23), an empirical analysis that estab-lished that “all sensible qualities, including tangible qualities, are mind-dependent” (Atherton 222).

Another important figure of the enlightenment, David Hume, had launched a critique of the “sovereign self” in A Treatise on Human Nature (1739): “But self or person is not any one impression . . . there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea” (299). Hume’s empirical analysis concluded in uncertainty, where “questions concerning personal identity can never be decided, and are regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties” (310). Hume’s argument, as Jerrold Seigel indicates, should not be “taken too easily as his last word on the subject” (125), although the analysis has tended to dominate subse-quent discussions of his critique of the self. For this study, however, Hume’s empirical analysis closely resembles that undertaken through the prajñapāramitā (Sanskrit for perfection of wisdom) literature of Buddhism, which placed the movement away from “a fixed identity” (Batchelor Verses 44) and the embrace of a “no-self” model at the core of Eastern forms of enlightenment (see chapter 3).

To open the nineteenth century, the French jurist and student of Oriental religions Jean-Denis Lanjuinais perceived precisely this con-nection between Asiatic concepts of self-emptying and self-overcoming,



seeing considerable compatibility between “Illuminism, Spinoza and Berkeley” and the views emerging from “India” (Schwab 161). Berkeley and Hume exerted extended influence across European philosophy and British Romanticism, and through them Western philosophic thought could locate its own arguments for the mediated state of the mate-rial world, one requiring participation rather than elaboration, one highly skeptical of purely mechanical models of mind and matter, one deeply suspicious of the sovereign self, and one, therefore, increasingly in accord with Eastern views of the “non-entity (or transparency)” of materiality and the “moral significance” achieved by overcoming “the reified splitting of self and other” (Low 263). With this emergent view, enlightenment epistemology moved into a second phase further fueled by Romantic art and philosophy in Britain, France, and Germany.


C h a p t e r

T h e St r a nge C a se of A l e x a n de r

Csom a de Körös

For early didst thou leave the world, with powersFresh, undiverted to the world without,Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.O life unlike to ours!

(Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy”)

From Orientalism to Romanticism

The lines above, from Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” were not written with the Hungarian philologist and scholar-adventurer Alexander Csoma de Körös in mind, but its catalogued tendencies fit him well. Csoma, from the small village Körös located in the Transylvania area of what is now Romania, played a pivotal role in the emergence of Buddhism in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. The story of the fragment from the “Sutra on the Adherence to the Great Mantra” places Csoma in a line of scholars working at the vanguard of an intense zone of linguistic and semi-otic interaction. Buddhism blossoms at the nexus where the unusual beauty and simplicity of Tibetan texts and its script, the extreme dif-ficulty of the concepts embedded within them, and their relationship to other primary languages of the dharma; the new religion coming into resolution, although a construct from without by the application of enlightenment methods, provided a primary layer of texts seen as



closest to the words of the sage of the Shakyas. By the time of Csoma’s journey to the East, the primary languages forming the body of the dharma—Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan—had arrived in Europe and were awaiting assimilation by the linguistic engine of enlightenment philology (comparative analysis) across the following forty years. The canonical/linguistic lineage of Buddhism in these languages had the strongest historical ties to the source (and to claims of authenticity) and were supported by references in languages of dispersion farther from India (e.g. Bhutanese, Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Nepalese, or Thai), which offered translations of works filtered through adaptation to and acculturation within the host country, its customs, and its language.

Relatively little is known about Csoma, and only three biogra-phies in English describe his life. Two of these, written by Hirendra Nath Mukerjee and Edward Fox, are little more than biographi-cal sketches, and the work most cited remains The Life and Works of Alexander Csoma written by Theodore Duka, a Hungarian com-patriot, although his work is itself dominated by quotations from Csoma and his works. All these works present an individual seen at the national level as the hero-hermit who walked to Tibet in search of the origins of the Hungarian language and the monkish scholar gypsy working along the shifting borders of on-site Oriental studies in trans-Himalaya. Duka’s biography, the first and most authoritative due to his close proximity in age, nationality, and region to Csoma (Duka was a Hungarian working in India), offered praise for his act of nationalism (as a Hungarian) and expressed admiration for Csoma’s Oriental studies (on Sanskrit and Tibetan). Duka discovered in the Asiatic Society’s library and its sequestered records room, which bore Csoma’s profound imprint, the primary manuscripts and texts that formed his biographical analysis of Csoma’s importance for both Hungary and Oriental studies.

Duka worked in India during the period of transition from the Governor-Generalship of the East India Company to the political rule of the British Raj, serving as Civil Surgeon for the region of Calcutta and later as Chief Medical Officer for the Monghir district along the Ganges. Twelve years after Csoma’s death, Duka first entered the Asiatic Society Library, which held the primary sources for his biog-raphy, and as M. Aurel Stein recounts in his commemorative address for his friend: “After that first search [in the Society’s archives and records] Duka never relinquished the ambition of rescuing for his compatriots and for all those interested in the history of Oriental


A l e x a n d e r C s o m a d e K ö r ö s 31

studies the memory of the noble life which Csoma had devoted, and in the end sacrificed, to the service of research” (18):

Before Duka published the results of his labours on Csoma, the fig-ure of that great scholar presented itself under two strikingly different aspects. In Hungary patriotic feeling cherished his memory as that of the adventurous student who, with the scantiest of means and noth-ing but his own enthusiasm to support him, had set out on his own feet towards distant Eastern lands in order to search in the wilds of Central Asia for the old home of the Hungarian nation. The first news of his scholarly labours in India had stirred patriotic pride when it tardily reached Hungary at the beginning of the thirties of the last century. But the true field of these labours, rigorously restricted as it was to Tibetan Buddhist literature, naturally failed to arouse any special interest at a time when serious study of Orientalia had scarcely begun in Hungary.1

One focus of Duka’s analysis of Csoma centered on his “strangely diffident reserved nature” (Stein 25), which accounts for only scant mention of him in letters and reports written by British functionaries (e.g. William Moorcroft, Captain Kennedy, or H. H. Wilson).

Csoma was reticent to stand in the eye of public approbation, in spite of his copious accomplishments and his lasting fame back in Hungary, and only one image (a painting that generated a poor line engraving prepared by a Hungarian artist visiting him in Calcutta) has come into the historical record. Such hazy information, when coupled with his motive for undertaking both his Oriental studies and his journey to the East, has created an “aura of Romance” (Batchelor Awakening 236) around him. More than any other individual involved in the “textual construction [of Buddhism]” (Masuzawa 126) within Europe during the second half of the Romantic period, Csoma fits well Lopez’s description of those Curators of the Buddha (1–30) responsible for bringing the sūtras into European awareness. The phrase rightly emphasizes the efforts of Oriental scholars to construct and disseminate the dharma, thereby “creating” the world religion known as Buddhism by the end of the nineteenth century. Csoma’s tale, like his definitive translation of the fragment that concluded chapter 1, epitomizes in one narrative the threads of those processes that led to the transmission of manuscripts and texts to the seats of Oriental scholarship and that gave rise to emergence of Buddhist thought and practice into European consciousness. Although often an absent presence in discussions of Romantic



Orientalism, Csoma’s education ref lects established enlightenment principles and his motivation ref lects emergent romantic imperatives, rendering his role pivotal and his life paradigmatic for the concerns explored thus far. The conditions connecting his activities to those explored in chapter 1 need additional elaboration to place his accomplishments in the proper context, since his tale does not operate in a vacuum.

While the core of this chapter is focused primarily on Csoma’s activities, its secondary aim is to complete the discursive mapping by which scholars in Britain, France, and Germany brought Buddhism “to life, perhaps for the very first time” (Masuzawa 126). Other cru-cial figures were certainly engaged in the process, not least of which was Brian Houghton Hogdson, who in 1824 “began accumulat-ing Buddhist works in Sanskrit (and Tibetan) and dispatching them around the world” (Lopez Curators 55) from his colonial outposts in India and Nepal. With the arrival of these materials, the number of manuscripts and books in Sanskrit and Tibetan located in the “European philological workshop” (Masuzawa 126) reached criti-cal mass. These works supplemented those Pāli texts already pres-ent in Europe, which entered through textual materials gathered from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and through the convergence of materials expressed in the three primary languages of the dharma, the stage was set for their synthesis by Eugene Burnouf, whose unique com-bination of talents rendering him “the ideal person” to construct newly collated documents with an intelligible structure of concepts and ideas that would henceforth be “the prototype of the European concept of Buddhism” (Batchelor 239).

In the period between the death of Sir William Jones (1794) and the arrival of Csoma to Tibet (1823), the dominance enjoyed by England at the vanguard of Oriental research, through a number of factors, began to dissipate even as its control over the subcontinent was solidi-fied. Britain’s East India Company, a joint stock company “formally incorporated on 31 December 1600 after a group of London mer-chants had raised £30,000 capital” (Weir 22) and finally displaced by the British Raj in 1858, exerted monopoly trade status across the East Indies but ultimately came to control the vast enterprises clustered in India itself. This control, which vied for dominance with the French during the eighteenth century, was solidified in 1757 (the year of Blake’s birth) after the Battle of Plassey, where Company forces led by Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal and French allies, leading to Clive’s appointment as the Governor-General of Bengal. The slow erosion of French colonial influence in India, which resulted from



incessant warfare with the British over the second half of the century, was finally concluded during the Napoleanic period. Thereafter, the Company became a virtual monopoly, with its agency extending not just to the trade of commodities (e.g. cotton, opium, saltpeter, silk, and tea) but the administration of the region, including exploratory and military operations. This situation provided the backdrop for the assumption of Company control by Warren Hastings, who replaced the former governor-general of Bengal John Holwell in 1774, at the beginning of the Romantic period. This shift “marked a transitional moment” (Makdisi 101) in administrative philosophy from the past “masterly inactivity” to a present “forward policy” stance (McKay 61–77). After Hastings assumed his duties, the British conflict with the American colonies drew to a close (eventually bringing Cornwallis to India), an event converging with the solidification of India under East India Company control, the arrival of Jones to assume judicial authority in Calcutta, and the first British attempts (through the par-liamentary East Indian Company Act in 1783 and followed by Pitt’s India Act in 1784) to place the control of the Company under British political control.

Hastings had a long and complicated history in India: he was a clerk (1750) for the Company and was held prisoner when hostile indigenous forces captured Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1756. He served on the Calcutta Council (1761) but returned to England (1764) because of his disgust with administrative corruption (an irony, given his later trial before Parliament), and he then returned to India (1769), join-ing the Madras council and becoming Governor-General of Bengal (1772). Ultimately, Hastings became the first Governor-General of India (in 1774), and he saw himself as a reformer implementing a policy of enlightened engagement with the indigenous population of India, which extended to cultural spheres such as art, literature, and drama, but also saw the pragmatic ends such support offered the colonial agenda.

Hastings found himself the extension of governmental control of the Company , through Pitt’s India Act, and “the administration of the Company’s commercial interests” (Weir 24), finally leading to his resignation and return to Britain (in 1784 and 1785, respectively). As David Weir suggests, Hastings served as “the scapegoat for all the disorder and exploitation that had occurred” during his directorship, but the charges were also tinged with personal animosity, since he had “seriously wounded [Edmund] Burke’s friend Philip Francis in a duel in 1780” (25). Hastings was charged with high crimes and misdemeanors, was impeached before parliament (a case led by the



eloquent, powerful, and vindictive Burke), and finally acquitted of all charges after a lengthy and sensational trial (in 1795).2 In almost daily reports in newspapers and journals, citizens of London fol-lowed the trial, and the connection made between the trial and the events developing in revolutionary France often came into focus in the pages of the Analytical Review, which was founded in 1788 by Joseph Johnson. The year before Hastings’s acquittal, for example, the Review takes Hastings’s side in the affair, arguing that he left “the great continent [of India] universally in peace [and] the [British] provinces . . . in the highest state of prosperity,” even achieving a recapitalization of the Company itself by increasing revenues “from three millions sterling a year to five” (quoted in Weir 27). Hastings was influential in the success enjoyed by Jones’s journal and had actually declines Jones’s offer to serve as the president of “his newly formed Asiatick Society” (Franklin “Accessing” 48), which convened its first meeting in January 1784. While following his trial and voic-ing its support both for an acquittal and for the pursuit of liberty in France, the Analytical Review also served as a primary conduit for the dissemination of the textual counterflow from India into the wider populace.

In the wake of Hastings’s appointment, the stream of books, man-uscripts, and translations returning to England and Europe became a veritable torrent of colonial counterflow, and the Society’s jour-nal, Asiatic Researches, which “spread with remarkable speed and pervasiveness among scholars and writers in England, Germany, and France” (Schwab 52), added to this influx, going through numerous editions and becoming extremely difficult to find on the continent. By the end of its inaugural year, the Society experienced its first major literary achievement with the 1784 publication of Charles Wilkins’ translation of The Bhagavad-Gita, which became “the first com-plete translation directly from a major Sanskrit text” into a European language (Schwab 51). Hastings wrote a “Preface” for the edition published the following year in London, and the governor-general lavished praise both on the work, pronouncing it “a performance of great originality; of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and dic-tion, almost unequalled,” and on its translator, lauding his “ingenu-ity,” “perseverance,” and “accuracy and fidelity” (Allen and Trivedi 171–2).

The appearance of this work, and its subsequent translation into French by Abbé Parraud as La Bhaguat-Geeta, contestant un précis de la morale et de la religion des Indiens, d’apres la version anglaise de M. Wilkins (1785) was followed, in short order, by Wilkins’s



translation of the Hitopadesha (1787). Jones immediately brought forth both his justly famous and vastly influential translations of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1789) and the Gita Govinda (1792), which appeared in the third volume of the Society’s journal. Meanwhile, on the continent, Abraham Anquetil-Duperron had previously pub-lished selections from the Upanishads in Recherches sur l’Inde (1786), a work which inspired the translation projects pursued by Jones and the Asiatic Society, and the eighth edition of Asiatic Researches included a study of the Vedas by Henry Thomas Colebrooke, another Company scholar who served as “secretary of the Indian Civil Service in 1783 [and who] became a professor of Sanskrit and Hindu law at the College of Fort William in 1801” (Schwab 37).3 While The English Encyclopedia (1802) described “BUDUN [as] one of the Ceylonese gods” (quoted in Almond 9), this view, clearly based on a misreading of the Pāli canon from Ceylon, gave way as better infor-mation became available through Sanskrit, a language taught at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain and Calcutta. Collectively, these works cemented the profound role the Asiatic Society played to inspire a generation of Oriental scholars across Europe to study Sanskrit, launching the Oriental Renaissance in the wake created by its inflow of texts and knowledge about a broad range of subjects throughout the East.

The long trial of Hastings in the homeland, the clash over a new strategy to take for administering India, and the martial conflict that erupted with both revolutionary and Napoleonic France reveal those tensions that diverted English attention away from its established prominence at the forefront of Oriental research. Immediately fol-lowing the trial of Hastings, his prosecutor Edmund Burke turned his attention to events across the channel, as the French Revolution erupted into violence and eventually inaugurated the Napoleonic period of war. By this time, France had moved to the foreground of Oriental studies, through the work of Silvestre de Sacy and the founding of L’ecole des langues orientales vivantes (in 1795), and those individuals who provided the next catalyst for the emergence of Buddhism later in the century flocked to France to take up the mantle of Orientalism through the work of Sacy and Abel Rémusat, whose work on Chinese further codified the study of Asiatic lan-guages in which Buddhist discourses were located and from which the dharma would emerge. However, the British provided one last (and lasting) contribution in the figure of Alexander Hamilton (a naval officer, East India Company employee, and founding member of the Asiatic Society), who “had come to Paris [in 1803] to collate oriental



manuscripts at the Bibliothéque Nationale” (Schwab 67; Masuzawa 153). Hamilton was trapped in Paris, due to the collapse “of the Peace of Amiens between France and England” (Schwab 67), but he was fluent in Sanskrit, having learned the language in Calcutta.

Hamilton was allowed to continue his review of the archives thanks, in part, to the intervention of Constantine Volney, and in exchange for this consideration, he offered Sanskrit instruction to a group of Oriental scholars, including Jean Louis Burnouf (father of Eugéne), but his most enthusiastic student, Friedrich Schlegel, was more than any other, responsible for creating “a general cultural movement out of one particular field of knowledge” (Masuzawa 155). Even prior to his studies, Schlegel had already articulated one of the most famous phrases to emerge from Oriental studies and ripple throughout the Romantic Age, when he asserted in his Athenaeum essay (in 1800) that “It is in the Orient that we must seek the highest Romanticism” (quoted in Schwab 69). The skills and insights solidified during his studies with Hamilton were transmitted to an “illustrious Romantic circle of friends, which included Novalis (1772–1801) . . . his own elder brother August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) . . . and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)” (Masuzawa 154). In an 1803 letter written to Tieck, Schlegel gave voice to another crucial feature of his studies derived from “The English, the masters of India, [who] maintain that everything comes from there [India]” (Schwab 70): “Here is the actual source of all languages, all the thought and poems of the human spirit; everything, yes, everything without exception has its origin in India” (quoted in Masuzawa 154). Schlegel’s two phrases mark a reorientation of focus by those at the vanguard of Oriental studies constructing the body of the Buddhism (i.e. the dharma), and the emergence of a “nostalgia for origins” (King 147), already a recognized dimension of Romanticism drawn from Herder’s views of geography, cultural customs, and economics, sensationalized his col-leagues, bringing Germany and its institutions of higher learning to the crux of Oriental reseearch. Not surprisingly, these views arrived to Göttingen and ultimately defined the course of study for, and fired the imagination of, Alexander Csoma.

From Körös to Göttingen

Csoma, long recognized as the “Father of Tibetology” (and hence one link in the lineage for this study and my own practice of Tibetan Buddhism), was a philologist and cataloguer of textual materials for the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Csoma served as a curator of the



Buddha, in Lopez’s memorable phrase, and confirms the judgment (discussed in the previous chapter) that its establishment as a world religion near the end of the nineteenth century was founded as “a textual object based in Western institutions,” where “Understanding [was] an event in which both interpreter and text mutually determine one another” (King 146, 74). Csoma has remained a relatively obscure figure in Romantic studies, for reasons briefly discussed above, and his obscurity reflected his own reticence for the traditional accolades sought for scholarly achievements. His humble origins at the fringe of Europe and (after his departure for Asia) his insistence on operating at the fringe of colonial activities further contributed to his marginal place in scholarly studies of Romantic Orientalism. As Csoma stated directly in the introduction to his dictionary, “I was not sent by any government to gather political information,” and in a letter to the Indologist James Prinsep, stated unequivocally that “I will abstain from every statistical, political, or even geographic inquiry” (quoted in Mukerjee 9). The material trace of this commitment to maintain separation from “imperialist interests of expansion, penetration, and consolidation” (Mukerjee 9) was his revelation, in the preface to the dictionary, that “I never sealed a single letter” (Csoma Dictionary vl) while working in Tibet and India.

Csoma’s reputation among indigenous scholars in the region, how-ever, was always fairly prominent, as Hiren Mukerjee’s opening com-ment to his biography makes clear: “This was the scholar and saint who lies buried in India’s Darjeeling, and we in India, the Asiatic Society in Calcutta especially, can claim him, as Hungary does, as one of India’s heroes also” (viii), and his praise grows in the biography itself:

Without naming names, one can recall the fact of a certain suspicion attaching to some apparently innocuous and even estimable intel-lectual pursuits by some scholars in Trans-Himalaya. Not the faint-est breath of such moral misgiving has ever besmirched the shining escutcheon of Csoma’s great endeavor” (Mukerjee 9)

Csoma’s achievements have gained greater relevance during the last half of the twentieth century, with the relocation of the Tibetan gov-ernment in exile to Dharamsala, India (north of New Delhi) after the post–World War Two invasion of Tibet. Receiving the youthful Dalai Lama with open arms was itself a courageous act on the part of a fledgling nation only recently freed from British control and with the burgeoning strength of communist China positioned on its northern



border. From this location, Tibetan lamas and citizens have emigrated throughout the world, establishing monasteries and temples on every continent creating, in the process, the pan-global acknowledgment of his holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, The Thirteenth Dalai Lama as the lead-ing figure of Buddhism in the present age.

The Tibetan canon of Buddhist texts was the last to make its presence felt in the explosion of Oriental studies that opened the nineteenth century, a delay traced both to its difficult script and the inaccessibility of its location. As Csoma suggested in his 1834 preface to A Grammar of the Tibetan Language, Tibet was “considered as the head-quarters of Buddhism in the present age” but had remained isolated “among inaccessible mountain” (ix). Tibet’s climate actually served to preserve “the volumes of the Buddhist faith, in their original Sanskrit, as well as in faithful translations, which might be sought in vain on the continent of India” (x), and as Edward J. Thomas indicated in The History of Buddhist Thought, “Since much of the literature in the original Sanskrit [had] disappeared [in India and elsewhere], the Tibetan translations [came] to be of the highest importance” (249) for the reconstruction of a Buddhist canon. Thus, Csoma’s role in the elaboration of the Tibetan language (through his dictionary and grammar), its Buddhist canon (through his English-Sanskrit-Tibetan vocabulary) and his transmission of Tibetan and Sanskrit manuscripts to Europe proved definitive for their uses by Eugene Burnouf in the solidification of those core works that determined the shape of Buddhism in Europe for the remainder of the century. These works also assured the long-term impact Csoma’s efforts have exerted since his death in Darjeeling in 1842, when he sought to travel to Lhasa and consult works in the vast library of the Dalai Lamas. In the same year of his death, Archibald Campbell offered a report of Csoma’s last days and death, appropriately, in the eleventh issue of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the journal conceived in the year of his birth (303–9).

Csoma was born in 1784 in the small village of Körös in the Transylvanian region of Romania that “lies at the foot of a snow-capped peak of the sweep of the Eastern Carpathians” (Csetri 143). His family was of modest means, although his father Andras was a village leader who served in the frontier guard established by the “Székler system of public administration” (Csetri 143). The Széklers maintained, from the late-medieval period, their descent from Attila the Hun through his incursion into Eastern Europe. They were also renowned warriors, a fact displayed with animal ferocity and Christian fervor in their defense of the kingdom of Hungary during



the Ottoman invasion of Eastern Europe.4 This projected affiliation formed the region’s history in Csoma’s childhood and was bound up with tales of its settlement by the Huns, resulting in legend becoming for its people “a living part of the past” (Csetri 146). While this leg-endary connection cultivated in elementary school impacted Csoma’s search for the origins of the Hungarians in central Asia, the approach to education actually pursued by Csoma indicates how far enlighten-ment principles shaped in Scotland, England, France, and through-out Germany had migrated by the latter decades of the century. Those principles discussed in detail by Richard King, which include “the primacy of reason and rationality,” “universalism,” “uniformity of human nature,” and “the rise of nationalist discourses” (44–5), shaped the educational model for Csoma’s teachers and through them exerted a formative impact on the young scholar during his early education.

From an early age, Csoma gained the reputation for dogged determination and gritty resilience, attributes observed by family and friends. Csoma was physically small but was well known for his determination and toughness, talents that served him well in his long journey to the East. One particular manifestation of Csoma’s ability to endure physical hardship was his “aptitude for walking long dis-tances” (Fox 13), and his passage into the East, accomplished almost exclusively on foot, prompted his most recent biographer, Edward Fox, to title his work The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven. This pattern was set quite early in his life, as the observation offered by his cousin Jóseph Csoma suggested: “As boys, we could never compete with him in walking, because, when he happened to reach the top of a hill, that did not satisfy him, but he wished to know what was beyond it, and beyond that again, and thus he often trotted on for immense distances” (quoted in Fox 13). When the time came to advance his studies, he walked the 200 miles from Körös to the Bethlenianum College in Nagyenyed.

As Edward Fox observed, the College (which admitted students solely on their academic merits) was “strikingly similar in many ways to the Himalayan Buddhist monasteries in which Csoma would later spend eight years learning the Tibetan language” (14). The austere academy was a hierarchically organized and highly competitive learn-ing environment where younger students literally battled for food and knowledge alike. The elementary curriculum of Greek and Latin, as well as mathematics, ethics, and religion, formed the foundation of Csoma’s pronounced linguistic facility, and by the time of his death Csoma had mastered thirteen primary languages and most of their



subdialects (Fox 18–21). Given Csoma’s somewhat advanced age (he was five years older than any of his peers), he was something of an oddity in the school, but by the end of his first year, students and instructors alike recognized his unique combination of drive and intelligence. His primary qualities, those that brought him not just through the College but propelled him, subsequently, through the University of Göttingen and across the world, were a photographic memory, an iron will, and a pronounced sense of frugality. The first allowed him to master early on Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—as well as modern French, German, Romanian, and Turkish. The second ren-dered him impervious to almost any physical hardship, leading most biographers to assert that Csoma, while still a young man, had “con-quered his own human nature” (Fox 17). The last allowed him to tra-verse geographical and logistical difficulties and to master a daunting amount of alien knowledge while remaining relatively disconnected from most colonial entanglements.

During his Nagyenyed years, discernible ‘Romantic’ inf luences swept across Hungary when radical thinkers, inspired by the American and French revolutions, sought to maintain independence from Western (Austro-Hungarian) and Eastern (Ottoman) empires alike (Mukerjee 12). Ádám Herepei, an “ardent proponent of the enlightenment, the French Revolution and the national spirit . . . who instructed rhetoric and politics in addition to history” (Csetri 151), taught history classes that included works by Edward Gibbon and the work of the Oriental scholars J. H. Klaproth and J. G. Eichhorn (with whom Csoma studied after arriving in Göttingen). In typical Romantic fashion, the longing for independence “expressed itself [through] a revival of Hungarian culture and language” (Fox 19), leading inevitably to unresolved questions regarding origins. In the estimation of nineteenth-century philologists, Hungarian resembled no other European language, manifested only a few direct connec-tions to Finnish and Russian, and seemed better connected to the languages of Asia, including Sanskrit. This linguistic isolation from immediate neighbors fired the imagination of cultural nationalists, Csoma included, and the Hungarian gaze turned eastward to seek the “origins of the Hungarian people in the vast spaces of Central Asia” (Mishra 139). In his twelfth year of study (ca. 1811), Csoma became a lecturer in poetry, and three years later earned a schol-arship for further study at the Göttingen’s renowned university. However, before departing for the German university, Csoma and two fellow students, inspired by national fervor and a belief that the Hungarians were directly descended from the war-like hordes



of the Huns, vowed to seek the origins of the Magyar language and people beyond the high Himalayas. Of the three, only Csoma kept this vow.

The tendency to travel by foot, previously discussed, was married to a pronounced sense of frugality, which would serve Csoma well in years to come, and not surprisingly when he departed Nagyenyed and matriculated to the University of Göttingen, he still traveled by foot in spite of having significant savings from his long years in Bethlenianum College. At Göttingen, Csoma fell under the influ-ence of “the orientalist [Johann] Eichhorn” (Schwab 53), one of the foremost philologists in Europe who was among “the first scholars to apply textual criticism to the Bible” (Fox 25). Csoma developed a close relationship with Eichhorn, who was in charge of the English scholarship program that made Csoma’s presence in Göttingen pos-sible (its region of Hanover was the ancestral home of the Georgian Kings of Britain). Csoma also studied with Klaproth, who was at work on his formative Leben des Budd’a, “which attempted to system-atize the chronology of the Buddha’s life” (Schwab 110) and which was published in 1823, one year after Csoma had arrived in Tibet. Csoma’s subsequent training in Göttingen added Arabic, English, Italian, and Spanish fluency to his growing linguistic reservoir, and with his vow in mind he also began systematic geographical studies, which provided him sufficient detail to allow him to virtually walk to Tibet. By 1818 Csoma approached the limits of indirect knowl-edge through scholarship and began preparations for his journey to the East. After receiving his degree in 1818 and under these various influences, Csoma began to map mentally his sojourn East, which he thought would move from Moscow through the Ottoman Empire to Constantinople, where Eichhorn knew of books and manuscripts that would allow his young protégé to corroborate conjecture with direct evidence codified in Turkish geo-cultural scholarship residing in its justly famous imperial library.

One incident that occurred immediately prior to his brief return to Körös provides a glimpse into his personality. When Csoma sustained a betrayal by a friend (who had borrowed and never repaid 100 gold coins), the incident forever altered his attitude toward others, rein-forced his reclusive tendencies, and rendered him, in his own words, “less inclined to do good deeds in [the] future, and less inclined to [acknowledge] glad feelings.” As well, upon returning to Körös (at the age of thirty-four), Csoma’s by then well-known quest did not inspire others but rather, to his consternation, met with resistance from his few friends and baffled his former colleagues and teachers,



who expected him to accept one of three possible teaching posts (which included two professorships). The final obstacle, the govern-ment’s refusal to issue his official passport, closed the door on his intended route through Moscow, and so Csoma began his journey in a psychological state of disappointment and disillusionment. Without knowing it, his more southern route into Asia brought him constantly into those regions in which the “great game” of colonialism pursued by Britain and Russia had entered a new, more intense stage of devel-opment (Bayly 56–96; Edwardes 1–17).

From Europe to Asia

In February 1819, his former gymnasium teacher Samuel Hegedus reported that “before the snows [melted and] only clad lightly as if he intended merely taking a walk,” Csoma departed on his trek to Tibet, carrying only “a stick in his hand and a small bundle” of food and paper under his arm (Mukerjee 15, 16). His resources were indeed meager, although they included “200 forints, half of which had been given to him by a sympathetic Hungarian government official” (Fox 30). Hirendra Nath Mukerjee, one of his early biographers, described his passage from eastern Europe to the monasteries of Tibet and the imperial city of Calcutta as “an epic journey” (16), and it was one of the most arduous trips ever undertaken without official sanction or support. Intermittent letters and his own account of his travels (con-structed after the fact and only at the urging of British colleagues in Calcutta) supply the only details for his journey. During his four-year passage to the Zangla Monastery in Tibet, Csoma traveled through Thrace, Chios, Rhodes, Alexandria, Constantinople, Aleppo (in Syria), Baghdad, Teheran, Meshed (in Khurason), Bokhara, Kabul, Lahore, Leh, and Kashmir. Arriving at the Kashmir border and with his financial resources depleted, Csoma met the English adventurer and colonial functionary William Moorcroft, “an agent of the East India Company intent on securing British influence in Central Asia as a means of thwarting the southward advance of imperial Russia” (Batchelor Awakening 235).

Moorcroft, “a veterinary surgeon” charged with procuring horses for the East Indian Company’s forces, was “the first British trav-eler to cross the Western Himalayas into Tibet in 1812” (Marshall 134). A detailed catalogue of his impressive and far-ranging travels were gathered from original journals and correspondence with H. H. Wilson and published after his death, and Garry Alder’s explora-tion of Moorcroft, his travels, and his role in the colonial enterprise



remains the definitive scholarly assessment of his importance in the great game. Moorcroft was the most vocal Britain in his stern analysis of Russia as potential threat, but his dispatches were ignored in India. At one point, taking matters into his own hands, he “negotiated a commercial treaty with the ruler of Ladakh,” but British authori-ties, dubious of Russian intentions and fearful of regional reprisals by Ranjit Singh, immediately “disowned it” (Hopkirk 96). Moorcroft and Csoma traveled together to Leh, where he gave Csoma a copy of Giorgi’s Alphabetum Tibetanum and, perceiving the usefulness of the guileless Hungarian scholar to his colonial aims, also offered him “some money and letters of introduction” (Mukerjee 19) in exchange for Csoma’s commitment to publish his findings through Calcutta’s Asiatic Society (Bethlenfalvy 7–25).

By June 1823 Csoma completed his journey and entered Zangla Monastery to undertake Tibetan studies with its head lama, Sangye Puntsog (Tbt. Bande Sangs-rgyas Phun-tshops), and the edi-tor of Csoma’s collected works, J.Terjék, offers a compelling and detailed description of this encounter, one that speaks to the aura of romance attached to Csoma and his importance for the “imagi-native creation of Buddhism in the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury” (Almond 4):

On June 26, 1823 . . . a strange wanderer arrived at the Tibetan Lamaist Monastery of Zangla, situated in the Himalayas 3,500 meters up, and far from the routes used by tradesmen and pilgrims. He had come from Leh, the capital of western Tibet, or Ladakh . . . His name was Skandar Beg . . . There was something strange about his face . . . but only the lama who received him, Sangye Puntsog, knew what is was. He was a European. The first, the very first[,] to reach that place. (Terjék vii)

Csoma initially spent seventeen months under the tutelage of Puntsog, studying in conditions hardly less rigorous than the dif-ficulties encountered in his movement from Europe to Asia:

The conditions in which he worked are difficult even to imag-ine . . . At that altitude [well over 10,000 feet] the cold was always intense . . . During winter, the doorways were blocked with snow, the temperature constantly below zero. With his lama, he would sit in a cell no more than nine feet square, with no heating, no light after dark, neither of the two venturing to leave the ‘closet’[,] with the bare floor to sleep on and nothing but the stone walls keeping out the cruel cold. (Mukerjee 20)



Lama Puntsog, who served “as a government dignitary with the Dalai Lama” (Mukerjee 25), was a renowned physician, was erudite and accomplished and was deeply educated in the full range of Buddhist sūtras, tantras, and techniques. The texts the lama used to train his rather uncharacteristic European student were, simply phrased, the entire Buddhist canon available in Tibet at that time and which pre-served Sanskrit texts no longer extant in India. In Fox’s estimation this collaboration, “in its first phase,” represented an effort “as remark-able in the annals of scholarship as in the extremes of human endur-ance” (58). Following this initial period of study, Csoma departed the monastery to make his findings known to the British Bengal Society in Calcutta and arrived at the Anglo-Indian enclave of Sabathu in May 1825.

Csoma, expecting that advanced word regarding his activities had been communicated to the British authorities by Moorcroft, presented himself to Captain C. P. Kennedy, who was initially sus-picious of this “apparition of a European” (Mukerjee 23) and who detained him as part-guest and part-prisoner for two months while instructions were sought from distant Calcutta, but they eventually became life-long friends. Remarkably, given the conditions of pro-duction, Csoma arrived with extensive drafts of his Tibetan-English Dictionary and Tibetan Grammar in English, and he has also com-piled a summation of the 320 volumes of the Tibetan Ka-gyur, which included a survey of all major Buddhist concepts and which is now known as the Mahavayutpatti. In Csoma’s typical understated man-ner, he stated that his efforts “had ‘caused to be copied the contents of these immense works and treatises in the same order as they stand in the printed indexes,’ never hinting that he was doing not only a pioneer but also a monumental work” (Mukerjee 20). Csoma had intended to return immediately to the Buddhist monastery to con-tinue his work, but Moorcroft’s promise to alert officials and procure texts for Csoma had not occurred in Sabathu but had been relayed to sources in Calcutta, thus delaying his return to Tibet until word from Calcutta arrived.

While in the hilltop station of Sabathu, Csoma drafted, at the request of Governor-General Lord Elmhurst, the narrative of his travels, his findings, and his intentions to pursue further work. After a two-month delay, word finally came from Calcutta providing mod-est support (fifty rupees per month) for subsequent studies and per-mission to return to the terra incognita of Tibet. Csoma launched his second journey in summer 1825, heading again, after a short interlude in the British controlled region of Busahir, for Zangla and the aid of



Lama Puntsog, who had agreed to continue his help with Csoma’s studies.5 The lama was delayed, and Csoma waited for six weeks to continue his studies, which at this time shifted to the monastery of Phugtol in nearby Tetha. During this trip, Csoma reported, in a letter to Wilson, that his “lama was very careless in teaching me, and he only stayed a short time with me. Since then I have been unable to find anybody else to help me to fulfill my purpose.” When he returned to the British enclave at Sabathu in 1827, he had obtained almost full facility in the Tibetan language and also brought “boxes bursting with precious literary cargo” (Mukerjee 26), a cache that included “printed books about grammar, chronology, astronomy and moral philosophy [and] . . . some extracts from works on chronology, geog-raphy and history of literature.”6 Reactions to Csoma’s prior work had already begun to flow back to Europe, and his former teacher at Göttingen, Klaproth, and Remusat, in Paris, simply dismissed his Tibetan efforts, prompting Wilson to refute their claims in the pages of the Government Gazette.

In the autumn, Csoma undertook his third trip, this time through Simla and Kunawar, in route to Kanum monastery, where he was later visited by Dr. James Gilbert Gerard, “the earliest medical explorer of the Himalayan region” (Mukerjee 29). The best information for Csoma’s circumstances during this third trip was derived from Gerard’s letters and reports, and Duka quotes extensively from these documents (Duka 50–90). During this third trip, Csoma remained at Kanum for over three years, completing his dictionary and grammar and preparing the English version of the Mahavayutpatti (his com-parative vocabulary of English, Sanskrit, and Tibetan vocabulary and concepts), but abandoned by Sangye Puntsog the intrepid Hungarian worked in isolation and privation in a hut with no table or bed and simply surrounded by his work, his Tibetan sources, and his meager cache of food. In autumn 1830, Csoma returned to Sabathu and, through the intervention of Kennedy, received a 500 rupee grant to proceed to Calcutta with his materials, arriving in April 1831.

Under the auspices of the Asiatick Society of Bengal, Csoma’s dic-tionary and grammar were published immediately (since they were viewed as having colonial value), while the Mahavayutpatti was not published until the twentieth century following World War Two (when the manuscript was discovered intact, somewhat miraculously, in the paper-devouring basement of the Society itself). In the next nine years since his arrival, Csoma traveled to Tibet three times to complete his studies with Puntsog and two other lamas, but he finally settled in Calcutta, taking up residence in the basement of the Asiatic



Society. Once settled, his life and work habits reflected his monastic experience, and for his entire stay Csoma lived in a nine-foot square formed by boxes of books and manuscripts in the basement of the Society, where he slept on the floor and ate his meager meals of rice. He was elected an honorary member of the Society, often function-ing as its cataloguer and librarian, and in 1832 he began to publish a veritable torrent of germinal scholarly work in the Society’s Journal. While space precludes an exhaustive discussion of these publica-tions, Csoma’s body of work—beginning in 1832 and extending well beyond his death—analyzed almost every aspect of “the great compi-lation of the Tibetan Sacred Books, in one hundred volumes . . . styled Ka-gyur” (Csoma 175–230, 265–424). The masterful summation offered in these publications and in the Mahavayutpatti addressed practically every dimension of Buddhism, including discussions of the four noble truths (Buddha’s first teaching), the middle way (articulated by Nagarjuna), the way of the bodhisattva (charted by Shantideva), and the path to enlightenment (mapped by Atisha) and offered explanations of the complex interactions of compassion, suf-fering, emptiness, reincarnation, samsara, and nirvāna operative in all Buddhist traditions, concepts, and practices.

Between 1831 and 1842, Csoma served as librarian for the Asiatic Society, where he collected and catalogued materials sent from Brian Houghton Hodgson, who was stationed in Katmandu, Nepal and who was systematically gathering manuscripts and books in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Csoma’s work habits, forged across a lifetime of difficulty in Europe and among the high Himalayas, changed very little during this time, and he was said to leave the basement only rarely to walk in the city and only ate rice for every meal. After the full publication of those works for which he was justly renowned (in 1835), Csoma trav-eled into India itself in 1837 and added Sanskrit and Bengali to his vast knowledge of other languages. In 1840, a young painter named Ágost Schöfft, well informed of Csoma’s legendary status back in his homeland, came to visit the sage of Tibetan scholarship and painted his only known portrait. At the age of fifty-five and after a ten-year stay in Calcutta, Csoma again turned his thoughts toward Tibet and specifically Lhasa, where he hoped to finally fulfill his oath regard-ing his search for the origins of the Hungarians, which he had never forgotten.

As Csoma related in the “Preface” to his Tibetan-English Dictionary, “The study of the Tibetan language did not form part of my original plan, but . . . I cheerfully engaged in the study of it, hoping that it might serve me as a vehicle to my immediate purpose, namely, my researches



in respect to the origins and language of the Hungarians” (vl). He reached Darjeeling on March 24, 1842 but succumbed to fever and died on April 11. Appropriately, Csoma is buried there, resting at the crossroads through which Buddhist learning, in several great waves, flowed north and east. Also appropriately, less than a century follow-ing his death, “On 22 February 1933, Csoma was officially canon-ized as a bodhisattva in the grand hall of Taisho Buddhist University in Tokyo and a statue of him in meditation posture, donated by the Hungarian Oriental Society, was installed in the Japanese Imperial Museum” (Batchelor Awakening 237). As Mukerjee notes, the grant-ing of bodhisattva status to Csoma offered “the highest praise a man can get in Buddhist terms” (74), since the term “bodhisattva” literally means an “awakened one.” The term also designates one who strives for enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, rather than one working toward individual release from the circle of transmigration, which defines the chief doctrinal difference between the two primary “schools” of Buddhist thought and practice (the Hīnayāna [Sanskrit for lesser vehicle] and Mahāyāna [Sanskrit for great vehicle]).

Tibetan Buddhism is oriented toward the Mahāyāna tradition, which connected its canonical works to those religious traditions in China and Japan and which emerged primarily from Sanskrit rather than Pāli sources. The transmission of those Sanskrit works that would finally congeal into “a set of sacred scriptures” (Lopez Curators 53), once joined to the Pāli and Tibetan materials, were delivered by Brian Houghton Hodgson and marked, in Max Müller’s view, “the real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrines of Buddha” (Lopez Curators 49). Like Csoma, Hodgson’s educational structure reflected typical enlightenment training, which he received at Haileybury, a college created “to educate future civil employees of the East India Company” (Waterhouse 2). Languages shaped the foundation for this institution, and Hodgson thrived in its atmosphere, “passing out as top of his year with honours in Bengali, Persian, Hindi, Political Economy and Classics” (Waterhouse 3). He chose to work in Calcutta, arriving in 1818 and receiving subsequent training at Fort William, but when illness overtook him, after only a single year in northern India, Hodgson transferred first to Kumaon in 1819 (as Assistant Commissioner) and then to Kathmandu, Nepal (as assistant Resident) in 1821.

From the outset in his Nepalese post, Hodgson became fasci-nated with Buddhism, and he engaged the services of an indige-nous scholar Amritananda to aid his understanding and help with the collection of Sanskrit and Tibetan manuscripts and books. His



transmission of these materials began in 1827 and extended to 1844, when he returned to Britain. Across an eighteen-year span, Hodgson sent 423 works back to centers of Oriental scholarship in India and Europe, with 375 remaining in India (66 manuscripts went to Fort William, 94 works were dispatched to the Asiatic Society of Bengal [some moving through Csoma’s hands], and 79 transmitted to the India Official Library) and another 154 were dispersed to Europe (7 for the Bodleian Library, 88 for the Société Asiatique, and 59 for Eugene Burnouf). Beyond the large number of works scattered to sites of Oriental scholarship, the works themselves were vastly impor-tant to the rise of Buddhism by mid-century, including Atisha’s The Perfection of Wisdom (a part of the robust prajñāpāramitā literature), the Sukhāvativyūha (a prime sūtra for the “pure land” traditions), the Daśabhumika (a discussion of the ten stages of the boidhisattva’s path), the Lankāvatara (a root text for both the Yogācāra school in India and the Chan traditions of East Asia), the Bodhicāryāvatāra (a famous eighth century poem by Shantideva on the way of the bodhisattva), the Buddhacarita (a second century ce poem by Asvaghosa on the life of the Buddha), and the Saddharmapundarika (the famous Lotus sūtra translated by Burnouf and published shortly after his death).7

As scholars have long acknowledged, “Hodgson’s contribution to Buddhist studies was not his scholarship” but in his delivery to “the scholarly community . . . hitherto unknown Buddhist texts” (Batchelor Awakening 238) that formed the foundation for almost all Buddhist beliefs and practices. Hodgson certainly published scholarly work in the most influential journals of Orientalism (e.g., Oriental Quarterly Magazine [1827], Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society [1829], and Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society [1834, 1835, 1836]), but his attempt to synthesize this knowledge, “Sketch of Buddhism, Derived From the Bauddha Scriptures of Nepál” (which appeared in Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1828), proved problematic and was finally disproved by better philologists and deeper scholarly analysis (Lopez “Ambivalent” 57–61). Max Müller, looking back in 1862 upon the textual counterflow created by Csoma and Hodgson, offered a summative assessment that suggests that “the real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrine of Buddha” (Lopez “Ambivalent” 49) arrived in these acts of transmission: “Whereas for years, nay for centuries, not a single original document of the Buddhist religion had been accessible to the scholars of Europe, we witness, in the small space of ten years, the recovery of four complete Buddhist literatures” (quoted in Lopez “Ambivalent” 54).



From Romanticism to Buddhism

Once the grammar and dictionary of Tibetan compiled by Csoma and the primary materials transmitted by Hodgson came into con-fluence in the hands of Eugene Burnouf, the pieces were in place for the full f lowering of the dharma. In Burnouf’s first lecture “at the Collège de France in 1833,” he justified “the study of Buddhism in terms of an understanding of the ancient origins of our common humanity” (King 147), taking a step beyond the nationalist motives of Csoma and the colonialist aims of Hodgson and a step toward “inte-gral humanism” (Schwab 110). Burnouf’s facility in both Pāli and Sanskrit, once supplemented by Csoma’s scholarship and the primary works sent by Hodgson, allowed him to recognize canonical works in Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian as “derivative forms” (Masuzawa 126) translated from of the original Sanskrit. The 1844 publication of Burnouf’s definitive L’introduction á l’historie du buddisme indien laid the foundation for “the construction of Buddhism as an object of European scientific knowledge” (Batchelor Awakening 242) but bringing into existence an “ahistorical and textualized Buddhism located in and administered from the libraries of Europe” (King 148). This decontextualized canon of Buddhism did not exist in the East but was synthesized in the West.

Burnouf sought to build his synthesis on the Introduction to the History of Buddhism in India, and between 1844 and 1852 he stead-fastly worked to impose “rational order on this pervasive disorder” (Schwab 241), a systematic examination cut short by his untimely death in 1852. That same year, his translation of the Lotus sūtra became the first, translated directly from Sanskrit into a European language, although Isaak Schmidt had earlier (1837) published a French translation of the Diamond sūtra in St. Petersburg using a Tibetan text (Batchelor Awakening 239–41; Schwab 111–2).8 The emergence of Buddhism was a pan-European and transatlantic event facilitated by crosscurrents along which flowed scholarship and pri-mary texts. The same year Burnouf’s History of Buddhism in India appeared, Henry David Thoreau published his translation of a frag-ment of the Lotus sūtra (included in Burnouf’s work) in the Dial of 1844, which Thoreau acknowledged as “one of the religious books of the Buddhists of Nepal” and which asserted that “the supreme truth” could only be achieved through “complete annihilation” (Fields 61). The Chinese form of the dharma appeared on the American west coast, as “Chinese merchants and traders” were drawn by the dis-covery of gold in 1848, and they led the way for “twenty thousand”



workers migrating to California by 1852 (Fields 70). In the following year R. Spence Hardy, a Methodist minister who had performed his missionary duties in Ceylon, published A Manual of Buddhism, and he followed, across the next fifteen years, with book-length studies comparing Christianity and Buddhism and analyzing British involve-ment in Ceylon. In 1858, Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire published Le Bouddha, and by 1860 Abbé Auguste Deschamps could announce, in the pages of Le Correspondant, that “Buddhism has emerged from its profound and long silence” (Batchelor Awakening 242).

Almost simultaneous to this pronouncement, a counter strain that viewed Buddhism as an intellectual danger to the West also became evident and was expressed inversely to the earlier fear that indigenous Buddhist traditions in the East represented the chief obstacle to the hegemony sought by spiritual and economic colonialism. However, the canon of Buddhism, once forged in Western libraries by Oriental scholars and taught in Western universities and institutions, assumed an increasingly popular form available for intellectual and public con-sumption. Intellectual engagement with the dharma ensued as artists, philosophers, and theologians pursued hermeneutic acts at the zone of interaction between Eastern and Western forms of enlightenment, identifying shared affinities in the process.

The increasingly positive reception accorded Buddhism during the last forty years of the nineteenth century would surely have horrified Xavier or Desideri (not to mention the intolerant Friar William), as European and American forms of enlightenment, albeit in its positiv-istic aspect, engaged the dharma in a dialogic exchange at the point of contact in consciousness. The first major philosophical engagement occurred through Arthur Schopenhauer, whose post-1844 editions of his master work The World as Will and Representation operated with knowledge of Burnouf’s History, often referred directly to Buddhist religion structure, as when he proposes, in response to the four nobles truths (the Buddha’s first teaching): “Never has myth come closer to the truth, nor will it” (quoted in Schwab 427). Schopenhauer does indicate that his understanding of Buddhism was partial (in at least two senses) and sometimes superficial (a statue of the Buddha shared his desk with a bust of Kant—the same pairing, as epigrams, opens chapter 1). For example, his emphasis on will, which strongly attracted Nietzsche to his teachings, tended to condition his reaction toward Buddhist concepts like “empty nothingness” and “ nirvāna” and resulted in his avoidance of them, yet these same concepts also attracted him, since he could glimmer within them “the point where



subject and object no longer exist” (I. 412). The resistance to dual-ism represents one major aspect of Romanticism’s challenge to scien-tific forms of enlightenment epistemology, and the Buddhist tenets intersected this anti-epistemological position. Equally appealing was Buddhism’s rejection of “theism”: “It is a thoroughly established fact that Buddhism in particular, the religion with the greatest number of representatives on earth, contains absolutely no theism, indeed rejects it out of hand” (I. 487).

Schopenhauer, prompted by his mixed reception of the dharma, suggested that Buddhism had “pre-eminence over the other [systems of religions]” and praised, on the same page, the efforts of “Csoma Körösi” in bringing “the language and sacred writings of Buddhism” to light (II. 169). Schopenhauer believed that Buddhism provided a “conclusive vindication for his views” (Batchelor Awakening 256), and in 1854, when the rising tide of teachings by the Buddha flooded into European and American bookshops, Richard Wagner received a copy of The World as Will and Representation as a gift and “pro-ceeded to read it five times in the following nine months” (259). At the time, Wagner was working on his The Valkyrie, and Schopenhauer ignited, through tantalizing hints and brief references, an abiding curiosity in Buddhism. Wagner noted the influence of Burnouf’s History two years later, and the composer conceived and sought to execute an operatic work based on the life of Buddha, entitled The Victor, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in Venice in 1883. The Aryan connection to India led Wagner to Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s hyper-national Orientalism, which retained the term “Aryan” and, in the last section On the Inequality of the Races, asserted the primacy of “Germanic Aryan [as] sacred, the race of the lords of the earth” (Schwab 432), leading to a stern repudiation of Wagner by his friend, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Perhaps the most surprising engagement with Buddhism occurred when Friedrich Nietzsche deployed his responses to Buddhism in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, although he first encoun-tered its traces when he read Schopenhauer’s master work and its views of Buddhism when twenty-one (ca. 1865). His early friend Paul Jakob Deussen, who was also influenced by Schopenhauer, decided upon a career in Oriental philology, which brought Nietzsche into even deeper contact with the dharma. Deussen later became friends with Swami Vivekananda, an Indian native born in Calcutta who repre-sented India at the Parliament of World of Religions in Chicago [1893] and who lectured extensively throughout Europe and America. Not



surprisingly, given Nietzsche’s views on religion, the Buddha did not escape the scrutiny of the hammering philosopher and was grouped with other “preachers of death” (although Schopenhauer saw this aspect as one of Buddhism’s strengths [II. 463, 508–9]). Nietzsche also indicts Buddhism and Christianity as “nihilistic religions” (129), but this analytic arrow strikes an unexpected target, for he shifts into an extended and laudatory summation of Buddhist thought:

Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic that Christianity—it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its compo-sition, 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 . . . it no longer speaks of “the struggle against sin,” but quite in accordance with actuality, “the struggle against suffering.” It already has . . . the self-deception of morals behind it—it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil. (129)

The ethical dimension of Buddhism, expressed here as its erasure of “theism,” its analytic ‘positivism’, and its shift from “sin” and to “suf-fering” as the struggle defining the human condition, held the most attraction for Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was positioned at the end of the nineteenth century and could discern a Buddhist religion constructed through enlight-enment methods and principles but would deploy interrelated forms of Orientalism and Romanticism to deconstruct the direst dimen-sions of enlightenment epistemology through which Buddhism itself appeared. A few pages later, Nietzsche again juxtaposes Christianity with Buddhism, to the favor of the latter. Christianity “had need of barbarous concepts and values” that reflects as its political unconscious “desires to dominate beasts of prey” (132). However, Buddhism “is a religion for late human beings . . . a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization” (132). Romanticism, as most philosophers might accept, “both climaxed and [collapsed]” in Nietzschean thought (Batchelor Awakening 263), and Buddhism exerted a strong coun-terinfluence through the counterflows from colonial regions, the transmission of texts between countries at the vanguard of colonial contacts, the circulation of those primary and secondary works to various sites across the known world, including returning to the East itself, this time carrying converts such as Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrova Blavatsky back to the site of its origins. The anal-ysis in this chapter, especially in its final pages, necessarily moved past



the temporal frames established for Romanticism (ca. 1757–1850) in prior discussion to complete the mapping of semiotic lines of flow and force working to bring Buddhism into view, and the next chapter undertakes an exploration of shared affinities, rather than direct his-torical connections, but such an exercise is only made possible by the efforts of those discussed in the first two chapters.


C h a p t e r

Rom a n t icism’s Fou r Nobl e

T ru t hs

The teachings on the Four Noble Truths clearly distinguish two sets of causes and effects: those causes which produce suffering, and those which produce happiness. By showing us how to distinguish these in our own lives, the teachings aim at nothing less than to enable us to fulfill our deepest aspiration—to be happy and to over-come suffering.

(Tenzin Gyatso The Fourteenth Dalai Lama)

Whosoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking—beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality—may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, open his eyes . . . [on] the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and life-affirming human being.

(Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil)

Returning to Romanticism

The second phase of the relationship between Buddhism and Romanticism (conceptual engagements rather than historical and textual encounters), inaugurated here through Friedrich Nietzsche (often viewed as the last Romantic), will drift backward from his most productive period (ca.1878–1888) to the ‘Romantic’ decade of the 1790s. That decade opens with the publication of Blake’s triptych Songs of Innocence, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Songs of



Experience, Constantine Volney’s Ruins of Empire and Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Judgment and closes with the publication of that “revolution in poetic language” (Kristeva 82–3) launched by Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and the proposition by Friedrich Schlegel that emergent Oriental literature represented the highest form of Romanticism itself.1 With Schlegel’s assertion in mind, the next two chapters forge conceptual connections between Romantic and Buddhist thought, using the reception derivable from within Nietzsche’s work (and filtered through Schopenhauer) and employing it as a hermeneutic tool to works by Blake and Shelley to bring shared philosophical and ethical commitments into view. The backward drift from Nietzsche through Schopenhauer to Blake and Shelley serves to reverse the arrow of time thus far established for Romantic Dharma, shifting from the historical, philological, and tex-tual concerns discussed in chapters 1 and 2 and toward philosophical and poetic zones of intellectual interaction and re-asserting a syn-chronic, rather than purely diachronic, methodology to probe the affinities evoked previously.2 The second half of the chapter will argue that, more than any other English Romantic work, Blake’s Marriage, both in form and content, operates like the unique combination of critique and affirmation located in the Buddha’s sūtras generally and the literature of the prajñāpāramitā (Skt. the perfection of wis-dom) specifically. The next chapter then shifts to the last generation English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyric drama Prometheus Unbound, a work that strongly embodied the principles articulated in the Buddha’s first teaching (The Four Noble Truths) but, through its confrontation with suffering and the insight leading to its antidote (love), provides a detailed Romantic map for the realization of bodhi-chitta (Sanskrit for enlightenment mind), which transforms suffering into individual wisdom and collective transformation.

As Jerrold Seigel notes, “Schopenhauer’s philosophy made little impact before the 1850s” (540), yet his master work mediated the late-century philosophical reception of Buddhism, including that of Nietzsche. This influence flowed from his arguments that freedom as experience required that “one must first break free of this circle of subject-object relations” (541). Nietzsche’s laudatory comments on Buddhism’s shift from the ontology of sin to one of suffering as the defining attribute of existence (which concluded the last chapter) requires the eradication of precisely the “subject-object” duality iden-tified by Siegel and points directly to the first offered by the Buddha, The Four Noble Truths. The passage above makes another connec-tion, in Nietzsche’s view, between Buddha and Schopenhauer: the


R o m a n t i c i s m ’s F o u r N o b l e T r u t h s 57

proposed “fall into empty nothingness” (Heidegger 73) discloses that “The subject, the self, the individual are just so many false concepts” (Haar 18), a position already derivable from the philosophies of Hume and Berkeley in Western enlightenment thought prior to the 1790s. Within Nietzsche’s work, the self is often seen as a defining attribute in his philosophy (and just as often for Romantic writers as well), but Nietzsche’s critique of Western constructions of the subject moves toward a metaphysics where “the subject is absent” (Parkes 360), one of the prominent dimensions of structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism defined in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, which emerged from the reception of Nietzsche and was thereafter filtered through Heidegger.3 This analytic space, often interpreted as nihilism, stages the play of “complexity, a plurality of forces in conflict” (Haar 18), which paradoxically also reveals, in this same place, “the impossibility of coming to an end and finding an outcome in this end” (Blanchot 126). Emptiness passed into epistemology, and uncertainty became philosophical teleology for emergent forms of Western thought.

The strains of Buddhist thought embedded in Nietzsche’s work, however, cannot and must not be construed as the type of appropria-tion and affirmation periodically expressed by his “teacher,” Arthur Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation.4 The highest form of freedom, for the shifting philosophy of the West, was relocated into “a transfiguration through art” as a vehicle for an experience of “nirvana” (Taylor 443).5 Schopenhauer pursued this redefinition of Western thought through his linkage of Buddhist concepts and his own “meditative philosophy” (I. xxvi), seeing the former as a vindica-tion of the latter, and the last sentence of the first volume of World as Will (excluding the appendix) turns to the Buddhist prajñāpāramitā tradition associated with the Heart sūtra (especially its closing man-tra) to connect Eastern and Western modes of enlightenment brought into mutual illumination and dynamic exchange during the Romantic period:6 “But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing” (I. 412). Schopenhauer’s note cemented the connection, since “This is also the Prajna-Paramita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where sub-ject and object no longer exist” (I. 412). Schopenhauer’s philosophy manifested other entanglements with Buddhism, as when he con-cluded his discussion of death in the second volume with an evoca-tion of “nirvana”: “He willingly gives up the existence that we know; what comes to him instead of it is in our eyes nothing. The Buddhist



faith calls that existence Nirvana, that is to say, extinction” (II.508),7 and Schopenhauer’s espousal of “a Buddhist outlook” shifts toward a view of “liberation” as “an escape from the self and the will alto-gether” (Taylor 443).

Even for a philosopher like Schopenhauer with a “more posi-tive” response to Buddhist views than that voiced by Nietzsche, the reception accorded emptiness or nothingness (Skt. śūnyatā) as wis-dom (Skt. prajñā), in particular, had proved problematic even after 100-plus years of philological attempts to translate it into European languages from Chinese, Japanese, Pāli, Sanskrit, or Tibetan.8 Timothy Morton points to the misreading of precisely this concept in Hegel’s reception of the dharma, who viewed “Buddhist nothing-ness [as] a false, reified concreteness” (“Hegel” 20). The references scattered across Nietzsche’s work confirm that “his grasp” of “Hindu and Buddhist ideas” was “less than firm” (Parkes 357), and with the significant exceptions noted above (i.e., his comments regarding suf-fering to which I will return), Nietzsche in general directed his cri-tique of Buddhism toward its view of “nothingness” which is reduced to “nihilism.” In the indictment of Western culture in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, he argued: “I began to understand that the constantly spreading ethics of pity, which had tainted and debilitated even the philosophers, was the most sinister symptom of our sinister European civilization—a detour to a new Buddhism? To a European species of Buddhism? To nihilism?” (154).

Nietzschean nihilism had always been a complicated concept to unpack, since it enfolded both negative and positive values that came into play in intellection and any realization of freedom: “The ulti-mate aim of this liberation is independent self-mastery and supreme health in a life of continual experimentation and adventure” (Magnus and Higgins 31). Heidegger and Megill also perceived positive and negative attributes in the Nietzschean discourse on nihilism, which was “an event achieved in history, and yet it is like a shedding off of history, a molting period, when history changes direction” and was often located at “the horizon of every particular science” (Heidegger 122) when a paradigm shift occured (Kuhn 43–51). Nietzsche fore-grounds “a nihilism that fails to respond [to] the opportunity offered by the world’s nullity,” yet proposes “an active, aesthetic Nihilism . . . as the appropriate attitude for modern, and postmodern, existence” (Megill 33–4). Generally, in the estimation of a number of Eastern scholars (where Nietzsche’s work has exerted a strong counterinflu-ence), the proposal of this mode of metaphysics for modernity, in the The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, comes “close to the distinctively



nonmetaphysical standpoint of Mahāyāna Buddhism” (Parkes 372). Specifically, the concept also underwrote “the enthusiastic reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in China and Japan,” since his thought intersected “the ideas of several major thinkers in the Asian tradition” and reflected “certain affinities” with “early Buddhism in India” (Parkes 372).

Nietzsche also remained suspicious of the asceticism of Buddhism, judging its meditative practices “lazy.” Again drawing upon The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche asserted that an “ascetic life is a self-contradiction” (III. 16), cloaking in its denial a “lust for power as it is manifest in those who are declining or decadent” (Magnus and Higgins 51). As Paul Valadier has argued, “the ascetic ideal,” in Nietzsche’s reading, “keeps a certain distance from life due to its fear of life” (Valadier 248), and in spite of some positive value, he concluded that “the long-term impact of ascetic ideals [were] psycho-logically and physiologically damaging” (Magnus and Higgins 51), ironically arriving at the same judgment made by the Buddha (who also offered a stern critique of asceticism). However, asceticism also provided, in the short term, a vehicle through which to realize life “as a totality and a unity of self and world” (Haar 30), where “libera-tion [as] self-mastery” proceeds to the insight, at the conclusion of The Genealogy, that “All great things perish of their own accord, by an act of self-cancellation: so the law of life decrees” (XXVII. 297). “Buddhism,” therefore, “is not a religion in which one merely aspires after perfection: perfection is the normal case” in spite of being “a hundred times colder, more veracious, more objective” than other religions, since “it merely says what it feels: ‘I suffer’” (Nietzsche Anti-Christ 131, 132). For both Buddhist and Nietzschean thought, the triumph of the will resides in the use of it as a vehicle for over-coming its own operations to achieve a state of enlightened “self-cancellation.”

The Heart of Wisdom

Nietzsche, of course, was no Buddhist, and his critique of the dharma as he knew it was often quite severe. His work, nonetheless, seriously engaged the most complicated concepts of Buddhism (compassion, emptiness, enlightenment, and suffering) that emerged into European consciousness through the labors of his fellow philologists and phi-losophers, adapting them to the conditions and demands of Western philosophy. The role of suffering would certainly attract Nietzsche’s interest, given the role it played in his own philosophy, and the shift



from “sin” to “suffering” as the epistemic framework for living in the world, discussed at the end of chapter 2, points to the Buddha’s artic-ulation of the Four Noble Truths—with which Nietzsche’s views are quite compatible. Indeed, Nietzsche’s own discourse on “The Four Great Errors,” from Twilight of the Idols, seems an appropriation and transmutation of the ignorant grasping for an illusory sovereign self, which Buddha’s famous first discourse placed at the root of suffering. Nietzsche’s errors indict flawed views of causality, which lead to false views of the operations of the will: (1) “errors mistaking causes for consequences”; (2) “errors of false causality”; (3) “error of imaginary causes,” and (4) “the error of free will” (47, 48, 50, 53).

Nietzsche described the first error as “reason’s intrinsic form of corruption” (Twilight 47), a position explored with equal zeal at the dawn of English Romanticism through Blake’s relentless analysis of the primacy of reason for forms of Western enlightenment in The Marriage, The Book of Urizen, and other illuminated prophecies. The second error, after identifying three internalities through which it becomes manifest (will, mind, ego), reveals them as illusions that only extend the first error and that therein embrace the phantom “after-product [of] empiricism” (Twilight 49), a position adopted in different ways by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats in their critical writings. The third error “start[s] from a dream” (Twilight 50) re-inscribed in consciousness to alleviate “distressing states” through ideological commitment to “a selected and preferred kind of [causal] explanation, the kind by means of which the feeling of the strange, new, unexperienced is most speedily and most frequently abolished” (Twilight 51). Shelley’s unnamed poet in Alastor, who perceives in dream a “veiled maiden” who is subsequent sought (upon awakening) in the world, provides a parallel poetic exploration of the “error of imaginary causes,” as well as exploring the limits of Nietzsche’s final error. The fourth error, belief in “free will,” is “the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind ‘accountable’ [and thereby] making mankind dependent on him,” which generates in its wake a culture of “guilt” in service to an economy of “punish-ment” for “sin” (Twilight 53). A broad range of English Romantic writing, from Blake’s Book of Urizen and Book of Ahania through Byron’s “The Giaour” and Manfred to Shelley’s Queen Mab and The Cenci, launch analogous attacks on and pursue extended analyses of the divine economies of guilt as the mechanism of control at the core of organized religion.9

Considerable confluence between The Four Great Errors and The Four Noble Truths is easily mapped in any comparative analysis,



and given Nietzsche’s expressed admiration for the shift from sin to suffering at the root of Buddhism, a brief explanation of this foundational view, for the dharma, will allow the apprehension of further congruencies in the form of concepts strategically deployed to overcome error. The Four Noble Truths (Skt. Dharma-cakra-pravatara sūtra) functions as the foundation for both the earli-est expression of the dharma in the Hīnayāna (Sanskrit for lesser vehicle) and in the later elaboration of the Mahāyāna (Sanskrit for great vehicle) traditions, shaping the core principles upon which all Buddhist practices are stabilized.10 Seven weeks after his enlight-enment, the tathāgata (Skt. “one who has thus come” or “one who has thus gone”) was encouraged by Indra and Brahma and urged by his students to offer his first teaching, which was deliv-ered “At Bārānasi, in the Deer Park at Isipatana” (Bodhi 77) and which focused on The Four Noble Truths (the very foundation of all Buddhist schools).11 Basically, these “truths” emerge from a recognition that all sentient beings aspire to achieve happiness and seek to overcome suffering (Skt. duhkha), yet most are drowning in forms of suffering that are self-imposed. Four truths f low from this re-cognition of reality:

The truth of suffering1. The truth of the origin of suffering2. The truth of cessation of suffering3. The truth of the path beyond suffering.4.

Commentaries on these concepts, which assert “the middle way” between “the pursuit of sensual happiness in sensual pleasures” and “the pursuit of self-mortification which is painful, ignoble [and] unbeneficial” (Bodhi 75), literally fill monastic libraries (East and West). All the major post-Buddha scholars and teachers address the function of these truths in some form, including Āryadeva, Asanga, Atiśa, Chandrakirti, Dharmakīrti, Maitreya, Nāgārjuna, Śāntideva, and Tsong kha pa (to name only the most obvious), and a condensed discussion of these noble truths through the role of suffering, the illusion of the self, the middle path between nihilism and essential-ism, and the relationship between emptiness and cessation by these towering figures (whose refinements defined virtually all Buddhist practices and traditions) can provide transition to similar insights located within a wide range of Romantic writing.

Buddha’s discourse opens with the assertion of “the middle way” and moves directly to the proposed solution, a “Noble Eightfold



Path” defined as “right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, [and] right concentration” (Bodhi 75–6). The first truth simply confirms the universality of long-familiar experiences operative across the spec-trum of sentience: “birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suf-fering, death is suffering” (Bodhi 76), and the second truth, “the origin of suffering,” implicates “craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination” (Bodhi 76) as the unhealthy response to existential suffering. Their combination represents the Buddha’s diagnosis of the universal condition of everything that lives. The third truth asserts that “the cessation of suffering” is possible through the “remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving [through] nonattachment” (Bodhi 76), and the fourth truth reiterates the Noble Eightfold Path “leading to the cessation of suf-fering” (Bodhi 76). In the remainder of the discourse, Buddha briefly expounds on the interrelations of the four truths at three existen-tial levels, and his realization, after identifying suffering as the root of unhappiness, indicates that “Unshakable is the liberation of my mind” (Bodhi 77). Through his first teaching, his students proclaim that “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation” and announce that “the wheel of the Dhamma [Pāli; Skt. dharma] had been set in motion” (Bodhi 77).

Buddhist literature proposes a tripartite structure to the suffering associated with samsāra (Skt.) or the “flowing on” (Pāli) of the “cycle of repeated birth and death that individuals undergo until they attain nirvāna” (Keown 248). This cyclic view, present in all Indic religious systems, predates the Buddha’s discourse and quite likely provided the structural model for Nietzsche’s “eternal return,” which came to him, as Klossowski indicates, as “a sudden awakening” (107). At a fundamental level, all sentient beings share the painful experiences of birth, sickness, old age, and death; at a secondary level, all suf-fer change and experience relative and short-term pleasures, which temporarily relieve such pain but which eventually alter and change themselves, giving rise to subsequent suffering. The suffering of con-ditioning—to borrow a phrase from the current Dalai Lama—“refers to the bare fact of our unenlightened existence . . . under the influence [of ignorance]” (Gyatso The Four Noble Truths 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” (54–5), and the prime agent in the continuation of suffering emanates from the tendency to cling to an essential, stable self. In light of the view of conditional suffering, the truth of suffering’s origin resides in



a willed ignorance of dependent origination and the ego’s resistance to acknowledge interdependent rather than independent existence as the boundary condition for all sentient beings.

Once suffering as boundary condition is perceived and once the role ignorance plays in the maintenance of suffering is unveiled, the crucial question shifts to the possibility of cessation. Can one achieve liberation from suffering? Within Buddhist practice, cessation emerges with the recognition of the impermanent nature of all things and thoughts, hence the tendency in analytic meditative practice to focus on emptiness. In the Heart sūtra, this view achieves expres-sion in the famous phrase “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form,” a seemingly paradoxical statement with analogues in Romantic philosophy and poetry.12 The Heart sūtra and the Diamond sūtra shape the core of those teachings known as the prajñāpāramitā and history (or perhaps legend) indicates that the perfection of wisdom was originally taught “in the sixth century B.C.E. by Shakyamuni Buddha on the slopes of Vulture Peak, outside the contemporary city of Rajgir in northeast India” (Simmer-Brown xvi). The larger group of prajñāpāramitā sūtras are commonly believed to have originated in the first century bce., and Eastern and Western scholarship agree that this cluster represents “the originating texts of the Mahayana [tradition]” (Thurman x), which “represented a paradigm shift in wisdom and pedagogy” (Simmer-Brown xviii) for Buddhist commit-ments and conceptions. These works also undergo extensive revision and extension, and the Heart and Diamond sūtras are now seen as abridged segments of a much larger group of sūtras of varying length collectively known as the Great Mother of the Buddhas.13 The present concern, the Heart sūtra, established the core of wisdom as emerg-ing from the heart rather than logic and placed “emptiness” (Skt. śūnyatā) at the foundation of realization of “suchness” (Skt. tathatā: related to one name for the Buddha, tathāgata), which makes intrigu-ing its elaboration not by the Buddha himself but by Avalokiteśvara (the bodhisattva of compassion) and which establishes a direct doctri-nal connection between wisdom and compassion.

The closing mantra of the sūtra weaves these various threads together into a pedagogical instrument designed to propel students toward enlightenment: “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all hail!” (Skt. Gata gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā [Conze Wisdom 113]) As Judith Simmer-Brown indicates in her preface to the Conze translation, “emptiness, the absolute nature of reality” has been the most difficult concept in Buddhism for Western thought and translation alike, since the



mantra locates wisdom beyond “concept, limit, or boundary of any kind” (xv). Both Timothy Morton and John Rudy, in their discus-sions of Buddhism and Romanticism, focus for different yet related reasons on the Heart sūtra in their analyses of thought and practice. Morton’s superb analysis of Hegel unfolds in relation to the Heart sūtra to establish “his view that Buddhism involves the stripping away of all determinants from the self by a rigorous asceticism and (for him) a paradoxical identification with the nothingness” (29). Rudy’s adoption of the sūtra provides a vehicle for a rigorous application of its “mode of generative codependency” as a tool to excavate works by Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth.

Romanticism’s Noble Truths

With acceptance that liberation from suffering can be achieved, the path from pain proceeds through “a direct intuitive realization of emptiness,” the initial step along the Path of Connection (sometimes termed the Path of Seeing). Romantic poets trod these paths as well, a point argued by Stephen Batchelor in his reading of Nāgārjuna’s Verses from the Center (Skt. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā). Nāgārjuna, often considered the most profound teacher of Buddhism after Shakyamuni himself (because of his poetic rendering of the middle way), was thought to gather his verses by descending to a subterra-nean lake beneath Katmandu, Nepal in the second century ce to visit “a species of aquatic serpents called nagas to retrieve the Buddha’s Wisdom Discourses” (Verses 3). Nāgārjuna’s poetry articulates the “middle way” designated at the opening and closing to Buddha’s first discourse, The Four Noble Truths, and his approach to prac-tice is taken up by Śāntideva’s poetic The Way of the Bodhisattva, which extended the wisdom derivable from the earlier Threefold Lotus sūtra and the prajñāpāramitā sūtras.14 Śāntideva’s work offers clearly defined connections to Romantic thought, and his interrelation of compassion, emptiness, and enlightenment in a profound poetic form resonates quite well with Romantic thought: “Take others—lower, higher, equal—as yourself;/Identify yourself as ‘other’”; “The truth, therefore, is this:/That you must wholly give yourself and take the other’s place” (130, 132). As Batchelor indicates, “to be empty is no longer to be full of oneself” (43), a view clearly in the same spirit as Blake’s proverb of hell that “The most sublime act is to set another before you” and his later admonition, in Milton, that “Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually/Annihilate himself for oth-ers good” (E 139: 38.35–6).



Batchelor draws a further connection to Romantic poetic practice in the perceived efficacious effect of meditation within nature as a vehicle for the realization of emptiness, something he practiced dur-ing his Dzogchen training: “a Dzogchen master invites one to ‘the solitude of a mountain peak where you can gaze into the vast expanse of a sky so limpid no trace of cloud or haze can be seen, where pure radiance alone shimmers’” (Batchelor Verses 43). Batchelor’s Zen master used the sublime encounter as an event capable of moving a student beyond individual identity and “into a network of endless relationships with others” (Verses 44). The Western analysis of the sublime, especially in its earliest iterations, points to “elevation” and “transport,” but these mental experiences settle into “enthrallment.” Such a state is actually counter to what Batchelor describes, since the Zen master has withdrawn the “fear” from the event (the particular passion at the core of the Western analyses of the sublime), and only in the critique of Kant and Schiller, in the 1790s, does Western con-templation of the sublime approach the “emptiness” effect sought by the Zen master through the sublime encounter.

The experience of the sublime through nature, traced back to Longinus’s On the Sublime, has long been associated with Romanticism through the philosophical elaborations of Burke, Kant, and Schiller, through the varied poetic practices that traverse every national representation of it, and through a robust critical assessment of its functions as a vehicle to transform a state of arrested progres-sion into “a state [that] is apocalyptic” (Weiskel 26). For Longinus, the sublime is a discursive mode that sought to capture “the elevation of mind” (85) experienced in nature, and the desired textual affect was “not persuasion but transport” (81). The related poetic idiom of the sublime’s “power” operates through “amplification” (88) as the preferred vehicle to establish, problematically in relation to the argument here, “enthrallment” (89). Burke’s On the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful emphasized those natural attri-butes (e.g. vastness, ruggedness, obscurity, darkness, solidity) from which the sublime experience emerged and coupled the psychologi-cal state to the perceived “ideas of pain,” which “is stronger in its operation than pleasure” (305). In this sense Burke positioned the sublime reaction in “the sensation and the emotion together” but in the process elided it “from the realm of judgment” (Monk 37, 38). The analysis of Immanuel Kant’s third critique simply subsumed all prior discussions and shifted the critical emphasis away from modes of expression and toward modes of intellection, since “the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature, but only in our own



ideas” (97) because it is an activity of noumena rather than an attri-bute of phenomena (a synthetic psychological experience in the sub-ject rather than a discrete physical attribute of the object). In the sublime encounter, Kant indicated that “The mind feels itself set in motion,” and “the point of excess for the imagination” opens “like an abyss . . . in which it fears to lose itself” (107). Writing after Kant, Schiller argued that “The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling” because “our power of apprehension [is] defeated in an attempt to form an image” capable of capturing the “vital power” against which “our own [being] dwindles to nothing” (198). This understanding of “the limits of identity” underwrites, in Romantic literary prac-tices, a movement “beyond identity” (Weiskel 162), which arrives at its instructional value for the Zen master as recounted by Batchelor.

Romantic poets intensively juxtapose “the sublime selflessness of the natural world [with] the pettiness of . . . self-centered fantasies,” with the net effect of an experience of emptiness as the condition when one is no longer “full of oneself” (Batchelor Verses 32, 43). Batchelor, a well-known translator of Buddhist texts who was also a monk in the Tibetan and Zen traditions, connects this annihilative approach to two English Romantic writers in particular—John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Keatsian “negative capability,” he argues, “captures the tension between the negative quality of emptiness which allows the capacity of creative and empathetic responsiveness” (Verses 46), and proposes that the concept offered by Keats, in his famous letter, was likely an expansion of Coleridge’s view of “the creative sensi-bility [as] the ‘suspension of the Act of Comparison, which permits [a] sort of Negative Belief” (Verses 46). This eradication of the self, in Batchelor’s estimation, underwrites an awareness of and openness to “the shifting, poignant, beautiful and tragic contingencies of the world” (44–5), a position connecting Buddhist and Romantic prac-tices in spite of both writers’ lack of knowledge of the dharma.

The meditative structure of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry often offers poetic models for self-emptying. Rudy identifies this tex-tual effect at work in several of Wordsworth’s poems, where the poet’s “leaving-taking . . . marks not so much a refusal to abide as an open-ing to all conditions, an acceptance so complete that the very experi-ence of the alternating joy and sorrow attending the continual arrival and departure of the senses sets the poet beyond those very senses” (Wordsworth 209). Rudy also provides an astute analysis of a simi-lar poetic dimension operative in Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp,” whose initial imagistic entwining of “stillness and sound” verbally suggests their “interdependent” natures and therein enacts a “ self-emptying”



that collapses, in the poetic swerve from nondualism, toward a mono-theistic synthesis into “one Life” (Rudy Romanticism 140). The mani-festation within Romantic writing of forms of “emptiness” argued by Batchelor and analyzed by Morton and Rudy emerge from attempts to deconstruct the source of suffering, a sovereign self, at the elabora-tive core of Europe’s first stage of enlightenment epistemology (Seigel 3–44; Taylor 3–24). However, as the preceding comparative analysis of Nietzsche’s Four Great Errors and Buddha’s Four Noble Truths indicates, cessation of suffering through nonattachment to realize wisdom must be preceded by the recognition of suffering as the exis-tential boundary condition of all sentient beings, and such paths of connection are not terribly difficult to locate in English and other modes of European Romanticism.

Continuing with Batchelor’s focus on Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relentlessly explores the experience of individual suffering both in its own poetic terms and through the literary lin-eage of the work to the myth of the wandering Jew, which establishes the Mariner’s state of suffering as the result of a divine economy of guilt superimposed by organized religious views of sin, rather than as a boundary condition for all sentient beings, and Coleridge hardens this aspect across his revisions between its initial appearance in Lyrical Ballads and its final state in Sibylline Leaves (through the evocation of Thomas Burnet and the inclusion of the marginal gloss). Coleridge’s Rime cast long shadows across the literature of the second generation, and Byron’s fondness for the work sets in relief his occasional attacks on Coleridge’s metaphysical musings (i.e., in the dedicatory stanzas for Don Juan). Byron’s early and middle works repeatedly dramatize both mental and physical pain and suffering, which serves as bound-ary conditions not just for his Byronic heroes but for all sentient beings (I think here not solely of Prometheus, the Giaour or Manfred but equally of the dog in “Darkness” and the bull in Childe Harold). Of course, Percy Shelley appropriates the same myth exploited by Coleridge (the tale of the wandering Jew) for a late section of Queen Mab (although the tale of Ahasuerus functions to undercut the theo-logical economies at work in The Rime), and Mary Shelley’s narra-tive of the creature’s woes in Frankenstein owes much to Coleridge’s “mini-epic” (as he called it). Indeed, her extended analysis also cri-tiqued the drive of an ego (seemingly the foundation of the Mariner’s act of violence) formed in the forge of enlightenment epistemology through Walton and Waldman, as well as Victor. The very adoption of the Prometheus myth for Percy Shelley’s lyric drama, as the preface states directly, highlights his “suffering and endurance” as providing



“the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature” (131), anticipating Taylor’s linkage of “selfhood and morality” (3) in his elaborate discussion of identity. As well, Prometheus’s recanta-tion of his curse, a selfless act of self-overcoming (that completes his earlier altruistic acts toward mankind) based on the wish that “no living thing suffer pain” and his recognition that this curse actual empowered the Jovian universe, strike a very Buddhist stance (see chapter 4). The Titan has recognized that “the real destroyer” of “happiness is always there within us” and through his act of re/cogni-tion combines “intelligence and emotion” to “change and transform” both inner and outer reality (Gyatso, The Four Noble Truths 90, 91). When Keats describes the state of “negative capability” as the abil-ity to stand in “uncertainty,” he articulates a position wherein the poet has “no identity,” an experiential state termed “no self” in the Buddhist Cittamātra (or Mind Only) school.15 The planes of suffer-ing located in Keats’s poetry, most often evoked through “Ode to a Nightingale,” eloquently speak to the arrival of English Romanticism at views highly conversant with the identification of suffering as the true source of human misery, as Nietzsche perceived in Buddhism (rather than the reality of sin), and promotes the experience of empty nothingness as the noble path to cessation.

Blake’s evocation of suffering as the steady state of sentient exis-tence, and its grounding in the torments of love and jealousy experi-enced by the grasping self, arrived early in the canon and extended to its conclusion, forming a continuous thematic concern from The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion through the Lambeth and Felpham prophecies to the Job illustrations and the Dante paint-ings upon which Blake worked on his deathbed. The recognition of a self fragmented within and alienated without gives rise to varied re/cognitions of Western enlightenment modes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, whose response to the crippling dualisms at work within rational thought shares much with the Buddhist erosion of subject/object relations in the concept of dependent origination. Perhaps no work in Blake’s early canon more directly confronts the conditions of suffering than Vision of the Daughters of Albion, whose heroine Oothoon—raped, rejected, enchained—nonetheless raises her voice against the uni-verse of victimization to articulate a multi-verse of potentiality placed under Urizenic erasure. The process of mapping analogous views expressed in Blake’s work and in Buddhist sūtras could be extended indefinitely, but I will close with the con-cept of self-annihilation, the overcoming of selfhood, in Milton and Jerusalem (discussed at greater length in chapter 5). Through the



agency of the Bard’s song, Milton recognizes Satan as his specter of selfhood, which prompts his explosive departure from eternity in an overt act of self-overcoming, and the unveiling of the illusions of selfhood represented in Milton is crystallized in mirrored writing inscribed in Jerusalem:

Each Man is in his spectre’s powerUntil the arrival of that hourWhen his Humanity awakeAnd cast his Spectre into the lake.

Blake’s plural verb “awake” is applied to “Humanity,” a grammatical forging of collective connection in preference to subjective isolation (a counter to the singular possessive pronoun “his”). This awakening is predicated on the re-absorption of the specter of selfhood by the mirror of mind, and the mirrored writing process reinforces in its readers the active nature of the process, since any one confronting Blake’s cryptic comment must either seek a mirror or become one to read the passage at all.

Blake’s SŪ TR A of Wisdom

In almost every semester when I have taught The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (at any level of the curriculum), students invariably raise the question of his influence on Nietzsche (which was nonexistent) and his knowledge of Buddhist thought (which was impossible).16 Quite often, the location for such perceived accord (both retrograde regard-ing Buddhism and prospective regarding Nietzsche) occurs precisely in the same textual space, “The Proverbs of Hell,” a tradition Blake knew well from his reading of Lavater’s Aphorisms of Man (1788). Blake’s critique of Lavater in his annotations, whose maxims upon occasion gave rise to the perception of “A Vision of the Eternal Now” (E 592) but which just as often indicated that he was misled by “the Philosophy of Causes & Consequences” (E 601), points to his modi-fication of the aphoristic tradition in the enigmatic direction later pursued by Nietzsche, who was equally a master of the aphoristic form and whose maxims often occur in works which include discus-sions of Buddhism. As Nelson Hilton has acknowledged, “Blake’s aphoristic genius creates what might be thought of as an interrelated collection of ‘kōans’—those zen word viruses or instructional devices designed to cut through muddied perceptions of everyday language” (“Early Works” 203). John Rudy similarly focuses on the “unfolding



kōan-like meditative process” (93) at work The Marriage, comparing profitably Blake’s poetic, prosaic, printing, and prophetic practices to a wide range of Zen masters, including Bunan, Dōgen, Hakuin, and Suzuki (93–126). As Hilton and Rudy imply, Blake’s proverbs, like Zen kōans, are instructional devices designed “to directly elicit an experience of awakening,” and their “shock” method included “beat-ing, shouting directly into a student’s ear, or giving paradoxical or nonsensical responses” (Keown 143).

Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” strive to achieve analogous affects through shared methods, although his aphorisms unfold through a dynamic interactive textuality woven from word and image. The “beating” of the aphorisms hammers moral restrictions (“Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity”; “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with Bricks of Religion” [E 35, 36]); the “shouting” of their exclamatory punctuation aspires to ignite inspiring flights beyond self-restriction (“When thou seest an Eagle. Thou seest a portion of Genius. Lift up thy head!”; “Enough! Or Too Much” [E 37, 38]), and the “paradoxical or nonsensical” chal-lenges mental limitations and cultivates strategies to move beyond such restrictions (“The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but wisdom: no clock can measure”; “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth” [E 36, 37]). When Blake proverbially proposes that “One thought, fills immensity” (E 36), he articulates a kōan-like enigma which forces a radical extension of thought beyond fixed lim-its, and the proverb itself f lows into the visual field, where two ships sail across an ocean past an island over which seven birds fly freely, forcing a movement from one form of semiosis (words) to another (images) and one form of reception (reader) to another (spectator).17 The proverbs, thus, serve to move the mind and the eye, pushing out-ward towards greater dimensions quite common to the Buddhist view of mind, which is both “the still centre of the wheel [and] the source of bondage and liberation” but which perceives that “each world contains all others, one instant of thought contains 3,000 worlds” (Williams 157).

Blake’s intersection with Buddhist concepts, as opposed to his direct appropriation of Buddhist texts, became a leitmotif within Allen Ginsburg’s work (both poetry and prose), which comes as no surprise, given the saturation of the Beats in Buddhism, Ginsburg’s practice of Tibetan Buddhism, and his acknowledgement of Blake as his prophetic predecessor. Interestingly, Blake criticism, which emerged with ferocity during the same decade, also exhibits a spo-radic tendency to compare his insights to that found in Buddhism,



occasionally by some of the most traditional names defining that scholarship, as when Northrop Frye “claim[ed] that ‘terms from Blake and Mahayana Buddhism [could] be used interchangeably’” (quoted in Weir 11). Only rarely does this sense of compatible vision taken on a sustained voice, but Nelson Hilton, in his comments above and in “Blakean Zen,” perhaps stands at the foreground of this uncommon critical practice, since his analysis of Blakean systems (prominently on display in The Marriage) establishes the insight that prophetic illu-mination necessitates that its readers must stand “deep in the folds of some structure of interrelations” (“Zen” 183).

More recently, Louise Economides forges numerous connections between Blake’s corrective vision of flawed dualistic humanism, his ‘deep ecological’ outlook, and his intellectual resonances with both Heidegger and Buddhism, and Heidegger’s presence in her discus-sion is particularly intriguing, since he was deeply influenced by both Nietzsche and Suzuki: “A crucial step toward acknowledging human-ity’s appropriation within the fourfold lies in recognizing a deeper relationship between emptiness and form than has traditionally been available in post-Platonic Western philosophy—a relationship con-vincingly elaborated within Eastern traditions” (16).18 Kazuyoshi Oishi ’s reading of the reception of Blake by Yanagi Muneyoshi, which occurred at about the same time as Heidegger’s embrace of Suzuki, explores the degree to which “Blake’s philosophy might be compatible with Zen Buddhism” and matured into an “extraordinary, almost empathetic, devotion to Blake” (183). All these critical views suggest that anti-dualism, emptiness, illusion, relative versus abso-lute truth, and transparency form the strongest ties connecting Blake to the Buddhist Mahāyāna traditions, and they equally suggest that the perfection of wisdom sought by Blake and Buddha, as well as by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, are highly interactive, even “necessary,” to achieve a shift in Western philosophy itself. However, such connections tend to float on the margins of Blake Studies, yet they point to the play of synchronicity argued in this book, where the revision of Western enlightenment modes during the Romantic age arrived at analogous epistemological and existential views compatible with the dharma of the Buddha and its transmission into European consciousness during the long Romantic period.

Romanticism offers, I argue, no work closer to a prajñāpāramitā sūtra than Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in spite of his complete lack of “opportunity for any kind of direct, unmediated exposure to Hindu myth” (Weir 44) or any knowledge, direct or indi-rect, of the traditional textual form for the teachings of the tathāgata.



In fact, the only reference to the Buddha occurs late in the canon in a catalogue of prophetic figures in Jerusalem, although as Weir argues Blake did have ample opportunities to encounter a broad range of Oriental literature through the immediate circle of acquaintances and friends circulating around Joseph Johnson, whose Analytic Review constantly mediated the presentation of Oriental scholarship to the reading public (Weir 31–43). Most of these contacts took place at the beginning of the 1790s, when Blake’s illuminated works deploy dynamic contraries as an epistemological foundation for the world and the self, and Weir mounts a strong circumstantial case for the poet’s contact with and reception of Oriental literary works—with much of his primary textual evidence drawn from The Marriage. The recep-tion history of Blake in the work of Asian writers provides another aspect of the compatibility of his ideas as perceived by practitioners of Buddhism itself, and a number of essays included in Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki’s The Reception of Blake in the Orient trace a critical tradition that “responded to the power of his work to produce novel and unpredictable configurations in radically different cultural and historical contexts from his own” (2), which also marked the migra-tion of the dharma into countries beyond India.

As Makdisi observes in his analysis of Blake’s critique of British imperialism (and its relationship with Orientalism), the visionary poet of the early 1790s “was basically the only major poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who categorically refused to dabble in recognizably Orientalist themes or motifs” (Impossible 209).19 This is not to say that Blake was not conversant with Orientalist knowledge, especially at the beginning of the 1790s (the inception of The Marriage), since friends like Henry Fuseli were contracted by Joseph Johnson to write reviews for the Analytical Review during this time (Weir 39). Blake’s lost painting, “The Bramins,” which was included in his 1809 one-man exhibition and discussed in its Descriptive Catalogue, has also been one primary focus for the few studies that probe Blake’s understanding of Orientalism (Connolly 148–9; Makdisi 244; Weir 4–5, 21). The painting depicted the activi-ties of Charles Wilkins “translating the Geeta,” and Blake’s descrip-tion (the shortest in the Catalogue) acknowledged it as “the first publication of that part of the Hindoo Scriptures” (E 548). Wilkins (as discussed in chapter 2) helped ignite the Oriental Renaissance with his translation, which initially appeared in the pages of Asiatic Researches (the journal created by Sir William Jones) before appear-ing in book-form in London (with a preface by Warren Hastings). In terms of its composition, Blake’s famous painting “Michael binding



Satan” (ca. 1805) has also been viewed as encoding his understanding of the Eastern representation of contraries, since the configuration of figures and the interplay of darkness and light have often prompted comparisons with traditional representations of “yin-yang” (Klonsky 37). In my own case, I felt the affinity most strongly when an acci-dental juxtaposition of Blake’s painting “Epitome of James Hervey’s ‘Meditations among the Tombs’” (ca. 1820–5) with the Amitabha thanga on the cover of this work brought into resolution the medita-tive and visionary tendencies of both, where an individual at the foot of the design reads upward, creating through the operation of imagi-nation the very visualization of saints and bodhisattvas (respectively) that dominate the heart of both works.

These critical assessments, which hint at Blake’s synthesis of other modes of mythology in The Marriage and other illuminated proph-ecies, represent an attempt on his part to move beyond the “com-parative mythography” pursued by Sir William Jones’ application of enlightenment methodology and further indicated that he shared with Jones an attempt “to locate the origins of religion outside of the Bible” (Weir 44, 41). This view provides an expanded context within which to read Blake’s corrective assertion, in the second “Memorable Fancy” in The Marriage (the dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel), that “The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human per-ception” and that these principles, designed to create “a perception of the infinite,” are equally connected to the visionary practices of “the North American tribes” (E 39). Michael Ferber, in his assess-ment of the dialogic exchanges with Isaiah and Ezekiel (in the second “Memorable Fancy”), views Ezekiel’s answer “a revelatory shock, like the answers a Zen master might give to a novice, whom Blake would call an ‘idiot Questioner,’ in order to raise him into a perception of the infinite” (59).20 Supposedly primitive religions (in India and America alike), which enlightenment mythography sought to subject to Christianity, gain ascendency in Blake’s deconstructive treatment, since poetic genius undergirds religious expression itself (which moves toward the Nietzschean view of achieving transcendence through expansive artistic assimilation and not through restrictive religious expression).21

The construction of The Marriage, in Hilton’s analysis, also mani-fests a “yin-yang nature” (“Early Works” 203) in its erosion of the body-soul dualism ascribed to all “bibles and sacred codes” at a the-matic level and its interplay of poetry and prose at the foundation of its structural strategies at its textual level. In terms of its hybrid generic form, corrective intellectual content and context, and composite



textual complexities, The Marriage strongly resembles the assemblage of the sūtra form, and Paul Williams’s description of those works of the prajñāpāramitā tradition captures rather well various dimensions long recognized as defining attributes of Blake’s Romantic coda:

But the landscape of the Mahāyāna sūtras is quite extraordinary, space and time expand and conflate, connections seem to be missed, we move abruptly from ideas so compressed and arcane as to verge on the meaningless (37).

The sūtras provide a “framework for textual exposition,” establish “the lineage of transmission,” and often include “the phenomenon of laudatory self-reference” in a composite generic form where “the prose and the verse versions of a particular episode” coincide to pro-vide an inner dialectic through which wisdom emerged (Williams 38, 39). The articulation of the Mahāyāna sūtras have also been historically understood as a direct refutation of the overtly rational and dedicatedly academic tendencies of the abhidharma traditions, which were often “regarded as dry and scholarly” in the application of relentless categorical methods to “represent the constant structure of human psychology” but which thereby generated “a very precise way of looking at mind” (Trungpa Glimpses 1, 3). For this reason, as Christopher deCharms has argued, the abhidharma has often been viewed as Buddhism’s form of Western mind-science, although as many differences as similarities can be discerned in any comparative analysis (45–59).

Even a superficial reading of both The Marriage and its criticism confirms the degree to which Blake’s work intersects this description of sūtras dedicated to the perfection of wisdom. The work has long been recognized as extremely difficult to classify in terms of its form and content, although most interpretations follow the reading of it offered by Bloom via Frye, as “an intellectual satire and a prophecy of imminent apocalypse, although an element of irony severely qualifies the prophecy” (Bloom “Commentary” 896). Its satiric operations are indeed prominent and most often engage Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), but if Bloom is correct in his assessment that the work has “an affinity with [Swift’s] A Tale of a Tub,” then its satire might be a necessary feature for its apocalyptic intentions, as Thomas Jemielity has argued (124–7).22 Swedenborg certainly received the brunt of Blake’s satiric attack, both in the form of the work’s symmetries (Heaven and Hell, Memorable Fancies) and content (“Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb, his writings are the linen clothes folded



up” [E 34]), yet Isaiah and Ezekiel do not escape Blake’s withering critique in the work’s second “Memorable Fancy.” However, the work also repeatedly uses the elements of satire to cultivate wisdom through processes of unlearning, a method which forms a pronounced dimen-sion of the prajñāpāramitā tradition.

Like works in the wisdom tradition, Blake establishes a multi-dimensional and temporally extended lineage for the work, which might aptly be described as “compressed and arcane” in its staged confrontations with Swedenborg, its deployment of a satiric edge derived from Swift, its critical views of Paradise Lost, its literary allu-sions to Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, its evocation of figures and citation of texts from the Old and New Testaments, its articulation of countertraditions associated with “the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen” (E 43), its adoption of unlearning as the primary vehicle for its corrective vision, its stance against rationality as the singular measure of inner health and outer reality, and its insistence, in “A Song of Liberty,” to integrate the visionary agenda derived from these methods and traditions and to apply them directly to read the contemporary world. The work certainly includes a brief section of “laudatory self-reference” through the temporal confluence of the agency of the author, the moment of The Marriage’s appearance, the time between its articulation and the establishment of Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem, and the age of Jesus at the moment of his crucifixion: “As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives” (E 34). This self- referential passage introduced what is considered the operative thesis not just for this work but for the synthesis of his triptych of texts in the companion volume that followed in its wake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” (E 34).

Blake’s theory of contraries (its yin-yang aspects evoked by Hilton) has dominated critical consideration of the early canon, and the theory itself points to a revelation intersecting another aspect of the prajñāpāramitā, “the relativity of perception to a potentially infinite context or frame of reference” (Hilton “Early Works” 206). Here a “direct, non-conceptual insight is attained,” which (as Williams indi-cates) connoted entry into “the Path of Insight” by a bodhisattva who has obtained “a direct, non-dual cognition of the ultimate” (Williams 73), which perceived “a fall out of harmony” (Hixon 100) as the source of suffering. The fall into disharmony becomes the operative



event for all Blake’s subsequent illuminated works, from The Book of Urizen to Jerusalem, and Blake sounds this theme of lost psychologi-cal symmetry most intensely in The Four Zoas, the work predicated on a “fall into Division,” on the inscription of psychotic disintegration in the world, and on the path of correction by which a “Resurrection to Unity” renovated the individual and the world (E 301). Blake indi-cated, in the first line of the unpublished work, that this theme forms “The Song of the Aged Mother” (E 300), and the manuscript liter-ally functions as a textual unconscious (The Mother of the Buddhas in the language of the prajñāpāramitā) for the illuminated canon, since it enfolds whole passages from the earlier Lambeth prophecies and exports its exotic imagery and syncretic mythology to the later large epics of the Felpham prophecies.

Blake follows this elaboration of a dynamic dialectic resisting syn-thesis with his indictment of the manifest “errors” communicated in “All Bibles or sacred codes,” elevating “Contraries” as the antidote to the dis/ease of dualism festering in the theological episteme of “Body” and “Soul” (E 34). On the next two plates, Blake extended his critique of dualism to the epistemology of the enlightenment (the Western analogue to the Buddhist ahbidharma canon), which elevated “reason” over “desire” and thereby created inner alienation as the boundary condition for human existence and therein assured that this state of alienated unhappiness was inscribed in the world. This sequence established a crucial structural concord between two seemingly opposed systems, theology and philosophy, and placed this connection at the foundation of inner and outer discord. In a similar way, Buddha’s arguments to Subhuti in the Diamond sūtra proposes emptiness of self as the solution to dualism (in both its registers) as the chief problematic generating suffering and thwarting happiness, and its analytic focus on the tendency to seize an absolute “self,” an unchanging “soul,” and an independent “being” as the chief impedi-ment to the perfection of wisdom (Conze 26) further connects Blakean thought to the perfection of wisdom traditions. Non-dualism, for Blake and Buddha alike, establishes a middle ground between nihil-ism and essentialism within which wisdom resides, the “empty” space of simultaneity initially postulated by Northrop Frye and defined by total integration without grasping: “The transcendental insight of the diamond being is called the vision which simultaneously sees and sees through all subjective and objective structures without remain-ing to grasp or even encounter them. This gnostic vision is limit-less, unwavering, sublime” (Hixon 58). This transcendence is radical



immanence, the space where sublimation yields to sublimity (Weiskel 68–71; Batchelor Verses 48–50).

The radical expansion represented by these works are themselves enabled by an eradication of the enlightenment “subject” as an illu-sion that “does exist as such” (in the mergence of Angel and Devil as Elijah in the last “Memorable Fancy”) and thereby inculcated “its own instability,” which results in the “impossible landscapes traversed by the many narrators of The Marriage” (Makdisi 240). These “impos-sible landscapes” form the geographies of the memorable fancies, and the first such visionary space mediates textual transition between the relentless critiques (unlearning) offered in the first six plates of The Marriage and entry into the aphoristic dimension of “The Proverbs of Hell.” As the previously cited description by Williams of the sūtras disclosed, these Mahāyāna works also strive to cultivate “visionary experience and inspiration” (30) and, in their radical shifts of tem-poral and spatial registers, assumed a dream-like quality that equally represented “a paradigm shift in wisdom and pedagogy” (Simmer-Brown xviii) toward an “uncompromising sublimity and otherworld-liness” (Conze “Foreword” xxviii). These descriptions of the sūtras intersect rather precisely the idiom Blake employs in the most distinc-tive sections of The Marriage, its sequence of ‘Memorable Fancies’ (that push well beyond their formal satiric function of similar sections drawn from Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell). The first “Memorable Fancy” functions as a transition between the opening plates and their promotion of unlearning (of literary, philosophical, and theological “errors”) and the subsequent section, “The Proverbs of Hell.” The I-persona for the work (not easily collapsed with its author, Blake, but more often functioning as a character) is engaged in the active gath-ering of proverbs to “shew the nature of Infernal wisdom” (E 35).23 The “Fancy” also offers another form of “laudatory self-reference” (for those in the know) when “a mighty Devil . . . with corroding fires . . . wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men” (E 35). The “self-reference” operates on at least two levels, as Bloom indicates, since the passage literally evokes the printing tech-nique of bathing copper plates in corrosive acid pioneered by Blake to engrave The Marriage and since the passage symbolically suggests the broader function of the work itself, whose corrosive wisdom is designed to move readers toward deepening insight (Bloom 11). Not surprisingly, the last feature of the first “Fancy” takes a prover-bial form that indicts “fallen human consciousness” and strives to raise the “intensity of perception” through a paradoxical method of



“triumphing over nature through nature” (Bloom 12): “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (E 35)

Blake proverb mediates movement into the sequence of kōan-like aphorisms previously discussed, and the “Memorable Fancy” as a nar-rative feature relocates its textual activities into a purely imaginary realm for the manifestation of “wisdom,” presenting an expansive rather than constrictive vehicle for the arrival of wisdom. Unlike the proverbs, which like Zen kōans are designed to offer an immediate yet momentary mental glimpse of enlightenment, the memorable fancies, like the more elaborate sūtras, aim at a more sustained realization through an intensified scene of instruction in the empty space of the imaginary itself. What Blake provides in these textual excursions, to borrow a phrase from the Buddha’s exchange with Subhuti, is an expe-rience of “relativity” via “the strange adventures in consciousness” (Hixon 175). Like the prajñāpāramitā works, spatial and temporal categories break down in these sections, as alluded to above through the “Memorable Fancy” involving the dialogic exchanges between the I-persona and Isaiah and Ezekiel (in which the former asserted the primacy of “The philosophy of the east”), and the realms entered are situated at the coincidence of what Jacques Lacan termed the “real, imaginary, and symbolic orders” (Four Fundamental 279–80) and what Buddhism described as “the three realms of relativity—mun-dane form, sublime form and formlessness” (Hixon 175).24 For those Blake critics who have adopted Eastern philosophy as a hermeneutic tool to read Blake’s Marriage, the penultimate “Memorable Fancy” (E 41–2) offers the most profound rendering of his techniques and represents the most extended and wide-ranging of this type of scene of instruction (Weir 94).

During this “Memorable Fancy,” the I-persona is engaged by an Angel, who criticizes the corrective activities undertaken across the work up to this point, and at the invitation of the I-persona, the Angel proposes to demonstrate his “eternal lot” (E 41). After plunging into an abyss of standard theological torments, a journey from “a stable & thro’ a church & down into the church vault” (E 41), the pair arrive at “a void boundless” from which one can view the I-persona’s eternal lot, conceived as a corrupted space positioned “between the black and white spiders” of the Angel’s vision and which looks over a “cataract of blood” from which arises “the head of Leviathan” (E 41). Once the Angel, frightened by this vision, withdraws from the scene, the relative nature of his construction is unveiled: “I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light hearing



a harper who sung to the harp, and his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind” (E 42). Blake arrives, in this moment, to an insight made by Nāgārjuna in the Madhyamakakārikā: “[when] the everyday con-ventional world [of the Angel] is thus seen correctly it is apparent that emptiness (the ultimate truth) and the world are not opposed to each other but rather mutually imply each other” (Williams 70). The lesson in relative versus ultimate truth is cemented by the I-persona’s counter- juxtaposition of an alternative vision of the Angel’s “eternal lot” in a Swiftean satiric space of “monkeys [and] baboons . . . grin-ning and snatching at one another,” drawing from him a protest that “thy phantasy has imposed upon me” and prompting the response “we impose on one another” (E 42). In the penultimate “Memorable Fancy,” Blake uses “the vision and the dream . . . to dismantle the hard categories we impose upon reality” (Williams 52), an approach argued by Buddha through the “Prajnaparamita [which] does not perceive any structure as spatially located or as temporally or eter-nally fixed” (Hixon 201).25 Blake then brings the episode to a pro-verbial close, a technique shared with the sūtras, which conclude with the lesson to be derived from the relative imposition of Angel and I-persona: “Opposition is true Friendship” (E 42).

The next section of The Marriage opens with a parable that con-nects the imagined “eternal lot” of the Angel to “A man [who] car-ried a monkey about for shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain” (E 42). This man is Swedenborg, and after praising him for unveiling “the folly of churches” and exposing “hyp-ocrites,” the work returns for a last time to complete his destruction earlier undertaken through satire: “Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods: And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who hate all religion” (E 43). This last attack on apparent vision collapsed into conventional orthodoxy leads to the last “Memorable Fancy,” where the final perfection of wisdom assumes a fugue state that combines the angelic and devilish dimensions of the work to achieve a prophetic visionary state. The I-persona witnesses a discursive exchange between “a Devil” and “an Angel,” and the former, in line with the prior read-ing of Swedenborg’s “error” of paying heed only the angels, assets that “The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. And loving the greatest men best . . . for there is no other God” (E 43). Bloom’s aesthetic reading of this passage moves quite close to the positions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s



“transcendence through art” (discussed above): “As God is a Man, for Blake, and finds his being in human acts of creation, so any man who achieves greatness in art is God to the extent of being himself constituted by his own creative acts” (Modern 20).

The Angel challenges this view by evoking the sanctity of “Jesus Christ” and his sanction of “the law of ten commandments” but is refuted by a radical re-reading of the acts of Jesus against the grain of received wisdom:

. . . if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the Sabbath, and so mock the Sabbaths God? Murder those who were murdered because of him? Turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? Steal the labor of others to support him? Bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? Covet when he pray’d for his disciples . . . I tell you no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules. (E 43)

In this passage, Blake’s specific critique of Swedenborg and his broader dismantling of organized religion achieve a combined cre-scendo that offers one of the most intense “challenges . . . to moral-ity and to Church of England orthodoxy” (Bentley 136) produced in the Romantic age. Orthodoxy gives way to “theological and political humanism [and] moral emancipationism” (Erdman 175) and articulates Blake’s “most explicit statements of antinomianism” (Thompson 172). “Swedenborg’s pretence,” as Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi argue, “is that he is a true visionary with something new to tell the world when he is a mere imitation” (128), a false prophet cum priest who must be opposed because his supposed visionary views have simply crystallized into the hypocrisy of most “religious authorities [i.e. a Church]” (Moskal 17). Simultaneously, Blake tears down “the God of orthodoxy” (Tannenbaum 111) in preference for a visionary prophetic agenda of the poetic genius (“the philosophy of the east”), completing the work’s “redefinition of good through a system of contraries” capable of bringing “man to the threshold of vision” (Wittreich 193).

While the critical responses of Blake scholars rightly concentrate their attention on the deconstruction of orthodox conventions, Blake’s Marriage manifests the “dangerous enthusiasms” explored by Jon Mee that defined religious expression in the 1790s (50–8, 205–6) and deploys a method that “has the capacity to produce significant



transformations in a reader’s psychic economy” (Bracher “Rouzing” 183). Thus, Blake’s criticism actually returns the discussion to the method at the dialogic base of the sūtra form itself and is best exem-plified, relative to Blake’s approach, by Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka (Sanskrit for middle way): “Finally, when the Mādhyamika criticizes a thesis of the opponent he is not to be taken as trying to establish as really existing a thesis which is the negation of that of the opponent. The Mādhyamika simply refutes the thesis that something is the case, and might then also continue to refute the thesis that it is not the case (for some poor deluded person may also become attached to this)” (Williams 64). The Marriage, in its closing action (the embrace of Angel and Devil), generates “Elijah” as the ur-prophetic figure for the Hebraic tradition, and the dyadic relations across the text settle into a plurality “we” (43, 44). That Blake understood the danger of refutation leading to subsequent attachment is confirmed when, in mirrored writing to begin “Book the Second” of Milton, he offered a corrective to the theory of contraries put in play in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Contraries are Positives/A Negation is not a Contrary” (E 129). What is also often overlooked, in the terminal “Memorable Fancy,” is the function that love plays in honoring “the greatest men” and “the greatest man” alike, which grounds Blake’s revisionary agenda in a well-known covenantal shift from the Old to the New Testament. However, for the dharma as well, love discon-nected from individual grasping connects all sentient beings through compassion (Skt. karunā), which is the omnipresent virtue for all schools of Buddhism, which serves as the vehicle for the cessation of suffering, and which, therefore, is the vehicle to realize non-at-tachment and emptiness. This broadest form of love brings in its wake a healing of dualism, and the experience predicated upon it, as Buddha discussed at the conclusion to the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra of 8,000 Lines, blooms “into universal enlightenment” that opens “the door of omniperception” (224), entering “into universal love, generosity, and compassion” (226). Or, in the language of Blake’s book of wisdom, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, overcoming “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul” leads to virtually the same description for the perfection of wisdom: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite” (E 39).


C h a p t e r

I n n e r R e volu t ion:

T h e Lu m i nous M i n d of

E n l igh t e n m e n t

Our enemies are our best teachers.

(The Buddha)

The most important thing for us to know is that afflictive emotion is our ultimate enemy, [our] source of suffering.

(The Fourteenth Dalai Lama)

The Wisdom of Selflessness

In the “Ancient Poets” section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—which follows the “readerly” negotiations of the kōan-esque sequence of “The Proverbs of Hell” and precedes the “Memorable” exchange between the I-persona and Isaiah and Ezekiel (where Ezekiel pro-posed that his elevation of the “Poetic Genius” reflected the philo-sophical wisdom “of the east, [which] taught the first principles of human perception”)—Blake proposes that the emergence of myth occurs through projective efforts of the imagination, resulting in the animation of “all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” (E 38) then projected onto “the Vegetable Glass of Nature” (E 555). However, after the visionary act, the “vulgar” (i.e., priests) use these very pro-jections to “enslave” humanity by crafting “forms of worship from poetic tales” and thereby shaping these into an ideological apparatus of control predicated on the denial “that All deities [originally] reside in the human breast” (E 38). In Blake’s later account of the operation



of “Science [as] the Tree of Death” (E 274) in Milton, Western enlightenment forms of knowledge follow this same movement from interiority to exteriority, where the “Newtonian phantasm” (E 141) establishes a mechanical universe by an extension of “Mathematical Proportion” (E 99) that reduces the free-flowing operations of the imagination through the deadening projections of “the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man” (E 142) as the prime attribute for the rec-ognition of truth. His solution to this quandary, “Self-annihilation” (E 142), forms the major concern in his small-scale epic Milton and will be explored at length in the next chapter.

When Blake suggests, in the penultimate “Memorable Fancy,” that “Opposition is True Friendship,” he approaches the wisdom residing in the opening epigrams, and his view connects to the chief concern for this chapter, where Jupiter provides the best instruction for the development of Prometheus’s enlightenment and thereby creates the conditions that lead to the collapse of Jovian tyranny. Blake’s relent-less grappling with Newtonianism, its mechanistic universe, and its insinuation into cultural formations through the thought of Jeremy Bentham, Reverend Malthus and other proponents of enlightenment utilitarianism are seen in his critique of the symbolic agency exerted by Urizen and his sons and daughters across the illuminated canon. However, this path of conflict leads, in the final plates of Jerusalem, to the reconciliation of “Bacon & Newton & Locke & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer” and the reassertion of symmetry within “every Man,” which cannot go “forward irresistible from Eternity to Eternity” in the absence of the Urizenic presence (E 257: 98.9, 12, 27). Both literally and symbolically, this reconciliation brings the fourfold dimensions of man and Albion into mutual coincidence, which Blake imaged as the dialogic exchange among the four zoas, the components of consciousness forming his mythic representation of mind’s warring faculties:

And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which brightRedounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in VisionsIn new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of IntellectCreating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders DivineOf Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immenseOf Childhood, Manhood& Old Age[:] & the all tremendous unfathomable Non EnsOf Death was seen in regenerations terrific[.] (E 258: 98.28–34)


I n n e r R e v o l u t i o n 85

The imagination shapes the operations of mental components of consciousness (memory and intellect) to create outer embodiment in materiality (in space and time), with the dynamic exchange felt across the expanse of life as the proper preparation for death (which will be examined in chapter 6). More significantly for this study, Blake’s emphasis endorses Ezekiel’s insistence “upon an individual pro-phetic stance for salvation” predicated “upon personal responsibil-ity” (Bloom “Commentary” 929). Myth provides the method for this endeavor, and the creative fusion of mythic forms from East and West alike were available for such an endeavor, for the first time, through philological activities at work across the Romantic age (discussed in prior chapters).

Blake creates a sublime allegory constructed from the mental faculties organized through an appropriation and transmutation of mythologies tied to the Old and New Testaments (something schol-ars have seen as the typical technique [the imaginative dimension] of prophetic discourse originating in biblical traditions) but which is equally interactive with other world mythologies recovered by Jones, Volney, Bryant, and other heirs to Western enlightenment codification of religious expression that emerged into Europe during the 1790s. Blake sought to express a myth for a new age, as numerous stud-ies have proposed, and his approach also incorporated newer forms of epistemology like science yet equally presaged such future forms of thought as anthropology and psychoanalysis. Blake’s method also anticipates modern structural studies of mythology, with his mythic forms reflecting “fundamental feelings [he viewed as] common to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or revenge,” and just as clearly, given the “Ancient Poets” section of The Marriage, Blake “shifted the problem [of mythic construction] away from the natural or cos-mological toward the sociological and psychological fields” (Lévi-Strauss 860). As Hazard Adams notes, Blake prophetic works occupy the “mythic pole” of a spectrum of cultural expression, and his illu-minated works, constructed at that pole, presents “a man-centered myth” that, ironically, “decenters man” (598–9). This decentering is at the core of Buddhist thought as well, which embraces emptiness as its epistemology, which eschews any dogmatism and any creator deity (both seen as inhibiting rather than enabling moral and ethical development), and which moves away from a self-enclosed sovereign sense of self toward an expansive view of interdependent conscious-ness that begins in the individual and extends into the world. Buddha specifically critiques “volitional formations as self,” arguing that if



“consciousness were self, this consciousness would not lead to afflic-tion,” and proposes instead the “correct wisdom” of the formless or “nonself” (Bodhi 340–1) that is uncovered through the practice of nonattachment, establishing impermanence or emptiness as the fun-damental state of all existence (discussed in the last chapter).1

The conjoined appropriations and transmutations of the Promethean myth by Mary and Percy Shelley (in Prometheus Unbound and Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) similarly reconfigure mythic forms as a vehicle to explore, and ultimately reconcile, the operations of mind and its drive toward outer embodiment. Their different yet related treatments attempt to redress the same episte-mological quandaries and ideological tyrannies with which Blake grappled (psychological mechanisms of control implanted within consciousness through introjections of science and religion, respec-tively). Through its varied registers in Frankenstein, the Western form of the enlightened mind connected to sovereignty of the self receives its strongest narrative critique during the Romantic age in Mary’s representation of the ego’s desire to exert control over nature and its willed blindness to the dire consequences of such obsessive attach-ment to the self-driven will. As M. Waldman suggested in the chem-istry lecture that fired Victor’s imagination, “The ancient teachers of this science . . . penetrated into the recesses of nature, and shew[ed] how she works in her hiding places” (28), and Victor mirrors this view in the following chapter, when he commits to a type of experimenta-tion grounded in the method of Bacon and Descartes that pursues “nature [into] her hiding places” (32).2 Victor’s blind attachment to this sense of self occurs with frightening regularity in the novel, and a brief exploration of three different manifestations can place Mary’s critique in perspective.

Immediately preceding his commitment to probe nature’s “hid-ing places,” Victor’s arrogant yet ignorant blindness underwrites his desire that “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me” (32), with adoration generated from the field of the other defining the end toward which his craving is attached (self-reification from externality).3 The inversely related form of this impulse occurs later in the work when, at the moment he destroys the creature’s mate in direct violation of his promise to his creature (the sole commitment offered his offspring), he rationalized his decision relative to the gaze of cultural history: “I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race”



(115). In both instances, Victor seeks self-validation from exterior-ity rather than crafting his worth from interiority. After destroying the creature’s mate, Victor’s attachment to himself leads to the most serious misreading in the work, when the creature threatens that “I shall be with you on your wedding night” (116). Victor’s misreading determines his behavior on that night with disastrous results when, in spite of all recent evidence to the contrary (the systematic destruction by the creature of those he most cherishes), he believes “the dæmon [will] employ every art to destroy me” (131), leading to the clash between creator and creature that only ends with Victor’s death in the last pages of the novel.4 One last example of Victor’s self-attachment can provide transition to Percy Shelley’s counter critique to this men-tal orientation, since the antidote to his self-grasping attachment is placed directly before him. During the trial of Justine Moritz for the murder of his younger brother William, Victor hesitates to proclaim her innocence and even elevates his own feelings over those of the victim of his labor and silence: “My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. . . . The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was innocent, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom and would not forego their hold” (54). When he then vis-its Justine on the eve of her execution, Victor ignores the ethos of Otherness the victim herself manifests, since “the poor sufferer tried to comfort others” and since her last words were to “Live and be happy, and make others so” (57).

A more thorough analysis of this form of Victor’s attachment to Western enlightenment mind is beyond the current parameters of this study yet has shaped a significant dimension of the novel’s robust critical tradition. Percy Shelley addressed this issue in his review of Mary’s work, suggesting that only “those who are accustomed to rea-son deeply on their origin and tendency will . . . be the only persons who can sympathize . . . in the interest of the actions which are their result” (185). As well, virtually every essay included in the “Modern Criticism” section of Hunter’s edition of the novel addresses this issue, whether George Levine’s notion that Victor is destroyed “by his own nature” (208), thereby becoming a victim, in Christopher Small’s reading, of the external focus of his “restless inquiring mind” (207). Feminist critics have astutely focused on similar aspects, with Victor’s self-attachment, in Barbara Johnson’s insightful interpreta-tion, generating “a story of a man who usurps the female role by physically giving birth to a child” (248) and dramatizing through the process, in Mary Poovey’s interpretation, “the degeneration of incipient curiosity into full-fledged egotism” (254). Anne Mellor’s



hermeneutic engagement with the novel and this issue has been the most sustained, linking the novel’s critique of a patriarchy result-ing in blindness as a logical effect of Victor being “fixated on him-self” (275). As she argues in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters: “Frankenstein in effect hopes to become God, the creator of life and the gratefully worshipped father of a new race of immortal beings” (70). Victor has accumulated knowledge but lacks wisdom, specifically the type of wisdom discussed previously through Blake Marriage that embraces “selflessness” as the apt response to analytic recognition “that self is non-existent” (Gyatso Kindness 161), the very position placed before Victor on Justine’s final night of life. This wis-dom beyond self-identity is only achieved when, as Śāntideva proposes in the “Wisdom” section of his poetic The Way of the Bodhisattva, the mind had “realized voidness” (144: 48).5

This chapter focuses on the emergence of this different cast of mind, the ethos of otherness evoked through Justine Moritz as a counterweight to Victor’s obsessive self-assertion, in Percy Shelley’s lyric drama Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s drama provides an elabo-rate and detailed exploration of both the impediments to and the benefits derived from the perfection of wisdom. In his treatment of Promethean myth, Shelley depicts a staged passage from selfhood to a no-self state manifested by the Titan (as opposed to Mary’s decon-struction of an omnipresent self exhibited by Victor), which results in the emergence of the mind of enlightenment (Skt. bodhichitta) as the end of a process of gradual awakening. In Shelley’s treatment, Prometheus “is self-victimized” (hence linked to Victor’s malady of identity) yet ultimately comes to realize “that the sources of tyr-anny are not external but psychological,” a state only made apparent through relentless “self-questioning” that results in “liberation of the self” (Curran “Ideology” 602, 606). Prometheus’s inner revolution transmutes enclosed self-pity into what Buddhism describes as the “luminous nature of mind” (Rinpoche Luminous 22). This act of self-overcoming is accomplished by exchanging love for hate, which sub-sequently gives rise, through its transmission by Asia as its primary agent, to an outer revolution felt across the surface of the earth (Act III) and which becomes the boundary condition for the entire cos-mos, from elementary particles to planetary bodies (Act IV).

Critical descriptions of what precisely Shelley’s enchained Titan achieves through his “self-questioning” (in spite of a broad range of disagreement regarding its sources, its form, and its significance for inner and outer reality) nonetheless attain amazing analytic accord whose rhetorical depictions intersect this exploration of an envisioned



process of individual enlightenment leading to collective transforma-tion. Anyone even remotely familiar with Buddhist views of enlight-enment can discern in these critical assessments, stages of liberation capable of illumining both the individual and the world. For example, in his analysis of the first act of Shelley’s lyric drama, Ross Woodman argues that the stages of transformation demonstrate “[Prometheus’s] mind, gradually awakening to love” (118), and Carlos Baker locates the genesis of “a new freedom” in the “the rebirth of love and light in the human mind” (111).6 In language overtly intersecting the argument pursued here, this type of alteration of mind results, in Desmond King-Hele’s estimation, in a state of “Nirvana” (203) that becomes the boundary condition for all of existence. This state of nirvāna can only be experienced after “the reintegration of the split personality,” in M. H. Abrams’s assessment, “by that annihilation of selfhood which converts divisive hate into affiliative love” (302), and in a similar vein Harold Bloom argues that the dramatic development of the work illustrates how “imagination overcomes selfhood,” a view intersecting prior and later discussion of the wisdom cultivated by Blake in The Marriage and Milton as the realization of “emptiness,” since “the real unbinding of Prometheus [is] a matter for himself to settle” (Mythmaking 92).7 Alan Richardson mounts a related argu-ment in his analysis of the work’s first act, which dramatizes “a process of self-analysis” leading to “self-overcoming” that, after weathering the temptations of Mercury and the furies, simply “obliterate[s] the enclosures of the egotistical self altogether” (126, 129, 134).

The vehicles for the perception of the interdependence of all phe-nomena and the ensuing manifestation of awareness as emptiness, “hopeful endurance and the sympathy for every other being’s real needs” (Hogle 174), thereby provide a map for mind’s achievement of “the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature” (Shelley 207). Shelley adopts and adapts the Promethean myth, a procedure enabled by the absence of Aeschylus’s comic resolution, with the “psychological shift in [Aeschylus’s] character” (Drew 259) providing a means to represent the realization of “universal enlightenment” by which the Titan would be freed through conscious action (Curran Annus Mirabilis 6, 39). Given these dramatic conditions, as Linda M. Lewis argues, the gift of “fire is thus a symbol for all sorts of enlight-enment,” where the material and mental gifts bestowed on humanity illumine “the human condition” (Lewis 22). As Nigel Leask argues, this type of outcome follows Shelley’s shift away from his earlier deployment of “secular/revolutionary” language and toward forms of representation that reflect “religious enlightenment of the sort which,



after Jones’s On the Philosophy of the Asiatics, was the more usual object of visionary experience” (Leask 127–8), requiring “the figures of mythology” located in Eastern literary works “to be interpreted relativistically and symbolically” (Priestman 69). The dangers for the poet committed to such a mythic treatment is palpable, as both Blake and Shelley learned in hostile receptions of their poetic efforts. Karen A. Weisman suggests that Shelley sensed “the precarious status of the individual who engages in private meditation in a form—poet-ry—which is offered for the public benefit” (Weisman 83), a sensi-tivity conditioned, if in no other way, through hostile reviews of his work, and as Timothy Webb indicates, the chief problematic for the poet remained “the difficulty of definition, the problems of com-munication, the cramping boundaries of language” (708). This dif-ficulty has also been a recurring problem for all Eastern attempts to describe enlightenment (whether in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or Zoroastrianism), given the acknowledged inadequacy of language to image the enlightened state, which “defies discursive representa-tion” (Weisman 82) and “which cannot be expressed directly” (Webb 708). Like Buddhism in particular, Shelley’s approach, again as noted by Webb, strives to solve this problem of representation “through the assistance of negatives” (708) capable of negating the omnipresent negativity of the Jovian world.

Shelley’s poetic answer to this linguistic quandary was simple, sub-tle, and successful. The poem’s imagery is “drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed” (Shelley 207), thus crafting a solution to the intellectual malady Shelley noted in his Treatise on Morals: “We do not attend sufficiently to what passes within ourselves” (Clark Shelley’s Prose 184).8 This also allows Shelley to symbolize from a static position an inner revolution and reverses the outward movements and outer revolutions that characterize his earlier large works, Queen Mab and Alastor (as Leask observed). Shelley structures the emergence of wis-dom as “three types [or stages] of enlightenment” (Gyatso Flash 116) connected to the realization of “the truth of suffering,” the com-prehension of “the origin of suffering” in self-imposed “ignorance [of dependent origination]” (Gyatso Four 72), and the intuition that “the cessation of suffering” requires resolution through individual “action” (Skt. karma) applied to “afflictive emotions” that have become “our ultimate enemy and source of suffering” (Gyatso Four 89). The “experiential knowledge of emptiness” (Gyatso Four 116) generates an existential “nirvāna” event, bringing inner revolution to fruition through altruistic self-annihilation as the path to “[go]



altogether beyond [into] an awakening” (Conze Wisdom 113). With a state beyond selfhood achieved, the realization of the insight known to Buddhism as “bodhichitta,” as The Venerable Lobsang Gyatso has suggested, ignites “a desire for the welfare of others [and] is in essence a form of great compassion, wishing that all sentient beings could be freed from suffering” (106). The resulting state of mental stability or śamatha (Skt.) becomes the platform for the subsequent realization of “loving-kindness,” which “shines forth, bright and brilliant” and which, according to Buddha “surpasses” all other forms of “bodhi-chitta” (Bodhi 176–7). For Shelley’s lyrical approach, enlightenment is the aim; poetry is the vehicle; self-annihilation is the required state of consciousness, and transmission of loving-kindness is the necessary condition leading to cosmic transformation.

Shelley’s presentation of the staged passage of Prometheus beyond suffering and selfhood into enlightenment is strikingly similar to the path proposed by Buddha in his first teaching, The Four Noble Truths (embedded above and discussed in chapter 3), with both Buddhist and Shelleyean forms embodying “the purest and truest motives [of altruism]” directed towards “the best and noblest ends [of univer-sal enlightenment]” (Shelley 207).9 Shelley’s established structural remedy for individual and universal suffering in Prometheus Unbound also parallels related narrative and poetic constructions encoded in the dharma itself, intersecting, for example, the analysis Śāntideva presents in The Way of the Bodhisattva (Skt. Bodhicāryāvatāra), where embodied enlightenment has both intentional and active dimensions (as Acts III and IV demonstrate):

Bodhichitta, the awakening mind,In brief is said to have two aspects;First, aspiring, bodhichitta in intention;Then, active bodhichitta, practical engagement. (I. 15)

Prometheus’s enlightened “intention” first exchanges love for hate (the first aspect) and then embraces love, thereby activating the operations of Asia as the governing principle of human existence subsequently transmitted to the very foundation of the universe in Demogorgon’s cave (the second aspect), an act which establishes “enlightenment [as] the summit of human evolution” (Thurman 61). In this sense, Prometheus, by the end of the work, has entered a state of enlightened being Buddhism associated with the bodhisattva: “The inner attitude of compassion begins . . . when we become aware of the suffering of those near and dear to us. It then gradually extends



to universal love. The bodhisattva who practices this way gradually eliminates every self-cherishing attitude and cultivates a state of mind truly oriented toward others” (Rinpoche 137).10

Mythic Assemblage

In the earliest account of the Promethean myth offered in Hesiod’s Theogony, “humankind is favored by Prometheus,” and other classical sources suggest that “he is both creator and preserver of man” whose “only acknowledged flaw is in loving man to an extreme” (Lewis 17, 18, 26). The Titan, in his initial intervention with Cronos/Saturn and subsequent alliance with Zeus/Jupiter, seems to manifest the very ethos of otherness evoked above. In the first instance, he seeks to “deliver man/From death and steep destruction” (Aeschylus 11), inaugurating a revolt with Zeus/Jupiter as his ally in opposition to the usurper Cronos/Saturn, who once enthroned abandoned man-kind to a state of abjection by denying humanity their “birthright of . . . knowledge, power,/The skill which wields the elements, the thought/Which pierces this dim Universe like light,/Self-empire and the majesty of love” (Shelley 248: II. iv. 39–42). In the second instance, having assisted Zeus/Jupiter in the overthrow of his father, Cronos/Saturn, Prometheus had only asked in exchange for his sup-port that his ally “Let man be free” (Shelley 248: II. iv. 45). The Olympian overlord ignores this request, holding “the hapless race of man/Of no account, resolving to destroy/All human kind and sow a new seed on earth” (Aeschylus 11), and instead creates a state of suffering for “the race of man” represented by “famine . . . toil . . . dis-ease . . . strife . . . wounds, and ghastly death” (Shelley 248: II. iv 49–51). In response to both acts of abandonment and betrayal, Prometheus promulgates an outer revolution launched against dei-tific forces that define the human condition as “sufferance” (Hogle 174). In his stance against Zeus/Jupiter, the Titan steals fire to light the mortal world and thereby earns the enmity of his ally cum enemy, who physically tortures him by chaining him to a mountain and send-ing his eagle/vulture daily to feast on Prometheus’s liver and who psychologically torments him through visitations by horrific, subser-vient intermediar ies like the furies.

As his “Preface” makes clear, the mythic materials Shelley inher-ited from Aeschylus specifically and Greek myth generally were actu-ally inadequate to his task of imbuing “poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 209), a lack



noted by numerous critics. The work might better be described as a “collective assemblage” of myth (Deleuze and Guattari 80), a syn-thesis Shelley evokes in a different form in On Life as “the assem-blage of thoughts,” and the final state of the work fused Western and Eastern mythologies designed to push into imaginative terrain well beyond both and well beyond the typical discriminations of identity located in “the words I, you, [and] they” (Prose 174).11 Blake, working through “The Old and New Testaments [as] the Great Code of Art” (E 274) and the literary traditions evoked in The Marriage, takes a similar syncretic approach to mythic construction in his own efforts in the Lambeth and Felpham prophecies and moves in an analogous direction to that pursued by Shelley in Prometheus when he cre-ates, in the latter works, a “Sublime Allegory . . . addressd [sic] to the Intellectual powers” (E 730). Both mythic systems display “a deeply held commitment to the oneness of human experience” (Curran 103), which formed a significant dimension of Western enlightenment philological pursuits to construct a hierarchy of world religious sys-tems (discussed in previous chapters). As Curran has argued, Shelley expended considerable intellectual energy to locate “the key to all mythologies” (Annus Mirabilis 33–94), and Lévi-Strauss’s descrip-tion of the structural method of mythic analysis as the exploration of “fundamental feelings common to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or revenge” aligns rather well with the minute particulars Shelley explores in Prometheus Unbound. The lyric drama reflects, in its impressive mingling of sources and traditions, a “syncretic accre-tion,” a fusion the poet believed “unattempted” in his current age, although had Shelley “known his contemporary William Blake, who in a more traditional epic form realized the same radical ends, he might have diminished his claims” (Curran 91, 114). However, as opposed to Shelley’s pan-Hellenism (a tendency shared by Byron, Keats, and their circle), Blake registered his long-standing opposi-tion to “The Classics” of the Greek tradition in a variety of locations (annotations, epic prefaces, letters, public addresses, and small-scale illuminated works) even as he too reworked the Promethean myth “to produce through poetry an alternative to his fragmented man [Albion] guided by Selfhood” envisioned not as “a return to a golden age” but one realized “within the mind and heart of restored human-ity” (Lewis 124, 141).

Unlike the conjectural case for Blake’s exposure to Eastern lit-erature and myth mounted by Weir and his resistance to appropri-ating Oriental models and subjects observed by Makdisi, Shelley’s



knowledge of these forms and traditions and their deployment in several works have been thoroughly explored by Curran, Leask, Makdisi, and others, although virtually no evidence exists to estab-lish any specific knowledge of the Buddhadharma by Shelley.12 Of course, the argument throughout Romantic Dharma has not been one of direct contact and subsequent influence but rather the con-fluence of analogous views of mental operations and social commit-ments, with Romantic thought arriving to the same conclusions as Buddhism through systemic modifications of Western enlightenment forms and techniques. Blake and Shelley share the appropriation and transmutation of the mythemes of Promethean narrative, whose dis-crete elements were quite likely learned from a common source, Jacob Bryant’s A New System: or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology (Lewis 131), for which Blake “engraved designs” (Priestman 94). Harold Bloom, Stuart Curran, and Linda Lewis have forged copious links between Blake and Shelley regarding the treatment accorded the Promethean elements resident in John Milton’s poetry and derived from Bryant’s influential work, with both poets pursuing reorienta-tions of the myth toward inner revolution as the antidote to the failed outer revolution in France.13

The range of Shelley’s knowledge of Eastern literary and mythic works flows from many sources, and Prometheus Unbound foregrounds, in Act I, crucial elements of Zoroastrianism, although the work “is not unique among Shelley’s writings in its reflection of the Zoroastrian and Manichean ethical duality” (Curran 81). This connection is crucial to Shelley’s aims, since “Zoroastrianism was, in the dominant view of the early nineteenth century, the first religion whose doctrines confronted and attempted to resolve the most serious of ethical questions, the origins of evil” (Curran 83). In general, the appropriation of the Zoroastrian materials emerges in detail through the Earth’s evocation of “The Magus Zoroaster,” who supposedly “met his own image walking in the garden,/That apparition, sole of men he saw” (Shelley 215: I. 192–3), pointing to the poet’s recognition of the “Difficulty of Analyzing the Human Mind” in A Theory on Morals:

If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being from the earliest epochs of his recollections, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own rec-ollections and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears—all that they dare not, or that daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of the day. But thought can with difficulty visit the



intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. . . . The caverns of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervading with a luster, beautifully bright indeed, but not shining beyond their portals (Prose 185–6).

These “caverns of the mind” figure prominently in the work, as Curran argues, with Shelley’s representation of the cave to which Prometheus and Asia retire after their reunion (in Act III), drawn from “Zoroaster’s long labors to create the Zend-Avesta within a cave on Mount Albordj,” which offered a workable mythic image that paralleled “the artist’s effort to create harmonious order from the tumultuous experiences of his life” (Curran 77). Earlier criticism has also seen the cave connected to “Plato’s myth of the cave” in which mankind has “kept it[self] enchained in darkness” (Baker 113), while John Drew “locates the cave in Kashmir and identifies it with Hilarion’s ‘cave of congelations’ in The Missionary” (quoted in Leask 247).14

Blake draws upon this same symbol to image a similar cavern of mind to open Europe, a Prophecy, a work concerned with the 1800-year process of mental mystification leading to the outer revolutions during the Romantic age, which take the same negative orientation evoked in Shelley’s Theory of Morals. Blake’s image inversely intersects Shelley’s construction of the liberation of Promethean consciousness in Prometheus Unbound, making it akin to the via negativa rhetorical strategies Webb perceived at work in Shelley’s drama (708):

Five windows light the cavern’d Man; thro’ one he breathes the air;Thro’ one, hears music of the spheres; thro’ one, the eternal vineFlourishes, that he may receive the grapes; thro’ one can look.And see small portions of the eternal world that ever growth;Thro’ one, himself pass out what time he pleases[.] (E 60: 3.1–5)

In Blake’s analysis, these primal energies are now restrained by sym-bolic restraint, thereby forming the antithesis of their liberation in Shelley’s representation of Promethean enlightenment. Blake’s extended image does, however, capture the state of Promethean mind at the play’s opening, where mentality is closed off from any “percep-tion of the infinite” within a windowed cavern only lit by the senses and the sense of self connected to them. In this treatment, sensation moves from outside to inside to darken rather than enlighten, Blake’s ironic critique of Western enlightenment epistemology. In this dark-ened space, inner alienation rather than inner illumination leaves “those senses . . . clos’d from thought” (E 64: 12.8).15 Against the constrained conditions critiqued through Blake’s caverned mind of



man, Shelley’s “Cave”—not darkened by contracted senses but illu-minated by the expansive operations of “Asia, thou light of life”—is an abode defined by “love and care” (Shelley 259: III. iii.5–10) and from which emanates “the low voice of love . . . That tempers or improves man’s life” (Shelley 260: III. iii.45–48).16 These conditions generate Shelley’s image of enlightenment as the empowering agent of imaginative productivity (Shelley 260: III. iii.49–56):

And lovely apparitions dim at firstThen radiant—as the mind, arising brightFrom the embrace of beauty (whence the formsOf which these are phantoms) casts on themThe gathered rays which are reality—Shall visit us, the progeny immortalOf Painting, Sculpture and rapt PoesyAnd arts, though unimagined, yet to be.

As Leask argues, such symbolism connecting Asia and the impor-tance accorded love points to another crucial dimension of my argu-ment, since the enlightenment event that occurs across the first act generates the activation of universal love via Asia in Act II. These two complementary principles of mind are then brought into mutual illumination in Act III, which establishes a wider agency for Asia than prior criticism has been willing to recognize. In fact, only with the harmonious reunification of Prometheus and Asia (mind and love) does the form of enlightenment Buddhism terms “loving-kindness” blossom into a power capable of creating universal transformation, with the dimensions of Asia’s agency extending from her function as poetical character through her allegorical aspect to the geopolitical topos evoked nominally (Leask 146–54).

Leask’s extended discussion of Shelley’s Asiatic sources in British Romantic Writers and the East, which ranges across the full spec-trum of Shelley’s writing and traces the varied tributaries feeding his knowledge of Eastern literary and mythic forms, begins and ends with Thomas Medwin, who “read his Indian journal to [his cousin] Shelley at Pisa in October 1820” but who sounds an “end” to the poet’s “utopian optimism . . . that the colonial encounter need not exhaust the possibilities of the meeting of different cultures . . . premised nei-ther upon paranoiac discriminations nor fetishistic identifications, the twin pathologies of imperialism” (69, 169). Makdisi signals, in his dis-cussion of Alastor, a troubling tendency in the early Oriental works of Shelley, where Asiatic landscapes are “emptied of their peoples [and]



are rendered as tombs of the dead, frozen museum-piece images, icons of antiquity,” registering the poem’s dis/ease “in its treatment of the peoples of the East” (Imperialism 142, 143). However, in Leask’s estimation “the deployment of myth” in Prometheus Unbound breaks with the earlier practices in works like Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam, enacting a reorientation of Greece at the mythic foundation of the work (which John Drew also addressed):

Ostensibly, of course, Shelley’s “Lyrical Drama” is Greek, a rework-ing of the final play in the Aeschylean triology, although it exchanges Aeschylus’ setting of the Georgian Caucasus for the Indian Caucasus or Hindu Kush and its principal female protagonist, the Greek Io, for the female figure called Asia. And yet, as John Drew comments of Shelley’s Prometheus, “unlike the Prometheus of Alexander’s men, he is not simply a defiant Greek figure who has been moved geographi-cally east. His re-orientation, his re-location, in the Orient . . . is indica-tive of a corresponding (and wholly appropriate) psychological shift in his character” (141).

Shelley’s reorientation draws “together the central mythologies of Asiatic and European culture” (Curran Annus Mirabilis 90), and his Eastern shift of the scene of action to the “Indian Caucasus” for Prometheus’s enchainment and “A lovely Vale” in Cashmir (Kashmir) for Asia’s ignition shape a geopolitical dimension through which to realize, at the fundamental level of the play’s setting, “the possibilities of the meeting of different cultures . . . premised neither upon para-noiac discriminations nor fetishistic identifications” (Leask 169). The closing retirement to a cave “near the site of Plato’s Academy,” fol-lowing the reunion of Prometheus and Asia, situates the last events of the poem, planetary and universal liberation, as springing from a middle ground between East and West, since Greece was liter-ally contested territory in Shelley’s immediate surrounding (Curran Annus Mirabilis 91) and reflects a similar use of Greece as the middle ground explored in Byron’s “The Giaour.” Shelley’s scene of instruc-tion requires a middle path position, a view conversant with a broad range of Buddhist thought associated with Nāgārjuna, a major figure in the development of the Mahāyāna traditions.

Stages of Promethean Enlightenment

Prometheus Unbound opens slightly before dawn, with the darkest time of day indicative of the spiritual state of the Titan, who expresses



across his opening soliloquy those positive attributes of endurance and fortitude in the face of potentially endless suffering of “pain, pain ever, forever” (210: I. 24). The “dead” landscape devoid of “life” matches the blasted state of Prometheus’s consciousness, with his patient endurance of pain the only trace of his higher virtues, since he has become attached to his altruistic intervention to alleviate mankind’s condition (209: I. 20–1), which now dominates his self-construction. Shelley emphasizes the limitations to the Titan’s view that have kept him enchained, and across the opening act, the prepa-ration for the genesis of enlightenment begins for the Titan, as it does for all sentient beings trapped in suffering, through the “cleansing of all wrong-doing and obstructions and by creating a conducive inner environment” (Rinchen 57) within which enlightenment can blos-som. Three millennium separate this scene and the end of Aeschylus’s tragedy, and the resolution promised by the title swerves from that of his Greek predecessor for ethical reasons (a necessity in Shelley’s view): “I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind” (206). Prometheus’s opening address equally displays his harmatia or tragic flaw, his hubristic attachment to an illusory image of selflessness that actu-ally leaves him enclosed “eyeless in hate” (I. 9) and problematically locked in continuous “strife” with his foe. His asserted status as the only “One” not subject to Jupiter’s tyranny leads immediately to an assertion of an equality (“Thou and I alone of living things/Behold”) forged in shared “self-contempt” and “hate” and directly conjoined to a shared desire for “revenge” (209–10: I. 2–4, 8–9), which give rise in sequence to self-pity (I. 12–17, 31–47).

At the opening of the work, Prometheus’s attachments to nega-tive emotions takes shape as “limited views and mental aff lictions,” which Buddhism sees as inhibiting “our human potential to eliminate the sources of suffering within our own being” (Wallace Buddhism 42, 21). Shelley skillfully unravels both the sources of Prometheus’s suffering and his attachment to it with acute insight that connects his imagistic choice to the “process of self-analysis that extends throughout the act” (Richardson 126). This contemplation exposes “the limitations and contradictions inherent in a self-consciousness that originates in an act of transgression” and revolves around the Titan’s repression of this “critical moment in his psychic history,” which cannot be “acknowledge[d] without abandoning his pretense to moral eminence” (Richardson 124, 127). However, the continua-tion of this form of contemplation produces two preliminary gestures



toward an alternative ethics disconnected from expressions of hatred and a desire for vengeance, a respite that replaces these passions with “pity,” quenching his hatred and prompting his need to recall his curse:17

—As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim—Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the bloodFrom these pale feet, when then might trample theeIf they disdained not such a prostrate slave.—Disdain? Ah no! I pity thee.— . . . I speak in griefNot exultation, for I hate no moreAs then, ere misery made me wise.—The CurseOnce breathed on thee I would recall. . . . Though I am changed so that aught evil wishIs dead within, although no memory beOf what is hate[.] (211: I. 49–53, 56–60, 70–2)

Prometheus’s diatribe against Jupiter has generated a preliminary unconscious awareness that his emotional attachment to hatred and a desire for revenge mirrors his hateful and vengeful foe, setting the stage for lessons learned from the elemental dimensions of material reality, the third and fourth spirits who refuse to repeat the curse and who “lay the blame directly upon Prometheus” (Curran Annus Mirabilis 41) for the widening of worldly pain through it, a pattern that recurs in the opening speech uttered by The Earth:

By such dread words from earth to HeavenMy still realm was never riven;When its wound was closed, there stood,Darkness o’er the Day, like blood. . . . And we shrank back—for dreams of ruinTo frozen caves our flight pursuingMade us keep silence—thus—and thus—Though silence is as hell to us. . . . The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hillsCried “Misery!” then; the hollow Heaven replied,“Misery!” And the Ocean’s purple waves,Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds.And the pale nations heard it,—“Misery!” (212: I. 99–111)



Prometheus’s curse, not yet a linguistic presence in the work, must be judged initially by its dire effects, which ripple across the world, gen-erating “fear,” “shrieks of slaughter,” and “rending groan[s]” (211–2: I. 76, 80, 85) that coalesce in collective “Misery!”

These elemental and earthly indictments have a predictable countereffect on the modest emotional gains achieved thus far by Prometheus, prompting the reassertion of his attachment to exem-plary self-identity: “Know ye not me,/The Titan, he who made his agony/The barrier to your else all-conquering foe?” (213: I. 117–9) Prometheus remains, as yet, blind to his implication in the state of misery enshrouding the world, and in a petulant outburst, again embraces his self-constructed image of heroic effort for all:

Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, nowTo commune with me? me alone, who checked—As one who checks a friend-drawn charioteer—The falshood and the force of Him who reignsSupreme, and with groans of pining slavesFills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses? (213: I. 124–28)

Prometheus has listened but not heard the complaint raised by the spirits and his mother, failing to apprehend that his curse has rein-forced, indeed magnified, “the groans of pining slaves,” and his brief return to the enslavement to his own image, the verbal embodiment of self-cherishing, resides in his asserted superiority as “me alone” and the only “one” to stand against Jupiter. Prometheus remains “the altruistic though as yet imperfect champion of man” (Baker 95), since this prior compassion simply feeds “the Self-within” (Bloom Mythmaking 100). The purity of Promethean mind, to borrow lan-guage directly from the dharma, remains obscured by the veils of attachment, ignorance, and affliction, locked in its prior “karma, or causation of actions” (Rinpoche Luminous 27) and thus submerged in samsara (Sanskrit for cycle of conditioned existence) until the means to overcome self-grasping can shatter “the self-centered atti-tude” (Gyatso Bodhicitta 61).

His mother Earth, who will not “dare . . . speak . . . lest Heaven’s fell King/Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain/More tor-turing than the one whereon I roll” (213: I. 140–2), only further enables the continuation of Prometheus’s attachment to an illusory self-construction, thereby delaying his realization of the first stage of enlightenment, by relating how “thy voice her pining sons uplifted”



and filled “our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread” (214: I. 159, 161). Worse still, Earth expresses a hope for the success of the vindictive dimensions encoded in the curse: “We meditate/In secret joy and hope those dreadful words/But dare not speak them” (214–5: I. 184–6). Here the hindrances separating Prometheus’s experience of samsara and nirvāna (a difference Buddhism perceives as arising only through flawed perception) remain active and can only be purged by his remembrance and renunciation of the curse. Taking his mother’s advice, the Titan summons “the ghost of Jupiter” to relay the words that burden the world, being hesitant to “let evil, pass again/My lips” (216: I. 211, 218–9). Prometheus thus far manifested several of the particular hindrances discussed by the Buddha in the Sāmaññaphala Sūtra that impede entry onto the path of enlightenment, which requires “abandoning ill-will and hatred” for “compassionate love for the welfare of all living beings” (Walsche 101). The Buddha’s speech uncannily aligns with Shelley’s approach when the tathāgata described the discriminating attitude of mind needed to obtain the “imperturbability” required to reorient the individual committed to liberation toward “knowing and seeing” (Walsche 104):

He knows the mind with hate to be with hate; he knows the mind without hate to be without hate. He knows the deluded mind to be deluded; he knows the undeluded mind to be undeluded. He knows the narrow mind to be narrow; he knows the broad mind to be broad. He knows the expanded mind to be expanded; he knows the unex-panded mind to be unexpanded. . . . He knows the liberated mind to be liberated; he knows the unliberated mind to be unliberated. (Walsche 106)

At this point, Prometheus’s inability to recall the curse stymies his ability to “drastically alter the nature of human thought” (Lewis 159) and undercuts his early moments of perceived “change,” since without understanding the particular terms that establish his relationship with Jupiter and the humanity he sought to protect, his ignorance feeds his unrest and underwrites his mental lapses into selfhood, which block his ability to confront and overcome those hindrances discussed above.

The discrete features of the curse confirm both its “verbal expres-sion of hate” (Webb 698) and the grasping selfhood that ultimately mirrors the detested attributes of his tormentor, which remain locked in “the limitations of self-consciousness” (Richardson 134). While Prometheus has thus far described his opposition solely in



terms of the negative attributes of Jupiter, the elements of the curse actually call down universal suffering, the very charge earlier leveled against him by the elementals and even his mother. The defiance expressed in the opening stanza of the curse somewhat predictably assumes the stance of heroic individualism that characterized his prior self-conceptions:

Fiend, I defy thee! With a calm, fixed mindAll that thou canst inflict I bid thee do;Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Humankind,One only being shalt thou not subdue.Rain then thy plagues upon me here[.] (217: I. 262–66)

Prometheus asserts his status as the only “One” willing to resist Jovian tyranny and immediately evokes the degree to which his actions have served his prior ally (“O’er all things but thyself I gave thee power/And my own will” [217: I. 272–3]), but the hatred of his utterance leads to the widening of suffering well beyond his own mind and body, since he urges that “mischiefs [be] sent/To blast mankind” and “those I love” until the inner degenerate state defining Jovian con-sciousness fills the world with “woe” (217–8: I. 274–5, 277, 283).

Prometheus exhibits through his curse a form of blindness akin to that of Victor Frankenstein, who misread the intention of his creation to extract physical pain rather than wreck havoc on those around him as the vehicle to inflict psychological anguish. In his preliminary outcry, uttered by the phantom before the curse itself is repeated (218: I. 286–301), Shelley’s representation of the “error[s]” of the Titan confirms that the presence of mental afflictions “still imprison his self-expansion” (Hogle 174). Once the curse has moved from the unconscious and into consciousness, Prometheus acknowledges that his grief and pain blinded him, a recognition that “doth repent me” and that generates the bound-less mind that wishes “no living thing to suffer pain” (218: I. 303–5). At this point, loving-kindness begins to condition Promethean conscious-ness, with the afflictions of hatred and desired vengeance extinguished. He thereafter enters the first stage of enlightenment by recognizing uni-versal suffering as the existential boundary condition and by acknowl-edging culpability in the presence of suffering in the world, and by generating the wish to end that suffering. As Robert Thurman states in a different yet related context, Prometheus’s perception of “inexorable interconnection with all other beings [has been] brought to the fore-ground of awareness” (Inner 141), and in a Buddhist sense, Prometheus



has become at this point in the drama an “arhat” (Sanskrit for worthy one), having eradicated the “outflows [of affliction passions]” and hav-ing eliminated the “defilements [of self-grasping]” (Keown 18), an atti-tude associated with the Hīnayāna (Sanskrit for lesser vehicle) forms of Buddhism (which focus on individual enlightenment). However, for Mahāyāna traditions, this preliminary enlightened state inevitably gives rise to the higher aim of “the simultaneous enlightenment of self and others” (Inner 141) motivated by universal love, which is associated with the “bodhisattva” (Sanskrit for a being oriented toward enlightenment). Having attained this higher level of enlightenment, loving-kindness is established as the stable state of awareness, the mental orientation capable of renovating the world. Stated in Shelleyean language, the unrestricted presence of love can alone create the conditions leading to Jupiter’s fall. However, for both the “bodhisattva” and the awakening Titan, the calm-abiding mind of enlightenment stabilized by universal love embodied in efforts to assuage the suffering of all sentient beings, remains in danger of disruption. Mercury and the furies represent just such a danger for Prometheus; both tempt a return to the lapsed state of self-interest and self-enclosure, with the former promising individual ease in exchange for particular knowledge (the conditions leading to Jupiter’s fall) and the lat-ter cultivating despair for ongoing resistance through his implication in collective suffering (the degraded state of humanity across the last 3,000 years of history). The Earth mistakes this exchange of hate for love as a sign of defeated acquiescence, crying out “Misery, O misery to me,/That Jove at length should vanquish thee” (218: I. 306–7), indicating a subhuman response associated, as Bloom argues, “with the [limited] state of nature” (Myth-making 112). However, the necessary first stage of enlightenment has been achieved, as Ione suggests in her assertion that “The Titan is unvanquished still” (219: I. 315), setting the stage for the temptation to regress into prior states of affliction.18

Prometheus, after recalling the curse, then recalls it (the long rec-ognized movement from remembrance to renunciation), which traces his psychological passage beyond an unhealthy attachment to his afflicted self-pity and self-aggrandizement and into a state of loving-kindness extended to all sentient beings, including his Olympian per-secutor. The arrival of the furies and Mercury, however, immediately tests the stability of this new state of awareness, although Panthea’s assertion that “The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud” (219: I. 336) indicates that his past affliction of pride has been overcome. However, the universal constant of self-loathing noted by several critics as the boundary condition for a world ruled by Jupiter (Richardson 129–30;



Webb 696–8), must now be confronted in the external world, having been eradicated within. Mercury’s first words reflect this state:

To thee unwilling, most unwillinglyI come, by the great Father’s will driven downTo execute a doom of new revenge.Alas! I pity thee, and hate myselfThat I can do no more. (220: I. 333–7)

Mercury’s charge reflects the “will” of Jupiter and reinforces an inner division imaged as self-loathing (“I pity thee, and hate myself”), given his “commission” (221: I. 368) to extract Prometheus’s “secret knowledge” or unleash the furies. Mercury mounts a subtle double-edged argument of vacillating flattery and threatened punishment, initially praising his wisdom but nonetheless attempting to compel supplication by criticizing the Titan’s “haughty heart” (221: I. 278).

The power of temptation can be measured by the defiant response Prometheus offers, which ranges across the stages of the path thus far presented, moving through an attachment to exemplary self-identity (“I gave all/He has”) and possessive compassion (“my beloved race”). Curran’s analysis of this aspect is compelling, where Mercury’s dual discourse (f lattery and threat) “tempts [Prometheus] to succumb . . . to moral weakness” yet actually reinforces “his resolve by subordinating the question of imperfect means to his vision of perfect ends” (Annus Mirabilis 98). Thus, the reassertion of unhin-dered “Kindness” breaks through a desire for “bitter stings . . . of Revenge” (221: I. 381–2, 386), and in this light of sought ends, “Submission” is impossible because it would only be a “death-seal of mankind’s captivity,” with Prometheus practicing patience while awaiting the arrival of “Justice,” which will enact “Pity not punish-ment” (221: I. 395, 397, 403–4) on his persecutor. Mercury then attempts a different rhetorical tactic, appealing to his emergent com-passion (“O that we might be spared—I to inflict/And thou to suf-fer”), to the continuation of unending “years . . . pain,” and to the possibility for the Titan to “dwell among the Gods,” and when these arguments fail, Mercury echoes the pity voiced by the Titan: “Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee” (222: I. 410–1, 414, 425). Prometheus’s final spurning of Mercurial temptation returns the scene in circular fashion to the first stage of the enlightened mind, as the imagery in his response to Mercury’s sympathy makes clear: “Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven/Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene/As light in the sun” (222: I. 429–31). Prometheus, like all



aspirants to enlightenment, experiences moments of hesitation and temptation, yet he also exhibits a “calm abiding” within that sup-ports the vigilant discipline needed to maintain the mind “in perfect self-possession,” (Śāntideva 110, 62).

Once repelled by Prometheus, Mercury unleashes the furies, who actual represent the more dire temptation (of despair), since the cli-max of their attack is focused on the Titan’s most vulnerable weak-ness, his love of mankind. The drama also shifts its mythic synthesis to another dimension by contextualizing the temptations offered by the furies relative to “Shelley’s profound and life-long admiration for the character and teachings of Jesus and his even profounder convic-tion that organized Christianity [had] betrayed the moral leadership of its founder” (Clark Prose 103). Shelley forges through martyrdom direct connections between Prometheus and Jesus, where both fig-ures, motivated by “the affections through which our fellow-beings are rendered dear and venerable to the heart” (“Essay on Christianity” Prose 205) finally must confront “the common fate of all who desire to benefit mankind” (“I Will Beget a Son” Prose 104). The danger posed by the furies does not reside in their function as “ministers of pain and fear” capable of inscribing these “nerve from nerve, working like fire within” the individual, since as Prometheus asserts, “Pain is my element as hate is thine” (224: I. 452, 476–7).

The first two furies are repelled with relative ease, but the third fury remains to pursue a more complex psychological torture designed to work against the emergent principles of enlightenment by seeking to disrupt “the self-content of wisest men” through the implantation of “self-contempt” (225: I. 510). This last torture forces Prometheus to confront the dire consequences of his curse, and Shelley ingeniously deconstructs this last affliction through a careful parallel between myth and history, which brings the temptation of Prometheus to its conclusion. Just as the Titan’s curse has ultimately submerged his beloved humanity in war, famine, and waste, so too the ethos of Otherness at the foundation of the New Testament was perverted after Christ’s agony, which also plunged mankind into relentless pain and suffering. As Lewis notes, Shelley’s iconographic connec-tion of Prometheus and Christ tropes off a long established relation-ship operative in art and literature alike (172–4) yet equally reflects Shelley’s modulation of his earlier attacks on Christianity to express his admiration of “Christ as a great teacher” (172):

One came forth, of gentle worth,Smiling on the sanguine earth;



His words outlived him, like swift poisonWithering up truth, peace and pity. (227: I. 546–9)

This “most heart-rending of all emblems” is designed “to scarify the mind of Prometheus rather than his body” (Baker 99), a dramatic moment given added intensity when Ione reports the initial impact on Prometheus: “what a low yet dreadful groan/Quite unsuppressed is tearing the heart/Of the good Titan” (227: I. 578–80). The “emblem [of] those who do endure/Deep wrongs for man, and scorn and chains, but heap/Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him” (228: I. 594–6), which the third fury placed before Prometheus, completes the literal association of history and myth, leading to the one of the most acute and devastating descriptions of the human con-dition offered in Romantic literature:

In each human heart terror survivesThe ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fearAll that they would disdain to think were true:Hypocrisy and custom make their mindsThe fanes of many a worship, now outworn.They dare not devise good for man’s estateAnd yet they know not that they do not dare.The good want power, but to weep barren tears.The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;And all best things are thus confused to ill.Many are strong and rich,—and would be just,—But live among their suffering fellow menAs if none felt—they know not what they do.

The double language of “want” (as desire and lack) is designed to generate despair and disturb “self-content,” as the closing echo of the words of Jesus on the cross confirms, yet the language also calls Prometheus back from the brink, since the fury herself knows not what she does, having evoked terms at the foundation of the positive turn of Promethean mind (“good,” “love,” “wisdom,” “suffering fel-low man”), again engaging his “pity” (the vehicle that rebuffs the fury, who “vanishes”).

As Richardson notes, “the lesson is not lost on Prometheus” (129), and the education of expansive consciousness by its enemies reached its most intense phase in this encounter. The third fury tore the last veil of illusion impeding the clarity of Promethean vision, forcing the recognition that his curse had stranded “the great majority of the



human species [in] squalid ignorance and moral imbecility” (“Essay on Christianity” Prose 207) and allowing the Titan “to realize the limitations of a purely moral framework” (Woodman 115) discon-nected from love. Prometheus transforms the final fury’s discourse of despair into clarity of insight that the human condition of suf-fering is self-inflicted and can only be overcome through an inner revolution: “I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear/Thy works within my woe-illumined mind” (229: I. 636–7). The presented “sights” only strengthen Prometheus’s “soul/With new endur-ance” (229: I. 643–4) and leads to his perception that “The nations thronged around, and cried aloud/As with one voice, ‘Truth, lib-erty and love’” (230: I. 650–1), a collective rather than individual expression of the naturally enlightened condition of consciousness. In its analysis of “the four veils that mask the pure mind or buddha nature,” Buddhism arrived at the same conclusion and asserted an analogous process as its antidote, where “aff lictions [are] transmuted into mirror-like wisdom, wisdom of equanimity, discriminating wis-dom, all-accomplishing wisdom, and emptiness wisdom” (Rinpoche Luminous 27, 169).

Fittingly, given that Shelley and Buddha alike conceive the natu-ral state of consciousness as “Truth, liberty and love,” the comfort extended to Prometheus by his mother Earth emanates from “the dim caves of human thought,” rendering the Chorus of Spirits the expression of the now clarified “atmosphere of human thought” illu-mined from within (230: I. 659, 676). Shelley’s chorus of spirits gives voice to what Julia Kristeva terms “the semiotic disposition” (Desire 133) or chora inscribed in the heart of the arts by the “economy of primary processes” (Desire 6) placed under erasure during the for-mation of the subject (through subjection) within the field of the symbolic order. Both Kristeva and Shelley derive these primal ener-gies from a shared source (Plato), and the semiotic is associated with the maternal that precedes and opposes the Name-of-the Father as the tyrant that rules symbolic relations. Kristeva’s elaboration of the semiotic helps contextualize what Shelley pursues at the end of the first act, with the elements of art emerging from “a kind of place, or receptacle” (Lechte 128) in Promethean consciousness. These choric operations articulate artistic production, which encode “heteroge-neousness [into] meaning and signification” (Desire 133), a state that matches quite well Shelley’s choral spirits, who define the primal state of being, who arise from “the dim caves of human thought,” who function as “Gentle guides and guardians” suspended in “the [clear] atmosphere of human thought,” and who “bear the prophecy/Which



begins and ends in thee” (230–1: I. 659, 673, 676, 690–1) . From a Kristevean position, and in relation to the Buddhist assertion of the transformational possibilities offered by “the wisdom of emptiness,” the drives clustered in the chora at the wellsprings of consciousness “lead to no identity” (Moi 95), since the semiotic stands between the real and symbolic, both rupturing and bridging in dual meditational operations but has in itself no essential presence.

These spirits signify elements of the liberated state of Promethean consciousness that begin to move beyond intention and into action (as mapped in the language of the dharma above), which alone under-writes the overthrow of Jupiter, and their presence appropriately medi-ates the work’s passage from individual to collective enlightenment. The first spirit rides on “a battle-trumpet’s blast” akin to what Blake evokes through “Mental Fight” (E 95), with the products of the imagination waging war against literal and symbolic tyrannies, con-testatory acts motivated by “the soul of love” (231: I. 705) rather than a desire for dominion. The second spirit of compassion narrates the possibility of a new ethos of otherness metonymized through a tale of war when, wrecked and adrift, “one gave an enemy/His plank—then plunged aside to die”, and the third spirit gives voice to the human capacity to “Dream” for “Pity, eloquence and woe” to function in mutual illumination (231–2: I. 721–2, 726, 730). The fourth spirit of poetic inspiration “feeds on the aerial kisses,/Of shapes that haunt thought’s wilderness” and that give rise to “Forms more real than liv-ing man,” thereby functioning as “Nurslings of immortality” (232: I. 741, 748–9). At this point, Ione perceives the approach of two other spirits that connect the elements of mythic assemblage Shelley has pursued thus far:

Behold’st thou not two shapes from East and WestCome, as two doves to one beloved nest,Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air,On swift wings glide down the atmosphere?And hark! Their sweet, sad voices! Its despairMingled with love, and then dissolved in sound.— (232: I. 752–7)

Fused in love, the “beauty” of the pair “gives [Ione] voice,” thereby repairing the ability of stricken consciousness to ex/press, which prompts the choral query: “Hast thou beheld the form of Love?” (232–3: I. 759, 763)

The products of enlightenment have begun to take winged thought beyond the enclosed self, but as yet Prometheus himself has



not committed to the second stage of enlightenment, putting wis-dom into action through the agency of universal love. The interroga-tive necessarily returns the discourse of the fifth and sixth spirits to the struggles and achievements honed through the Titan’s patient endurance of suffering, and his overcoming expresses a new fusion of universal energies textually realized as the mythic assemblage of “East and West.” The fifth spirit points to mind’s ability to transform evil into good, which was once only a potentiality, as several critics have noted, “till Thou, O King of sadness,/Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness” (233: I. 766–7, 770–1). The sixth spirit offers a different view of such abilities, for desolation itself “fans with silent wing/The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear” (233: I. 774–5), creating the very mental conditions by which desolation is vanquished. The most collective choral voice then prophesies the victory of “Love” over “Ruin” through “Death,” and when Prometheus asks the source of this knowledge, they simply sug-gest that like other natural processes (“As buds grow red when snow-storms flee/From spring gathering up beneath”), the very struggle to re-establish “Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace” as the boundary condition within consciousness (“In the atmosphere [of thought] we breathe”) creates the thing contemplated, serving as “the prophecy/Which begins and ends in thee” (233–4: I. 790–800), connecting inner revolution with outer alterations and prefiguring Demogorgon’s final speech to conclude Act IV.

At this point, Prometheus, who only periodically across the first act evoked the principle of love and its bearer, Asia (as opposed to the more problematic bond of sympathy offered by pity), now moves toward the next stage of enlightenment offered by unattached loving-kindness, since “I feel/Most vain all hope but love, and thou art far,/Asia” (234: I. 808–9) and since Promethean mind has moved beyond both the consolations of Earth and the torments of heaven. Asia awaits “in that far Indian vale,/The scene of her sad exile,” a “trans-forming presence” forged in love and compassion that will serve as the vehicle for the final stage of enlightenment (234–5: I. 826–7, 832). Even before Panthea enters the second act, Asia already feels the renovation, which Shelley images as the onset of spring unfreez-ing frozen dreams of liberty and love and returning the morning star (Venus) to herald the ignition of love, signifying changes in inner and outer reality: “This is the season, this is the day, the hour” (235: II. 6–24). Love, whether embodied by Christian agape or Buddhist mētta, mediates the passage to the higher realization, since once gen-erated “compassion is guaranteed to arise” and will be followed by



the dedication to alleviate the state of all sentient beings “tormented by suffering” (Lobsang Gyatso 41).

As Abrams has noted, Shelley’s drama dedicatedly maintains “the bodily separateness of Prometheus and Asia,” yet his cry to Asia con-cluding the first act “released his feminine complement, the full power of love, from her long exile” (300–1). However, Prometheus and Asia do intermingle in the two dreams transmitted between them through the mediation of Panthea, the event that opens Act II and that accel-erates Asia’s journey back to Prometheus in Act III. In a sense, the implantation of these dreams by Prometheus and their transmission by Panthea to Asia represent the enlightened mind’s movement from intention to action, which then allows Asia to recall her own dream of the Promethean imperative to “follow” (the third dream in the sequence). Her spiritual journey, as Curran suggests, is “equivalent [but] different” (100) from Prometheus’s static mental explorations, since her passage into and beyond the realm of Demogorgon to reunite with her beloved completes a second stage in the process of enlightenment that alone can transform samsara into nirvāna. In her dialogic exchange with Demogorgon, which is essentially a mono-logue, Asia completes the transmission of loving-kindness to the very core of physical existence as the final stage of enlightenment, with the level of necessity often associated with Demogorgon as the off-spring of Jupiter and Thetis providing its embodiment at a semiotic rather than symbolic level. Thus, Demogorgon’s assertion that “the deep truth is imageless” intersects Eastern views of the inability of language to represent with any definitude the most profound insights associated with the perfection of wisdom, with love at that moment established as the universal constant: “what to bid speak/Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change?—To these/All things are subject but eternal love” (250: II. ii. 118–20)

Just as inner light broke into the Promethean mind to complete his inner revolution, so too the journey of Asia into the heart of the cosmos and her ignition as the illuminating principle of the material universe realize outer revolution. Asia’s insightful comment that for “such truths/Each to itself must be the oracle” (II. Ii. 12–23) equally embraces the concept that individual responsibility, through love, is never severed from the world. Even before their actual reunion in the cave of mutual illumination (discussed previously), the evolution of conscious and the renovation of the world have been achieved, and the remainder of the drama records the effects of what self- annihilation motivated by loving-kindness can create. The radiant imagery of light, which I have analyzed elsewhere, dominates the



remainder of Act II; as Panthea observes in the fifth scene, “love, like the atmosphere/Of the sun’s fire filling the living world,/Burst from thee, and illumined Earth [in Act III] and Heaven [in Act IV]” (253: II. v. 26–8). With “the whole world” now emanating the new ethos of otherness defined by “thy sympathy,” collective enlighten-ment ensues, which “speak the love/Of all articulate beings” (253: ii. V. 34–5). Asia becomes the “Lamp of Earth” (254: v. 66), and her agency is imagined across the last three stanzas, which are among the most formal and the most beautiful in Shelley’s canon, if not the whole canon of all English poetry. After the rapid fall of Jupiter to begin Act III, which is also narrated in the second scene in a dia-logue between Apollo and the Ocean, Hercules frees Prometheus, and he embraces his beloved with the words “Asia, thou light of life” and asserts that “Henceforth we will not part” (III. iii. 6, 10). Inner revolution leads to outer revolution, only accomplished through the reunion of enlightened mind and universal love.

In the fourth scene of Act III, the spirit of the earth reports the renovation of the material universe read from exteriority, where “All things [from “toads and snakes” to the “ugly human shapes and vis-ages”] had put their evil nature off” (III. iv. 36, 65, 77). The relative report by the spirit of the hour also speaks of the signs of change read from interiority, after first communicating his “disappointment not to see/Such mighty change as I had felt within/Expressed in out-ward things” (267: III. iv. 128–30):

And behold! Thrones were kingless, and men walkedOne with the other even as spirits do,None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear,Self-love or self-contempt on human browsNo more inscribed[.] (267: III. iv. 131–35)

The metonymies of tyranny, “Thrones, altars, judgement-seats and prisons . . . Stand, not o’erthrown, but unregarded now” (268: III. iv. 164, 179), with humanity now seen in the natural state of liberty. Both reports offer accounts which reconnect with the Buddhist views of individual and universal transformation, tracing the shift from sam-sara to nirvāna, which in Buddhist thought is achieved through the transformation of consciousness from states of mental affliction to states of transcendental awareness. The state of samsara is embodied by “misapprehension and false behavior [manifest as] greed, hatred and delusion,” while the state of nirvāna is seen as “non-dual con-sciousness” understood as the attainment of “wisdom” by embracing



“compassion” (Williams 180–2). As with Prometheus Unbound, Buddhist thought establishes the renovation of the world through the renovation of individual consciousness, with individual responsi-bility and action (inner revolution) serving as the vehicle for universal transformation (outer revolution) through the ‘marriage’ of mind and love, an event predicated on the eradication of “mental obscurations” and generating “the open and luminous nature of mind” (Rinpoche Luminous 167, 22) as its proper end.


C H A P T E R

Se l f hood a n d Se l f-A n n i h i l at ion

i n Bl a k e’s M I LT O N

Our greatest enemy is to consider ourselves more important than others, which leads us and others to certain ruin. From this attach-ment to ‘I’ arises all the harm, fear, and suffering in this world.

(The Fourteenth Dalai Lama)

The Eye altering alters all.

(Blake)

Beyond Mythic Assemblage

The fourth act of Prometheus Unbound records the effects of loving-kindness as the new boundary condition for universal relations and verbally celebrates the arrival of outer revolution realized through inner transformation. The mythic key to Shelley’s poetic operations in Prometheus reflects his “deeply held commitment to the oneness of human experience” (Curran Annus Mirabilis 103). Shelley was well-versed in this type of knowledge through a “copious reading project” that included Oriental studies from Sir William Jones’s Works and Robertson’s Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India but which was also informed by British liter-ary works of Oriental interest by Byron, Elphinstone, Faber, Owenson, Southey, and others (M. Williams 171–2). The scientifically-oriented view of myth pursued by Western scholars extended enlightenment methods to categorize mythic representation, leading to the construc-tion of a family of world religions that ultimately included Buddhism



(King 44–8; Masuzawa 125–38). This procedure, as prior analysis in chapters 1 and 2 indicates, was deeply bound up with Oriental colo-nialism, and Shelley was not immune to the appropriation of Asiatic knowledge for literary effects, a point made in different ways in stud-ies by Leask (1–12) and Makdisi (1–22, 100–21). However, as most criticism equally recognizes, Shelley’s shift to a mythic assemblage enfolding eastern thought into Prometheus Unbound provided both “a realm of ideality within which Romantic self-consciousness could unfold” (Williams 172) but equally underwrote the conditions by which the attributes of self could be dismantled across the first act. The second act completes the uprooting of attachment to the selfish form of consciousness by engaging love as the emergent feature that “follows” from this act of self-overcoming.

Shelley’s eradication of the self opens onto a new ethos for men-tal interactions, with all that exists “beyond ourselves” established as “the bond and sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything which exists” (Shelley “On Love” 503). The bond between sentient beings is reported by the spirits of the Earth and of the Hour after the reunion of Prometheus and Asia, which assumes planetary extension as Act III concludes. In Act IV Shelley images the further extension of love as the fundamental principle in physi-cal systems and expands the agency of love as a universal dynamic at work across the entire cosmos and through which it achieves cohe-sion. In this double movement, Shelley offers a representation of a shared dynamic that surpasses his argument, in The Refutation of Deism, that “rigid necessity [the motive force generally associated with Demogorgon] suffice[s] to account for every phenomenon of the moral and physical world” (Clark Prose 132). Indeed, in Asia’s often quoted exchange with Demogorgon, the unlimited operations of love are the only attribute shared by consciousness and cosmos and are thus not subject to “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change” (250: III. iv. 119), an observation made by the offspring of Jupiter and Thetis in his longest speech of the scene. Curran points to this double movement, in his analysis of Shelley’s lyric drama, with the “imaginative structure of Act IV . . . predicated not on a new force in the universe, but on a new vision of universal forces” (Annus Mirabilis 109). In the terms of Buddhism, Prometheus’s inner revolution and its genesis of outer renovation is seen as a perceptual event of altered consciousness, which completes his passage from samsara to nirvāna through the conceptual movement from relative to ultimate truth and takes the imagistic form of “mind’s projection of light [as consti-tuting] reality” (Hoagwood 175).


B l a k e ’s M I L T O N 115

The entirety of Prometheus Unbound seems to demonstrate Lévi-Strauss’s postulation “that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied” (868). In the closing act Shelley also moves beyond his Eastern and Western mythic “assemblage” to envision a “unity in Nature” (King-Hele 209) as the by-product of individual self-annihilation by incorporating the terms and concepts embedded within a newly emergent mythology, that of science, to image this unification. Shelley was uniquely positioned among all Romantic poets to craft such a fusion between old and new knowl-edge, since he was “the most spontaneous of myth-makers and the most scientifically-minded poet of the age” (King-Hele 209). Given Shelley’s hope that the work’s wisdom would be “continued by his readers outside the boundaries of the text” (Hogle 202), the shift to scientific imagery made cultural sense. After all, the best reviewed and most celebrated poet in the 1790s was not William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge but Erasmus Darwin, and his varied works (and their copious notes) provided, in poetic form, “a guide to existing knowledge” (King-Hele 162) ready-made for importation into Shelley’s speculative synthesis of science and poetry characteristic of Lucretius, one of Shelley’s favorite classical writers. Shelley’s move equally established a physical basis by which to connect the poem’s preferred imagery (mental operations directed toward enlightenment) and the transformation of the world (as the ignition of love as the illuminative and connective principle), an analogous technique long employed by Buddhism to interrelate consciousness to the cosmos, since the dharma insists upon non-dualism and universal love as the properties reflecting the perfection of wisdom.1

Appropriately, given the achievement of enlightenment by Prometheus and the propagation of that illumination by Asia, the imagistic foundation for Shelley’s synthesis was the wave aspect of light, which achieved in Prometheus an “extraordinarily systematic” (De Man 110) symbolic pattern capable of forging linguistically the “perfect symmetry” between inner and outer phenomena, where “the light of nature and of mind entwine within the eye and call forth vision” (Zajonc Light 2).2 This metaphorical foundation was also well-suited to Shelley’s decision to use those “operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed” (Shelley 207) as the work’s primary (and primal) poetic idiom, since its terms allowed Shelley a “comprehensive and synthetical view” (Kelso 205) governing “the active collaboration of the human spirit with



Nature” as a mechanism to frame what might be termed an extremely “deep ecology” (Freeman 34).3 Even given the perceived limitations of his ecological theories grounded in scientific knowledge, the very poetic form activated in Act IV of Prometheus, Shelley’s assertion of the dependent origination of mentality and materiality rendered him among the first ecopsychologists, who “proceed from the assumption that at its deepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to the Earth that mothered us into existence” (Roszak 5). Shelley’s poetry of psycho-physicality bridges the boundaries between mind and matter, insisting on the interpenetration and interaction between consciousness and cosmos, thereby treating “the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole” (Bohm xi).

As Carl Grabo, Desmond King-Hele, Arkady Plotnitsky, and oth-ers have well documented, physical experiment and theoretical specu-lation based upon scientific principles were “early passion[s]” (Grabo 21) for Shelley, and these concerns resulted in poetic productions “much enriched by the infusion of scientific imagery” (King-Hele “Shelley and Science” 253). In Prometheus Unbound, this infusion emerges from Shelley’s deep understanding of light, which becomes the vehicle for the interrelation of mental and material events, and in its closing act, which insists on the union of mind and matter, the poet approaches theoretical insights now associated with quantum theory.4 Based on the copious evidence clustered in “The Triumph of Life,” Arkady Plotnitsky argues for a “quantum mechanical [reading of] Shelley” capable of accounting for both the imagistic trope of light’s duality (particle and wave) and the work’s “suspension of clas-sical causality” (263), and I have elsewhere applied a similar approach to read related elements of Prometheus Unbound.5 In this sense, the assertion of a “no-self” in response to “self-questioning” and “self-analysis” approaches both the “quantum self” elaborated by Danah Zohar and the empty nature of both self and phenomena observed by Buddhism. Eknath Easwaran’s introduction to Buddha’s famous poetic work of the dharma, The Dhammapada, mounts a similar argument:

Relativity and quantum theory, in fact, provide excellent illustra-tions of this strange world [presented in the dharma] so contrary to common sense. In the Buddha’s universe a personal, separate self is an illusion, just as substance is an illusion to the atomic physicist. Distinctions between an ‘outside world’ and an ‘inner realm’ of the mind are arbitrary. Everything in human experience takes place in one



field of forces, which comprise both matter and mind. Thought and physical events act and react upon each other as naturally and inescap-ably as do energy and matter. (59)

This description resonates well with the mental and material interac-tions examined in Shelley’s comic resolution to the tragic vision of Aeschylus, and for Shelley, Buddha, and Blake, the reunification of mind and matter is predicated on the eradication of selfhood (self-attachment), an approach that brings his tropes of mental operations into coincidence with Blake’s related pursuit of self-annihilation in Milton, with certain aspects of contemporary neurology and cos-mology, and with Buddhist approaches to enlightened engagement with the world. The approaches articulated by Blake, Buddha, and Shelley, while reflecting important differences in spiritual orienta-tions (Christian, nontheistic, and atheistic, respectively), nonetheless insist beyond the barrier of their differences on non-duality as a solu-tion to the illusions of selfhood and the omnipresence of suffering and propose models of complementarity ultimately highly conversant with contemporary theoretical physics.

The specific terms “selfhood” and “self-annihilation” define the problem and solution, respectively, in Blake’s Milton, a compli-cated work that simultaneously records the poet’s intense reception of the works of his prophetic predecessor John Milton and decon-structs Western enlightenment epistemology constructed upon the cultural priority accorded reason and rationality that is stabilized by a sovereign self serving as the core principle for political and social relations. Remarkably, Blake’s elaboration of the process termed “self-annihilation” intersects the same process asserted by Buddha in pre-cisely the same terms: “The extinction of self is salvation; the anni-hilation of self is the condition of enlightenment.” The coincidence of these statements within my reading (as a scholar of William Blake and Romantic Studies and as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism) made somewhat inevitable an obvious question to which this chapter offers an answer: “Do these two strikingly similar statements from two seemingly disparate spiritual traditions separated by over two millennium offer shared affinities regarding the dynamic operations of “self-annihilation,” a process in both systems that clearly functions as the privileged vehicle by which enlightenment is attained?”6 The answer to this question has admittedly become a prominent critical concern for me of late, given that it cuts across the boundaries of the professional and personal. Self-annihilation functions as literary device and philosophical procedure (in my professional study of Blake)



yet defines the primary principle of both psychological transforma-tion and of ethical commitment (in my pedagogical and meditative practices). The simple coincidence of the phrase “self-annihilation” points beyond language and encourages psychological action (as does the term “enlightenment”). This particular “spiritual” act against the “self” manifests, as well, strong affinities with the discourses of con-temporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and physics, a view recently explored by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso (The Fourteenth Dalai Lama) in his dialogues with Western scientists.

In any number of contexts, The Dalai Lama has sought to establish perceived bridges among these Western scientific forms and various Buddhist beliefs and practices. While hosting a group of scientists in India (1987), he asserted his view that “Buddhism, and particu-larly Mahāyāna Buddhism, is very close to a scientific approach [in its deployment of logical empiricism]” (Hayward and Varela 31), and in another East-West dialogue during the well-known “MindScience” conference at Harvard University Medical School (1991), he proposed that:

Buddhist thinkers . . . find it extremely beneficial to incorporate into their thinking the insights of various scientific fields, such as quantum mechanics and neurobiology, where there are also equally strong ele-ments of uncertainty and essencelessness. (MindScience 26)

In yet another gathering of Western scientists and philosophers (1997), commonality was found among Buddhist views on the uni-versal operations of consciousness realized as mind and matter and “the role of the observer, randomness, non-locality, and causality in quantum mechanics” (Zajonc Physics 17–30). However, perhaps the most intriguing statement for present concerns was the observation offered by Ricard Matthieu (a Tibetan monk and French translator for The Dalai Lama) in his response to the theoretical physicist Trinh Thuan’s evocation of William Blake’s oft-cited opening quatrain for “Auguries of Innocence” (which has been cited in hundreds of sci-ence books to explain relativistic and quantum mechanical effects):

To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour (E 493: 1–4)

After hearing these lines, Matthieu exclaimed: “I can’t help wonder-ing if William Blake had read these texts [of the dharma]! If you



consider these thoughts carefully, then you will see that the Buddha’s omniscience corresponds exactly to the global perception [expressed by Blake]” (Matthieu and Thuan 74).

Given these convergences, the epistemic, linguistic, and sym-bolic coincidence of shared vehicles and methods across two mil-lennia could simply not be ignored. Their convergence had the feel of a strong synchronicity or meaningful coincidence (in the sense discussed in the preface to this work), and the impulse to pursue one (the Blakean path) through the other (the Buddhist path) itself gradually grew into an attempt to articulate and embody an inte-gral model for all efforts and all things.7 While grappling with the maddeningly elusive coincidence of terms and concepts in Blake and Buddhism, I was also preparing for lectures at Monash University and the University of Melbourne in Australia, which forced another widening of perspective.8 My reading for those Australian lectures traversed two “old” influences, Fritjof Capra and Gregory Bateson, whose work intersected my analytic exploration of self-annihilation by adding an ecocritical dimension to it. As Capra argues, “The ori-gin of our [current ecological] dilemma lies in our tendency to create the abstractions of separate objects, including a separate self” (208), a state of being that disperses when “we” “overcome our Cartesian anxiety . . . [and] realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence” (Levin 3). For Bateson, “circuit structure” provided a conceptual framework for the funda-mental ecological relationship of mind and matter and therein offered “a new way of thinking about what a mind is” (490). Mind is not autonomous but is deeply implicated in its environment, exhibiting “autopoiesis (literally ‘self-making’)” (Capra 10) as an emergent fea-ture manifest in a “network” of relations in which “the phenomenon of life has to be understood as a property of the system as a whole” (Capra 10). In this context, mind and matter exist, to fuse terms from David Hartley, Michael Faraday, and Thomas Young current in Blake’s milieu, as a unified field of energy comprised of interactive rhythmic forces whose vibrations are manifest within and without (Nimii 174). Blake and Shelley (as well as Buddha) place “physical phenomena and mind in the same field” (Easwaran 67), and they all seemingly reflect the proverbial wisdom spoken by the Buddha long ago: “the wise live without injuring nature, as the bee drinks honey without harming the flower” (Easwaran 89: 49).

Bateson’s “broad conception of the world” was published over thirty years ago and claims, itself, to summarize research across “the last twenty years” (490). More recently, in a series of definitive studies,



the cognitive scientist Francisco J. Varela (who participated in one of the mindscience forums with The Dalai Lama) and his colleagues have arrived at similar conclusions:

Moment by moment new experiences happen and are gone. It is a rapidly shifting stream of momentary mental occurrences [where] the shiftiness includes the perceiver as much as the perceptions. There is no experiencer, just as Hume noticed, who remains constant to receive experiences, no landing platform for experience. This actual experien-tial sense of no one home is called selflessness or egolessness. (Varela et al. Embodied 60–1; View 1–15, 95–111)

Clearly, a consensual view of a sovereign self as an illusion (often col-lapsed into ego), a primary yet not primal delusion, has increasingly appeared in the experimental outcomes of Western neuroscience and the empirical observations made from within the Eastern mindscience of analytic mediation. As B. Alan Wallace, another Western Buddhist practitioner and translator for The Dalai Lama, has observed: “the tendency of the human mind to assume the existence of things that are in fact nonentities is considered to lie at the root of a broad range of unnecessary conflicts and miseries. The most basic expression of this mental distortion is the reification of oneself as an intrinsically existent personal identity” (Choosing Reality 142). The solitary self becomes, to paraphrase Blake, a “spectre of selfhood” that impedes inner recognition of the illusory separation of subject/object rela-tions. This view indicates that the dis/ease (both malady and source of discomfort) that emerges from this state forms the root of indi-vidual and collective suffering. As we will shortly see, re/cognition of this state (realization of the illusionary status of an essential self that leads to a reconfiguration of its fundamental expression) ignites an inner revolution in consciousness as the prefatory act for the alter-ation of the cosmos, bringing in its wake a new view of organism and environment that is now associated with the ecological state of human subjectivity.

Blake’s Prophetic Assemblage

Shelley’s Prometheus and Blake’s Milton, in spite of the almost twenty years separating their publication and their radically different epis-temological positions, actually make a good pairing to exploration of the emergence of concepts in Romanticism analogous to, but not generated from within, Buddhist views of dependent origination and



complementary operations at the location of consciousness and cos-mos. Like Shelley, Blake attempts through a mythic assemblage in Milton (the first Felpham prophetic work) an analogous marriage of consciousness and cosmos through the eradication of “Selfhood” (E 108: 14.30) by an act of “Self-annihilation” (E 139: 38.34). Blake’s imagery in Milton also evokes mental operations and events as the determinate dimension for the universe (although Blake’s unique melding of narrative nodes as discrete voices in parallel dimensions might be better termed a multiverse). As in Prometheus, which mani-fests two stages of enlightenment (the genesis of intention by the Titan and its extension into action by his consort) leading to plan-etary and universal liberation, Milton also begins with an awaken-ing (of the poet John Milton in Eternity) and the expansion of this awakening into the world (by the mutual annihilation of Milton and his emanation Ololon as contraries). However, Blake’s mythic con-struct in Milton spurns the “Stolen and Perverted Writings” of classi-cal literature, “which all men ought to contemn [sic],” and embraces “the Sublime of the Bible” (E 95) as the primal intertextual presence, which animates both this work and its completion in the final epic Jerusalem. Several generations of scholarship have confirmed Blake’s rejection of classical literature and myth as aesthetic models compro-mised by “War & Dominion” (E 270) in preference for “The Old & New Testaments [as] the Great Code of Art” (E 274), although the chief exception to this practice seems to be his adaptation of the Promethean myth itself (as discussed in chapter 4).

Blake expresses his severe critique of Greek literary models as symbolic tyranny in a variety of textual spaces, as when he con-cluded his short illuminated tract “On Homer’s Poetry” with the cry “The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars” (E 270) or when he proposed in his related meditation “On Virgil” that “Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destoyd it[;] a Warlike State never can produce Art” (E 270). Blake closes this last work with the connections he perceived between “Grecian [as] Mathematical Form” (E 270)—its valorization of abstract forms of perfection disconnected from the minute par-ticulars of life—and the materialist philosophy and science of his day. This reduction of diversified life into abstract perfection, as opposed to a “Living Form” (E 270) toward which Blake aspired, also inter-sected his critique of “Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful [as] founded on the Opinions of Newton & Locke” who “mock Inspiration & Vision” (E 660). However, the “Preface” to Milton offers a particularly virulent attack on “The Classics” which became



a “general malady and infection” that contaminated “Shaksdpeare & Milton” alike, indicting them (the classics) as aesthetic vehicles that “for ever [sic] depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War” (E 95). In opposition to this tradition, the preface urges “Young Men of the New Age” (i.e., architects, painters, poets, and sculptors) to reject them: “We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever [sic]; in Jesus our Lord” (E 95).

While Blake’s language established beyond doubt his Christian affiliations, his radical redefinition of Christian elements, as well as his relentless indictment of institutional forms of Christian religion, actually intersects Shelley’s own position regarding the perversion of the original message of Jesus (which Shelley included at the crucial moment of Prometheus’s temptation by the furies). The direction for those redefinitions is prominently displayed in his adaptation of “The Laocoön” group, which Blake drew in 1815 from a cast in the Royal Academy of the group located in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (which Shelley viewed during his Italian residency while completing Prometheus Unbound). Blake’s design, which David James suggests is the paradigmatic engraved work for Blake’s textual practices, rein-terprets the Greek statue in typically visionary fashion, translating it into a representation of the Hebraic “Jehovah & his two sons, Satan and Adam” (E 273), whose relationship structures the spectrum of embodied human consciousness in Milton.9 For Blake, “The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, God himself, that is, The Divine Body, Jesus we are his Members” (E 273). In Blake’s reading of the agency and function of Christ, now radically internalized and aes-theticized, “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists,” with Blake’s reformation approaching Nietzsche’s promulgation of art as the apt inheritor to traditional religion (discussed at the opening of chapter 4): “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man/Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian” (E 274). Thus, while Blake’s Christian orientation is not in doubt, his reorientation of Christian concepts and iconology can hardly be termed orthodox, a point well-displayed in the narrative functions of both Jesus and Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In this sense, Blake’s position that everyone has the capacity to realize what might be termed Jesus-consciousness parallels rather precisely the Buddha’s recognition of “the inherent Buddha-hood of every sentient being,” which requires an act of self-annihilation “to uncover it” (Keown 44). Milton offers a detailed visionary map by which this recovery can be actualized.



Blake’s Milton pursues, then, a similar assemblage method as that pursued in Shelley’s ambitious Prometheus, with redefined Hebraic and Christian mythic forms in the position Shelley reserved for Hellenic and Eastern mythological thought. As well, Blake small-scale epic unfolds as a dialogic, heterogeneous amalgamation of voices, which provides a dramatic dimension he conceived as the poetic deployment of his “Visionary forms dramatic” (E 257). However, in contradis-tinction to Shelley’s assemblage, which weaves together the elements of Hellenic myth and European science to achieve its “perfect sym-metry” between mind and nature, Blake’s prophetic poem combines Hebraic and Christian mythemes as the vehicles through which to critique European enlightenment philosophy as the bearer of “self-hood” in his age. The work’s prophetic assemblage, then, reflects that literary and spiritual lineage supporting The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (although other work helps shape its contours) and synthesizes complementary semiotic elements (word, design, interlinear flour-ish) into a textual product designed “to enlighten others” (Howard 20–1). The shift to a prophetic mode also presses into service a long-recognized dimension of Biblical prophecy, where prophets from Amos to Jeremiah sacrifice individual identity to become the voice of the other (as in the earlier example of Isaiah and Ezekiel giving voice to “Poetic Genius” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). As well, the coalescence of Hebraic prophetic forms (militaristic mes-sianism and pietistic apocalypticism) in all prophetic discourse after Isaiah, points to a tendency of appropriation and transmutation that shapes an imaginative dimension in the tradition. Joseph Wittreich’s analysis of this aspect of Milton can provide the context for Blake’s practice, where “prophecy looks backward and forward. Each new prophecy casting greater illumination on the past even as it receives illumination from it . . . This process ensures interconnectedness even as it promises renovation” (Wittreich 225).

Blake’s Milton is rendered more difficult for any immediate inter-pretation of its events by requiring readers to negotiate another aspect—the intratextual importation of his own mythic elements from the earlier Lambeth prophecies to achieve a “fearful symme-try” (25). Unlike Shelley’s Prometheus, which could depend on a prior traditional dramatic work by which readers could orient them-selves, this intratextual content creates hermeneutic difficulties which emerge at the outset of the journey through Blake’s Milton. As the Bard begins his song, the opening section offers a condensed reca-pitulation of The Book of Urizen. The repetition of Urizen’s gesta-tional “aging” as “State[s] of dismal woe” (E 97: 3.10, 13, 16, 19,



21, 23, 27) recounts his assumption of a material body and marks his separation from the other Zoas, with this disruption of psychic harmony imaged as an embrace of the selfhood of individual exis-tence. As Howard argues, Urizen (in Blake’s myth) and his specter Satan (in the Bard’s Song) function as the primary characters that embody this sad state of restricted consciousness: “Psychologically, the deluded, repressive, destructive self turns away from the openness and freedom of brotherhood, becomes self-involved, limiting its focus to its own interests, and separates itself from whatever threatens those interests. Then it extends its tentacles into the exterior world to hold fast” (76–7). Although cast in his own mythic terms, Blake’s poetic analysis traces a process whereby the debased inner state (reason) is externalized to become an ideological state apparatus (institutional-ized forms of enlightenment), which concretizes political and social barriers to impede future freedom (Althusser 162–76).10 The incor-poration of passages from the earlier Lambeth prophecies represents both Blake’s attempt to fuse these elements into a new vision while simulta neously representing a form of self-overcoming, with the intra-textual and the intertextual alike “looking backward and forward,” allowing the unfinished manuscript of The Four Zoas to function as a mythic unconscious for Milton and Jerusalem.

S. Foster Damon suggests that “the self or selfhood is the innate selfishness with which we are born” (362), connecting the solipsistic critique of individual identity formation and its embedded operations in cultural systems of restraint. Both in its incipient forms and its more direct embodiment in Milton, selfhood functions as the sin-gle greatest obstacle to Blake’s peculiar view of the last judgment (the overcoming of error by any individual), which itself intersects Buddhist descriptions of enlightenment as liberation from “all [men-tal] defilements [that] have the false theory of individuality for their root” (Conze [1995] 167). Almost every critic drawn to Blake’s epic effort to textually embody his transformational ethos attempts to articulate some type of understanding of the convoluted processes that link the state of selfhood (the diagnosed malady of obsessive self-consciousness) and the act of self-annihilation (the salvific antidote to this narcissistic malady). From early respondents like William and Dante Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Butler Yeats to the vibrant generation of critics currently elaborating the deeply enriched environment of contemporary Blake studies, these concepts stand at the heart of visionary process, providing the acute diagnosis of the human condition and its active antidote, respectively. Harold Pagliaro persuasively argues that traces of both “selfhood”



and “self-annihilation” appear in incipient if not nominal forms as far back as Songs of Innocence and Of Experience (17–33), and aspects of these psychic states also circulate widely through the illuminated works of the 1790s, including most especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen.

Blake criticism confirms the late fruition of these concepts, although both the bound state (selfhood) and the liberating act (self-annihilation) have incipient forms in many of the Lambeth prophecies (i.e., Albion’s angel in America and Fuzon’s crucifixion in Ahania), but the actual terms that first achieve linguistic bodies in The Four Zoas, are first explained in daunting and depressing detail in Milton and, finally, receive the prescribed cure in the visual field of Jerusalem. For every Blakean subject/character, the specter of delusion haunts self-consciousness and is precisely what must be overcome in any act of self-annihilation, as its first literal appearance in the canon (in the seventh night of The Four Zoas) clearly proposes:

. . . Los embracd the Spectre first as a brotherThen as another Self; astonishd humanizing & in tears,In Self abasement Giving up his Domineering lust . . . & by Self-annihilation back returningTo Life Eternal (E 367–8; FZ 85.30–5)

At this stage of the unfinished work, Albion continues to fragment and is poised on the abyss of “death and torment” (E 376: 95.4), in danger of collapsing into a subject state Blake terms “non-entity,” which always has dire psychological and historical consequences. However, as Peter Otto notes, even at this dark textual moment, “the embrace of the Spectre allows Los to bridge the gap between self and subject, objective world and subjective individual” (244), thereby enacting a “self-annihilation” by which imagination returns to primal unity where any essential understanding of self disappears: “thou art but a form & organ of life & of thyself/Art nothing being Created Continually” (E 368; FZ 86.1–3).

The emergence of the linked concepts of selfhood and self-anni-hilation comes late in Blake’s corpus, because the relationships among the Zoas and their emanations continued to shift during the Lambeth period and only stabilized with the drafting of Vala (the first title for The Four Zoas). As well, once this stability was asserted, the Orc cycle, which had assumed paramount importance in the earlier prophetic books (e.g., America, A Prophecy), emerged as a problem in need of visionary resolution, since Blake (and Buddha) had concluded that



violence only begat further violence. Finally, the visionary geography of the final epics allowed Blake the space to trace the contours and chart the operations or the processes implied by mental operations and their embodiment (imposed versus willed approaches to the self and its overcoming and the renovation of inner and outer reality), which only the inflated visionary universe of the late epics and their illuminations provided. The complex operations of selfhood and self-annihilation across both consciousness and cosmos are best mapped through the epic dimensions of Blake’s late poetry, where psyche and phenomena exhibit mutual interdependence (Pagliaro 17–34). Selfhood, as Ronald L. Grimes reminds Blake’s readers, “is formed without” and when “one is self-centered, or selfish, he is contracted into a tiny involved mass outside himself and consequently outside of others” (76), since this tendency is anchored in the field of cul-ture and promotes its agency in ideological ways. While afflicted by selfhood, “Milton was unable to detect his own enemies [within]” (Tayler 257), a perceptual state only alleviated after his reception of the Bard’s Song, and Prometheus exhibits the same malady when pain and suffering blinded him to the full implications of his curse and his participation in widening suffering among humanity.

Miltonic Awakening

The broadest aim of Blake’s epics connects his effort to those of the sūtras, since all three (The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem) have a shared concern, individual and collective awakening, explored through the slumbers of Albion (both an individual character and a collective name for England), which is Blake’s grand theme. This concern is etymo-logically encoded into the very term “Buddha” which is “an epithet of those who have achieved enlightenment” and which is derived “from the Sanskrit root ‘budh,’ meaning ‘to awaken’” (Keown 42). As well, when Milton achieves a preliminary awakening in eternity, other entities residing with him are awakened by his example, another parallel with the Buddha’s sūtras, since the tathāgata often instructs the gods in the wisdom of dependent origination, nonattachment, emptiness, and loving-kindness. This tendency is often at work in the prajñāpāramitā sūtras, with the best example being the prologue to the Heart sūtra (discussed in chapter 3), where the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Sanskrit for the Lord who gazes down) learns les-sons in emptiness from Buddha’s exchange with his student Sāriputra and uttered the work’s famous intellectual quandary regarding the interrelation of form and empitiness.11 In this sense, while Blake’s



Marriage of Heaven and Hell was argued to be the work closest to a small-scale text in the perfection of wisdom tradition (in chapter 3), Milton might be considered a longer poetic sūtra in the same tradi-tion, given its dramatic exploration of a mental state (selfhood) and of an act leading to self-overcoming that results in enlightenment (self-annihilation).

In Milton, this concern for awakening is present at all levels of the narrative (Eternity, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro), and as the work opens, the omniscient narrator reports Milton’s deep unhappiness in Eternity a century after his death. As Irene Tayler observes, the poet’s “selfhood is at war with his own prophetic vision” (253) as he con-templated his spiritual state, which has left “his Sixfold Emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep/In torment” (the physical embodiment of his work) and which requires an “unexampled deed” (self-annihilation) to remedy: “To go into the deep her to redeem & himself perish” (E 96: 2.18, 19–21). His perplexity suggests that the author of Paradise Lost seems to have forgotten his pre-eminent model at the core of his later work Paradise Regained, and in an episodic parallel with Shelley’s opening act of Prometheus, the “Bard’s prophetic Song” allows Milton to recall “Christ’s sacrifice by annihilating his own selfhood” (Wittreich 265) as the solution to the contracted state of self-affliction named “Satan,” who in self-willed fashion usurps the position of his narrative brothers Palamabron and Rintrah (in the Bard’s Song) and whose identity is associated, by Blake, with the rela-tively new material sciences: “art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts/And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day and night?/Art thou not Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of Locke/To Mortals thy Mills seem every thing” (98: 4. 9–12).

Satan’s methods of “Mathematical Proportion of Length Bredth Highth” identify him as “the Reasoning Negative” of selfhood that constricts “The Eye of man [into] a little narrow orb closd up & dark/Scarcely beholding the great light,” and he thereby restricts access to the visionary city of art “Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal” (98–9: 4.26, 5.21–2, 6.1), which Blake introduced in Milton. The range of Blake’s visionary geography in Milton is daunting and compelling in scale, ranging across visionary spaces (e.g., Eternity and Beulah), other countries (e.g., Mexico, Peru, China, and Japan), regions of Great Britain (e.g., Ireland, Stratford, and Dover), and spe-cific cityscapes in greater London (e.g., South Moulton Street, the Gardens of Kensington, and Hyde Park) and thereby providing a local, global, and cosmological scope for the operations of both selfhood (in constrained forms that include colonialism and imperialism) and



enlightened consciousness (in expansive forms of interconnection).12 The expanse of the visionary geography presented in the Bard’s song testifies to the dire effects of selfhood as governing principle, the suffering which Satan (reason) sows with the plow of Palamabron (pity) in the external spaces of Ulro (fallen existence). The solution can only be the overcoming of selfhood at its source, which requires an inner revolution in the other half of the visionary geography within. In this sense, when the Bard aims his prophetic discourse at the eternal Milton, he chooses his audience well, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues: “The transfer of poetic message, its effectiveness as a call to action, is presented as a matter of karmic affinity between speaker and hearer . . . The only good listener to the Bard’s Song, then, is the one who not only understands the ironies, but applies them to him-self . . . and transforms the Bard’s ambiguities into immediate action” (“Comedy” 294 [my emphasis]). In succession, the only listener in materiality who can read these acts and further transfer their energies into a vehicle capable of outer transformation, Blake as author, leads to his appearance as active character in the drama itself in preparation for his “union with Milton [and] Los” (Mitchell “Comedy” 286).

During his song of fallen faculties, Los and Enitharmon (imagina-tion and its embodiment), the parents of Satan, recognize that “Satan is Urizen” (104: 10. 1) and lament the wide agency their offspring has established in materiality, and the Bard concludes his visionary prophecy by defining “the Two Limits” of human consciousness: “The Divine Hand found the Two Limits: first of Opacity, then of Contraction/Opacity was named Satan, Contraction was named Adam” (106: 13.20–1). When the Bard was “much question’d” by the eternals, he asserts his prophetic agency in terms argued in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! For I Sing/According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius” (107–8: 13.51–14.1) and takes “refuge in Miltons bosom” (108: 14.9), prompting one of the work’s most powerful statements of compas-sionate action in Blake’s canon:

And Milton said, I go to Eternal Death! The Nations stillFollow after the detestable Gods of Priam; in pompOf warlike selfhood, contradicting and blaspheming.When will the Resurrection come; to deliver the sleeping bodyFrom corruptibility: O when Lord Jesus will thou come?

The short answer to this Miltonic question is the same as the one Demogorgon offers to Asia, in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, when



she asks virtually the same question (“Behold”), since the poem “demands simply and relentlessly that the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ be repeated in every man” (Rieger 270) and that event occurs in the “now” of consciousness freed from the affliction of selfhood. Milton’s achievement of a preliminary state of enlightenment immediately generates the next stage, rendered in an anaphoric sequence that brings the three crucial terms of this discus-sion into mutual illumination:

I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave.I will go down to the sepulcher to see if morning breaks!I will go down to self annihilation and eternal death,Lest the Last Judgment come & find me unannihilateAnd I be siez’d & giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood . . . I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One!He is my Spectre! (E 108; 14.14–24)

These lines bring our three crucial terms into mutual interaction, and the anaphoric sequence of the central lines enacts linguistically (“I will”) what the text evokes thematically—identifying the drive for self-annihilation to the “will.” Blake’s verbalized process inter-sects Schopenhauer’s citation of the “perfection of wisdom” litera-ture, which was discussed previously in relation to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the energy of the will is harnessed, by Milton, to empower its conquest, a deconstructive procedure that co-opts the will’s entanglement with self-consciousness and selfhood as the very vehicle by which both (self-consciousness and selfhood) are annihilated. When Milton pro-claims his commitment to enter materiality and undergo “Eternal Death,” Blake enfolds both Miltonic and Biblical concepts of self-sacrifice as models for his construction of annihilation of self-identity, which as Wittreich suggests should be viewed as the culmination of a prophetic agenda where “expanded consciousness” functions as the agent of “Milton’s redemption” (239).

Milton’s success in overcoming selfhood through willed action is recorded in the visual field of the work as a two-step process. The title plate and plate sixteen, which in essence textually ‘frame’ the Bard’s Song, capture quite well the first two steps in Milton’s movement toward enlightenment, which in typically perverse Blakean fashion moves from eternity to materiality to be realized in the “Sea of Time and Space” at Blake’s cottage in Felpham (see the small-scale design



at the foot of plate 36). These plates visualize the method of self-annihilation as the necessary visionary act in response to selfhood within (the individual) and without (as symbolic systems reifying its operations), which becomes more easily discerned than its thematic evocations in the verbal field. The title plate finds a nude Milton stepping further into the depths of the plate, entering a swirling mass of clouds that moves in vortical fashion around him, a clear visual reference to the famous “Vortex” that provides two-way transporta-tion between eternity and generation (E 109: 15.21–35). Of more significance for this essay, the design presents the past poet stepping away from selfhood (positioned at the reader’s location relative to the design) and into self-annihilation (positioned as the vanishing point perspective in the depth of the design), with his right hand reach-ing forward to sunder in half his own name (as well as the work’s title), which begins to flow into the vortex. The character Milton and the author of Milton simultaneously perform, on the title page, an act of self-annihilation before the theme, or even the discrete terms themselves, are introduced (a visual practice on Blake’s title plates that extend back to Urizen and The Marriage). As seen above, Milton only announces his intention to pursue “self-annihilation” and thereby overcome his “spectre” on plate fourteen and only clearly defines these terms at plate forty, so Blake’s title plate places prior-ity on the annihilative process, staging a performance of it by acting simulta neously against two locations in the spectrum of nominaliza-tion (character/historical entity, textual title/author).

Plate sixteen, I argue, depicts Milton’s second step in his move-ment against selfhood through the pursuit of self-annihilation, and the plate, read from foot to head (i.e., bottom to top), shows the prophetic subject overcoming selfhood. Once again, processes of sig-nification are broken, this time at the foot of the plate by Milton’s right foot, which literally splits “Self-hood” even as the design defines it: “To Annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit & False Forgiveness” (E 110). While the right foot led on the title plate, the left foot now steps deeper into the design and, with both hands extended, Milton grapples with an Urizenic figure, with the visual structure of the design derived from that work’s title plate. However, here the figure leans away from the poet, falling backward and thereby splitting the twin tablets of the Decalogue, an act against what Lacan termed the Symbolic Order. Like Urizen in Blake’s myth, this Lacanian order lurks in the reified reflections of a solitary self (the imago) reinforced ideologically by empowered forms of cultural semiosis seeking primar-ily to control and thereby promote conformity to encoded behavior.



In the background, five female figures dance on top of the hill behind Urizen and play musical instruments, representing the liberation or freedom experienced by the senses upon completing the inner revolu-tion inaugurated through self-annihilation. Some would describe this end as a form of enlightenment, and Robert Thurman’s description of Buddhist practice fits quite well with the processes mapped by Blake on the title plate and plate fifteen of Milton: “The experience of self-lessness as freedom from alienated ego-addiction is a revolution in the deepest heart of the individual” (98).

Blake’s reception of Milton is another form of self-annihilation recorded as a narrative event (reported twice), establishing a commit-ment to annihilation even at the position of authorship, and immedi-ately precedes Milton’s full-plate grappling with the Urizenic element of selfhood. As Milton descends “Precipitant loud thundering into the Sea of Time & Space” (E 110: 15.46), the narrator experiences this descent, in both cases, as an event of interpenetration of subject and author:

Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star,Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift;And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there;But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe. (E 110: 15.47–50).

Immediately beneath this passage, Blake provides a small-scale inter-linear design that visually records this event, which is recapitulated in two-full plates designs later in the work: at the conclusion to Part the First (plate 29) and following Blake’s Venn-like diagram of the mun-dane egg, the zones of the zoas, and Milton’s track into materiality (plate 33).13 The second narration of this event occurs six plates later, with Blake providing in between descriptions of “The Mundane Shell” (E 110: 17.21) that constrains consciousness within a Newtonian cos-mology and the constricted conceptual environment therein created for “The Four Zoas” (E 112: 19.18). Milton continues his fortunate fall “thro Albions heart, travelling outside of Humanity” to embody “an old Prophecy in Eden” predicting that “Milton of the Land of Albion should up ascend/Forwards from Ulro from the Vale of Felpham” (114–5: 20. 41, 59–60), the very location at which Blake writes the poem and at which Blake (as author) under the impetus of Los (zoa of imagination) strives to subdue selfhood:

But Milton entering my Foot; I saw in the netherRegions of the Imagination; also all men on Earth,



And all in Heaven, saw in the nether regions of the ImaginationIn Ulro beneath Beulah, the vast breach of Milton’s descent. (E 115: 21.4–7)

When Milton commits to eternal death, he plunges into the material world, which from the restricted space of flawed eternity looks like a “total destruction of Milton’s being,” but as Mark Bracher argues, through Blake’s treatment “such eternal death is not total annihila-tion of being” but rather a shift in perspective that “overturns the orthodox view completely and threaten the metaphysics of presence on which it is based” (Bracher Being 80).

The textual trajectory, then, maps the “movement of mind from ignorance to wisdom, from crass materialism to the universe as sacred body” (Brown 136), which is realized at numerous levels in acts of annihilation, with Blake, Los, and Milton finally coalescing as mutually illuminating entities whose efforts promote projective and retrospective awakening across the spectrum of semiosis and sentience, although the argument Grimes offers as gloss on this process should be kept in mind: “The assimilation of Milton and then Los to Blake himself is recognition that a figure from the past, a poetic character, and a man of the present are not sealed off from one another in visionary perception. One must beware, however, of jumping to the fallacious conclusion that imagina-tive time is reversible or that sequence is being denied” (61). Indeed, as Grimes goes on to discuss, Milton occupies at least two time zones, “mythical [and] historical” (Grimes 61), and forces its readers to negoti-ate passage between them through the vortex of thought as the sub-lime allegorical mode of transport. Blake’s amalgamation of past poet, allegorical zoa, and present poet clearly is designed to highlight as well the psychological and aesthetic gains for acts of self-annihilation, and the description of the state of “self-victimization” left behind, offered by Judith Butler, resonates with both Blake’s view and the view of the Buddha: “the subject engages in its own self-thwarting, accomplishes its own subjection, desires and crafts its own shackles, and so turns against a desire that it knows to be—or knew to be—its own” (Butler 24).

When Milton provides the Bard refuge in his bosom, his assump-tion of shared mission shapes an initial state of awakening through this mergence of particular poetic identity and the eternal dimension that informs that identity. The preliminary act of insight (that he is his own specter) results in the realization that only by an ensuing act of self-annihilation, a descent into the “Sea of Time and Space” (an act perceived as “Eternal Death” from the static position of the Eternals), can his emanation Ololon (the material embodiment of his



thought) be redeemed. As the work moves toward its climatic conclu-sion on the lawn of Blake’s cottage in Felpham, Milton perceives that his individual act of annihilation is actually an eternal principle for all those who strive for enlightenment:

Satan! My Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilateAnd be a greater in thy place, & be thy TabernacleA covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comesAnd smites me as I smote thee & becomes my coveringSuch are the Laws of thy false Heavns! but Laws of EternityAre not such: know thou: I come to Self-AnnihilationSuch are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutuallyAnnihilate himself for others good, as I for thee[.] (E 139: 38.29–36)

At this point, Milton launches into a full-blown critique of the false laws of material philosophy represented by Satan as the specter, the reasoning power of mind, which is embodied in materiality as the dominion of church and state over individual freedom (i.e., their domination and regulation of life itself in the name of uniformity) and which is inscribed within as the afflictions that result in self-victimization (the mind-forged manacles by which we restrain and control ourselves).

The Satanic specter responds in terms ultimately traceable back to The Book of Urizen, proclaiming “I am God the judge of all . . . Fall therefore down & worship me . . . I alone am God” (139–40: 39.51–6). Selfhood, given its reinforcement in a world made in its image, is always in danger of re-asserting itself, just as the rule of Jupiter is always ready to return (hence requiring the last speech of Demogorgon in Shelley’s drama), but the response to this powerless self-assertion occurs when the very allies Satan/Urizen seeks to press into his service, the Starry Seven, actually inaugurate the apocalypse, which potentially brings individual and universal enlightenment in the track of Milton’s pas-sage: “Awake Albion awake! Reclaim thy Reasoning Spectre. Subdue/Him to the Divine Mercy, Cast him down into the Lake/Of Los, that ever burneth with fire, ever & ever Amen!/Let the Four Zoas awake from Slumbers of Six Thousand Years” (140: 39.10–4). The Four Zoas, the elements of Blake’s sublime allegory of mental capaci-ties, and Albion, Blake’s image of collectivity, move toward a wider awakening that will achieve enlightenment by overcoming inner and outer forms of selfhood, which are the vehicles for all suffering in the world, thereby setting the stage for the redemption of Milton’s emanative contrary Ololon, who has followed in Milton’s track to also arrive at Blake’s garden in Felpham.



Milton’s commitment to annihilation leads to a detailed analysis of the state of selfhood, beginning with the lineage from which it assumes its authority and the empowered authors who helped define its philosophy. Significantly, he speaks these words to his emanation Ololon:

There is a Negation, & there is a ContraryThe Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in ManThis is a false Body: an Incrustation over my ImmortalSpirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alwaysTo cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-Examination.To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not HumanI come in Self-Annihilation & the grandeur of InspirationTo cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the SaviorTo cast off the rotten rags of Memory by InspirationTo cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s coveringTo take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with ImaginationTo cast aside from Poetry, all that is not InspirationThat it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of MadnessCast on the Inspired[.] (E 142; M 40.31–41.9)

Milton’s elaboration of self-annihilation as a corrective to selfhood uproots “this Newtonian Phantasm” and dispels its mystifying mode of “Natural Religion” (141: 40.11, 13), which are the corruptions Blake has located in Milton’s work. At this point, Ololon’s initial fear of eradication gives way to the final coalescence of Milton and Ololon as “Contraries,” an event that brings enlightenment in the form of “One Man Jesus the Saviour,” whose revelation is “written within and without in woven letters: & the Writing/Is the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression” (143: 42. 11–14).

Blakean Enlightenment and/as Post-Critique

Blake’s critique moves specifically against the bearers of enlight-enment epistemology, and by the strength of this “post-critique” (occurring after Milton’s redemption of Ololon and mergence with Jesus) the poet re-fuses (denies in that denial heals) division “between the philosophic and spiritualist concepts of developing a view of self,” thereby enacting through “woven letters” a renovation of “both a set of interior psychological principles and a set of exterior forces manifest in the world of men” (Howard 57), and Milton’s committed language indicates that his act of compassionate self-sacrifice is directed toward



both dimensions. Milton, through self annihilation, rejects the sover-eign self at the foundation of first-stage enlightenment epistemology associated with Satan, refusing this division, creating con/fusion as the context for understanding, and resisting the split between subject and object so crucial to Western enlightenment epistemology.

The implications of self-annihilation, then, impinge upon the fun-damental relationship of mind and matter, since mental concepts exit the mind to assume concrete institutional bodies that impact cor-poreal existence, thereby compromising the primary ecological state of the primal subject’s unity. The initial Urizenic state of mind that opens the work can only be characterized as alienated and fragmented, and self-examination leads to self-annihilation (explored by Blake, by Shelley, and by Buddha), providing a means for refusing a false divide between arenas of thought and experience in preference for an integral view capable of creating a unified framework for all self-generated actions (that is, to re/fuse [both to deny a division and to heal it] a false, even impossible, divide). The false divide between men-tality and material forms the core of Blake’s critique of the enlighten-ment epistemology against which he wrestled, an ideological presence Blake metonymized through “Newton.” As Donald Ault (in relation to Blake) and Robert Markley (in relation to eighteenth-century cul-ture) have discussed, the spread of Newtonianism as ideology had insinuated itself into virtually every sphere of human interaction by the 1790s, thereby reifying rather than assuaging suffering by reduc-ing all existence to “Mathematical Proportion.”14

The illuminated field of Blake’s Milton, which juxtaposes the verbal and the visual, aptly embodies the self-annihilation in its “compos-ite” state (Mitchell 3–40) as textual and thematic layers of interactive semiosis operate in interdependent and therefore mutually illuminat-ing ways, which renders it a better textual location through which to explore the “semiotic disposition” earlier used to assess Shelley’s Prometheus. The interplay of word and design rather precisely inter-sects Kristeva’s description of the chora of the semiotic, which she envisioned as connected to primal subjective functions placed under erasure by the tyranny of symbolic relations (against which Blake rails in his “Preface”). Blake’s composite text seems well-suited to unveil these symbolic tyrannies and to pursue its curative prescription as the eradication of the dis/ease of selfhood. In its interplay of the visual and verbal languages, Blake’s small-scale epic (like the other illuminated works) models the semiotic itself, whose composition includes the rhythms and intonations of poetry, the play of light and color in painting, the melodic and rhythmic disposition of music, and



the structure of dialogic exchange in drama (Kristeva Desire 132–4, 281–2). In the poetic narrative, the powerful preceding poet John Milton, pondering Blake’s present/presence and his role in shaping it/him from the (ad)vantage point of eternity, undertakes a willed act termed “self-annihilation” to overcome “selfhood” as the neces-sary first step in what can only be termed an apocalypse of the cre-ative imagination leading to an experience of absolute consciousness (E 108: 14.20–2).

Blake clearly expresses his tragic understanding of the subject’s plight throughout his work, perhaps nowhere more powerfully that in “London,” where every face the “I” engages reflects the “mind-forg’d manacles” of self-binding (Bandy 12–43). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Book of Urizen, albeit in radically differ-ent tones and voices, explore the degrees to which our projections of autonomous selves form the basis of our ignorance and become our shared fiction or delirium, a diagnosis offered in Blake’s work but more recently theorized by Gilles Deleuze: “we are not threatened by error, rather and much worse, we bathe in delirium . . . the positing of an identity of the self, requires the intervention of all sorts of fictive uses of relations, and in particular of causality, in conditions where no fiction can be corrected but where each instead plunges us into other fictions, which all form part of human nature” (43). Selfhood or a sovereign self, a delusion of separation and alienation, establishes sub-jectivity within “the Sea of Time and Space,” a nightmare realm tra-versed in Blake’s penultimate epic Milton but whose source is unveiled on the plates of the final epic Jerusalem.

The visual field in Blake’s last prophecies energetically attempts to bring the tragic fate of subject formation into readerly conscious-ness. The title plate and plate sixteen from Milton image (and thereby imagine) the first two steps in the eternal poet’s annihilation of self-hood, while a later design from Jerusalem, plate forty-one, operates meta-critically to unveil the mirrored dynamic at the foundation of the composite text and at the foundation of subject formation alike. Blake’s textual illustrations emanate an “aura of genius,” exude extraordinary power, and manifest impressive detail in their sup-port of the discourse of self-annihilation, providing something like a semiotic dreamscape for the linguistic processes ex/pressing itself as a singular, solitary subject rather than an interdependent entity (with the latter necessarily functioning as a boundary condition for all Blake’s illuminated prophetic books). Through the dynamic operations of word and design in Milton and Jerusalem, Blake gener-ates an enriched semiotic textual environment specifically designed



to unveil selfhood and stage self-annihilation in its most dramatic way, encoding the conditions for an inner revolution in the narra-tive and pictorial representation of that revolution; the illuminated prophetic textual state, then, exhibits analytic “post-critique” as a boundary condition for its textual operations, functioning as a form of meta-textuality at a primary layer of expression. Indeed, the inner revolution imagined by Blake and pursued by the titular character of Milton requires a commitment to “self-critique all the way down [i.e. beyond any self]” (Hoy 228). This critical mode dissolves “bound-aries of conventional ontology” (Lundeen 61) as a necessary stage for “individual liberation of the mind from ignorance” (Brown 127). Blake’s illuminated prophecies achieve their complexities by drawing upon “disparate discourses to create a bricolage” (Mee 5), refracting linguistic and semiotic rays into a spectrum of aesthetic ex/pression (that is, both as representation and as counter-repression), and such artistic labor achieves a fusion that underwrites “a new kind of body” and anticipates “a new kind of being” (Makdisi 262).

Intriguingly, as suggested above, at the very moment Blake artic-ulated his version of this annihilative process (a path well defined and documented within the Christian mystical traditions of which Blake was aware), an analogous mode for overcoming alienation and fragmentation began to emerge through Orientalist research that led to the crystallization of what is now termed “Buddhism” into European consciousness. Compellingly, the coincidence of exact terms for both the end, “enlightenment,” and the process, “self-an-nihilation,” points to practical and theoretical, if not historical, affin-ities, as Walter Truett Anderson has argued: “[The Enlightenment brought] an outburst of scientific discovery, social dissent, and philosophical exploration that at some points produced concepts of personal enlightenment much closer to what we find in Eastern tra-ditions . . . It isn’t entirely coincidental that we use the same word in English—enlightenment—for the Eastern concept of liberation from illusion and the Western concept of liberation from ignorance” (21). In Blake and Shelley (on the one hand) and Buddhism (on the other hand), self-annihilation provides a pragmatic method by which to inaugurate an inner revolution. This evolutionary method of men-tal self-examination deconstructs, by necessity, the self-victimizing tendencies of the sovereign self and thereafter energizes the forces by which to cultivate an outer revolution focused on the liberation from self-imposed suffering subsequently inscribed as cultural ide-ologies of control and restraint. Through this process, the Blakean approach scripted in Milton intersects both Shelley’s method of



mythic assemblage and contemporary attempts to reunite practice and theory, a position Padmasiri De Silva has strenuously sought to establish in contemporary cultural practices: “what is needed today is not a movement from theory to practice, but one from practice to theory, or more truly the art of what Anthony Weston calls ‘enabling practice,’ that theory and practice should develop together” (27). The actualized state of Blake’s textual practice of mirrored pro-duction (and mirrored writing) and the theoretical exploration of self-annihilation at the thematic level perform precisely such an “enabling practice” that Buddhists would describe as skillful means directed toward an enlightened end. Given this practice (or aesthetic technique as praxis), Blake’s Milton does function as a sūtra but in a distinctly Western mode of second-stage enlightenment pursued by Romantic writers in their revisions of their philosophical inheri-tance, since like any work dedicated to the “perfection of wisdom” it equates form and emptiness and thereby renders any “separate self [as] a spurious reality, which can maintain itself only by finding sup-ports, or props, on which to lean, or rely” (Conze Wisdom 103).

As alluded to briefly above, Blake’s critical examination of the interlocking nature of “selfhood,” the “spectre,” and “self-annihilation” reaches a creative crescendo in Milton, and his “sub-lime allegorical method” of alienated and fragmented mentality tra-verses territory usually associated with psychoanalysis. The specter emerges through mirror stage dynamics; the “Reasoning Power in Man” reifies separate existence through “Rational Demonstration,” and the necessary “Self-Annihilation” to overturn this state begins in “Self-Examination” designed “to wash off the Non Human.” What is equally somewhat astonishing here—beyond the discrete defini-tions offered for the specter, selfhood, self-annihilation, and self-examination—is the textual connection established between “self-annihilation” (which seems like death) and “selfhood” (which seems like life), an expression of Blake’s ironic view of existence. The “Non Human” to be “cast off” remains directly tied to the mechanical operations of mind (the vehicle which separates subject and object and engenders varied forms of dualism), which Blake here associated with “Bacon, Locke & Newton” and whose language leads to inter-pretations of his unbridled hostility to all science. Blake’s opposition to science, however, is more complicated than appearances might indicate. For example, this view should quite likely be read relative to the end of the unpublished epic, The Four Zoas (which serves as textual unconscious for both Milton and Jerusalem), when in “Night the Ninth Being The Last Judgment,” Blake creates the condition



through which “sweet Science reigns” (E 407; 10). The elimination of selfhood or the “Non Human” that occurs in “The Last Judgment” shatters the imago of the sovereign self, thereby creating the condi-tions through which the “New born Man” returns to the enriched dialogic relationship with all that is other than the human as the pri-mal state of the subject itself: “He walks upon the Eternal Mountains raising his heavenly voice/Conversing with the Animal forms of wis-dom night & day” (E 406: 138.28, 31).

Jerusalem establishes a similar dynamic operative within and with-out consciousness, with the additional recognition of “the terrors of annihilation” (E 150; 7.61) experienced by those that cling to an essential self for subjective stability, which acknowledges the problem-atic nature of a subject self constructed in “the field of the Other.” At the mid-point in the text, Blake laments the “narrowed perceptions” that accompany enslavement to “the most powerful Selfhood” and promises a jouissance when all “arise from Self” (E 198, 199: 49.21, 30, 45). Blake seeks to cultivate in consciousness the ability to reside at the nexus where imaginary and symbolic states interact (Kristeva’s semiotic) but which requires jettisoning the specter or illusion of a sovereign self. This zone of subjectivity pulses with emergent ener-gies that create a force field of enlightened consciousness: this zone of consciousness, like its cosmos, is ruled by uncertainty principles and relativity theories, defined by existential emptiness and mirror stage encounters, and is manifested in natural symmetries, cultural complementarities, and psychological affinities. In this state, the sub-ject enters that time and place (to paraphrase Blake) in “every day that Satan cannot find,” where enlightenment itself awaits the death of the self as willed act, and through this enacted state, conscious-ness orchestrates a collision of mind and matter capable of creating the epiphany of epistemology. In Hatsuko Nimii’s insightful words, “the annihilation of self means the unification of various contraries within the self, which is in consequence liberated from those con-traries. In the resulting state of fulfillment, all is affirmed without discrimination or limitation” (178), and without such limitations, the self dissolves into its interdependent environments to experience the jouissance of ecological existence.

The primary function of the specter seems to be that of cleav-ing the individual into subject/object and of bridging that abyss, an absence, with the assertion of a sovereign self, a process that merely gives an image to a psychic desire for individuality. In other words, Blake seems to have recognized the dangers inherent in Lacanian mirror stage dynamics well before Lacan put pen to paper, and



beginning in Milton Blake begins to produce an occasional passage or line in mirrored writing (that is, he inscribed the plate so printed words were reversed). In Milton, this occurs at a crucial place, the passage from “Book the First” to “Book the Second” to offer a neces-sary corrective to Blake’s earlier theory of contraries discussed in The Marriage (“Contraries are Positive/A Negation is Not a Contrary” [E 129]), since the diagnosed dis/ease of the specter and selfhood only found its cure in Milton’s passage through self-examination and self-annihilation. Mirrored writing also occurs in several places in the last epic, Jerusalem, but the first, plate forty-one, specifically continues the meta-textual and thematic interplay by providing the most pithy Blakean statement on specter, selfhood, and self-annihilation.

Blake’s most precise statement on the malady (selfhood) and its cure (self-annihilation through self-examination), as mentioned above, occurs on plate forty-one of Jerusalem in a half-plate design, where readers encounter Albion sound asleep and in serious need of awakening (illustration three). The head of Albion, Blake’s everyman (yet particular country) figure, has collapsed in slumber on a scrolled text draped across his knees. On the left side of the visual field, an impish figure (most often identified directly with Blake as the voice of the work’s four “addresses” to particular audiences) reclines at the left margin, resting on the curled leaves of the scroll with quill in hand after inscribing a meta-textual act of inspired mirrored writing:

Each Man is in his Spectre’s powerUntill the arrival of that hour.When his Humanity awake[s]And cast his Spectre into the Lake.

When we adopt the specter of the imago, we indeed become what we behold, assuming an image of totality and self-sufficiency, but Blake clearly strives to cultivate, in readers attuned to the visual field in the later illuminated works, the ability to shatter this mirror at will.

Blake reinforces this view of the shaping power of mirrored dynam-ics by unveiling, in the mirrored writing itself, his own process of textual production (inverse inscription on copper plates) at the foun-dation of the composite text. Once Albion either secures or becomes a mirror, he will encounter a seemingly straightforward lesson at the literal, symbolic, and imaginary layers of the plate’s complex semiosis, namely the process mapped throughout this essay. Once the subject self overturns its “World in which Man is by his Nature the Enemy of Man,/In pride of Selfhood” (E 185: 38.52–3), the asserted outcome



of the act of casting the specter back into the lake (mirrored mind) from which it emerges, the Blakean apocalypse, is realized for “when-ever any individual rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual” (E 562). When this process is completed in Milton, the identities of Milton (as character), Los (as the zoa of imagination and eternal principle of Poetic Genius) and Blake (the author) lose their stability and flow into one another.

Blake’s view of the last judgment sounds similar to, but strikes a diametrically opposed stance against, Western enlightenment claims for the pursuit of truth, and by the time Blake virtually closes his epic efforts (ca. 1810), the strongest theme across the canon, brought to its climax with the concept of selfhood, struggles against “Enlightenment mentality” in an effort to unveil its operations as “a persistent, psychocultural cause underlying the destructive . . . assaults on the environment” (Wei-ming 21), which approaches the Eastern view of enlightenment, where as Blake says “Every thing that lives is Holy” (a stance later echoed in Shelley’s “On Love”). Blake’s rep-resentation of mental apocalypse certainly has significance for the formative ecology of the mind/matter force field, as the previously evoked “The Last Judgment” section of The Four Zoas energetically explores:

The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worldsOne Earth one sea beneath nor Erring Globes wander but StarsOf fire rise up nightly from the Ocean & one SunEach morning like a New born Man issues with songs & JoyCalling the Plowman to his Labour & the Shepherd to his restHe walks upon the Eternal Mountains raising his heavenly voiceConversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & dayThat risen from the Sea of fire renewd walk oer the Earth. (E 406: 20–31)

This description of an interconnected subject beyond selfhood undergoes further expansion at the conclusion to Jerusalem, where “All Human Forms” experience freedom (“Jerusalem Thy Name is Liberty”), identify with materiality (healing the Cartesian fissure), shatter the projective imagination that strives to possess the world (overcoming the imago or specter), and experience enlightenment (the ability to expand and contract perception at will): “for contracting our infinite senses/We behold multitude; or expanding: we behold as one,/As One Man all the Universal Family” (E 180: 34.17–9). Here Blake approaches as close to Eastern forms of enlightenment as



any Western poet or writer. Inner revolution radically transforms the state of subjectivity that leads to an energized re-engagement with the world in all its complexities, rather than a retreat from it. In such states, opposition becomes true friendship, a bounding (rather than boundary) condition for consciousness where “Bacon & Newton & Locke [converse with] Milton & Shakespear [sic] & Chaucer” through “Visionary forms dramatic” (E 257: 98: 9, 28).

Although “some English writers, like Blake and in a different way also Wordsworth” attempt this form of “Romantic [inner] rebellion,” as Charles Taylor observes, the “idea was much further elaborated in Germany” (368–9). Both Dennis McCort and Kate Rigby amply dem-onstrate that German epistemology in the wake of Kant was ready to jettison its obsessive clinging “to the illusion of an autonomous self” (McCort 168) and thereby sought to resist “that severing of the natu-ral from the human sciences, matter from spirit, reason from imagi-nation, techne from poeisis” (Rigby 261). Indeed, as Rigby argues in another essay, the epistemic view of “interconnectedness . . . qualifies romantic science and Naturphilosophie as a form of ecology avant la letter” (29). The movement beyond opposites, in McCort’s apt phrase, was certainly more prominent in German Romantic thought than elsewhere, and even within Kant’s work, as Phillip Olson argues, a way of overcoming selfhood through self-annihilation or “negative consciousness” (37) can be located:

. . . I am conscious of myself in a twofold sense, both as spatial/tempo-ral phenomenon and as “empty” noumenon, then by becoming aware of the emptiness underlying and supporting my sensible appearance, I become conscious of myself as simultaneously bound by and free from sensible conditions. (38)

Early German Romantic philosophies sought to reintegrate mind and matter beyond dualism, with “their new understanding of nature as a dynamic, living, self-transforming whole” (Rigby [2004] 24) becoming the shared foundation for both consciousness and cosmos. When this body of thought encountered analogous views in Eastern forms and languages, their fusion ignited the “Oriental Renaissance” (explored at length in chapters 1 and 2) that inspired Friedrich Schlegel to argue that the “highest” forms of Romanticism must be sought in the East (Schwab 67–8; Batchelor 252–4). Given this encounter, the later philosophically intense engagements inaugu-rated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with Buddhism (discussed in chapters 2 and 3), which only achieved status as a world religion in



Western sociologies of knowledge across the period of Romanticism (Masuzawa 121–46), achieve the proper context.

As I have elsewhere argued, reading is among the most influential and paradigmatic mirror stage encounters experienced in the semiosis of the Symbolic Order (Lussier “Textual Mirrors” 48–50). The initial mirror stage in its Lacanian (and I suggest Blakean) form becomes a recurring structural situation by which the unsteady self maintains the illusion of its sovereignity (Green 187–90), one where participants in subjectivity relentlessly are driven to “become what they behold” (E 178, 187: 30.50 & 39.32), an anxious state also echoed in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Psychoanalytic, as well as neurological, mod-els point to the instability of an essential self, and the state of being termed “spectre” in William Blake’s poem Milton parallels quite well the view of subject formation articulated by Jacques Lacan, where the subject emerges through a “function of the imago” (Lacan [1977] 4) and is maintained by “anesthetized” desire (Lacan [1992] 324). The Freudian drives of “innate selfishness” precede the formation of the subject, whereas quite clearly for Blake, the state of selfhood emerges from what can only be termed, following Lacan, a “mirror-stage” encounter with the “vegetable glass of nature” or what Lacan terms “the intra-organic mirror”(Lacan [1977] 2, 5–6). The Lacanian sub-ject is constructed by and within “the field of the other,” and the imago shaped in the mirror-stage becomes a structuring device for the subject’s interactions with the Symbolic and Real realms of expe-rience (Fink 35–48). In this context, Blake’s evocative term/state/character “spectre” (whose etymology implicates both the eye and the gaze, as Lacan might say) assumes its full importance to the pro-cess herein mapped, since its agency bridges the visual and verbal dimensions of Blake’s expression. Like Lacan’s imago, Blake’s specter situates itself “between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt . . . of nature and culture” (Lacan 4, 7) in order to mediate all desire, yet beneath this specter, only a contingent and constantly shifting self exists.15

Phrased directly, “selfhood” emerges through mirror stage dynam-ics and is the “spectre” or imago of a solitary and self-sufficient “self”; self-consciousness initially reifies this external image yet ultimately recognizes its fantasy structure, thereby igniting self-examination as a skillful means to achieve “anti-self-consciousness,” in Geoffrey Hartman’s apt phrase, which reaches a climax in self-annihilation and which leads to Blake’s last judgment (Hartman 47–56). The dis-courses of contemporary ecocriticism have followed this same line of critical engagement with scientific paradigms associated with enlightenment epistemology. The emergence of the sovereign self, a



construct associated with “first-stage” enlightenment thinking (i.e., the Cartesian cogito or Newtonian objectivity), has been seen as the pivotal philosophical development underwriting dualistic thinking that fostered internal psychological fragmentation and established external alienation as the natural state for mind’s relationship with matter, defining these as their real relations (and thereby committing culturally to what one neuroscientist has termed “Descartes’ error” [Damasio 248]).16 As much criticism in the ecological mode has argued, the reaction of Romantic writers to first-stage enlightenment thought sought to heal both the fissure of subject-object relations at its foundation and the resulting fragmented psychic state that is its by-product. The salve offered to affect a “cure” for these twin afflic-tions within the particular strains of Romantic thought and expres-sion explored through Shelley and Blake was self-annihilation. Both poets envision a willed confrontation with the illusory nature of an independent, solitary, sovereign subject observing a separate mate-rial object, since “the self-positing ego cannot limit itself by positing non-ego opposed to itself,” which contradicts “ordinary experience” (Beiser 137).

Blake’s mode also seems compatibly interconnected to more recent descriptions of the physics of the mind itself, where the “self-reflec-tive capacity of thought to observe itself” (Zohar 179) through the meditative-textual technique of “post-critique” establishes “quantum interconnectedness of our consciousness” (Zohar 185) as the unified ground for all acts in the world. This “quantum self” as described by Danah Zohar very much resembles Blake’s awakened man, the ecological subject, and the enlightened consciousness of Buddhist practice; this contingent “minimal self” perceives “selfhood [as] an obsolete idea” (Lasch 257) through the recognition (and re/cogni-tion) of “our ongoing dialogue with our own pasts, with our expe-riences, with the environment, and with others” (Zohar 184). Of course, before making a commitment to self-annihilation, one must know or have some sense of precisely where to apply the practice, and Blake positions this quandary in the foreground of hermeneutic con-cerns for Milton. The operations of “Selfhood” and “Spectre” (con-nected psychological and neurological states)—traced by Blake for the first time in any depth in this work—thwarts the achievement of inner revolution, striving instead to reify “living in the everyday world conditioned by ignorance and confusion” (Varela [2000] 234).

Like other sacred theologies, Blake’s mythic treatment of mind and matter in the last two epics also elaborate a sacred ecology, since “worldviews and beliefs” figure prominently in its construction and



since it manifests “an ethic of nondominant, respectful human-nature relationship[s]” (Berkes 163). Not surprisingly, Blake’s process of self-annihilation as the vehicle for inner revolution just as clearly intersects Buddhist ecological thinking as well, since both recognize that “the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is purely illusory” and acknowledge that “the idea of a solid reality has dominated Western philosophical, religious, and scientific thought for over two thousand years” (Matthieu and Thuan 13). However, against Blake’s linguistic resistance to the “Satanic mills” of cultural consumption, the sover-eign self continues to dominate within and without, and as Blake’s Milton suggests, its dominion is maintained much to our individual and collective peril.


C h a p t e r

T h e Rom a n t ic Book of L i v i ng

a n d D y i ng

Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing.

(Schopenhauer)

[P]eople today are taught to deny death, and taught that it means nothing but annihilation and loss. That means that most of the world lives either in denial of death or in terror of it. Even talking about death is considered morbid, and many people believe that simply mentioning death is to risk wishing it upon ourselves.

(Soygal Rinpoche)

Blake, MILTON, Death

Blake’s view of death, as its poetic exploration in Milton suggests, was more complicated than most standard interpretations of it as simply the closing event of consciousness, and when Milton accepts his visionary mission to redeem his emanation Ololon, crying out “I go to Eternal Death” (E 108: 14.14), readers are left to ponder the implications of such a commitment for the poet of Paradise Lost, who had already been dead for over 120 years at the time Blake wrote his mini-epic. Milton could only assume his role as an “awakener” by descending into a realm of “Eternal Death” located in the “Sea of Time and Space,” and Blake’s representation of material existence as the plane of death functions across the span of his work as a poetic constant (from The Book of Thel to Jerusalem). As Jerome McGann



indicates, the type of “redemption through death and the annihila-tion of the righteous selfhood” envisioned in Milton originated, for Blake, in Christian myth, and as argued in the preceding chapter, “The Life of Jesus, along with all the economies of the Christian mystery, properly stands at the pivot of what Blake sought to accom-plish” (McGann “Blake’s Prophecies” 10) in his prophetic assem-blage. However, McGann also immediately acknowledges that this mythic structure of self-sacrifice, for Blake, has “nothing to do with religion as we commonly know it,” given Blake’s complete refashion-ing of Jesus and of Christianity itself. As might be expected from Blake’s “Ancient Poets” section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “the life of Jesus is a poetic tale, not a form of worship” (McGann 10) and should never become another ideological form of entrapment but rather an “idea” capable of leading to individual and collective liberation. Blake’s Laocoön design liberates the poetic tale from just this attachment to forms of orthodox worship and moves toward modes by which to render it a perspective by which to further inner and outer revolution. However, McGann’s analysis only impacts one aspect of Blake’s prophetic assemblage, its mythic context, and does not necessarily shed light on how a dead poet residing in eternity can commit to a descent into “Eternal Death” in materiality.

In Blake’s treatment of Jesus, the real miracle by which suffering can be alleviated in the world would be the universalizing of the prin-ciple of “dying for the other” (Derrida Gift 12), and Shelley echoes this view in his “Essay on Christianity,” where he asserts that “the morality of Jesus [was] itself miraculous” (Clark Prose 213). The gift of death accepted by Milton, then, already implies the inversion at work in Blake’s late prophecies of “giving one’s life by giving oneself death” (Derrida Gift 12). For virtually every entity in the prophetic books, “One does not undergo a single death and cease to exist” (Grimes 71); rather periodic death is more akin to sleep from which imaginative activity can awaken consciousness. The constant effort across Blake’s epic works to rouse the sleeping Albion confirms this view, with his awakening given added impetus by the inner revolution encoded as epistemic ethos in the prophetic epics: “Enwrapped round with weeds of death pale cold in sorrow & woe/He lifts the blue lamps of his Eyes & cries with heavenly voice” (E 388: 119.29–30). Although wrapped in death, Blake’s slumbering giant of the pro-phetic books reawakens to open “Night the Ninth Being The Last Judgment” in The Four Zoas, leading to the awakening of virtually every character comprising Blake’s sublime allegory, and this awak-ening of Albion conditions the resuscitation of Vala herself, the


T h e R o m a n t i c B o o k o f L i v i n g a n d D y i n g 149

titular character (in the epic’s first iteration) associated with Nature (hence, her status as the emanation of Albion), who has been liber-ated from the constraints placed on her by the specter of selfhood (“the reasoning power in man”). This discrete event shows how a shift in thinking impacts the world, thus working both narratologi-cally and epistemologically, which is the constant demand of a sub-lime allegory addressed to the intellectual properties of mind and its interaction with matter. Blake links “immortality” to a journey toward truth achieved through the dialogic exchanges of components of consciousness (the four zoas) and the drive for embodiment (their emanations). In The Gift of Death, Derrida notes that such a liber-ated mode of neo-Platonism seeking to represent immortality “takes the form of the soul’s internal dialogue,” giving rise to “individual immortality, individual because inner” (13, 14). In all Blake’s major prophecies, elements of consciousness and the characters that repre-sent them, upon awakening, experience a last judgment which, Blake argues in his “A Vision of The Last Judgment,” occurs “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual” (E 562). When his works succeed in trans-ferring this internal narrative effect to its readers, they too experi-ence “The Last Judgment [which] is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science” (E 565). Thus, an “overwhelming” last judgment is resident in every single second of every single day—as is death itself.

This overwhelming stands at the core of Milton’s embrace of the Bard, his inspiration to leave eternity and travel to materiality, his entry into Blake as author, and his redemption of emanation Ololon via the very work readers experience, with each point of confluence opening into immortality by the agency of self-annihilation. For those occupying the visionary universe of Milton, it is “through eter-nal death,” as Bracher observes relative to the Blakean logic of Milton, that “grasping and devouring ego-consciousness . . . is annihilated and one’s unique intrinsic individual being can emerge purified and tempered” (Being 79). When Milton makes a commitment to self-annihilation by descending to the realm of eternal death, his commit-ment “does not mean dying in the place of the other,” because this gift given for the salvation of others can only operate properly when individuals retain this choice, in which “resides freedom and respon-sibility” (Derrida Gift 43, 45)—the very purpose of annihilative acts in Blake’s later works: “Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually/Annihilate himself for others good” (E 139: 38.35–6). This shifts the ontological grounds of the ethos of otherness from an indi-vidual act undertaken for the salvation of all through the elimination



of sin (which Nietzsche so abhorred) to an individual act under-taken by all as the mechanism to bring the “good” into daily pres-ence through putting “off [the] Self” (E 139: 38.49) and thereby to assuage collective suffering by individual acts based in compassion.

The Blake approach to self-annihilation offers a prospective cri-tique of an argument later made by Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that “this annihilation is not phenomenal, nor does it give rise to anything like a coincidence of consciousness” (16). Given its principle of the coalescence of discrete consciousness, Blake’s Milton presents a “new vision of death and individual being” staged as the “union with otherness” (Bracher Being 79, 87) beyond the bounds of spa-tial and temporal fixity, which as I have argued are given relativistic dimension in the marriage of Los as Time and Enitharmon as Space (Dynamics 92–7).1 This principle, then, does intersect Levinas’s sense that “Time is not the limitation of being but its relationship with infinity” (19), and in Blake’s poetic analysis, life itself, imaged as “the shades of Death & Ulro” (E 108), is the actual realm of death in Blake’s work: “As inner being knows nothing of death, death exists only in the conscious mind and the world of matter” (Damon 99). As a condition of matter, death renders the study of materiality a “Tree of Death,” which Blake associates with “Science” (E 274) as the “modern philosophy” that attempts to assert a “stability of the world” founded upon “the energy of presence” (Levinas 132). It is through this projective activity that a philosophy of science “must be considered as a reflection of being,” with the specter projected out-ward as the veil draped across Vala, which stands exactly counter to Blake’s prophetic stance and his attempt to renovate this deadening agency “of identity in Knowledge” (Levinas 133).

Life under the sway of selfhood is, for Blake and his characters alike, death, and actual death simply functions as a transition from one existential state to another, which profoundly links self-annihila-tion to an awakening into enlightenment in his writing. Milton also suggests, in its coalescence of past and present writers with the eternal poetic genius, that all transformative acts of writing can only occur after one “has sufficiently cast off his own personality” (Ricouer 39), an argument antithetical to that Harold Bloom mounts for creative misprision (as Wittreich has noted),2 and John Keats makes a related point to Richard Woodhouse in 1818 in his assessment regarding “the camelion Poet” who “has no Identity” (Cox 295). In these skill-ful ways of “casting” off personality, Romantic writers like Blake and Keats begin to articulate “an authentic being-toward-death,” the philosophic view associated with Martin Heidegger, which is



not simply a “thinking about death” (Being 240–1) but is something more expansive:

On the contrary, if being-toward-death has to disclose understandingly the possibility which we have characterized as such, then in such being-toward-death this possibility must not be weakened, it must be understood as possibility, cultivated as possibility, and endured as possibility in our relation to it. (Being 241)

In these and related thoughts in Being and Time, the influence of Zen Buddhism on Heidegger’s thinking is apparent, as Takeshi Umehara argues with considerable force and insight, and like Tibetan Buddhism its Zen relative tends to be rather precisely ori-ented toward looking at “death and dying as a living, organic entity” (Mullin 216), with both traditions often stabilized by the curiously enlivening practice of death meditation: “It seems certain that the approaches to death differ in the different schools in Buddhism, but their point of departure is the same, namely, the self-awareness of death or finiteness” (Umehara 280). Keats’s thought is again related to Blake’s poetic practice, when he argues in his April 21 entry to the serial letter to George and Georgiana Keats that the denial of death is essentially unnatural, given that death (“the most interesting question that can come before us”) is “native to the world,” leading to Keats’s stunningly astute assertion of the world as a “The vale of Soul-Making . . . [as] the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal” (Cox 329–30).3

As Grimes proposes in his analysis of time and space in Blake’s epics, “Death is sheer transition” (Grimes 71), which is more than just a nar-ratological device for the poet. This becomes quite clear when Blake voices an analogous view while contemplating his own approaching death, telling Crabb Robinson: “I cannot consider death as anything but a removing from one room to another” (Damon 99). Blake’s varied visualizations of this transitional door opening onto eternity occurs with some frequency, for example, in the backgrounds to “London” or plate 10 of Milton, but is most prominently displayed as the very entry into Jerusalem, the work that follows Milton. Blake’s utter disregard of physical death can be felt in the equanimity he exhibited in the face of its real presence near the end of his life. Four months before his death, Blake’s letter to George Cumberland matter-of-factly reports that “I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever” (E 783). Death is



of the body, but immortality depends on the imagination. As his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist noted, in the days before death, Blake continued to exercise his imagination and “still went on designing as of old,” facing his passage “serenely [and] joyously” under the pallia-tive care of his beloved wife Catherine, even striking “off by hand” her portrait while on his death bed. In the immediate hours before his parting, Blake “lay chanting songs to melodies,” finally leaving the world of generation “with a calm and painless withdrawal of breath” (352–3). Gilchrist also records a response from a female neighbor who helped Kate in the final hours, who said, “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel” (353).

Other friends echoed the sense of Blake’s “happy death” (as Camus might say), with George Richmond reporting, in a letter written to Samuel Palmer, one of the young painters drawn to Blake in his old age, that his friend died “in a most glorious manner”: “Just before he died His countenance became fair—His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out singing of the things he saw in Heaven” (quoted in Wilson 301). Frederick Tatham, who seemed a corporeal friend but proved a spiritual enemy of all those interested in Blake’s work (having reput-edly destroyed a considerable cache of unpublished manuscripts), offered another report that indicated Blake’s continued embodiment of an ethos of otherness captured in the hellish proverb that “The Most Sublime act was to set another before you”:

After having answered a few questions concerning his Wifes means of living after his decease, & after having spoken of the writer of this, as a likely person to become the manager of her affairs, his spirit departed like the sighing of a gentle breeze, & he slept in company with the mighty ancestors he had formerly depicted” (Bentley 437).

Blake’s approach to actual death and his depiction of it in the illu-minated books form a seamless whole, a unity that reflects what Heidegger describes as laying claim to “it as something individual,” which for Blake, Heidegger, and Buddha alike brings freedom: “But anticipation does not evade the impossibility of bypassing death . . . but frees itself for it. Becoming free for one’s own death in anticipation frees one from one’s lostness in chance possibilities urging themselves upon us” (Being 243).

Living in the Face of Death

Not surprisingly at this stage of my study of shared affinities between Romantic and Buddhist thought, these descriptions of both Blake’s



attitudes toward death and his specific responses to the immediate presence of death itself have strong analogies with both Buddhist and Hindu practices, even being often expressed in almost the exact same words and phrases. For example, after the renowned sage Ramakrishna died (1886), he reportedly reappeared to his wife to offer comfort, “assuring her that he had not gone away but had only passed from one room to another” (Blackman 44). On the evening of his death, the influential and widely respected Lama Thubten Yeshe, who died in 1984, “was completely conscious, talking and laugh-ing with the nurses and eating strawberries” (Blackman 131–2), and when his end was approaching, the famous Tibetan meditation mas-ter Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche, who died in 1991, offered this analysis of death and life, which was rather close to Blake’s own inversion of typical categories: “When death finally comes, you will welcome it like an old friend, being aware of how dreamlike and impermanent the phenomenal world really is” (Blackman 31).

In fact, one of the most distinctive dimensions of Buddhism in its Tibetan form is its commitment to live literally in the face of death. Tibetans embraced this approach as an antidote to grasping self-attachment and establishes as one of its core cultural texts the elaborate work titled The Tibetan Book of the Death (Tbt. Bar-do thos grol) reputedly written by Padmasambhava, an Eighth century ce adept who “who was instrumental in introducing Buddhism into Tibet” (Keown 207). However, as Chögyam Trungpa (cofounder of Naropa University in Colorado) points out in his commentary to his edition, the very title cloaks the full focus of the work, “which is the fundamental principle of birth and death recurring constantly in this life” (1), and the work addresses not just what occurs in the “gap” (the translation of the term “bardo”) between death and rebirth but equally the preparation needed before the event by both the one who passes away and those attending to his/her needs. The text, then, functions parallel to the current field of “thanatology” pioneered by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Raymond Carey, and Ernest Becker (Mullin 21).

Quite often, Buddhist teachers use the act of death as the oppor-tunity to teach a final lesson, as when Zen Master Tung-shan responded to the emotional outburst of his students upon learning of his impending death by saying, “We monks are supposed to be detached from all things transitory . . . What is the use of groaning and moaning,” and he then ordered a “‘stupidity-purifying’ meal for the whole community” (Blackman 141). The model for this “gift of death” as a final opportunity to provide instruction traces its lineage



back to Mahāparanibbāna Sutta (Pāli for The Discourse on the Great Decease) that records the Buddha’s last days, and “Buddha himself had set the example of dying in the presence of one’s students and doing so voluntarily and consciously as a skillful means of inspiring the minds of those to be trained” (Mullin 110). When the Buddha was near death, he told his closest attendant and most beloved stu-dent, Ānanda, “do not weep and wail! Have I not already told you that all things that are pleasant and delightful are changeable, subject to separation and becoming other” (Walsche 265). When the moment of death arrived, Buddha requested that monks “feel [no] remorse” and uttered his famous last words: “Now, monks, I declare to you: all conditioned things are of a nature to decay—strive on untiringly” (Walsche 270). Buddha’s point was simply that individuals must work out their own spiritual salvation in relation to his example and teach-ings but not dependent on any dogmatic assertions from the awak-ened one nor any deification of him personally. The final passing becomes the best teaching moment for traditions and thinkers com-mitted to nonattachment, impermanence, and emptiness.

The attitudes toward death and dying exhibited by these masters are often said to be saint-like, as Blake’s neighbor stated of his passage into death, but each of these sages, Blake included, would quite likely argue that anyone can, and indeed everyone should, take precisely the same attitude, emptying fear from what can only be seen as the predictable completion of a life lived in time and thereby achieving freedom in the process, and the process of emptying fear (yet another form of emptiness) can only be accomplished by exemplary effort across life itself and not at the moment of death itself, with this effort marking the difference between existence and existential being.4 This type of story could be repeated in various ways for virtually all the poets of the Romantic age, although I will focus on the second gen-eration of English Romantic writers as transition to this chapter’s extended analysis of Lord Byron’s work. When John Keats was only eight years old (1804), his father died when his horse slipped on the cobblestone streets, and by the time his mother passed away (1810), death had visited the family often, decimating the family and setting the children adrift to the whims of fortune, including the denial of rightful inheritance. As Walter Jackson Bate observed, “Death could perhaps be taken more for granted by a child at that time than it is now. Still, the board was being cleared rather swiftly. The father was gone, the uncles, the grandfather, and now the mother” (21). During his mother’s final months, Keats (as the oldest son) performed what would now be described as palliative care for his mother, sitting up



with her “for nights on end, giving her medicine, even trying to cook food for her” (21), and in late-1818, when his brother Tom slowly sank into terminal illness, Keats saw to his last needs even while he was personally assailed by the blistering reviews of Endymion, aes-thetically engaged in the first Hyperion, and beginning to experi-ence his own symptoms. In a sense, Keats, through his palliative acts of compassion administered for his family members and through his own his medical training, was forced by necessity to live and pro-duce in the growing awareness of “the self-same beat of Time’s wide wings” (Cox 484).5

Perhaps the most famous event in how Keats viewed death occurred in February 1820, when “the full horror of his plight was suddenly revealed” (Coote 294) as reported by Charles Brown, when Keats found a drop of blood on his sheets after a late-evening excursion: “After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calm-ness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, —‘I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that colour;—that drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die’” (quoted in Coote 294). His calm regard of the drop and the steady acknowledgement of its implications link Keats’s response to that of Blake explored above, and although after an extended illness that worsened then improved and then worsened again (he experienced another hemorrhage in June), Keats was prompted upon the advice of his doctors to travel to Italy for health reasons, arriving in Rome (after quarantine in Naples) in November. Three months later and after protracted illness, Keats died in February 1821. In his reports of John Keats’s death in Rome, Joseph Severn’s record of his friend’s physical struggles seems rather amazingly shorn of any self-pity: “He was calm and firm at its approach . . . to a most astonishing degree,” and at the moment of his death, he sought to comfort Severn by say-ing “I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm and thank God it has come” (quoted in Bate 695, 696). A last lesson of the imper-manence was, Keats’s hoped, to be an epitaph inscribed on his name-less headstone in the Protestant Cemetery (although Severn, who designed the tombstone, violated these wishes), which he had para-phrased from Beaumont and Fletcher: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Although Keats, perhaps more than any other of the canonical Romantic poets, literally lived his life in the face of death, the cases of Mary and Percy Shelley were equally compelling.6 Mary lived her life under the burdening awareness that her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died ten days after her delivery (September 10, 1797), and Percy’s



first encounter with death occurred when his grandfather Sir Bysshe Shelley died in January 1815. Mary and Percy led complicated lives after the precocious poet came into the Godwin circle in 1812, and in July 1814, Mary and Percy eloped to France, although Percy was still married to his first wife, Harriet, who had given birth to his daughter Ianthe (June 1813) and his first son and heir, Charles (November 1814). Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied the couple to the continent, which was in the final year of its ravaging Napoleanic death throes. The same year that Sir Bysshe Shelley died (1815), the couple experienced the first intimate encounter with death when a daughter was born prematurely in February and died in March, which plunged Mary into severe depression, as her journals from the period record.7 During this same year, Shelley composed what can only be described as an extended “death meditation,” Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (which will briefly be discussed later in the chapter). The following year their beloved son William was born (January 1816), and the summer brought them to the most famous rendezvous in English Romantic literary history, when they arrived in Geneva to spend time with Lord Byron at Villa Diodati (which saw the genesis of Mary’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s The Vampyre, Shelley’s lyrics “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” and the third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). After returning to England in September, both sustained wrenching encounters with death when Fanny Imlay Godwin (Mary’s half-sister) committed suicide (in October) and Percy’s first wife Harriet drowned herself (in December). To open the next year, 1817, Claire gave birth to her daughter Allegra after an affair with Lord Byron, and the Lord Chancellor, ostensibly because of Percy’s overt atheism and his passion for revolution (evi-denced by the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, the long materialist poem Queen Mab, and his elopement with the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin), denied Percy custody of his children from Harriet (Ianthe and Charles).8 Later that year (September) Mary gave birth to their daughter Clara. Thus far in their controversial and well-known love affair, the shadow of death cast over Mary and Percy was perhaps typical for an age with high mortality rates for childbirth and for younger children, but the worst blows were to come shortly.

The year 1818 seemed to hold much promise, with Mary and Percy, accompanied by their children and Claire (with her daughter by Byron) leaving for the continent in March, ultimately reuniting with Lord Byron in northern Italy in late summer. After settling in Este (outside of Venice), Percy was posed to undertake his mas-terwork Prometheus Unbound, but on September 24, their daughter



Clara died, with Percy’s depression recorded in the sorrowful and powerful opening words of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “Many a green isle needs must be/In the deep wide sea of Misery” (110: 1–2). With their sorrow in tow, Mary and Percy departed northern Italy for Rome, Naples, and the historical sites just south along the Bay of Naples, finally settling in Rome in early March 1819, but three months later, their favorite son William (little “Willmouse”) died of malaria, in spite of Percy’s constant care, “sit-ting up in the room for three consecutive nights,” and two days later, he “was buried at once in the Protestant Cemetery” (Holmes 518), plunging them both into severe depression. Mary stopped record-ing her feelings in her journal, and they left Rome one week after the interment, with Percy writing to Thomas Peacock that they felt “hunted by calamity” and believed they “should never recover any cheerfulness again” (quoted in Holmes 518). Mary gives voice to her feelings in a June 29 letter to Marianne Hunt, lamenting that “We came to Italy thinking to do Shelley’s health good—but the Climate is not any means warm enough to be of benefit to him & yet it is that that has destroyed my two children . . . I never know one moments ease from the wretchedness and despair that possesses me—May you my dear Marianne never know what it is to lose two only & lovely children in one year—to watch their dying moments” (Bennett Letters 45). The depth of Mary’s depression prompted this notebook poem from Percy to Mary:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,And left me in this dreary world alone?Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—But thou art f led, gone down a dreary roadThat leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.For thine own sake I cannot follow theeDo thou return for mine. (quoted in Seymour 223)

Mary’s depression only lifted with the birth, in November, of their son Percy Florence. Between the death of William and the birth of Percy Florence, Shelley experienced a burst of creativity, complet-ing and transmitting The Cenci to England and responding to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester (August 16) by writing ninety-one stanzas of rhymed outrage entitled “The Mask of Anarchy,” in the estimation of even the generally censorious biographer Richard Holmes “the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English” (532).



The tragedies haunting the Shelleys seemed to recede, and they relocated to Pisa from Florence in January 1820, enjoying perhaps the longest period of relative peace and the strongest fellowship of their long Italian sojourn among the Gisbornes and the Williams fami-lies. However, in April 1821 news arrived from London announcing Keats’s death in Rome, generating Shelley’s elegy Adonais (pub-lished in Pisa in July 1821), yet with the arrival of Byron and Edward Trelawny in January 1922 the “Pisan Circle” was formed. With the declaration of independence by Greece (March 1821), and the ensu-ing extended hostilities between Greece (supported by England, France, and Russia) and Turkey, Prince Alexander Mavrocordata, another member of their circle, began preparations for his return home to join the fray, and Byron, accepting an appointment from the London committee formed to support the cause, began preparations with Trelawny to sail to Greece and lead a military campaign to liber-ate Greece from the Ottoman Empire. However, in June, Mary suf-fered a severe miscarriage, during which she lost so much blood that her physician thought she would die, and the next month learned of a charge that Percy had sired a child named Elena Adelaide Shelley (by a servant Elise Foggi or by Claire), who was registered in Naples as his by Mary and who died on June 9, 1820. The details surrounding this episode remain rather cloudy, since some biographers have pos-ited that the child was perhaps adopted or was even sired by Byron, but on August 10 Mary wrote Isabelle Hoppner (whose husband had communicated the rumor to Byron) to refute the charges and declaim their source (Bennett Letters 76–8). Only six weeks after the life-threatening miscarriage and four weeks after the soul-rendering accu-sations, Percy, as well as Edward Williams and their young shipman Charles Vivian, drowned on July 8 while returning (on his own boat “Don Juan”) to San Terenzo after having settled the Hunt family in Pisa. The run of tragedy experienced by the Shelleys had reached its crushing crescendo, and Percy was cremated in mid-August and finally laid to rest in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, the site of Keats’s grave and the resting place of his beloved son William.

If the reports that Shelley was running at full sail and resisted an offer of boarding a larger vessel or lowering his sails in the face of a swollen sea and violent summer storm are to be believed, then he faced his death with fearless fortitude,9 but more important for this meditation on actual death, this section rightly concludes with Mary’s exhibition of the quiet courage of everyday life in the face of physical and psychological suffering across the term of her then still relatively young life. Her letters during this period are filled with



both a deep-seated pain, but they also often evince this type of quiet courage, perhaps best on display in her long, touching letter to Maria Gisborne on August 15 (just a month after Percy’s death and the day after his cremation), in which she describes her anxiety in the absence of knowing his fate and concluding “all that might have been bright in my life is now despoiled—I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child & render myself worthy to join him” (Bennett Letters 102). Mary remained in Italy, living with the Hunts in Albaro (near Genoa) for another year, and had begun to transcribe Percy’s unpub-lished poetic drafts for future publication (including his final work “The Triumph of Life”), which was published as Posthumous Poems in June 1824 (eleven months after her return to England) but that was subsequently suppressed by Sir Timothy Shelley. She lived for another twenty-seven years, writing novels, biographies of European authors, and travel works, and she continued her attachment to Shelley’s work and battled his father to assure his literary legacy. She also began to weaken after 1839, suffering from a variety of maladies and symptoms thought by her physician to be a brain tumor, and at the age of fifty-three she died in February 1851, having most certainly in her creative work and her intercessions for his post-death legacy rendered herself “worthy to join him.”

Poetry as Death Meditation

The abbreviated discussion regarding both the attitudes and actuali-ties of death faced by Blake, Keats, and the Shelleys serve to point to a dimension of Romantic writing and behavior often disregarded in current critical analysis, although Julie Carlson’s most recent work offers a corrective to this disregard (162–4, 184–90, 220–7), and it is tempting to interpret this in light of the epigram offered by Soygal Rinpoche drawn from his influential The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which has become an important work for those dedicated to hospice care. Rinpoche’s point “that most of the world lives either in denial of death or in terror of it” is a rather common insight for those engaged in hospice work, and I have personally experienced the attitude, among family, friends and students, that “Even talking about death is considered morbid.” Thanatology as elaborated by one of its founders, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, was conceived to counter ten-dencies “in a society bent on ignoring or avoiding death” (On Death 25) and to reestablish a more historically robust and cross-cultural view that “Death is not an enemy to be conquered or a prison to be escaped. It is an integral part of our lives that gives meaning to human



experience” (Kübler-Ross Death x). Indeed, in my own palliative care training and hospice certification several sections of the work were offered as exemplars for individual practices while sitting with the dying. The most important dimension of this training has never been a particular theological orientation toward death (which quite often compromises the aim of hospice practices), but the necessity of a will-ingness to live in the face of death, which as suggested above must be cultivated continually by practitioners dedicated to such service. In general, two methods can serve to aid this cultivation: living literally with the presence of death (something clearly at work in the lives of both Keats and the Shelleys and in the performance of hospice duties), and contemplating the omnipresence of death (something that both literary representation and analytic meditation accomplish). For the remainder of the chapter, I will shift from the first to the second of these methods, since the contemplation of death defines a signifi-cant dimension of what Romantic literature offers to its students and scholars alike. Romanticism, I argue, has actually encoded in some of its finest works precisely this attitude that death functions as a “final stage of growth” (Kübler-Ross Death x), and while the chief emphasis will be on Lord Byron’s work, I will inaugurate my approach to his relentless gaze on death through a brief consideration of works by John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

As mentioned previously, Buddhism often cultivates this type of awareness through death meditation, a difficulty practice by which to achieve deepened awareness of the impermanence of all conditioned things (although other vehicles can equally serve to achieve such insight).10 As well, a number of objects are used as aids to reflection, and one such physical object, the crown of a human skull, is often preferred. English literature has also focused on the skull as a vehicle to confront the transient nature of human existence, with the gravediggers scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet perhaps the most well-known example. However, in one of his most rarely taught and discussed poems, “Stanzas on Some Skulls in Beauley Abbey, Inverness” (which was “a collaborative piece by Keats and [Charles] Brown” [Cox Keats’s Poetry 268]), Keats undertakes something akin to the impetus at the root of such death mediations, which are used to establish the commonality of death for all humanity as a lesson in impermanence.11 In this sense, the skulls, although “tongueless things” are capable of speaking “by proxy” (Keats’s Poetry 269: 11–2), demonstrating the “vanity of human wishes” and testifying in their physical residual the craving for salvation represented by “craze/’Mid bead and spangle”



(270: 44–5). In another “lily-colour’d skull, with all/The teeth complete, so white and small,” Keats projects a youth who “died ere superstition’s gall/His heart invaded” (270: 55–6, 59–60). While the stanzas are drolly represented as an exercise in craniology (269: 17), which was believed capable of mounting insightful interpretations of personality based purely on reading the actual “bumps of the skull” (Cox 269), the physical fact of the objects of contemplation establishes a common fate in spite of the diversity of personalities asserted in the exercise itself. Thus, while the opening stanza suggests that “no tears/Deep thought, or awful vision” (268: 1–2) were prompted by this meditation among the skulls of the abbey, the closing stanza brings home the point of impermanence in rather straightforward fashion:

Enough! Why need I farther pore?This corner holds at least a score,And yonder twice as many moreOf reverend brothers;’Tis the same story o’er and o’er,—They’re like the others! (Cox Keats’s Poetry 271: 91–6)

Indeed, why contemplate the individual skulls in particular, since in their ability “To speak by proxy” the skulls tell “the same story” over and over, and for all their differences of minute physical features each skull is “like the others” in its mute testimony to the common story for all that live.

A large number of Keats’s poems grapple with the reality of death in various forms, whether a sonnet on pillaged artifacts from Greece written when “Mortality/Weighs heavily” (73: 1–2) on the poet, a romance adaptation from Boccaccio that concludes with a head implanted in a “Basil-pot” (444: 473), an ode recording that the poet had “been half in love with easeful Death” (459: 52), or an aban-doned epic on the fall of the Titans (“there shall be death” [507: I. 424]). All the works evoked here can in no way be reduced to an obsessive concern for the agency of death, since the work of Keats is marvelously multivectored, but the thematization of death does trace in Keats’s poetry an exemplary mode of thanatology, which is not morbid or omnipresence but determined in its attitude to incorporate death as a vehicle of greater knowledge and personal growth through which humanity moves from mere existence to existential comprehen-sion. Keats’s thematic confrontations with faces of death match the historical conditions, in McGann’s estimation, faced by the collapse



of certain aspects of Romanticism’s self-constructed cultural myth of perpetual renewal:

[Keats] wants nothing more than the joys of beauty and the realms of gold. What he keeps discovering, however, are pale kings and beauti-ful, merciless ladies: death that is deathless, true, but terrible for that reason—death that is hardly endurable, and ranged with a beauty that must die not in a benevolent order of nature but in the gorgeous pal-aces of art, as Lamia shows (Byron and Romanticism 248).

The discovery of deathless death marks precisely the initial illumina-tion for most death meditations, and the enlightenment that follows tends to generate an exuberance seemingly at odds with objects of contemplation, which I tend to associate, along with a wide range of critics, with a poem like “To Autumn,” where the very fullness of its self-emptying mode of expression positions it at a point “where, with no pain, existence and nothingness coincide” (Fry 471). Out of critical context, this phrase by Paul H. Fry could equally be a descrip-tion of the mutual coincidence of samsara and nirvāna in Buddhist thought.12

Percy Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude achieves a simi-lar insight in its relentless meditation of death as concluding event to a human’s horizontal passage across the surface of the earth to contemplate both cultural and physical processes and vertical passage from the psychological dimension of dream to existential expiration in pursuit of its embodiment. This view of the poem intersects but finally diverges from related readings rendered by Evan K. Gibson among others: “If death is the only possible area of union with the vision, and if, as we hope to show, Shelley intends to conduct the poet into the realms of death, how else but by allegory may the material be presented” (560). Gibson makes the “union” the core of his argu-ment, which in his reading of Shelley can only be accomplished in the “realms of death,” whereas my exploration places death itself as the object of concern whose contemplation brings an awareness of “emp-tiness” (Ferber “Alastor” 656) later transmuted into the fullness of enlightenment, where emptiness points to the integration of enlight-enment, an experience oddly appearing as a feature of the frame nar-rator’s tale but missed by the frame narrator himself. Shelley’s preface to Alastor suggests that it seeks to imagine through allegory “one of the most interesting situations of the human mind,” and as Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat suggest, Earl Wasserman’s reading of the work as an exploration of “the interrelations between the universal



human need for love and social ties and the idealist’s solitary search for ultimate truths and ideal love” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 72) aptly captures this dimension of the work. However, for the purpose of this analysis, my reading concentrates of the unnamed poet’s passage “to an untimely grave” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 72), which with uncanny accuracy parallels a type of death meditation common to Buddhist practices, where “living, dreaming, [and] dying” are viewed as comprising “the totality of [human] experience” (Nairn xv). These aspects of human experience form the broad sequential structure of Shelley’s allegorical exploration, with the frame narrative offering an opening and closing gloss that asserts, in limited ways, the dangers of self-attachment when asserted against the impermanence that defines human existence. The transformation of grasping into enlightenment through Shelley envisioned “marana-sati (death awareness practice)” can be read in the degree of “stability and peace” (Rosenberg 32) achieved by the unnamed Poet, when he finally succumbs to death.

Generally, like most meditations, the initial focus of death medita-tion begins with one’s most intimate relations, usually the mother, and Shelley’s frame narrator twice evokes “our great Mother . . . of this unfathomable world” (74: 2, 18) to open the poem, with the place of contemplation occurring “In charnels and on coffins, where black death/Keeps record” (74: 24–5). The narrator’s perspective can be felt immediately through the voice of lamentation with which the tale begins: “There was a Poet whose untimely tomb/No human hands with pious reverence reared” (75: 50–1). Against this pietistic view, where graven tombs record the passage of individuals into eternity, the actual conclusion to the narrative about the poet betrays the desire of the narrator, rather than the effort undertaken by his subject:

Even as a vapour fed with golden beamsThat ministered on sunlight, ere the westEclipse it, was now that wondrous frame—No sense, no motion, no divinity—A fragile lute, on whose harmonious stringsThe breath of heaven did wander—a bright streamOnce feed with many-voiced waves—a dreamOf youth, which night and time have quenched for every,Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. (89: 663–71)

The larger poem asserts a state of nothingness, a no-self state cap-tured in the internal repetition of “No” in line 666 that excludes “divinity,” which for both the atheistic Shelley and the nontheistic



Buddhist traditions can only be read as a continuing attachment, on the part of the narrator and not his subject, for a continuity that the poetic activities of the unnamed poet does not itself support. Shelley creates a dialectical tension between the interpretation as narration offered of the Poet’s efforts and the outcome of those efforts within the tale itself, with the frame evincing a blindness only transmuted into wisdom by the imaginative effort to negate the narrator’s projec-tion, reading through his words to the tale present but nonetheless placed under erasure.

The very subtitle of the work (spirit of solitude) points to another element connecting Shelley’s exploration of fading consciousness in the poem, after the Poet awakens from his dream of the “veiled maiden” (77: 151), and Eastern analytic meditative modes focused on death. The experience of “solitude,” a typical initial outcome for death meditations, seemingly lamented within the poem captures quite well the collective existential state Buddhist traditions propose for the situation of individual consciousness: “Life is a walk down a wide road leading to death” (The Seventh Dalai Lama, quoted in Mullin 55). By envisioning the movement of the Poet from “the fountains of divine philosophy” through “Nature’s most secret steps” to “The awful ruins of the days of old” (75–6: 71, 81, 108), Shelley traverses the terrain of self’s entanglement with time, and after his contemplation of the vestiges of nature and culture, the Poet’s achieves a “vacant mind” (77: 126) that seems to be the pre-requisite for his comprehension of “The thrilling secrets of the birth of time” (77: 128).13 The horizontal exploration of the Poet brings him to the limit of temporality as such, since his analysis of nature and culture has brought awareness that “Temporality [only] temporalizes world time, in whose horizon ‘history’ can ‘appear’ as an occurrence within time,” and this opens the poetic space for the succeeding vertical exploration of “Spirit [which] does not fall into time” (Heidegger Being 396). The trajectory in the work, following its brief interlude with the “Arab maiden” (77: 129), shifts to this vertical vector even as the poem continues its horizontal sojourn to the East (Makdisi Imperialism 137–43), with a “vale in Cashmire” (77: 145) becoming the site for his dream fantasy of “the lover” and his “self-centred” attempt to find in actuality “a prototype of his conception” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 73).

Once awakened from his dream, which as most critics have noted operates in relationship to the myth of Narcissus, externality has, in essence, died, and within eighteen lines, this visionary becomes reoriented toward “the dark gate of death” (79: 211). The pursuit



that ensues, occasionally told from positions outside the Poet’s perspective by “cottagers” and a “mountaineer” (80: 254–71), moves deep into the Indian Caucasus, a drift toward the loca-tion for Prometheus’s enchainment and the place of Asia’s exile in Prometheus Unbound (see chapter 4). The Poet boards a “little shal-lop” (81: 299) to continue his journey toward absolute knowledge, which was one of his favorite images (ref lecting both his love of sailing and his sense of an apt image for passage across “the waters of wide Agony” in “Euganean Hills” [112: 67]), he unknowingly adopts another crucial image for the dharma, as described by Śāntideva: “Regard your body as a vessel/A simple boat for going here and there” (72). The unnamed Poet’s destination has also come clearly into focus, since the drift of the shallop and the poem moves directly into an embarkation to “meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste” (81: 305).

The movement toward death that occurs from this point to the end of the poem replicates another aspect of a death meditation, which often involves the visualization of one’s own physical dissolu-tion, and the medium of poetry, especially as deployed in Alastor, strikes the appropriate balance teachers suggest for the practice: “the point [of the practice of contemplating death] is not to replace the denial of death with an obsession with death but to chart a straight-forward middle course” (Lief 71). Shelley visualizes the slow erosion of the physical attributes of the body: “his withered hair” hangs lank; his “flushed cheeks” emanate a sickly glow, and his body becomes a “shadowy frame” (84: 413–6). The most complete visualization of the body’s approach to death occurs in the scene that replicates that of Narcissus, although the difference is not one of immediate attach-ment to the self but a realistic portrayal of the body’s passage beyond the poem’s opening description:

Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheldTheir own wan light through the reflected linesOf his thin hair, distinct in the dark depthOf that still fountain; as the human heart,Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,Sees its own treacherous likeness there. (85: 469–74)

The grimness of this scene gives way to a meditation on the symbolic nature of the landscape, with the “rivulet” onto which his boat passes becoming, in the last words spoken by the Poet within the narra-tive (i.e. the third moment depicted graphically inside of quotation



marks), an image with two faces—life as a river, and consciousness as a stream—familiar to both Hindu and Buddhist traditions:

O streamWhose source is inaccessibly profound,Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness,Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs,Thy searchless fountain, and invisible courseHave each their type in me[.] (85–6: 502–8)

The apparent tragedy of the Poet’s situation can be read in his inabil-ity, initially, to enter the stream without the superimposition of his internality upon it.

The natural interlude that follows his declaration ranges across many of Shelley’s most-cherished images of nature, with his out-ward journey into materiality moving into coincidence with the slow exhaustion of his strength, with the ravages of the body becoming a register of the poem’s temporality: his skin wrinkles; his hair turns white, and his eyes lose their radiance. As the end of the poem and the Poet’s life grows near, death becomes its grand theme, with soaring sections connecting the external “storm of death” to his understand-ing “that death/Was on him” (88: 609, 626–7). In the penultimate description of the state of poetic consciousness, Shelley’s language approaches the most sublime descriptions of any sūtra:

—and thus he lay,Surrendering to their final impulsesThe hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,The torturers, slept, no mortal pain or fearMarred his repose, the influxes of sense,And his own being unalloyed by pain,Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fedThe stream of thought, till he lay breathing thereAt peace, and faintly smiling[.] (88–9: 637–45)

The visionary’s acceptance of death, unlike any other element of his quest, has allowed him to conquer the “torturers” of expectation, has eradicated both “pain [and] fear” and brought calm to “the stream of thought.” Shelley’s description strikes amazing accord with a wide range of dharma works and the literature of thanatology. The Poet, through the cultivation of “mindfulness and self-observation” (Mullin 65) in the later stages of his journey, has found the middle path between



his earlier obsessions with external knowledge (nature and culture) and external attributes sought in the world (the veiled maiden), with the “calm” providing the opportunity “for the arising of wisdom” (Ponlop 125, 241). He has accepted the pain and disappointment created by attachment to “the entire world of the senses” (R. Smith 163), which has allowed him to discover “what lies beyond sorrow” (Rinpoche Glimpse June 19). With both hope and despair extinguished, with grasping at an end, the Poet’s existential state has become “as sim-ple and efficient as possible” (Samten 51) and dissolves into a close approximation of “the non-dualistic state, the space of Dharmakaya” (Lodö 53).14 While the majority of the narrated life reflects the Poet’s tendency to live at the extremes of external and internal reality, the moment of approaching death brings a reconception of those efforts as “one long line of growth experiences” (Imara 147). The “faint smile” of the Poet, then, suggests that the end of the narrative proffers an awakening into enlightenment, which the narrator actually misses.

Byronic Scenes of Death

Anyone who reads Lord Byron’s work cannot overlook the relentless gaze of death staring directly into the eyes of his readers, whether poetic or dramatic, and I adopted this chapter’s epigram by Soygal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying specifically with Byron in mind for three reasons. First, Rinpoche’s sense of lives lived in the denial of death continues to haunt Western thought, a state confirmed for me in my own hospice work and in spite of an increas-ingly well-developed industry surrounding issues of death and dying (referenced above as thanatology). Second, Rinpoche’s analysis often connects the denial of death in modern culture to a perceived terror of death, pointing directly to a Western tendency to cede too much power to a natural process inaugurated with birth and brought to fru-ition with death itself. Third, both of these stances receive extended attention and stern critique within a wide range of Lord Byron’s best-known poetry, although critical discussions of it has tended to inter-pret it as the poet’s fatalism spawned from mutated forms of Calvinism and his later contact with Catholicism. Given his poetic commitment to gaze steadily, even relentlessly, into the eye/I of death and its impli-cations, the relative paucity of critical analysis given this strong strain has continued to perplex me and has motivated this closing gesture to revalue the function of death in the Byron’s poetry and in his life.

As Emmanuel Levinas suggests, time and death are bound up with “the search for the significance of the being of beings” (46),



a point that supports Schopenhauer’s assertion, offered as the other epigram for this chapter, that “without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing.” Byron’s best critics have rightly focused on the primal status accorded the varied representations of a singular archetype, the “‘Pilgrim of Eternity,’ the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind” (Evans 347) who populates a significant number of the early work and the closest dramas. Through this spatialization of temporality (Lussier Dynamics 109), the varied pilgrims of eter-nity respond to the hovering presence of death by living at the edge of its possibility. Thus, for Byron and his personae (generally bound up together as McGann has argued [Byron 141–59]), “death is not, then, the ending of a duration made up of days and nights but an ever open possibility” (Levinas 47). Further, Byron’s characters seem not to fear death, the denial often prominently on display in Eastern and Western philosophical discussions of death and dying alike, but rather pursue “a taking charge: a taking charge within Dasein” (Levinas 46) as the antidote to fear and as the assertion of freedom as experienced individuality, for as Derrida suggests, “Everyone must assume their own death” (Gift 45). Byron’s personae recognize death as an inevi-tability whose possibility resides in every moment of existence and re/cognize this uncertainty into a philosophy of engagement with the world and the self. His best characters emanate, then, a resoluteness akin to what Levinas describes as “taking charge”: “Resoluteness is an active decision to embrace one’s finitude and, through that embrace, to take over the repeatable possibilities of existence” (Harrison 96). Thus, many of Byron’s strongest characters embodied the Keatsian principle of “negative capability” in their commitment to “being in uncertainties . . . without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Cox 109).

Across the canon, Byron’s works commit to a somewhat relentless and remorseless examination of death, with his work often encoding and representing the positive, even salvific, benefits of a life spent “living in the face of death” (Mullin 19–44) under the varied masks of Byronic satire, a dimension present but somewhat unexplored in McGann’s analysis of mask and masquerade in Byron’s work (Byron and Romanticism 141–59). This prominent strain of Byronic concern, often placed under critical erasure as scholars’ construct “an other” Byron, might best be evoked through two short examples at either end of the poet’s career to provide a sense of imagistic and thematic parameters and to thereby stabilize an examination of poetic conti-nuity in between them. On the morning of his thirty-sixth birthday while in residence at Missolonghi (in Greece), Byron thought he was



penning his last poem (“On This Day I Complete my Thirty-sixth Year”), and its opening stanzas expresses a fear that he can no longer feel or inspire love, a symbolic pattern peaking in the fourth stanza, where the poet acknowledges that he cannot “[share the] power of love” (112: 3). As Harold Bloom notes (279–81), these opening lines became Byron’s epitaph (“Tis time this heart should be unmoved”), which establishes a rather sentimental tone for such a social signifier and one, I argue here, at odds with the very poem from which it was drawn. Bloom’s analysis swerves from the poem’s closing acceptance of the death as the fitting culmination of life lived in the face of death, where the literal “land” upon which the poet stands, Missolonghi, prophetically becomes “the land of honourable death,” which the poetic “I” evokes as “here” (both a time arrived and a space attained, that is a spatial-temporal confluence):

If thou regrett’st thy youth, why live?The land of honourable deathIs here:—up to the field, and giveAway thy breath!Seek out—less often sought than found—A soldier’s grave, for thee the best;Then look around, and choose thy ground,And take thy rest.

In the poetic analysis of his chosen ground, Byron gives voice to a life lived without regret (something Rinpoche comments upon for those overcoming any terror of death itself) and expresses through his unsentimental perspective “a gentle but unshakable composure” (Rinpoche Living 36).

Arriving in a “soldier’s grave,” as Byron notes with typically droll satirical and political acumen, is rarely a matter of choice, a position his meditation on the dead bodies of both British and French soldiers at Waterloo, in Childe Harold, makes abundantly clear: “The earth is covered think with other clay/Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent/Rider and horse,—friend,—foe,—in one red burial blent” (McConnell 56: XXVIII). This leveling effect of death is prominently displayed in Byron’s early meditation on death in “Darkness,” a rel-atively early work which pursued the question of death in a more aesthetic and abstract way but which nonetheless could function as a textbook example of what Buddhism describes as a death medi-tation, where one mentally extinguishes all things, beginning with what one loves and cherishes most, as a way to create awareness that



impermanence is the condition of all existence. The purpose of such meditative practices is to stabilize the mind through equipoise, and for those not familiar with it, its excessive visualization of the eradi-cation of all things seems morbid. Of course, the poem “Darkness” partakes in his culture’s fascination of ‘last man’ narratives, the same impulse from which Mary Shelley’s Last Man emerges:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.The bright sun was extinguished, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space,Rayless, and pathless, and the icy EarthSwung blind and blackening in the moonless air. (McConnell 20: 1–5)

Although Byron provides a slight poetic “out” in his marginal frame structure of “a dream, which was not all a dream,” the poem opens with the very collapse of the cosmos, an entropic event evoked by the death of the stars, the sun, the moon, and the earth.

Following this description of cosmological catastrophe, he turns to the interiority of “men [in] their desolation,” a state resulting from this initial cosmic collapse and the subsequent systematic consump-tion of the earth’s waning resources and the wars fought over them. Following the carnage of conflict, all difference is eradicated into a collective “thought”: “All earth was but one thought—and that was Death,/Immediate and inglorious” (McConnell 21: 42–3). The reign of death is craven but not graven, since “Men/Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh” (21: 44–5). Men turned to cannibalism, and dogs devoured “their masters, all save one”:

And he was faithful to a corse, and keptThe birds and beasts and famished men at bay,Till hunger clung them, or the dropping deadLured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,But with a piteous and perpeptual moan,And a quick desolate cry, licking the handWhich answered not with caress—he died. (21: 48–54)

In a typically ironic gesture for Byron, the sole selfless act during the conflagration was performed by a dog that protected his master’s body until succumbing to death, and through this episode Byron’s poetic thought intersects those currently engaged in probing, in Cary Wolfe’s phrase, “the question of the animal,” which is equally an interrogation of what it means to be human.15 As the poem closes,



“all living things” (i.e., “birds and beasts,” “dogs” and “humans”) have vanished, and an entropic “heat death” enshrouds the planet:

. . . The World was void,The populous and the powerful was a lump,Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

Byron pushes further still, imagining the death of the “waves” and “tides’ that expire “in their grave,” a planetary collapse akin to that envisioned in environmental studies of global warming, and this type of death, unlike the one imagined in his last poem, provides not the cultural comfort of continued signification: “Darkness had no need/Of aid from them [all elemental media]—She was the Universe” (E 22: 81–2).

Between the early poem “Darkness,” which visualizes the sys-tematic expiration of all living things, and the resolute acceptance of death in “On This Day I Complete my Thirty-sixth Year,” Byron poetically stages death in a variety of ways. One important dimen-sion of Byronic heroism, I suggest, is the degree to which these personae operate in a constant awareness of death as a vehicle to live life fully, with his poetic view enabling both characters and readers alike “to retain an authentic attitude towards our mortality without succumbing to an enervating anxiety” (Scarre 67). Byron sounds these depths repeatedly in his best-known work, as when he envisions in prophetic language his own death: “and should I lay/My ashes in a soil which is not mine,/My spirit shall resume it—if we may/Unbodied choose a sanctuary” (78: IV.ix). When the final canto of Childe Harold has reached its term, the disappear-ance of the pilgrim is envisioned as a death: “He is no more—these breathings are his last—/His wandering done—his visions ebbing fast,/And he himself as nothing” (79: clxiv). The double-layered language shatters the mask within Byron’s earlier work, unveiling in the process “the self-limits of imagination” and marking a shift in “his poetry beyond the device of masks and into the dangerous scenarios of masquerade” (McGann Byron 153). This same slippage can be discerned in “The Giaour” as well, which opens with a med-itation on monuments commemorating the heroic dead but ends with the Giaour’s passage beyond “a token or a trace” (114: 1330). The hero of Byron’s best-known Oriental tale eschews “the half-life of the statue or memorial, status as statutory” (Harrison 20) and only finds life in his “broken tale” (114: 1333).



The existential acceptance of death as the boundary condition of life at the core of Byron’s work, which often represents a character “Facing death in a spirit of calm acceptance” (Scarre 66), remains a steady state, and the last scene of Manfred captures this acceptance quite well. When faced with his death, Manfred, like the Giaour, resists the easy comfort of the theological, even seeking to put his confessor, the Abbot, beyond harm:

Man. Thou know’st me not;My days are numbered, and my deeds recorded:Retire, or ‘twill be dangerous—Away!Abbot. Thou does not mean to menance me?Man. Not I!I simply tell thee peril is at hand,And would preserve thee. (156: II.iv.54–59)

When the “peril” does arrive in the form “a dusk and awful figure” come to take possession of Manfred’s soul, the language is purely exis-tential in his best-known exemplar of the Byronic hero’s commitment to “die as I have lived—alone” (157: III. iv. 90). Manfred’s closing expressions of defiance are among the most powerful and memorable argument for the possibility of individual agency in the face of death that Romantic writing offers:

Man. My life is in its last hour,—that I knowNor would redeem a moment of that hour;I do not combat against Death, but thee[.]

Having successfully defied this spirit and denied that supernatural agent’s agency, Manfred approaches his death by making a remark-ably human gesture, simply asking the Abbot to “Give me thy hand” before uttering his final words: “Old Man! ‘tis not so difficult to die” (159: III. iv. 148, 151). The implication, of course, is that it is difficult to live. As Northrop Frye suggests, “The key to this final scene is the presence of the Abbot. Manfred and the Abbot differ on all points of theory, but the Abbot is no coward and Manfred is no villain: they face the crisis together, linked in a common bond of humanity which enables Manfred to die and to triumph at the same time” (Frye 59).

While the characterization of death ripples across Byron’s best-known work, he was well-acquainted with the actual complexities of living and the reality of death itself. Of course, Byron would rarely be



confused with the figure of the bodhisattva that has often emerged in Romantic Dharma. He, in fact, is quite often critically associated with the antithesis of the bodhisattva, the very type of self-involved formation described in the term “selfhood” (in Chapters 4 and 5), yet in the poet’s final years his letters from Italy to England that discuss or report the deaths of those he loved suggest rather that Byron had arrived at what Heidegger later termed an “authentic being-toward-death,” which gains its authenticity by “being toward this possibility without f leeing it or covering it over” (Being 240). Byron understood this quite well from the death of his daughter Allegra, and when he contacted John Murray to receive her body and “erect a tablet to her memory,” he initially selected a site in a churchyard where he withdrew from the world: “there is a spot in the Churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking toward Windsor, and a tomb on the brow under a large tree . . . where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy; this was my favourite spot” (Quennell 695).

Byron certainly had come to understand that monuments are for the living and not the dead, and he quite likely knew as well that in Greek, the terms for the grave and the sign were derived from the same root, as Robert Pogue Harrison has noted:

A grave marks the mortality of its creators even more distinctly that it marks the resting place of the dead. It is not for nothing that the Greek word for “sign,” sema, is also the word for “grave.”. . . It was a sign that signified the source of signification itself . . . For the sema points to something present only in and through its sign. Prior to gaining an outward reference, its “here” refers to the place of a disappearance. It is that disappearance—death as such—that opens the horizon of refer-ence in the first place. (20)

His letters about Allegra’s death reflect both his understanding of the penetrative nature of the event of death and his resolution to continue in spite of its shock, writing to John Murray (April 22, 1822) that “it was a heavy blow for many reasons, but must be borne,—with time” (Quennell 691). The following day Byron writes to Percy Shelley and strikes a similar tone: “The blow was stunning and unexpected . . . But I have borne up against it as I best can, and so far successfully, that I can go about the usual business of life . . . I suppose that Time will do his usual work—Death has done his” (Quennell 691–2). Death con-tinued its labor during this last period of his Italian residence, since less than three months later (August 8, 1822) Byron wrote to his



friend Thomas Moore reporting the death of Percy Shelley: “There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken” (Quennell 704). Less than three weeks later, he sends a following letter describing Shelley’s cremation on the beach at Viareggio: “We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams on the seashore, to render them fit for removal and regular interment. You can have no idea what an extraordinary effect such a funeralpile has, on a desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame. All of Shelley was consumed, except his heart, which would not take the flame, and is now pre-served in spirits of wine” (Quennell 706).

In his own death, Byron became precisely a sign of the times, the spirit of the age, and he would quite likely have enjoyed the coun-terpassage from infamy to fame that his death underwrote, since it reversed the trajectory that had propelled him out of his own country to die in a foreign land fighting for the liberation of Greece. Death punctuated an interior narrative, penetrated the body, and prompted the production of signs in those who remained behind, but as opposed to Byron’s imagined grave in his penultimate poem, the actual inter-ment of his body reflects a broader cultural judgment at odds with itself. Byron’s grave at Hucknall Torkard Church near the ancestral home Newstead Abbey certainly points well beyond itself, since the best-known poet of the age was deemed too controversial a figure to be interred in the hallowed ground of Westminster Abbey among his fellow poets, although cultural authorities had invested in him the means and mechanisms to bring liberty to the Greek people. Death and the grave signify through the one below the ground the very boundary condition for life for those above it, yet this assumes that there will be those that actually survive to erect such an anthropocen-tric (hence anthropological) relic as a “lapidary representative” (281), to borrow words from Michel Serres.

Byron, like Keats and the Shelleys, had come acutely to the aware-ness that “Prior to the experience of physical death, our life is filled with many little deaths, disruptions, and losses both large and small,” and Byron’s life and art continually “acknowledge[d] those gaps in our experience” (Lief 163) and thereby found ways to bridge them. In this approach to life and art, Byron achieves what the Western philos-ophers of thanatology term “the ordinariness of death” (Lief 165), for his work articulates the potential vitality that comes with confronting and deconstructing the tyranny of temporality by articulating in art and expressing in life the understanding that “death is encountered



as a familiar event occurring in the world” (Heidegger Being 234). In this approach to life and art, Bryon also achieves a mode of conscious-ness associated with freedom itself, since “life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else” (Rinpoche 46). As Harrison argues, in The Dominion of the Dead:

Works of literature, then, are more than enduring tablets where an author’s words survive his or her demise. They are the gifts of human worlds, cosmic in nature, that hold their place in time so that the living and the unborn may inhabit them at will, make themselves at home in their authentic humanity—all thanks to the ultimate gift of the earth, which renders their testaments possible (15).

Literature, rather than graven headstones or other memorials, best encodes the mind itself, rendering its endurance as a gift of death capable of transferring its resoluteness, its authentic being-toward-death, its expression of affirmation to all those open to its possibilities and uncertainties. Byron offers such a gift in abundance.


A f t e r w o r d

Be yon d Com pu l sion: Towa r d

a P e dag ogy of Com pa ssion

There is a Tibetan saying that just as every valley has its own language so every teacher has his own doctrine. This is an exaggeration on both counts, but it does indicate the diversity to be found within Buddhism and the important role of a teacher in mediating a received tradition and adapting it to the needs, the personal transformation, of a pupil.

(Paul Williams)

Engaged Romanticism/Engaged Buddhism

One of the primary lessons I have taken away from both my study of Romanticism and my practice of Buddhism is the commitment in both paths of knowing to engagement, a commitment to transfer the insights gained from reading and intellection, and from empower-ments and meditation into the world. My closing focus on Byron in chapter 6 gestures to this sense of engagement, since he was willing to aid the cause of liberty in Greece in spite of the daunting conditions such an endeavor represented and in the face of his potential death in the process of embodying his commitment to liberation (as “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” acknowledges). Byron addressed his motive for intervention in a September 1823 letter to Augusta Leigh: “You ask why I came up amongst the Greeks? It was stated to me that my doing so might tend to their advantage in some measure in their present struggle for independence, both as an indi-vidual and as a member for the Committee now in England. How

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far this may be realized I cannot pretend to anticipate, but I am will-ing to do what I can” (McConnell 336).1 Of course, other examples are numerous in the Romantic period, as when William Wordsworth intervened in an attempt to preserve the Lake District from a pro-posed Kendal and Windermere Railway, which generated his famous 1844 sonnet and prompted the composition of two letters published in the Morning Post (Bate Romantic 50).2 Another example more clearly derived from prior chapters would be Percy Shelley’s attempts to secure equitable forms of legal, political and social justice, a posi-tion best represented by his “Address to the Irish People” and his articulation of a commitment as “the determined friend of religious and political freedom” (Clark Prose 59) to the alleviation of suffer-ing for an entire country. Shelley sought to move beyond the mere publication of his ideas and shortly after his first marriage traveled to Dublin in February 1812, addressing a large and primarily recep-tive audience at the Fishamble Street Theatre on February 28. In his postscript to the address, of which 1,500 copies were distributed, he pushed further to ameliorate the state of Irish suffering by proposing “an association for the purposes of restoring Ireland to the prosperity which she possessed before the Union Act, and the religious freedom which the involuntariness of faith ought to have taught all monopo-lists of Heaven long, long ago, that every one had a right to pos-sess” (Clark Prose 59). At times, the intervention was of smaller scale and more intimate importance, as when William Blake expelled an drunken soldier, John Scolfield, from his garden in Felpham and pro-pelled him into the town, an act leading Scolfield to allege that Blake and his wife Catherine uttered “seditious words” (E 734), which led to the trial for and acquittal of the sedition feisty and freedom-loving poet/prophet. I also view the type of palliative care John Keats offered his mother and then his brother Tom, in late 1818, as another form of engagement, especially given, in the latter case, a growing awareness of his own failing health, but Keats’s descriptions of his efforts were typically matter-of-fact, telling his brother George that “[Tom’s] last moments were not so painful, and his very last without a pang” (Cox 297).3

These forms of engagement, from the broadest possible interna-tional stage to intimate scenes of love and care, confirm that English Romanticism was as deeply committed to the translation of theory into practice as to the attainment of fame and wealth, with these writers in spite of their flaws capable of sounding the clarion call to engage the world and through that engagement to change it. Such


B e y o n d C o m p u l s i o n 179

examples needed, I felt, to be followed, and the mechanisms to pur-sue this are engaged everywhere around us. For example, I have had the good fortune to teach in Florence, Italy for numerous years as part of the Italian Summer Abroad program at Arizona State University (ASU), and every summer I “religiously” took the students to visit the English Cemetery, the well-known resting place for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, Fanny Hunt, and Theodore Parker, which is precariously perched in the Piazzale Donatello (essentially a traffic circle) at the intersection of Viale G. Matteotti and Viale A. Gramsci. The cemetery’s caretaker, Sister Julia Holloway, would take students through this magical space in the green ground around which rumbled the flowing traffic on one of the busiest street in the city, and Sister Julia and I became close friends through these annual pedagogical pilgrimages. What becomes quite clear on any visit is the challenges the cemetery faces, since the vibrations from cars and truck and the vandalism have led to its severe decline, with the iron fence breached in numerous places and with headstones uprooted and often shattered. Sister Julia and I talked about what might be done to alleviate the situation, and following my third summer in Florence, I returned to teach a graduate seminar on Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats. During the seminar, my students conducted research on those less famous individuals buried in its crumbling environs for inclusion on the CD-Rom Sister Julia compiled to raise funds for desperately needed preservation efforts (which ultimately gained support from Dame Judi Dench), and the next summer term I spent my weekends building bookshelves for the cemetery’s over-packed and impoverished library. When I then directed the 2006 International Conference on Romanticism in Tempe, “Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis,” the conference adopted both the English Cemetery and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome as projects and encouraged conference participants to offer financial support as a way to honor the theme for the conference itself.

My attempt to pursue this “romantic” form of engagement emerged in a personal connection that f lowed from my professional duties, whereas the effort to enact a form of engaged Buddhism brought the personal (Buddhist practice) into contact with the professional (my academic post at ASU). By the time I returned to ASU after a three-year residence in the Midwest at Western Illinois University, my wife Marcia and I began had begun to intensify our practice, and one aspect of this effort was to seek a place to make a material contribution in the community. With this in mind, we



simply walked into the Las Fuentes Medical Center in Guadalupe, the largest (yet nonetheless small) Yaqui Indian community outside Mexico, which is surrounded by the cities of Phoenix and Tempe. The clinic was the brainchild of Dr. John Molina, a member of the community, and the challenges were copious and complicated. We worked as the preliminary screeners for the cardiac clinic John ran each week, since we both had past training and work experience in the medical field, but I also began to wonder if some way might be found to connect Las Fuentes to the School of Nursing at ASU. With this in mind, I met with the director of community services for the nursing school, and within a few months a volunteer program was created that better served the needs of the community while provid-ing crucial experience to nursing students. In fact, after John secured state and corporate support, the clinic was renovated and the facil-ity’s scarce technology was upgraded, and the final outcome for the effort was so successful that we no longer had a place to volunteer, since the response from ASU Nursing School and its students was extraordinary. This was the best possible outcome for the commu-nity itself.

The emergence of an engaged Buddhism has been a distinctive development within sanghas in recent decades, as the emergence of Soghal Rinpoche’s importance to the hospice community con-firms (as discussed in chapter 6). Many of the areas within which Buddhism seeks to intervene in the world intersect with regularity the types of commitments of Romantic writers made in their own efforts to impact in the world and assuage suffering. In this endeavor, Buddhism has energetically sought to translate its well-known views that “humanity [is] an integral part of nature” (Kabilsingh 140), “that everything has Buddha-nature” (Lancaster 13) and that all existence manifests “interconnectedness” and “interbeing” (Hahn 166, 170) as the material trace of dependent origination. For example, to connect with Wordsworth’s environmental ethics, these Buddha views have led to the skillful means of Thai monks, who perform ordination ceremonies for trees, thus rendering forests themselves as a part of the sangha, thereby protecting them from the intrusion of governmental agencies intent on economic exploitation.4 In this endeavor, the forms of self-annihilation discussed in Blake and Shelley (chapters 4 and 5), which strive to overcome selfhood, interact with Buddhist views that the self stands at the heart of suffering, with dire ecological impact providing one overt form of that suffering. Buddhism social peace movements pursued by its most recognized practitioners (e.g., The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh) interact with the broad contours



of Romantic philosophy, and the core of compassion animating all Buddhist practices has increasingly moved into communities across the world in an attempt to heal the fissures not just between individu-als in any given culture but between world cultures and their people. The emphasis on the recognition of animals and the fight to achieve their rights and alleviate their suffering can be traced back to the period of Romanticism itself, as Kevin Hutchings and my colleague Ron Broglio have argued, which has lead to the area of Animal Studies and the emergence of philosophies that push beyond the human, yet this has always been a significant dimension of Buddhism, since for the Buddha and Blake alike, “Every things that lives is Holy.” As Ken Jones suggests, “Engaged Buddhism is not . . . some new kind of Buddhism, but simply [is] the logical extension of the traditional teachings of morality and compassion to twenty-first-century con-ditions” (xvii).5 Through such commitments, Buddhism has moved beyond (and indeed always was beyond) Nietzsche’s view of a spiri-tual practice disengaged from the world. As Jones suggests above, “traditional teaching” creates perhaps the most overt form of engage-ment for those that work in higher education, and the convergence of the professional study of Romanticism and the personal practice of Tibetan Buddhism has wrought an integration that makes pos-sible an integral model for the pursuit of all personal and professional commitments.

Pedagogy in Buddhist Thought

Before moving deeper into my particular adaptation of the student-student relationship in Buddhism to the educational context of Western higher education, some value can be derived in understand-ing the pedagogical dimensions of Buddhist instruction. The histori-cal origins of Buddhism primarily emphasize “teaching . . . restricted to ethics and meditational exercises” (Flew 50), and this ontological imperative is the aspect of Buddhist thought most easily transferred into contemporary practice within a university setting. In almost any discussion of the path of enlightenment practiced and encouraged by Shakyamuni Buddha (the name given to the historical personage Siddhartha Gautama following his enlightenment), the most general term applied to the sūtras is “teachings.” This term is significant, since it emphasizes the understanding that, as Buddha said, “I am a teacher” (Gyatso Kindness 29) and places emphasis on an openhanded method of instruction. What follows from this notion is the insight that, unlike the founders of the other world religions, the Buddha



“was the only teacher who did not claim to be other than a human being, pure and simple” (Rahula 1):

Other teachers were either God, or his incarnation in different forms, or inspired by him. The Buddha was not only a human being; he claimed no inspiration from any god or external power either. He attributed all his realization, attainments, and achievements to human endeavor and human intelligence. (Rahula 1)

Buddha’s teachings, rather than creating a fissure between an estab-lished teacher and a striving student, emphasizes attainment through adherence to a middle path between indulgence and mortification, and as Stephen Batchelor suggests, Buddha “described himself as an open-handed teacher without an esoteric doctrine reserved for an elite” (“Buddhism” 19). As well, the lack of an esoteric doctrine solidified into an authorized dogma establishes that “people should be responsible for their own freedom” (Batchelor 19), a concept easily transferred to students in any tradition.

This difference from other world religions establishes Buddhism as a radical form of what is termed in the West “humanism” in its asser-tion that “Man is his own master” and that “there is no higher being or power that sits in judgment over his destiny” (Rahula 1). While humanism in the West was initially bound up with an “intellectual movement that characterized the culture of Renaissance Europe,” its contemporary manifestation has been associated with “those who reject all religious beliefs, insisting that we should be exclusively con-cerned with human welfare in this, allegedly, the only world” (Flew 153). Of course, it is precisely the final assertion of this definition that remains at odds with Buddhist practice, since Buddhism argues that “this world” is “maya” or a realm of illusion. Buddhism has often been labeled as atheistic but is better described as nontheistic. Its methods function more as a science of mind, “a rational, deep, and sophisticated approach to human life which . . . emphasizes personal responsibility for inner development” (Gyatso Kindness 29), and for this reason Western neuroscientists, psychoanalysts, and physicians have moved into an engaged dialogue with its practitioners like the current Dalai Lama (see chapter 4). As the Buddha says, “You are your own master; things depend upon you. I am a teacher, and, like a doctor, I can give you effective medicine, but you have to take it your-self and look after yourself” (quoted in Gyatso Kindness 29–30).

The training pursued within Buddhist pedagogies is aptly summed up in this crucial analogy and is easily transferable to academic



settings within higher education. Like Buddhist traditions, the men-tor offers a cure to specific forms of ignorance (regarding a particular field and the profession of that field); the antidote to ignorance (a body of knowledge defining a field) must be willingly grasped by the individual student, and the synthetic shape of the field itself (the collective profession within which one works) must be entered with empathy and compassion for one’s colleagues. Teaching methods vary among specific schools of the dharma, as Rig’dzin Dorje discusses in Dangerous Friend: “Different vehicles of Buddhist practice are char-acterized by different styles of manifesting the role of the teacher. The definition of ‘vehicle’ is that it possesses a base, path, and fruit (or result)” (5).6 The structure within which knowledge unfolds in the student-teacher relationship has a number of common elements that cut across these traditions and their vehicles, and while the his-torical Buddha, as the only sage of his age to turn the wheel of the dharma, embodies “the path of self-liberation” (Dorje 7) associated with dzogchen, the majority of the teachings take the form of short and long sūtras. The transmission of specific techniques associated with tantra have generally shaped a significant dimension of Tibetan Buddhist practices and often been interpreted across the stages of encounter between Buddhism practitioners and European colonial representatives as “Lamaism” or the worship of the lama as a deity (a view articulated, for example, as early as the writings of Marco Polo yet still present in descriptions of the dharma during the Romantic period [see chapter 1]). This absurd reduction reflects profound igno-rance, since “no concept of a creator god has ever emerged from an authentic Buddhist tradition” (Dorje 1), and this commitment to a non-deistic view certainly extends to one’s lama. The lama is, rather, an instrument for the transmission of teachings often not codified into any textual body and often conveyed in an unbroken line of descent encompassing thousands of years.7

While the relationship of a Buddhist student and his or her lama might seem unidirectional, the structure of communication demands that both the “master and the student . . . examine their relationship” (Kongtrul Londö Thayé 113) critically and requires humility and commitment on both sides of instruction. Turning again to the anal-ogy of the physician, just as a doctor must check over a patient so too the patient must check out the doctor (Wallace Attitude 261), since a shared mindfulness is the best foundation for communication and studied progress. The teacher should display steadfastness, intelligence, patience, compassion, loving-kindness, learning, and accomplish-ment; the student should display diligence, devotion, concentration,



discipline, and patience (Kongtrul Londö Thayé 112–3). As the numerous sūtras evoked throughout Romantic Dharma suggests, the teaching method of the Buddha manifests strong similarities to the Western mode of instruction known as the Platonic method of questions and answers, a dialogic give and take designed to refine with every greater discrimination the limits of one’s own knowledge and thereby to open the “doors of perception” to an ever-evolving refinement through insight that brings wisdom in its path.

Toward a Pedagogy of Compassion

While the integration of the personal and profession impacts my approach to service commitments within both the community and university environments, teaching in general and mentoring in par-ticular remains my primary ground of praxis within higher educa-tion. Professionally, the majority of my experience with the complex relationship between a teacher and a student involves instruction and mentoring offered at the university level and was forged within contemporary Western modes of educational practice. This mode of instruction—which has traditionally eschewed techniques associated with spiritual practice—has prioritized compulsion as its operative method and has realized its aim through the attainment of external rewards accrued as its primary teleology. This separation of intellec-tual from spiritual attainment grows from the misapprehension that spiritual practices generally pursue proselytizing to promote a spe-cific religious ideology, which my undergraduate training by Catholic priests and nuns, Protestant ministers, and lay people itself refutes, since no belief system was required or sought at the University of St. Thomas. However, as one of my teachers, Za Choeje Rinpoche, has suggested upon several occasions, Buddhism is primarily a philo-sophical body of knowledge and practice that promotes a series of ethical commitments on the part of student and teacher alike.8 As such, Buddhist ethics applied to the realm of pedagogical instruc-tion within a university setting can offer usable techniques that arise within specific practices of critical analysis and analytic meditation, and these techniques can be deployed within the conjoined spheres of classroom instruction and direct mentoring.

Like the modernist Buddhism traditions discussed in the pref-ace to this work, my method displays a “hybridity” forged in the context of my direct experience with my primary Tibetan lama (Za Choeje Rinpoche) and my dissertation director and long-term friend (Jeff Cox). Both approached my training in the same opened-handed



way, with great emphasis placed on the transference of responsibility, throughout the training, from the teacher to the student as the path of empowerment. Before moving into graduate studies, I was pri-marily trained in pedagogies of compulsion, where static mastery of received knowledge served as a model of accomplished performance, and this training derived from the robust disciplinary approach pro-vided a superb foundation for graduate-level learning. However, once I began to teach my own courses and began to meet with my thesis and dissertation directors, a new ethic of committed compassion took hold, and I began to find that the compulsive model often inhibited, rather than stimulated, the strange alchemy at the heart of teach-ing, the transmutation of knowledge into wisdom. As a result of this insight, I slowly began to cultivate a pedagogy of compassion in the place of the more compulsive approach, which establishes and encour-ages discovery grounded in the present moment of a student’s engage-ment with the material at hand and the personal growth that results when a student makes the material his or her own. The practice I pursue is related, then, to what Shoshona Felman (in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis), termed “the adventure of insight” through which “unending struggle to become aware was able, in the process, to become attentive” to the “creative possibilities . . . in our theories as well as in our lives” (15–6). And this is an adventure that unfolds on either side of the student-teacher relationship.

The closing focus for Romantic Dharma is appropriately con-cerned with commitments made by a teacher to his or her students and the reciprocal expectation of similar commitments made by one’s students, since these mutually illuminating commitments will be car-ried forward throughout one own career and those of one’s ment-ees. Primarily, this engaged mode of instruction strives to cultivate growth, and Hammalawa Saddhatissa, in Buddhist Ethics, precisely summarizes five commitments through which a teacher conducts instruction and fosters development:

The teacher should show his compassion, or love, for the pupils by teaching and training them well and happily, seeing that they grasp all the arts and crafts equally and thoroughly, teaching them in the respectful manner he adopts toward friends, and making them secure in every way[.] (105)

This approach to instruction, grounded in compassion rather than compulsion, seems somewhat at odds with the way that current uni-versity training in diverse fields defines rigorous exertion leading to



the attainment of knowledge. However, my experience suggests that any instructional model based on compulsion favors reliance on what Blake called “the horses of instruction” and leads to the valorization of memory over the cultivation of intellect and its by-product wis-dom. The perspective that “all dharmas are dreams,” which often aids teachers in the cultivation of bodhichitta (enlightenment mind) for their students, speaks precisely to this situation, since such a stance indicates that “whatever you experience in your life—pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, grossness, refinement, sophistication, crudeness, heat, cold, or whatever—is purely memory” (Trungpa Training 29). While adopting a pedagogy of compassion that includes “love” and “respect” might sound somewhat “touchy-feely,” in practice such a foundation, which factors out any overt hostility in preference for what Locke termed “concernment,” actually allows me to be even more demanding of my students and actually allows them to pro-duce at a higher level of attainment. After all, this approach strives to cultivate the maximum amount of self-direction while providing the maximum amount of emotional and intellectual support, conveying to them the view that ultimately they and they alone are responsible for their own scholastic enlightenment.

The efficacious development of the student in Buddhist traditions generally involves five related aspects: “growth in confidence based on knowledge and personal experience (saddhā), in morality (sīla), in learning (suta), in the practice of giving up things or generosity (cāga), and in wisdom (paññā)” (Saddhatissa 105–6). When one establishes love, honor, and respect as the boundary condition for pedagogical efforts, importing these commitments from one’s own spiritual prac-tices, the preconditions for intellectual growth (suta) and achieved wisdom (paññā) are created. The strongest roots spring from such seeds, allowing students to cultivate sustained mental and spiritual growth as part of their training. Such training thereby prepares them not simply for the completion of their degrees but for a life in the complicated climate of the academy by providing, on the one hand, academic and scholastic stability in the face of uncertainty, and, on the other hand, psychological and spiritual equipoise shorn of grasp-ing, since the combination of these dimensions approaches what John Keats described as “negative capability” (the ability to stand in uncer-tainty with reaching for facts), which I believe offers the best vehicle to sustain them professionally and personally. Although my own ped-agogy seeks to avoid the second aspect of growth, morality, in favor of ethics (although the difference is primarily one of semantic transla-tion), all other aspects of Buddhist instruction have analogues within



and applicability for contemporary students in any field of study. The stages of higher education, especially at the graduate level, can be filled with “confusion and mixed motivation,” and my efforts are directed to transfer across the term of mentoring itself the ultimately responsibility to the student, since “such a lovely atmosphere of fasci-nation, uncertainty, contradiction and irritation” (Dorje 115) should not be wasted but used to shape ever greater stability and thereby assure ever greater attainment. If the receipt of recognition in the form of teaching and mentoring awards is any measure of the effec-tiveness of this approach (something I strongly doubt), then the shift from a pedagogy of compulsion to one of compassion has succeeded beyond all expectations, but the true measure of any successful effort is the manifest success of one’s students in the twelve directions of effort, which brings true delight and recommitment to go continually beyond the last semester and the last student. Indeed, the ethos of my method follows my most cherished Blake proverb: “The most sublime act is to set another before you.”


No t es

Preface

1. Similar acknowledgements can be found in Dennis McCort’s Going Beyond the Pairs (2), Timothy Morton’s on-line essay “Hegel on Buddhism” (acknowledgments) included in the Romantic Circles Praxis volume on “Buddhism and Romanticism” I edited, Phillip Olson’s The Discipline of Freedom (xviii), and in John Rudy’s Wordsworth and the Zen Mind (xiii) and Romanticism and Zen Buddhism (xiii–xiv).

2. These concerns were first introduced in two prior efforts: in the pre-vious year, the paper “Colonial Counter-Flow II: From Romanticism to Buddhism” was presented at the 2002 “Romantic Orientalism” conference at the University of Wales, while the first fruits of the project were manifest in another paper, “Colonial Counter-flow I: Textual Intrusions from the East,” read at the 2001 NASSR (“Romantic Subjects”). This first occasion was a special session I organized for the conference, and the work presented by panelists that day eventually became the special issue for the Romantic Circles Praxis entitled “Romanticism and Buddhism” (2006).

3. Peter Hopkirk discusses the early and middle phases of this game and its key players in The Great Game, 11–164.

4. “The chain of events that brought the Kashag’s letter [an official let-ter requesting military aid] to Undersecretary Rusk is probably what China points to when it states that it invaded Tibet in 1950 to fore-stall US plots to “invade” Tibet.” Thomas Laird, Into Tibet, 247.

5. The term means “higher doctrine” and denotes “the scholastic analysis of religious teachings” (Keown 2). Abhidharma texts appeared quite early in the exploration of mind and matter as manifesting codepen-dent origination (a view akin to that of George Berkeley) and pursued “a survey of the psychology of the human mind” (Trungpa Glimpses 2) mapped at the “moment of consciousness [and] analyzed into sub-ject, object, and mental factors that bind them” (Varela “Embodied” 116). The intersections of these views (neuroscience and Buddhism) have received extended critical attention and specifically shaped several “MindScience” summits held between his holiness, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Western scientists (Consciousness at the Crossroads 17–68; Mind-Science 11–88) See also, deCharms, Two Views of Mind, 25–62, and Hayward and Varela, Gentle Bridges, 50–125.

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N o t e s190

Enlightenment East and West: An Introduction to Buddhism

and Romanticism

1. The historical Buddha’s name was Siddhartha Gautama, who was born into a noble family in the Śākya clan. The name often applied to the Buddha was “Śākyamuni,” which translates to “sage of the Śākyas,” and the other name, besides “Buddha” (“an epithet of those who have achieved enlightenment” [Keown 42]) applied to Siddhartha after his enlightenment was “tathāgata,” an auspiciously ambiguous term meaning either “one who has thus come” or “one who has thus gone” (Keown 296). The relevance of this ambiguity will become clear in chapter 3 in a discussion of the Heart sūtra.

2. Donald S. Lopez, Jr., explores the historical aspects of this situation, connecting the first Jesuit to enter Lhasa to the current moment, in “Foreigner at the Lama’s Feet” (251–88).

3. While I do not see Romanticism as “the fulfillment and awakening of Enlightenment,” I do agree with the notation of coincidence stand-ing behind Marshall Brown’s view that Romantic writing preserves the “dream” within its representation of “the moment of awakening” (Brown 39).

4. In the landmark work Orientalism, Said pays limited attention to Buddhism, perhaps because as a discourse and textual counterflow from colonial borderlands, the impact of Buddhism seems to resist his view that all forms of European and American Orientalism shared the view “of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western cul-ture” (19). Perhaps more surprisingly, given the temporal range of its concerns, Said’s Culture and Imperialism replicates this same critical inattention, and even in the published volume of essays commemorat-ing Said’s achievements and mapping his oversights, Oriental Prospects, few directly relevant references to Buddhism can be located to help chart the emergence of the dharma into Western consciousness.

5. For example, the essays appearing in the splendid collection Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, edited by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, never touch upon the subject, nor does the equally superlative Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity by Saree Makdisi. The point here is not to castigate these authors and editors, since the pro-cess of emergence unfolds across a longer temporal span and requires looking beyond the periodic “borders” of Romanticism as classically construed (ca. 1780–1830); rather I find the absence endemic of the slow historical process through which Buddhism crystallized as a body of knowledge in European centers of learning.

6. Fortunately, several scholars have recently sought to steer Romantic studies toward this critical arena, with most included in a special


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issue of Romantic Circles Praxis (2006) focused on “Romanticism and Buddhism” that I recently edited. The volume included work by Norman Dubie, Louise Economides, Dennis McCort, Timothy Morton, and John Rudy.

7. Sakya Pandita’s argument primarily sought the integration of “the spiritual with the secular aspects” of being” (Davenport 4), with his well-known Treasury of Good Advice functioning as the primary vehicle of its elaboration.

8. See “Colonial Counterflow: From Orientalism to Buddhism” in the collection (Re)Interrogating Orientalisms.

9. Few would dispute the role played by the creative and sympathetic imagination within Romanticism, and the connection to Buddhist practice can be seen in this brief description of the preliminary phase of meditative process offered by Kalu Rinpoche: “Thus, imagine that all the deities of the Three Jewels and Three Roots are really gathered in the sky, radiant with brilliant light” (Rinpoche 28).

10. I operate relative to the position articulated by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson in the “Introduction” to Romanticism and Colonialism, “From a post-Althusserian position it is also possible to discriminate between colonialism, as the material system of conquest and control, and imperialism as a form of colonialism buttressed by hegemonic cultural ideological imperatives” (3).

11. As Captain Samuel Turner states in the “Introduction” to An Account of An Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet, “Teshoo Lama was at that time the Regent of Tibet, and the guard-ian of Dalai Lama, his superior in religious rank, who was yet in his minority” (viii).

12. The translation of this letter was inserted in Samuel Turner’s Account, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the calculating imagination at the core of the colonial drive, since the “narrative” (complete with letters exchanged between the Lama and Hasting, as well “[Cultural, Social, and Political] Views Taken on the Spot” offered by Lieutenant Samuel Davis and “Observations Botanical, Mineralogical, and Medical” provided by Mr. Robert Saunders) actually reads more like a blueprint for assimilation.

13. Michael J. Franklin, “Accessing India: Orientalism, Anti-’Indianism’ and the Rhetoric of Jones and Burke,” Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, Eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 62.

14. This out-of-copyright work was accessed through www.archives.org/details/poemsconsistingc00joneiala, an online digital copy made available by The California Digital Library.

15. Wilson included Remusat’s comments in French, and this trans-lation derives from a combination of my own and that offered by Batchelor (228).


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The Strange Case of Alexander Csoma de Körös

1. http://www.archive.org/stream/inmemoriamtheodo00stei/inme-moriamtheodo00stei_djvu.txt, 24–5.

2. “Warren Hastings.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-HastngsW.html

3. Colebrooke had also confirmed the Himalayas as the highest mountains on earth in the twelfth edition (1816) of Asiatic Researches (251–64).

4. The most famous claim to descent from Székelic ancestry was that offered by Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

5. http://csoma.mtak.hu/en/csoma-elete.htm 6. http://csoma.mtak.hu/en/csoma-elete.htm 7. Lopez “Ambivalent Exegete” 54–6. 8. The Lotus sutra (“The Sūtra of the Lotus Blossom of the Marvelous

Dharma”; Skt. Saddharmapun darīka Sūtra) was an extensive dis-course on two primary points of practice: that “there is only one goal practitioners of the Buddhist path, that is Buddhahood,” and that “Buddha, upon attaining nirvāna, does not go into extinction, but abides in the world . . . out of compassion for those still in need of teaching” (Keown 158). The sūtra was a relatively early document in the codification of the Buddha’s teachings (ca. first century bce) and was extensively translated from Sanskrit into Chinese and Tibetan. The sūtra marks a shift in the teachings from an earlier Hīnayāna to a later Mahāyāna view, as the closing chapter on “Encouragement of the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue” indicates (Katō et al. 339–44). Although Burnouf translated this core text, the work is closely related to two other short sūtras, “The Sūtra of Innumerable Meanings” and “The Sūtra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue” (one preceding and one following, respectively, the central Lotus sūtra), forming what is termed in the Chinese canon the Threefold Lotus Sutra (these short sūtras have not survived in their original Sanskrit forms). This created a privileging of the Mahāyāna view in the European con-struction of Buddhism in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Romanticism’s Four Noble Truths

1. Kristeva argues that “Literature has always been the most explicit realization of the signifying subject’s condition,” and both Blake’s Marriage and Shelley’s Prometheus make explicit, in different yet intersecting ways “the dialectical condition of the subject . . . in language” (82).

2. I recognize that viewing Nietzsche as the last “Romantic” is not without its problems, including his relentless attacks on some of Romanticism’s modes and manifestations, but for reasons akin to


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those argued by Allan Megill, “whatever the problems with the term, in the context of the present study its use cannot be avoided” (5), because “the shift from the Enlightenment to its successoral move-ments not as a natural process of decay and rejuvenation but rather as a conscious attempt to bring to light and to respond to theoretical inadequacies in the Enlightenment position” (6). The deconstructive elements to emerge in Romanticism already resided in Buddhism and achieved the “perfection of wisdom” in Nietzschean apprehension.

3. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argues that the work pro-vides a “neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (875). For Foucault, in “What is an Author,” the notion of the author is replaced by a more contingent and relative “author-function,” by which “the author’s disappearance” opens an analytic space for the apprehension of “complex operation[s] at play in textuality” during reception (906, 908, 909). Derrida’s various gestures “toward that which transcends all conceivable dualisms” (McCort 111) envelops the hard distinc-tion between both subject-object and author-reader relations, which takes its inspiration, appropriately in the immediate context, from a “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world” (“Structure” 292). Giorgio Agamben offers a later syn-thetic critique of these positions in his report, in “The Author as Gesture,” of a Foucault lecture wherein the erasure of the author is challenges: “This individual [who “must take up the book and read”] will occupy the empty place in the poem left by the author; he will repeat the same inexpressive gesture the author used to testify to his absence in the work” (71). The textual state of The Marriage, whose title plate offers no author and no place and date of publica-tion and whose narratological operations force a movement through (and into) an I-persona that cannot be collapsed with Blake himself, anticipates the eradication of the author that generates the play of contingent consciousness.

4. Nietzsche, not literally taught by Schopenhauer, embraced his “individual genius” in “Schopenhauer as Educator” and embraced his predecessor’s lesson to “those students who were capable of insight to recognize the laws of their own character” (Magnus and Higgins 27).

5. The early text by Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, is his first gesture in this direction. As he suggested in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” he asserts “a philosophy that dares to move, to demote, morality into the realm of appearance—and not merely among ‘appearances’ or phenomena (in the sense assigned to these words by Idealist philoso-phers), but among ‘deceptions,’ as semblance, delusion, error, inter-pretation, contrivance, art” (22–3). Later in his analysis, Nietzsche connects the choric presence to Dionysus in terms that intersect Buddhist thought: “sharing his suffering it also shares something of


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his wisdom and proclaims the truth from the heart of the world” (65 in Kaufmann translation).

6. The “Prajňā-pāramitā sūtras [were] composed over a long period” and address “the perfection of insight,” the last of the six perfec-tions, and once the last stage is achieved, “wisdom” (equally insight, discriminating knowledge, or intuitive apprehension) emerges as the “direct realization of emptiness [śūnyatā]” (Keown 218). The Diamond and Heart sutras, both traced to 300–500 ce, represent the “perfection of wisdom” in its highest forms. The mantra from the latter, difficult to translate, states that “perfection of wisdom” (prajňā-pāramitā) arises by application of a “spell” (mantra) of sub-lime elusiveness: Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all hail!” (Conze, Wisdom 113). Timothy Morton further connects the Heart sutra to Hegel’s views on “noth-ingness”: “there is a remarkable and historically probable collusion between Hegel’s view of the nothingness of the in-itself—or, as first stated in the Logic, Fichte’s phrase I = I [4]—and the dominant form of Tibetan Buddhism of which he was aware” (“Hegel” 3).

7. The next chapter explores connections between this “extinction” or “self-cancellation” and Romantic modes of “self-annihilation.”

8. Readers should recall, from chapter 2 that the concept was partially expressed in “The Adherence to the Great Mantra” Csoma translated and presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

9. Martin Priestman’s discussion, in Romantic Atheism, of “theism” as the opposite pole for his analysis of poetry and freethought provides numerous examples (37–43, 48–58, 184–218).

10. As Keown explains, “Hīnayāna” is a pejorative term “used disparag-ingly by “Mahāyāna” practitioners to describe the primal form of Buddhism, which focused on the attainment “bodhi” (Skt. enlight-enment) and whose adherents were judged “selfishly” because they sought individual salvation (107). Against this view, the “Mahāyāna” places stronger emphasis on the “bodhisattva” (Skt. bodhi-sakta), “a being who is oriented toward enlightenment” and who “foregoes his own enlightenment until all other beings in samsāra [Skt. “delu-sion: Pāli “flowing on”] have been liberated (248) from its cycle of suffering.

11. The play in this name strikes directly to the core of the Heart sutra’s closing mantra (see note 2 above).

12. For example, Friedrich Schlegel asserts, in “On Incomprehensibility,” that “Paradox is everything which is simultaneously good and great” (303). In another form closer to the English tradition, the closing lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” offers a similar conceptual conundrum when the urn states that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” and subsequently suggests that this Zen-like poetic koan defines the limit of knowledge itself: “that is all/Ye know of earth, and all ye need know” (Cox xxx: 49–50).


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13. These works are generally organized into four groups, and the following list moves from oldest to youngest articulation: (1) the Aşţasāhasrikā and the Ratnaguņasamcayagāthā; (2) the Satasāhasrikā, the Pañcavimśatisā, and the Astasaśasāhasrikā; (3) the Vajracchedikā (“the famous Diamond sūtra”) and the Abhisamayālamkāra, and (4) the Adhyardhaśatikā Prajñapāramitā (Williams Buddhism 41).

14. Both Nāgārjuna, and Śāntideva adopt poetic form as the vehicle within which to elaborate their views on the Buddhist practice and thought, and one of the major unanalyzed features of the dharma itself is the role that poetry plays in the tradition, which is an omni-present practice. I will undertake this study in a subsequent project entitled “The Wings of the Dharma,” for a broad range of dharma works in all traditions and within all national expressions of Buddhism adopt this poetic form as a method conducive to the intensification of apprehension by subversion of linear representation.

15. Keats seems to approach the “perfect aspect” of this tradition, which resides in “the fact of non-duality, [that] there is neither subject nor object but only a single flow” (Williams 85).

16. For example, three semesters ago, I taught an advanced senior semi-nar on Blake and Critical Theory, and two undergraduates wrote honors theses on Blake and Nietzsche focused on different aspects of the visionary poet’s connections to Nietzschean thought.

17. Of course, many Blake scholars have analyzed the operations of Blake’s composite art, although W. J. T. Mitchell has priority of insight: “Blake’s dialectic [in all its iterations] pervades his entire cos-mology, rendering it as a continuous process which never attains a final resting place” (75).

18. The full recognition Heidegger offers Buddhism, as Economides documents, followed his in-depth reading of Suzuki: “Many schol-ars have pointed to the influence of eastern thought—and particularly Buddhist and Taoism—on the development of Heidegger’s later work. The philosopher was already referencing Eastern thought in his lec-tures during the 1930s, worked with a Chinese scholar to translate Lao-tzu in 1946, and upon reading Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism in the 1950s, remarked ‘If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings’ (quoted in Suzuki xi)” (12).

19. While it is certainly the case that Blake avoided Oriental motifs and themes, at least defined by the appropriation of characters and texts for transmutation listed in his catalogue of such works (209–11), Blake did confront epistemological matters explored by a wide range of eastern philosophical works.

20. Later in his work, Ferber draws upon Alan Watts to highlight Blake’s attempt, in The Marriage, to craft “a transfigured temporal realm [as] our unfallen home” (154), which provides a model through which to approach that “Eternal Now” praised in one section of Lavater.


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21. As Weir argues, “Blake sustains the Enlightenment sense that contem-porary religious beliefs are corruptions of primitive understanding, but he diverges from Enlightenment mythography in his acceptance of primitive understanding as a more imaginative, vital, and human explanation of reality than anything reason can offer” (51).

22. “Swift’s A Tale of a Tub in particular, or Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for a second, trenchantly expose a spiritual deception not unlike that challenged in the prophets” (Jemielity 126).

23. The “I” of the text seems best read as an early manifestation of what Foucault later termed “the author-function” in his celebrated essay “What Is an Author?”: “The author-function does not affect all dis-courses in a universal and constant way” and therefore “does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an indi-vidual” (908, 909). Blake’s use of an I-persona, as a robust history of Blake criticism confirms, capably resists reduction to Blake as author, and this particular text, unlike other illuminated works, does not ever identify “Blake” as the author of The Marriage itself (and also does not include a date or place of publication).

24. Lacan’s triadic orders are equally relative, since they shape the pro-gressive development of the subject, where the real is placed under erasure by the imaginary adoption of an imago during the “mirror stage” (Ecrits 2, 7) and which is further disciplined during subse-quent passage into the symbolic, thereby which completing the for-mation of the subject in the field of the Other of Culture. In the immediate context, it should be noted that Buddhism forms one area of disagreement between Lacan and his ‘teacher’ (Freud): “I am far from agreeing with [the reduction of Oriental knowledge to “the religion of the Great Man”]. Yet in the history of the avatars of Buddhism, one can find a great a many things which, legitimately or not, can be made to illustrate Freud’s theory” (Ethics 175–6).

25. Hixon draws his example from the exchange between Buddha and Subhuti in the late Prajñāpāramitā Sutra in 8,000 Lines.

Inner Revolution: The Luminous Mind of Enlightenment

1. The Buddha mounts this argument in the Samyutta Nikāya (Pāli; Skt. Samyukta Āgama), the “Connected Discourses” known as Sūtra Pitaka in the Pāli canon.

2. The novel has mirrored functions embedded at almost every level of narrative, a position forcefully argued in Paul Cantor’s Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism relative to the manifestation of creature and creator as doppelgänger figures : “Frankenstein and the monster are mirror images of each other” (106). Cantor traces similar mirroring in Blake’s work (indeed the


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cover design is his famous painting “God Judging Adam”), as well as across numerous Romantic works.

3. As the Buddha indicates in the Mahāsatipatthāna Sūtra, the attach-ment to self shapes the most fundamental aspect of suffering: “It is that craving, which gives rise to rebirth” and which can only reverse its operations through “the complete fading-away and extinction of this craving” (Walsche 346–7).

4. Interestingly, neither Victor nor the creature has learned the les-son on nonattachment to the self, although the lesson is not lost on Captain Walton. In his last statement, the creature proposes, in his last address to the dead creator, that “Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse may not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever” (156), which takes almost the exact same form as Victor’s remorse in the Justine Moritz’s episode. Unlike both creator and creature, Walton finally abandons his quest for the secrets of nature and turns his ship homeward.

5. I have analyzed elsewhere some aspects of this tendency in Frankenstein (Romantic Dynamics 165–81).

6. Buddha intimates, in the Itivuttaka of the Pāli canon (the fourth book of the Khuddaka Nikāyā), that “the liberation of the mind by loving-kindness” [Pāli metta; Skt. maitre (Keown 121, 177)] surpasses them [all] and shines forth, bright and brilliant” (Bodhi 176), and the “sense of connectedness achieved in [this form of] enlightenment . . . can act to transform the entire universe” (Thurman Inner 140).

7. Bloom goes so far as to evoke the operation of “karma” in his discus-sion: “‘Karma is never the cause of emancipation,’ as Shankara says. Karma is only the causal consequence in time; when one dies to self one is delivered from it, and from time and cause. Karma never dis-pels ignorance; it cannot, for it is not in the category of knowledge” (Mythmaking 100).

8. This turn to imagery grounded in human cognition forms a signif-icant recurring presence in Shelley’s prose, shaping his interest in a “science of the mind” directed toward the reduction “of squalid ignorance and moral imbecility,” where “mind is his law [and] all things to him” (Clark Shelley’s Prose 304, 207, 186). This mode of imagery represents what Buddhism terms “skillful means” (Skt. upāya-kauśalya), a strategy introduced by Buddha in the Lotus sūtra to establish “innovation” as “a provisional means to bring beings to enlightenment” (Keown 318).

9. The altruistic commitment to sacrifice self for others (“the purest and truest motives”) pursued by Prometheus intersects what Buddhist philosophy would term “right view,” and in dedicating his energies toward individual and collective liberation (“the best and noblest ends”) the Titan embodies what Buddhists would see as “right effort.”


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Both precepts (right outlook and right outcome) are two steps on “The Noble Eightfold Path” that opens and closes the Buddha’s first discourse. This fit between Shelley’s stages of enlightenment and the Buddha’s Eightfold Path should not be construed as literally exact, given Shelley’s lack of knowledge about the dharma. However, the approach does indicate the poet’s tactical deployment of analogous methods to achieve strategically related ends. For example, the use of imagery “drawn from the human mind” can serve as both “skill-ful means” (see footnote 2 above) and “right speech” (the first step in the eightfold path.) As well, Shelley’s “motives” and his sought “ends” interest other dimensions of the path elaborated by Buddha (e.g., “right effort” and “right mindfulness”).

10. This same designation was offered to Alexander Csoma de Körös from within the Buddhist community (see chapter 2).

11. As discussed in detail through Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (in chapter 3), this “beyond” is the familiar territory of Buddhism’s prajñāpāramitā sūtras.

12. Curran Annus Mirabilis 39–46, 63–79, 81–7; Leask British Romantic Writers 120–2, 135–40, 152–4; Makdisi Romantic Imperialism 137–40, 144–53. Among those cited, only Curran makes reference to Buddha and Buddhism as offering “parallels” to Shelley’s concep-tual commitment̀ s in Prometheus (69, 221–2 [n52], 224 [n64]).

13. Bloom Shelley’s Mythmaking 93, 96, 98, 108; Curran Annus Mirabilis 104, 114–5, 213 (n. 12); Lewis Promethean Politics 131–2, 157.

14. This enclosure represents the caverns of sensation, a “receptacle or enclosure” in consciousness that Kristeva terms the chora, which “precedes and underlies figuration” and gains expression as “kinetic rhythm” (Moi 94) in aesthetic production (e.g., in dance or poetry). In A Defense of Poetry, Shelley suggests that this “rhythm or order” gives rise to aesthetic production that takes form as “the motions of the dance” or “the melody of the song” (Prose 278), pursuing a similar argument to the energies Nietzsche posits for the birth of tragedy.

15. As David Aers argues, Blake’s Europe operates off “a strikingly one-dimensional image,” where the “citizens’ senses are ‘petrify’d against the infinite’ [and] their thought systematically ‘Shut up’ within cat-egories of the present order” (252).

16. In her analysis of the “semiotic,” Julie Kristeva also draws from Plato in her analysis of cavern as chora (discussed later in this chap-ter) that connects Blake and Shelley’s images to an alternative mode of signification that disrupts symbolic attempts to control creative expression.

17. Richardson connects the play of “pity” to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is a problematic form of sympathy “inform-ing ‘our fellow feeling with any passion whatsoever’” (134) but which operates within a hierarchical based social structure. Blake critiques


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pity rather severely in Songs of Experience and Nietzsche concluded that pity was the chief malady for European philosophy and reflected epistemic collusion with institutional forms of Christianity.

18. My reading slightly modifies that offered by Woodman, who views Prometheus’s attainment of “a state of disinterested benevolence” but who argues that the first act requires a subsequent replacement of “Godwin’s doctrine of a gradual growth of consciousness [with] Platos’ doctrine of the gradual enlargement of the capacity to love” (114). Against this view, I argue that the path of enlightenment always unfolds in stages of awareness, with each gain providing a foundation for the next step along a graduated path. I agree that Prometheus’s “pity” still reflects a dimension of “lingering hostil-ity . . . too closely identified with self-love” (114), but the ignition of compassion (disinterested benevolence), the first stage of individual enlightenment, necessarily precedes the broader agency of universal love needed to transform the Jovian world.

Selfhood and Self-Annihilation in Blake’s MILTON

1. Shelley’s so-called atheism and the nontheistic orientation of Buddhist thought lead to the shared view of complementary mental and material operations. Shelley argues, in The Necessity of Atheism, that “the mind cannot believe the existence of a God,” since “every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity” (Prose 39), and he arrives at this conclusion by adopting the skeptical empirical method evoked through Bacon (in the epigraph) and argued through Locke and Hume. As David Lee Clark notes in his introduction to The Necessity of Atheism, Shelley “does not here, nor did he ever, f latly deny the existence of God. He merely asserts that with existing data and the known laws of logic, the existence of God cannot be proved” (37). Buddha strikes precisely the same stance at several points in his teaching, never referencing “a term we would translate as ‘God’” (Batchelor Buddhism 15). This has led to the difficulty in classifying Buddhism as a religion, since its founder described himself “as an openhanded teacher” and since its practices operate outside standard theistic models and modes. In his introduc-tion to The Good Heart (a dialogue between Christian clerics and The Dalai Lama), Laurence Freeman sums up the Buddhist position quite well: “God was not a part of the Buddha’s idea of liberation. He felt that questioning and pondering the existence and nature of God did not help the practical work of freeing oneself from ignorance” (23). Batchelor embraces the term “agnosticism” in its preliminary elaboration by T. H. Huxley in the mid-nineteenth century as the best descriptor for the position taken by the tathāgata.


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2. Zajonc, a professor of physics at Amherst College, led one of the Mind and Life forums with The Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1997, which was focused on apparent connections between the new physics and cosmology and Buddhist views of the interpenetration and inter-actions of mind and matter. Zajonc’s account of the meeting appears as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama.

3. Even Timothy Morton’s serious critique of the “green thinking” shaping Shelley’s ecological impulses, nonetheless, concludes that the poet “was [beyond question] an ecological thinker” whose approach exemplified “many of the successes and failures of such thinkers” (Morton “Green” 429, 430).

4. The compatibility of current physical knowledge and the Buddhist exploration of consciousness and cosmos have been asserted with regularity by his holiness, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso in what has come to be known as the Mind and Life Seminars con-ducted with an impressive range of renowned scientists. Speaking in relation to the complicated concept of “emptiness,” The Dalai Lama argued in an early mind-science dialogue that “Buddhist thinkers also find it extremely beneficial to incorporate into their thinking the insights of various scientific fields, such as quantum mechanics and neurobiology, where there are also equally strong elements of uncer-tainty and essencelessness” (MindScience 26). In a dialogue from a later forum, he argues, in the language intersecting my discussion of Prometheus Unbound (and Blake’s Milton), that both “[western] scientific investigation” and the rational and empirical demands of the Buddhist methodology “have more or less refuted the notion of a truly existent self” (Consciousness 140)., with the impressive range of scientists present confirming this view. A similar analysis occurs in Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of the Mind 146–65). More recently, his arguments have connected what Buddhism terms “absolute” and “conventional or relative” truth to the forms of knowledge emerging in experimental acts of observa-tion in relativistic and quantum physics (The New Physics 147–62; The Universe 43–69).

5. Shelley was well-acquainted with the debate over the particulate ver-sus wave nature of light and its grounding in the experiments of Thomas Young presented before the Royal Society between 1799–1803 (Lussier “Wave Dynamics”).

6. “Blake’s concept of selfhood,” as John Howard proposes, “is best imagined as a defensive covering that both imprisons the immortal spirit and defends against threats from without the personality” (63). He then defines “self-annihilation [as] the individual’s mental act of removing the dominance of his selfhood, which is only part of his psyche” (177).

7. Jung describes this “event” as follows: “Therefore it cannot be a ques-tion of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of


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simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have selected the term “synchronicity” to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation” (19).

8. I thank with all gratitude the wondrous Kate Rigby (who arranged the Monash lecture and class, who took me into her household, and who revealed to me the wonders of southern Australia) and the courteous Peter Otto (who arranged the Melbourne lecture and offered a splendid dinner and even better conversation at the end of the trip).

9. At the material level of production, James proposes that the engrav-ing “evidences to an extreme degree the formal effects of Blake’s mature practices of emphasizing the spatial and graphic qualities of his text and of combining text and illustration in such a way that the plate becomes a unit of composition” (228). Regarding its thematic thrust, his analysis intersects the current argument, since “Instead of demythologizing religion into a secular humanism or evolving a new poetic ‘mythos’ to supersede the Christian, Blake insists on the continued relevance and truthfulness of the spiritual aspiration and ontology of art” (232).

10. Blake’s Milton in particular seems, in its driven against empowered voices of enlightenment epistemology (i.e., Bacon, Newton, and Locke), fully cognizant that “Ideology represents the imaginary rela-tionship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” especially given that “the most famous [ideology of his age was] the mechanis-tic type current in the eighteenth century” (Althusser 162).

11. As previously noted, Timothy Morton has discussed the difficulty apprehending with clarity the doctrine of emptiness relative to Hegel’s reception of Buddhism, especially the mutual states (“form is emptiness, emptiness is form”) in the renowned “Heart Sūtra,” which stands at the very center of the prajñāpāramitā tradition in all forms of Buddhism. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, the philoso-phy of emptiness represented the most difficult element of Buddhism for European reception and did not gain broad presence until after Schopenhauer’s evocation of the prajñāpāramitā tradition in World as Will and Representation.

12. Makdisi, Impossible History (204–59).13. The first full-plate design has “William” inscribed on it, and the sec-

ond full-plate design has “Robert,” Blake’s dead brother, inscribed on it. Blake credited Robert as transmitting his printing method to him in a dreams after his death (E 705).

14. See Ault, Visionary Physics (43–53), and Markley, Fallen Languages (178–89).

15. My application of Lacanian constructs follows in the “breach” cre-ated by the earlier criticism of Thomas A. Vogler’s reading of Milton, in that I argue that Blake breaks through the symbolic production of the subject, which generates the Blakean “spectre,” and Milton’s


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descent “is both act and rupture, causing and constituting the gap in the Symbolic Order” (154).

16. The term “first-stage enlightenment epistemology” is designed to foreground a significant shift in precisely how Western enlighten-ment epistemology defines self as Romantic writers swerved from the material and mechanistic views of “Bacon, Locke & Newton” (E 142: 41.4) and sought to elaborate an “implicate multiverse” of dynamic interaction and energetic exchange. This shift also coincides rather well with the emergence of Buddhism into European consciousness.

The Romantic Book of Living and Dying

1. Blake, while including his genderization of time and space in Milton, also actualizes them through the human in “A Vision of the Judgment”: “But Time & Space are Real Beings a Male & a Female Time is a Man Space is a Woman & her Masculine Portion is Death” (E 563). In his last phrase Blake approaches a Lacanian conceit, since “her Masculine Portion” is imported from externality (the Symbolic Order), and its status as “death” grows from the female psyche’s subjection to and importation of the dominance of the phallus, which is supported by law whose ultimate authority resides in death both literal and imag-inary death, as when suppressing the semiotic (Kristeva’s chora), a form of radical difference, in preference for more of the same.

2. The Bloomian argument would force all discussions of Blake’s rela-tionship with Milton to begin with “the psychology of influence,” which “does not advance—our understanding of the Blake-Milton relationship” (Angel 73) and actually “confuses matters” (“Opening” 51). Rather than illuminating the text of Milton and the relationship that stands at its core, Bloom’s theory of influence simply becomes, if applied mechanically, a “covering cherub” (a phrase Blake appropri-ated from Ezekiel and associated with selfhood), of “false dogma” (Damon 94) for all hermeneutic acts.

3. Keats’s denial of the world as “a vale of tears” and its imaginative re-casting as a “System of Soul-making” clearly reflects his under-standing not just of Hellenic thought but those Eastern traditions (mentioned in this same entry) beginning to emerge into England through Oriental philology, and when he directly evokes “Vishnu” (Cox 331), it should be remembered that Sir William Jones had seen the Buddha as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu himself.

4. The thought of Ernest Becker in particular intersects the Tibetan view of “a taming of terror” (145) that brings freedom in its wake, which is finally not a denial of the fear itself but an overcoming (Blake’s “overwhelming”) “when we look at it full in the face” (15).

5. I am not intend on reading Keats’s final poetic productions as codes for his obsession with impending death, although passages of


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Hyperion might support such a reading: “As with us mortal men, the laden heart/Is persecuted more, and fever’s more/When it is nigh-ing to the mournful house/Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise” (Cox 487: II. 101–4). A similar approach might be applied to “Ode to a Nightingale” or “Autumn,” but I believe such pro-jection does considerable disservice to the aesthetic, political, and social complexities of such work, as the criticism of both Jeffrey Cox (Cockey School 82–123) and Nicholas Roe (1–27, 51–87), among others, make obvious. However, I am not interested in reducing the poetry to poetic transference into the poetry of any anxiety of death but am more interested in exploring Keats’s view of his own demise and the beneficial dimensions for self-annihilation when one lives one’s life in the face of death.

6. Julie Carlson’s splendid study England’s First Family of Writers con-fronts in exemplary ways the issues with which this chapter engages (164–93).

7. Mary reported being “Very unwell” on Saturday, March 11, and continued to dream of her lost first child, writing on March 19 “Dream[ed] that my little baby came to life again” and the next day states bleakly “Dream[ed] again about my baby” (Mellor and Matlak 1323).

8. As Richard Holmes reports, Shelley had completely misjudged the case against him pursued by the Westbrooks, which finally “lay not in what he had done as a writer [only the third of dimension of their case] but in what he had omitted to do as a father” (357). Although Shelley claimed, in a letter to Byron, that Harriet’s “death communi-cated a shock” he feared would not be overcome, he never “made use” of the “limited visiting rights” he won in the case (Holmes 257).

9. Even as Shelley could be seen as literally living life to fullness at this moment of death, his resistance to the wider implications of his action also suggests his continued attachment to selfhood, since his shout of “no” to the attempt of Williams to lower the sails and to the offer of leaving his vessel for the security of those attempting to rescue the foundering vessel resulted in the death of Williams and Vivian, as well as the sorrows of Mary.

10. In Tibetan culture, the practice of sky-burial, where the dead body is carried to a mountaintop and left open to be devoured by vultures and other carrion creatures, is designed to allow the dead “to benefit other living being” and to create awareness of “the transience and impermanence of life’ (Kelly 80, 81). The cloud that responds to the lament offered by Blake’s Thel asserts this same perspective: “Then if thou art the food of worms. O virgin of the skies,/How great thy use. How great thy blessing; everything that lives,/Lives not alone, nor for itself” (E 5: 3.25–7). Blake’s passage reflects his understand-ing of codependent existence and impermanence, to crucial aspects of Buddhist wisdom.


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11. Keats only wrote a few of the stanzas, and Cox identifies only three of its sixteen stanzas as written exclusively by Keats (Cox Keats’s Poetry 268).

12. John Rudy offers a related reading in arguing that the concluding stanza strives to transcend “time through the complete merging of death and life” (Romanticism 205).

13. As Reiman and Fraistat note, the horizontal passage across the sur-face of the earth in contemplation of nature and culture likely reflects Shelley’s reception of Volney’s Ruins of Empire, with the poet mov-ing “backward in time” (77) toward the origins of civilizations, but the passage (both as journey and as poetic lines) also approaches Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, where time as natural process erodes the very presumptions of human grasping, a point of view at work in “Ozymandias” (written two years later): “Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away” (110: 12–4). Derrida’s language helps gloss my reading of both Alastor and “Ozymandias” as works that erode an attach-ment to a unique self: “The individualism of technological civiliza-tion relies precisely on a misunderstanding of the unique self. It is the individualism of a role and not of a person. In other words it might be called the individualism of a masque or persona, a character [person-nage] and not a person” (Derrida Gift 37).

14. Dharma-kāya (Skt.) is “The Truth Body,” a state whose qualities include “freedom from all conception” the “liberation from all defilements” (Keown 75).

15. A slight aside: a mechanical instance of what I just described occurred in writing this sentence when the “autoeditor” of WORD refused to allow the application of “who” to “dog”—demanding “that” in its place.

Afterword Beyond Compulsion: Toward a Pedagogy of Compassion

1. While this last act is the most overt form of attempted intercession, Byron was also involved in a variety of liberation movements while in residence in Italy before his departure for Greece.

2. As is well known, Jonathan Bate virtually launched the study area of “Green Romanticism” with his 1991 study of Wordsworth, generat-ing a critical explosion in the process, and he thereafter sought to take his critical insights into social practice and to inspire his students to extend his work well beyond his own efforts.

3. Other forms of engagement are well known to Romantic scholars, such as the poetic intervention of Robert Southey and Hannah More in the drive to eliminate slavery and the slave trade, the vocal opposi-tion of William Godwin to all forms of social and political injustice,


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Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft’s opposition to Edmund Burke’s reactionary response to the French Revolution, or the imprisonment of Leigh Hunt for libelous sedition in publically opposing the crown of tyranny. The examples are too numerous to enumerate here, but the artistic forms of engaged romanticism continue to inspire, and the acts of public intervention undertaken by my students offer impressive testimony to the continuing power these writers inspire such movement into the world.

4. Donald K. Swearer offers a summative analysis of this development, connecting Thai monastic practices with the eclipse of selfhood through the practice of “non-attachment or self-forgetting—the heart of the dhamma” (26) to a sustainable ecological ethic capable of intersecting more scientifically driven forms of ecology in the West.

5. In my own case, the more personal form of this engagement, as the focus on a “Romantic Book of Living and Dying” (Chapter 6) indi-cates, has taken the form of hospice work.

6. The three primary levels of instruction are sūtra, tantra, and dzogchen: “Sutra is characterized as the path of renunciation, in the sense of rejecting every kind of form to which one might develop attachment . . . Tantra is characterized as the path of transformation, in the sense of making use of every kind of form that arises, especially one’s own psycho-physical and emotional experience . . . Dzogchen is characterized as the path of self-liberation, in that all perception and experience has the nature of liberation itself” (Dorje 5–6).

7. The misprision resides in the method of visualization, where a stu-dent often visualizes the teacher as a Buddha, but given that all sen-tient beings hold within them a Buddha-nature, it is a technique rather than a belief. The purpose of the transmission assures stabil-ity of method, and I have received Medicine Buddha empowerments from his holiness, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama (x2) and his student Za Choeje Rinpoche (x2) in which the visualization techniques and other elements comprising the practice were exactly in accord.

8. Strangely enough, this view of the student-teacher relation was also the one I learned in my own professional formation under the tutelage of Jeff Cox.


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Abhidharma, xix, 74–6, 189Abrams, M. H., 89Adams, Hazard, 85Adler, Gary, 42–3Aers, David, 198Aeschylus, 89, 92, 97–8, 117Agamben, Giorgio, 57, 193Allen, Richard and Harish Trivedi,

3, 34Almond, Philip, xviii–xix, 2, 35, 43Alphabetum Tibetanum, 26, 43Althusser, Louis, 124, 201Amitabha (Buddha of Infi nite

Light), xiii–xiv, 73Analytical Review, 34, 72–3Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham, 35Arnold, Matthew, 29Arnold, Sir Edwin, 3Āryadeva, 61Asanga, 61Asiatick Journal, xix, 11, 192Asiatic Society of Bengal, 8, 25,

45–8Atisha, 46, 48, 61; The Perfection of

Wisdom, 48Ault, Donald, 135, 201Avalokiteśvara, 126

Bacon, Sir Francis, 86, 201Badiou, Alain, xiiiBaker, Carlos, 89, 95, 100, 106Bandy, Melanie, 136Barthes, Roland, 57, 193Batchelor, Stephen, xvii, 2, 4, 6, 8,

10–14, 25–7, 31–2, 42, 47, 49, 64–7, 77, 142, 182, 191, 199

Bate, Jon, 178, 204

Bate, Walter Jackson, 154Bateson, Gregory, 119Bayly, Christopher Alan, 42, 208Becker, Ernst, 153, 202Beiser, 144Bell, John, 19Bennett, Barbara, 157–9Bentham, Jeremy, 84Bentley, G. E., Jr., 80, 152Berkeley, George, 27–8, 57, 189Berkis, 144–5Bethlenianum College (Nagyenyed),

39–41Bhagavad-Gita, 6, 34Bignon, Abbé, 25Blackman, 153–4Blake, William, xiv, 2, 5, 55–6, 60,

64, 68–81, 83–5, 89, 93–5, 108, 113–45, 147–53, 159, 178, 181, 184, 192, 195–6, 198–202; Book of Urizen, 75, 83, 123, 125, 130, 133, 136; The Four Zoas, 75, 124–5, 138, 141, 148; Jerusalem, 68–9, 72, 84, 124–6, 136, 138–40, 151; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 68–81, 88–9, 93, , 127–30, 136, 148, 193, 195–6, 198; Milton, 64, 68–9, 83, 89, 114–45, 147, 151, 200–2; Songs of Innocence and Of Experience, 75, 125, 199; Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 68, 125

Blanchot, Maurice, 57, 208Bloom, Harold, 74, 76–77, 79,

85, 89, 94, 100, 103, 150, 169, 197, 202

Bodhi, Bhikkhu, 61–2, 86, 91, 197

Index

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I n d e x226

Bodhicāryāvatāra, 48, 88Bodhichitta, 56Bogle, George, 17Bohm, David, 116Bourdieu, Pierre, xiiBracher, Mark, 81, 132, 149–50Broglio, Ron, 182Brown, Charles, 155Brown, Marshall, 5, 132, 137, 190Bryant, Jacob, 85, 94Buchanan, Francis, xixBuddha, xi, 1–2, 7–9, 12, 15, 26–7,

30, 37, 41, 46, 47–8, 50–2, 55–64, 71, 72, 75–6, 78–9, 81, 83, 85, 91, 94, 100–101, 107, 116–17, 119, 122, 125–6, 132, 135, 152–54, 179–84, 190, 192, 196–9, 202, 205; Shakyamuni, 181, 190; Siddhartha Gautama, 181; tathāgata, 63, 71, 126, 189, 199

Buddhism, xi, 1–2, 4, , 30–53, 90, 111–12, 180–87, 192, 194–5, 199, 204; Cittamātra (Mind Only), 68; Hīnayāna, 47, 61, 103, 194; Kangyur, 15, 44–5; Mahāyāna, 10, 47, 59, 61, 71, 74–6 103, 118, 194; “Marana-sati” (death-awareness practice), 162–4; Tengyur, 15; Tibetan Buddhism, xi–xvii, 10–12, 15–16, 44–6, 203; Zen, 148–51

Burke, Edmund, 33–5, 65, 191, 204

Burnet, Thomas, 67Burnouf, Eugene, 2, 38, 47–50;

L’introduction á l’historie du buddisme indien, 49

Butler, Judith, 132Byron, Lord (George Gordon),

60, 67, 93, 97, 155–7, 158–9, 167–75, 177, 203; Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, 67, 156, 169, 171; “Darkness,” 169–71; Don Juan, 67; The Giaour, 67, 171–2; Manfred, 171–4

Campbell, Archibald, 38Cannon, Garland, 20–2Cantor, Paul, 196Capra, Fritjof, 119Carlson, Julie, 159, 203Cassirer, Ernst, 4Chandrakirti, 61China, xvi, 9, 11, 13–15, 19, 37Cieslik, Hubert, 14–15Clark, David Lee, 94–6, 101, 105

114, 148, 178, 197, 199Clark, Steve and Masashi Suzuki, 72Colebrooke, Henry Thomas,

35, 192Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6, 11–12,

60, 64–7, 115; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 65–7; Sibylline Leaves, 67

colonialism, xiv–xxCommentatio de Scriptus Tanguitics,

26Connolly, Tristanne, 72Conze, Edward, 63, 76–8, 90–1,

124, 138Coote, 163Cox, Jeffrey, v, xii, 150–4, 160–1,

168, 178–9, 184, 194, 202–5Csetri, S., 38Csoma de Körös, Alexander, xii,

xvi, 15, 20, 25–32, 36–49, 192, 198

Cumberland, George, 151Cunningham, Alexander, 9Curran, Stuart, 88–9, 93–6, 99,

104, 110, 113–14, 198

Damasio, Antonio, 144Damon, S. Foster, 124, 151, 202Darwin, Erasmus, 115Daśabhumika, 48Davenport, 191De Charmes, Christopher, 74, 189de Fano, Domenico, 26Deleuze, Gilles, 136Deleuze, Gilles and Félix

Guattari, 93


I n d e x 227

De Man, Paul, 115Derrida, Jacques, 57, 148–9,

168, 193de Sacy, Silvestre, 35Descartes, Réne, 86Deschamps, Abbé Auguste, 50Desideri, Ippolita, xii, 15De Silva, Padmasiri, 138Dhammapada, 116dharma, 62Dharmakīrti, 61Diamond Sutra, 49, 63, 76, 194Dorje, Rig’dzin, 183, 186–7, 205Drew, John, 11–12, 95–6Dubie, Norman, 191Duka, Theodore, 30–1, 45

East India Company, 2, 15–25, 30–6, 42–3, 47; East India Company Act (1783), 33; India Act (1784), 33

Easwaran, Eknath, 116, 119Economides, Louise, 71, 191Edwardes, Michael, 40Eichhorn, J. G., 40Erdman, David, 80

Faraday, Micheal, 119Felman, Shoshona, 185Ferber, Michael, 73, 162, 195Ferreira, Christovao (Sawano

Chūan), 14–15Fields, Rick, xvii, 2, 8Fisher, Michael, 3Flew, Antony, 181Foucault, Michel, 57, 193, 196Fourmont, Etienne, 25–6Four Noble Truths, 46, 55–6,

59–64, 67, 90Fox, Edward, 30, 39–40Franklin, Michael J., 7, 20–3,

34, 191Freeman, John, 115–16Freud, Sigmund, 196Fry, Paul, 162Frye, Northrop, 71, 74, 76, 172

Fulford, Tim and Peter J. Kitson, 23, 190

Fuseli, Henry, 72

Gerard, James Gilbert (Dr), 45Gibbon, Edward, 204Gibson, Evan K., 162Gilchrist, Alexander, 152Ginsberg, Allen, 70Giorgi, Antoine-Augustin, 26, 43Godwin, William, 199, 204Grabo, Carl, 116Great Game, 24–6, 42Green, Andre, 143Grimes, Ronald L., 126, 132, 147, 151Gyatso, Lobsang, 110Gyatso, Tenzin (His Holiness, The

Dalai Lama), xii, xvi, 4, 37–8, 62, 68, 83, 88, 90, 100, 113, 118, 181–2, 199–200, 205

Haar, Michael, 58Hahn, 180Hamilton, Alexander, 35–6Hampson, Norman, 24Hardy, R. Spence, 50Harrison, Robert Pogue, 168, 171,

173–5Hartley, David (Dr.), 119Hartman, Geoffrey, 5, 143Harvard University Medical School,

118Hastings, Warren, 14, 16–17, 20–1,

24, 33–9, 192Hayward, Jeremy W. and Francisco

J. Varela, 118, 189Heart Sutra, 63, 190, 194, 201Hegel, G. W. F., 64, 194, 201Heidegger, Martin, 56–7, 71, 1502,

164, 173–5, 195Hesiod, 92Hilton, Nelson, 69–71, 73, 75Hinduism, 2, 4, 9, 58, 90Hixon, Lex, 75–6, 196Hoagwood, Terrence Alan, 114Hodgson, Brian Houghton, 32, 45


I n d e x228

Hogle, Jerrold, 89, 102, 115Holmes, Richard, 157–8, 203Holwell, John, 33Hopkirk, Peter, 24, 43, 189Howard, John, 124, 134, 200Hoy, David Couzens, 137Hume, David, 27–8, 57, 120, 199Hunt, Leigh, 205Hunter, J. Paul, 86–7Hutchings, Kevin, 181Huxley, T. H., 199

India, 11–17, 30–7, 43–9Irigaray, Luce, xiiiIslam, 9

James, David, 201Japan, 4, 12–15Jemielity, Thomas, 74, 196Jesuits, 11–15, 34Johnson, Barbara, 87Johnson, Joseph, 34, 72–3Jones, Ken, 180–2Jones, Sir William, 2, 7–9, 16, 23–4,

32, 72–3, 85, 90, 113, 191, 202; Gita Govinda (1792), 35; Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1789), 35

Jung, Carl, xii, 200–1

Kabalsingh, 180Kant, Immanuel, xix, 1, 16, 58,

64–5, 142karma, 90, 195Keats, John, 5–6, 59, 64–8, 93,

150–1, 154–5, 159–62, 174, 186, 195–6, 202–4; Endymion, 155; Hyperion, 155, 203

Kelso, J. A. Scott, 115Kennedy, C. P. (Captain), 31, 44–5Keown, Damien, xvi, 69–70, 103,

120, 126, 153, 190, 192–4, 197, 204

Khan, Kublai, 11Khan, Mönge, 10–11, 15King, Richard, xi, 2, 4, 36–7, 39,

49, 113

King-Hele, Desmond, 89, 115–16Kitson, Peter J., 23–4, 191Klaproth, J. H., 40, 44; Leben des

Budd’a, 42Klonsky, Martin, 73Klossowski, Pierre, 62Kristeva, Julia, 107–8, 136–7, 139,

192, 198, 202Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth, 153,

159–60Kuhn, Thomas, 58

Lacan, Jacques, 78, 139–40, 143–4, 196

Laird, Thomas, 189Lancaster, Lewis, 179Lanjuinais, Jean-Denis, 27–8Lao-tzu, 195Lasch, Christopher, 144Lavater, Johann, 69, 195Leask, Nigel, xix, 20, 23, 89–90,

96–7, 114, 198Lechte, 107Levin, Jonathan, 119Levinas, Emmanuel, 149, 167–8Levine, George, 87Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 85, 93, 115Lewis, Linda M., 89–91, 93–4,

101, 198Licharov, Ivan, 25Lief, Judtih, 165, 174L’introduction á l’historie du

buddisme indien, 49Locke, John, 199, 201Lödo, Venerable Lama, 167Longinus, 65Lopez, Donald J., Jr., xi–xii, xx, 2,

8, 31–2, 37, 47–8, 190Lotus Sutra, 6, 48–9, 64, 192, 197Low, James, 28Lowes, Jonathan L., 12Lucretius, 115Lundeen, Kathleen, 137Lussier, Mark, xii, 143, 149, 168,

189, 191, 197, 200Lyrical Ballads, 56, 67


I n d e x 229

Magus, and Higgins, 58Mahāparanibbāna, 153–4Mahāsatipatthāna Sūtra, 197Mahavayutpatti, 45–6Maitreya, 61Makdisi, Saree, 20, 22, 24, 32–3,

72, 77, 93–5, 114, 137, 164, 190, 198, 201

Malthus, Rev. Thomas Robert, 84Manjushri (Buddha of Wisdom),

xviiManuel, Frank E., 16Markley, Robert, 135, 201Marshall, Julie G., 18, 42Masuzama, Tomoko, xviii, 4, 31–2,

36, 489 114, 143Matthieu, Richard, 118, 145Matthieu, Richard and Trinh Thuan,

145McConnell, Frank, 170, 178McCort, Dennis, xix, 5, 142, 189,

191, 193McGann, Jerome, 147–8, 161–62,

168, 171McKay, Alex, 33Medwin, Thomas, 96Mee, Jon, 80, 137Megill, Alan, 58, 193Mellor, Anne, 87–8Menke, J. B., 25Milligan, Barry, 12Mitchell, W. J. T., 128,

135–6, 195Moi, Toril, 108Monk, Samuel, 65Moorcroft, William, 26, 30, 42More, Hannah, 204Morton, Timothy, 58, 64, 189, 191,

194, 200–1Moskal, Jeanne, 80Mukerjee, Hirendra Nath, 30, 37,

40, 42–6Müller, Max, 26, 48Mullin, Glen, 151, 153–4,

166, 168Muneyoshi, Yanagi, 71

Nagarjuna, 46, 61, 64, 79–81, 97, 195

Nairn, Rob, 163Nepal, 5, 46–7Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 50–3, 55–

61, 67–9, 71, 129, 142, 149–50, 181, 192–5, 198

Nimii, Hatsuko, 119, 139nirvana, 57–8, 62, 101, 110,

112, 162Noble Eightfold Path, 62, 198

Oishi, Kazuyoshi, 71Olson, Philip, xix, 142, 189Orientalism, xiv, 2–4, 7, 20–4Oriental Renaissance, xvii, 3, 72Oriental Studies, 31Otterspeer, William, 23Otto, Peter, 125Outram, Dorinda, 3

Pagliaro, Harold, 124–6Paine, Thomas, 205Pāli, 2, 4, 9, 24–5, 30Pandita, Sakya, 11, 191Parkes, Graham, 57Parraud, Abbé, 34Peat, F. David, xiiPeter the Great, 25–6Plato, 107Plotnitsky, Arkady, 116Polo, Marco, 11, 13, 183Ponlop, 167Poovey, Mary, 87prajñapāramitā (perfection of

wisdom), 27, 48, 56, 63, 71–101, 126–9, 193, 196, 198, 201; Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra of 8,000 Lines, 8, 196

Priestman, Martin, 90, 94, 194Puntsog, Sangye, 43–5

Quennell, Peter, 173–4

Rahula, 182Ramakrishna, 153


I n d e x230

Rémusat, Abel, 26, 35, 45, 191Ricci, Matteo, 13–14Richardson, Alan, 98–9, 101–2,

106–7, 198Rigby, Kate, 142, 201Rinchen, Geshe Sonam, 98Rinpoche, Choyyam Trungpa, 74,

153, 186, 189Rinpoche, Dilgo Kyentse, 153Rinpoche, Kalu, 88, 91–2, 100,

107, 112, 191Rinpoche, Soygal, 147, 159, 167,

169, 175, 179Rinpoche, Zachoeje, v, xvi,

184, 204Robinson, Crabb, 15Roe, Nicholas, 203Rosenberg, Larry, 163Rossetti, Dante, 124Rossetti, William, 124Roszak, Theodore, 116Rubrick, Friar William of, 10–11Rudy, John, 7, 64, 66–70, 189, 191

Saddharmapundarika, 48Said, Edward, 7, 22–3, 190Saint-Hilaire, Barthélemy, 50Sāmaññaphala Sūtra, 101samsara, 46, 62, 100–1, 111, 114,

162, 194Samten, 167Samyutta Nikāya (Sūtra Pitaka),

196Sanskrit, 2, 4, 8, 24–5, 30Saunders, Robert, 18–19Schiller, Friedrich von, 64–5Schlegel, Friedrich, xvii, 5, 36, 56,

142, 194Schöfft, Ágost, 45Schopenhauer, Arthur, 50, 57–8,

129, 147, 168, 193, 201; The World as Will and Representation, 50, 57–8

Schwab, Raymond, xvii, 2–3, 9, 20, 23, 28, 34–6, 41, 48–51, 142

Seigel, Jerrold, 5–6, 27, 56, 67Serres, Michel, 174Severn, Joseph, 155Shaddhatissa, Hammalawa, 185Shantideva (Śantideva), 46,

48, 61, 64, 88, 91, 195; Bodhicāryāvatāra (The Way of the Bodhisattva), 48, 64, 88, 91

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 67, 86–8, 155–9, 170, 203; Frankenstein, 67, 86–9, 156, 197

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56, 59, 64, 86, 89–112, 117, 120, 135, 141, 143, 147, 155–6, 162–7, 197–9, 200, 203; Alastor, 60, 90, 96, 156, 162–7, 203–4; “Mont Blanc,” 156; Prometheus Unbound, 56, 67–8, 86, 88–117, 120–1, 123, 128, 143, 164, 198, 200; Queen Mab, 67, 90

Simmer-Brown, Judith, 63, 77Singh, Ranjit, 43Small, Christopher, 87Smith, Adam, 198Smith, R., 167Southey, Robert, 204Spinoza, Baruch, 28spiritual colonialism, 3–16St. Petersburg, 3, 15, 25–6, 49Stein, M. Aurel, 30–1Stewart, John, xixSukhāvativyūha, 48Śūnyatā (emptiness), 58, 63, 194Sutra on the Adherence to the Great

Mantra, 26, 29Swearer, Donald K., 205Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 74–5, 77,

79–80Swift, Jonathan, 74–5, 196Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 124synchronicity, xii, 19, 200–1

Tannenbaum, Leslie, 80Taoism, 90, 195Tatham, Frederick, 152Tayler, Irene, 126–7


I n d e x 231

Taylor, Charles, 57–8, 67–8, 142Teltscher, Kate, 16–18, 23Terjék, József, 43Teshoo Lama (Panchen Lama),

16–18Thayé, Kongtrul Londö, 183–4Thomas, Edward J., 38Thoreau, Henry David, 49Thuan, Trinh, 118, 145Thurman, Robert, 63, 91, 102, 197Tibet, 5, 9, 15–23Tibetan, 2, 4, 8, 24–5, 30, 37–40;

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 152–3, 159, 167

Todorov, Tzvetan, 23Tokugawa Shogunate, 15Tsong kha pa, 61Tung-shan, 153Turner, Samuel, 17–20, 191

Umehara, Takeshi, 151

Valadier, Paul, 59Varela, Francisco J., 120, 144, 189Vogler, Thomas A., 201Volney, Constantine, 36, 56,

85, 204

Wallace, Alan, 98, 120, 183–4Walsche, Maurice, 101,

153–4, 197Wasserman, Earl, 162Waterhouse, David M., 47Watts, Alan W., 1, 5, 195Webb, Timothy, 90, 101Wei-ming, 141

Weir, David, 20, 24, 32–4, 71–3, 78, 93, 196

Weiskel, Thomas, 65–6, 77Weisman, Karen, 90Weston, Anthony, 138Wilkins, Charles, 6, 34, 72;

Bhagavad-Gita (1785), 34, 72; Gita Govinda (1792), 35; Hitopadesha (1787), 35

Williams, Meena, 113–14Williams, Paul, 67, 73–9, 112,

177, 195Williams, Raymond, 2Wilson, H. H., 2, 25, 31, 42, 191Wittreich, Joseph, 80, 123, 127,

129, 150, 202Wolf, Cary, 169–70Wollstonecraft, Mary, 205Woodhouse, Richard, 150Woodman, Ross, 89, 107, 199Wordsworth, William, xix, 2, 7, 56,

60, 64, 66, 115, 142, 178, 180, 189, 204

Xavier, Francis, 12–14, 27, 50

Yeats, William Butler, 124Yeshe, Lama Thubten, 153Yolton, John E., 24Young, Thomas, 119, 200

Zajonc, Arthur, xiii, 115, 118, 200

Zangla Monastery (Tibet), 43–4Zohar, Danah, 116, 144Zoroastrianism, 90, 94–5


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