Enlightenment What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well Without Perfection
INTRODUCTION
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n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a revolution in the history of Buddhism occurred. As European and U.S. imperial interests in Asia advanced, Buddhist communities were forced to grapple with both territorial encroachments and the claims to greater rationality that these foreign powers brought with them. Aligned with sympathetic Westerners (Orientalists, anticolonialists, and mystics), Buddhists across Asia began to reinvent Buddhism in response to this epochal shift. Buddhism, they said, was not to be found in the folk practices of ritual, recitation, magic, and worship that visitors were witnessing. The true Buddhism, though perhaps not immediately evident, was to be found in its rich scriptural history. And what would be found there not only was as philosophical and rational as modern Western philosophy but also had achieved these insights millennia earlier. Further still, it had a method—meditation—that could close the gap between our claims to rationality and our still unruly emotional lives. As Buddhism continued to update itself over the century to come, claims would also be made that it was now and had always been pacifist, egalitarian, feminist, democratic, and antiracist.1
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What is perhaps most remarkable about this reinvention of Buddhism is how well it worked. Based on the strength and eloquence of its supporters as well as the truly powerful insights to be gleaned in the scriptural canon, modern Buddhism became the dominant way of understanding what it meant to be Buddhist. Buddhism went from despised other to universally applauded emancipator in a matter of decades. But its success has recently come under fire. For many critics, this modern global Buddhism is an inauthentic, Westernized invention that ripped Buddhist practices and histories out of their variegated local contexts and denied the power, meaning, and logic of the aspects that did not conform to Western ideals about rational living. In many ways the criticism is true, and this history has resulted in widespread ignorance of Buddhist life and even provided cover for the rise of new, militant Buddhist nationalisms in countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar.2 Nevertheless, as scholars in Buddhist studies have noted, simply discarding global, modern Buddhism as a false accretion is itself a rather inaccurate way to approach the history of Buddhism. After all, it developed as a missionary religion that spread throughout Asia over centuries. In so doing, it was constantly grafted to local traditions, transformed through encounters with other ways of belief, and forced to reform itself as other traditions surged or encroached. By the time Europeans began to really study Buddhism in the nineteenth century, they encountered a history so diverse that most Buddhists would not have even recognized each other as being part of the same tradition.3 Indeed, in some ways analogous to the rise of PanAfricanism, it was only in the face of the European onslaught that diverse Buddhists would begin to recognize their connections and develop a Pan-Buddhist, anticolonial, pro-peace, promeditation agenda.4
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This is a book about twentieth-century novels that incorporate this modern global Buddhism. Its argument is that we 5 can learn a lot from the novels about the complexity of this new era in the history of religion, and, more broadly, what that complexity teaches us about how to structure our desires, relationships, and activities in ways that can best promote human flourishing while still recognizing the inevitable dissatisfactions of human experience. In briefest form, I think that what we learn from this literary history of global Buddhism is that we live in a world where our hopes for some other way of thinking to save us have been destroyed. There is no absolute enlightenment coming from Buddhism or anywhere else. But this is precisely the lesson of modern Buddhism: once we move past the desire for complete resolution, we can begin to appreciate the minor insights and partial enlightenments—what Joseph Conrad called “spectral illuminations”—that light a path to lives of greater liberation and authenticity, even as we know full well that new problems will always arise. In a sense, this is itself a spectral illumination of classical Buddhism. The canonical teaching was that life was unsatisfactory and that our only path to overcoming it was a course of righteousness that would eventually allow us to escape the cycle of reincarnation. This broad soteriological goal has largely fallen away from modern Buddhism. But a specter of its insight continues to illuminate something about our existence. Samuel Beckett (who picked up a pessimistic strand of Buddhism from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer) said it succinctly: “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” 6 Some modern Buddhists had promised something like a cure. They promised that we could live in this world without anxiety or fear, and with tremendous generosity and presence. Modern Buddhist literature contains the spectral illumination of classical Buddhism’s
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response: you cannot live in such a complete way. The world runs beyond you. There is no cure for all the complexity and anxiety of life. But though we cannot fully overcome, we can still ameliorate our condition. Beckett again: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” 7 Modern literary encounters with Buddhism offer their own spectral illuminations about how to fail better from within this incomplete state. I began writing this book because, outside of Buddhist studies, recognition of the complexity of what modern Buddhism is has been very slow. For many literary and cultural critics, philosophers, and those generally interested in the humanities, Buddhism is primarily a philosophical and meditative practice.8 Indeed, one of my concerns here is that critics, theorists, and philosophers have so abstracted Buddhism that a caricatured vision of it now freely circulates among even the most sophisticated critics.9 In my first draft, I thought of my task as simply disabusing my fellow literary critics of their inaccurate ideas about Buddhism. But after a few colleagues read my several hundred pages of annoying finger-wagging, they encouraged me to think again about the purpose of this book. Through these conversations, I realized that I had something else to say about what we can learn through the study of modern Buddhism in world literature.10 This realization began with a simple insight: even modern Buddhism remains “embedded” in complex social systems and ways of life.11 That is to say, however much we have come to think of modern Buddhism as an abstraction of the lived experience of Buddhists, this abstraction is itself necessarily part of other social fabrics. Literature discloses to us how Buddhist practice has become embedded in global modernity in unpredictable ways. And studying Buddhism from this vantage teaches us that novels are not merely sites displaying
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the potential realization of philosophical ideas. They are not— or at least not always—moral fables. Rather, they can be social indices of how ideas are unevenly embedded in the world. Or, in simpler words, fiction can show us how ideas whose theoretical meaning we take for granted come to play out in surprising ways in our lived experience.12 As we will see, for example, the Buddhist ideal of dedicating one’s life to meditation does not mean removing oneself from the social world. Rather, it means creating the conditions in the social world that allow for some to undertake such rigorous meditations. These conditions may be as simple as time off from work or as complex as an entire monastic-political system dedicated to renting land to laypeople, using slaves to grow food, and collecting taxes in order to feed and house the monks. What we find in literary accounts, in turn, is a recognition of this whole interactive system that may escape modernizers, theorists, and meditative enthusiasts. The novels show how the ideals of Buddhist practice play out in the diverse situations of modern life. In this study, I focus on four primary themes—enlightenment, reincarnation, liberation, and authenticity—that predominate in the novels considered. While these ideas have appeared as philosophical concepts removed from everyday concerns or actual histories of Buddhist lives, I show how novelists explore their embeddedness in the difficult details of daily reality. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902), for example, considers the links between the desire for enlightenment and the practice of colonialism. The radical Tibetan secularist Jamyang Norbu, a century later, mines esoteric ideas about reincarnation for material paths to overthrowing Chinese colonization. Across this book, I consider ten novels that explore these themes and relations. The novels I have chosen tell a particular story about the
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embeddedness of Buddhism in modern literature. In brief form, it is as follows: deciding that total enlightenment is unachievable and personal identity is inescapable, these novelists embrace partial enlightenments as the most one can hope for within the accelerated conditions of global modernity. In so doing, they find themselves condemned to reincarnating failed historical processes, which they in turn seek to appropriate and reclaim for liberatory ends. This leads them to negotiate how their twin aspirations for spiritual and political liberation both coincide with and contradict each other, and how the irremovable suffering of being human requires an authentic way of being that embraces both humanity’s hopes and failures. Part of what I think blinds us to understanding this complexity of Buddhism in the modern world is that the desire for Buddhism to be special is incredibly strong. In a world of terror and suffering, modern Buddhism has presented itself as a realistic possibility for making life better. And modern Buddhists have indeed created new ways of being in the world that align with our highest aspirations. Mindfulness meditation for laypeople, which, as I discuss below, was practically invented in the early twentieth century, has had some documented success in decreasing anxiety and increasing awareness and joy.13 Engaged Buddhism, meanwhile, is a school of thought that developed in such contexts as Vietnamese responses to French and American colonization and Dalit critiques of caste Hinduism. Leading innovators—Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam and B. R. Ambedkar in India—reinterpreted everything in Buddhism, all the way down to the Four Noble Truths themselves. For Nhat Hanh, for example, old age, sickness, and death “are old ways of describing the First Noble Truth.” Speaking of suffering today, we should focus on “tension, stress, anxiety, fear, violence, broken families, suicide, war, conflict, terrorism,
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destruction of the ecosystem, global warming, etc.”14 Ambedkar’s version is similarly revolutionary, offering a vision of the ideal Buddhist not as a “perfect man” but as a “social servant.”15 Scholar Christopher Queen offers a synthesis of Ambedkar’s four new Noble Truths as follows: “For Ambedkar, the first noble truth for the present age was the widespread suffering of injustice and poverty; the second truth was social, political, and cultural institutions of oppression—the collective expressions of greed, hatred, and delusion; the third truth was expressed by the European ideals of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’; and the fourth truth was the threefold path of Ambedkar’s famous slogan [taken from the international labor movement], ‘Educate! Agitate! Organize!’ ”16 As these are ideals that developed in a global matrix of the modern striving for justice, they readily speak to the kind of world that many of us want to see today. And the idea that Buddhism has thousands of years of experience bringing peace, nondomination, and equality into the world gives it an unmatched pedigree. But while there are certainly brilliant moments of insight and justice in premodern Buddhist history, the idea of an unbroken continuum of Buddhist perfection is simply not true. What we should learn from Buddhism’s history is not that it has timetested ways to overcome suffering and create ideal worlds. Rather, it is that the creation of ideal worlds is an ongoing struggle with the conditions of one’s times that must constantly be updated. We run several risks in seeing things otherwise, including stereotyping Buddhists and ignoring the lessons of just how difficult it is to evenly embed our ideals in the foundations of society. And when Buddhists act like other humans and commit atrocities, we risk growing frustrated and abandoning what we can learn from the historical and modern forms of Buddhism altogether. After all, we should remember that
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Buddhism’s modern global reception was not always so rosy. In The British Discovery of Buddhism, Philip Almond records one reaction from a little before 1900: “Sirs and ladies, I venture to ask you if any people on the face of the earth seem to be more utterly indifferent to the shedding of blood and to human suffering than the followers of Buddhism.”17 More than a century later, when Buddhist monks were part of the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya in northern Myanmar, it was almost inconceivable to many onlookers that any Buddhists, let alone monks, could have done such a thing.18 It would be as wrong to think that the original British conception is correct as to hold that Buddhists are uniquely wonderful humans. Nevertheless, I recognize this story of enchantment and disenchantment, this rapture with the possibility of Buddhism that gives way to tremendous disappointment, because it is the story of my own engagement with Buddhism, which began in enthusiastic embrace and suffered a sharp decline in the face of learning this history. Each of these positions was mistaken, because what makes Buddhism worth thinking through is neither its perfection nor its failure, but rather how its remarkable ideals and practices have struggled to confront the everyday realities of human interactions and social orders. As I take the reader through this literary history, I will also share parts of my own story of learning, unlearning, and relearning Buddhism. This choice may surprise some of my academic colleagues. Personal accounts are not typical in professional literary criticism or exegetical religious studies, which tend to focus more on the texts being explicated than the author writing about them. Even a recent (and very interesting) book on the relationship between modernism and self-help, subtitled “searching for advice in modern literature,” does not reflect on the author’s own search for advice in what she is reading.19 Personal
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accounts are, however, relatively common in scholarly studies of modern Buddhism. Authors like Georges Dreyfus, Ann Gleig, and Evan Thompson weave their own experiences with Buddhism into their scholarly works.20 Why take this different approach? Often it is because they, like me, found the gap between the Buddhism they imagined and the Buddhism they encountered to be so remarkable. Thompson relates, for example, that he set out to learn about Buddhism as part of a “transformative path of rational liberation.” It promised not only what he had learned from Western philosophy—ideas about the meaning of life and the functions of the mind—but also a dedication to actually embodying that meaning through a meditative practice leading to “ ‘awakening.’ ”21 But while he certainly found elements of this in his study of Buddhism, he also found that meditation communities could be annoying and cliquish, meditation teachers could be sexual harassers, and Buddhist enthusiasts could overlook damning evidence about the history of Buddhism and the limits of meditation to advance its aims.22 While most scholars have personal narratives about why they got into their scholarship, with Buddhist modernism that narrative often is the scholarship: it’s the story of why we thought one thing about Buddhism, realized it was something much more complex, and then continued to probe this complexity. Indeed, for the most part, the initial disappointment did not chase people away: it is estimated that up to half of Buddhist studies scholars are also practicing Buddhists.23 (I am not one of them.) However, it did lead some of them, like Thompson, to become full-on critics of modern Buddhism. Part of my story is about how literature and my own experiences led me in a different direction: from this criticism into a new appreciation of what modern Buddhism offers.
“The stories about the Buddha, with their promise of awakening and liberation, are among the richest and most inspiring tales ever told. By focusing on the creation and complexities of a new, twentieth-century Buddhism and the novels it has produced, Avram Alpert delivers a brilliant work of literary history less concerned with the mythology of absolute perfection than the embedded, political, and existential realities that make modern Buddhism relevant for our lives today.” —CHARLES JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF MIDDLE PASSAGE, WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
“A groundbreaking contribution to Buddhist literary studies, A Partial Enlightenment provides a new lens through which to examine the influence of modern Buddhist themes in twentieth-century world literature. In his role of scholar-seeker, or contemplative critic, Alpert performs a complex, inclusive, and personal practice of literary exegesis, one that will enlighten academic and lay readers alike.” —RUTH OZEKI, NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING: A NOVEL
“In this stunningly sincere and groundbreaking work, Alpert takes the reader on a journey, often personal and always provocative, to see how literature doesn’t neatly present Buddhist truths but complicates the very way Buddhism is received and taught. No study of the modern encounter with Buddhism is complete without reading this truly refreshing and wonderful book.” —JUSTIN THOMAS MCDANIEL, AUTHOR OF THE LOVELORN GHOST AND THE MAGICAL MONK: PRACTICING BUDDHISM IN MODERN THAILAND
“Alpert’s timely book makes a significant contribution to reevaluating Buddhism’s role in engaging with the struggles and complexities of the postcolonial world. The book is at once a personal chronicle of disenchantment and discovery and a literary history that charts global Buddhism and the aesthetics of human fragmentation and connectivity. Its innovative readings are indispensable for students and scholars of religion and literature.” —GAURI VISWANATHAN, AUTHOR OF OUTSIDE THE FOLD: CONVERSION, MODERNITY, AND BELIEF
AVRAM ALPERT teaches writing at Princeton University. He is the author of Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki (2019). He is also coeditor of Shifter magazine and has written cultural criticism for outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Brooklyn Rail, and Truthout. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Anthea Behm, A/B Extract; Ed Ruscha, City, 1968, Custom Blur, 2011