Dominique Jullien, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Jorge Luis Borges wrote a number of essays on Buddhism, including the book-length Que es el budismo?(What is Buddhism?),co-authored with Alicia Jurado in 1976, a lecture in Siete noches (Seven Nights, 1980), and a handful of texts written in the 1940s and 1950s.Key ideas from his interest in Buddhism also make their way into many of his best-known stories, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'The Immortal', 'The Library of Babel', and 'The Writing of the God'.His fascination with Buddhism, we learn from Dominique Jullien's very fine scholarly account, stemmed from an early encounter with Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia.It was nurtured by his readings of Buddhist treatises like the Visuddhimagga, the Yajur Veda, the Majjhima Nikāya, and the Milinda Panha in translations by English, French and German Orientalists.It was also coloured by his love of Arthur Schopenhauer, Rudyard Kipling, and Gustave Flaubert, all of whom were interested in Eastern philosophy and culture.The period in which his writings on Buddhism are most heavily concentrated (what Jullien calls the 'Buddha years', p. 19 and passim) coincides with his own embrace of cosmopolitanism in 'The Argentine Writer and Tradition ' (1955); it was also a period of personal and political difficulties, including his forced resignation from the Miguel Cané library in 1946, the year of Juan Domingo Perón's ascent to power, and his descent into total blindness.Reaching far beyond the autobiographical inflections of Borges' enduring fascination, Jullien shows how the Great Renunciation, a founding element in the story of Buddhism, forms the core of a whole cosmos of interlocking political, ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic preoccupations.Its simple 'narrateme' ('a king leaves the palace to become an ascetic') branches out within Borges' oeuvre into structuring motifs (notably the coincidentia oppositorum of power and powerlessness), into his ethical conviction regarding the 'nothingness' of identity
Source: Comparative Critical Studies
Author: Rory O'Bryen
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4387956537