Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick by Daniel Herman (review)

It is a well-known fact that the American novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819–91) was deeply interested in the religions of “the East” and that his work abounds in passing allusions to Hinduism, the Buddha, Islam, the journeys of Marco Polo in China and Central Asia, Tibetan lamas, and so on. In his study of Moby-Dick, Daniel Herman (2002 [1851]) focuses on the “twinned” figures of the narrator Ishmael and the doomed Captain Ahab, who fatally pursues the white whale, Moby Dick. He argues that both may be illuminated by being viewed through the lens of Zen, which he terms “a possible way of considering the novel that I hope will be of interest” (xv).

Herman commences with the publication of Eugene Burnouf’s (1844) translation of the Lotus Sutra in the Transcendentalist publication, The Dial, in 1844, the year that Melville returned from four years at sea. Melville was a great reader with a penchant for esoteric subject matter, but the two books he is known to have owned that directly concerned Buddhism, Edwin Arnold’s (1998 [1879]) verse life of the Buddha The Light of Asia and William Rounseville Alger’s (1867) The Solitudes of Nature and of Man, which had one chapter on the Buddha, were both published after Moby-Dick (1851). Part of Herman’s study is devoted to tracing what Melville knew about Buddhism and how he acquired this knowledge (for example, his reading of Pierre Bayle’s [1826 (1697)] An Historical and Critical Dictionary and Frederick Denison Maurice’s [1854 (1847)] The Religions of the World), but the majority is given over to a reading of the novel that foregrounds the crew of the whaling ship Pequod as “types” of Buddhist praxis or enlightenment.

Pre-eminent among these is Ishmael. Herman notes his “persistent focus on his inconsistent mental states” and suggests this is “essentially aligned with the practice of Zen Buddhism” (41). Ishmael’s abandonment of life in Manhattan and his choice of life at sea, his friendship with the “savage” Queequeg, and his persistence in the pursuit of the white whale, make him the exemplar of a person grounded in “groundlessness” in the perpetually changing sea. He is contrasted with Ahab, the Nantucketer, whose tie to the land is symbolized by the “small vial of sand” from the beach of his hometown. Herman interrogates a recurrent question in Melville scholarship: as Ahab and Ishmael are so clearly contrasted, which (if either) is the hero? Ahab, as captain, is central to the Pequod’s work and master of the crew. Ishmael, by contrast, stresses his marginal status and is marked as questing for spiritual transformation, a process that begins through his intimacy with Queequeg, in which he appreciates the serenity of indigenous culture. Herman connects this with shamatha (“dwelling in tranquillity”) meditation (67). His openness to different cultures, values, and religions connects to this serenity. Ishmael says he is “enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides” (73).

Moby-Dick is a first person narrative of a survivor of the Pequod’s last voyage, a voyage in which all of the crew apart from Ishmael perished. For Ahab, the great whale is a focus for his self-identity and also for his search for, and opposition to, God. Herman draws attention to Ahab’s monomaniacal consideration that “there is very little difference between” whether he is driven by an external God or a part of “his fractured self “ (127). Ahab, the captain, is the clearest example of the inability of “civilized” men to perceive the truth. Ishmael emphasizes the capacity of the three “savage” harpooneers, Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, to “see” truth and accept the reality in which they exist. This view, of course, is a version of Said’s Orientalism, an “othering” that assists in the self-definition of the...