Some Impressions of the Buddha: Dreiser and Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia

SOME IMPRESSIONS OF THE BUDDHA: DREISER AND SIR EDWIN ARNOLD'S THE LIGHT OF ASIA Douglas C.Stenerson Since the early nineteenth century, a small but influential minority of American writers and intellectuals has responded with varying degrees of intensity to the religious and philosophical traditions of Asia. One of these authors is Theodore Dreiser. His literary use of Hindu teachings in The Stoic (1947) is well known and has been evaluated by a number of critics.1 The strong interest in Buddhism expressed in his non-fiction, on the other hand, has largelyescaped attention. Dreiser, like most American and British readers, had to depend for information about Eastern traditions on English translations and interpretations of the primary sources. Had he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, he could, like Emerson and Thoreau, have learned a good deal about Hinduism but not much about Buddhism. At that time Hinduism, and to a lesser extent Confucianism, were widely publicized because British and continental Orientalists had translated Hindu scriptures like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Vishnu Purana from sanskrit and Confucius from the Chinese. Buddhism, for which parallel sources in English did not yet exist, still remained largely an enigma. Only a few of the European scholars to whom lay readers looked for guidance had mastered Pali, which, along with other Oriental languages, was required for Buddhistic studies. Furthermore, even specialists found Buddhism confusing because of the many guises it assumed as it spread from northern India to Ceylon, Tibet, Burma, China, Korea and Japan. Not until the 1860s and 1870s did the literature grow sufficiently and attract enough attention to account for the vogue of Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia (1879), a lively and colorful narrative poem about the Buddha.2 Just as Dreiser derived his summary of Hindu doctrines in The Stoic mainly from the Bhagavad-Gita, so he drew heavily upon Arnold's poem for his knowledge of Buddhism. Some time between 1900 and 1916,he preserved nine substantial excerpts from it in his scrapbooks--more than from any other single work.3 He apparently did not record any explanation or comment, and no copy of The Light of Asia 388 Douglas C. Stenerson appears among his books in the Dreiser Collection in the University of PennsylvaniaLibrary. One reason for the striking success of The Light of Asia with Western readers was that Arnold, by filtering Buddhist myth through his Victorian consciousness, created an intellectual landscape familiar enough not to be forbidding but still exotic enough to be intriguing. The poem appealed strongly to Dreiser because in its major themes he heard reverberations of some of his own most deeply-help feelings and convictions. As this essay will show, these universal themes, such as love of nature, the Darwinian struggle, mutability, the power of sex, and several others, pervade his novels as well as his non-fiction. As a truth-seeker on his own lower level--a self-styled "Ishmael, a wanderer"--he could appreciate what the Buddha's six-year quest for enlightenment cost in suffering and self-sacrifice.4 The purpose of this essay is fourfold: first, to compare Dreiser with his contemporaries interested in Eastern thought; second, to consider how and under what circumstances he was drawn toward it; third, to show how each of the passages he chose from Arnold parallels and confirms views he already held; and fourth, to examine his references to the Buddha, the ways in which he uses them, and the extent and reliability of the knowledge behind them. Although the effect of Europe upon American life and thought has been a constant theme for reflection since the first settlements, the parallel Asian influence did not become a subject for scholarly inquiry until the early 1930s. In the vanguard were authors like Arthur E. Christy, with The Orient in American Transcendentalism (1932). In an appraisal of the extensive scholarship that now exists, Carl T. Jackson points out that some Americans have viewed Oriental thought with "interest and qualified appreciation (usually of those elements most similar to one's own ideas)" and others with "acceptance and even assimilation of parts of the Asian traditions."5 Dreiser...