The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire

Chapter 4 Buddhism and the Empire of the Self in Kipling’s Kim

Chapter 4 Buddhism and the Empire of the Self in Kipling’s Kim And whoso will, from Pride release, Contemning neither creed nor priest, May feel the Soul of all the East About him at Kamakura. —RUDYARD KIPLING, “Buddha at Kamakura” (1892) The world that exists is the result of the non-existence of any independent self-established substance. This emptiness of self-existence...is what the world is full of, a fullness sometimes called the Void. —NOLAN PLINY JACOBSON, Understanding Buddhism (1986) The Critical Polarization over Kim Criticism of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) has a history of polarization that is familiar to Kipling scholars, though not all scholarship has participated in this debate. The divide is between these two camps, oversimplified here for the sake of argument: (1) those who celebrate the novel’s accomplishment in portraying Indian peoples and Eastern religions with an evenhandedness and sympathy that transcends its author’s well-known prejudices, and (2) those who focus on the implicit racism of the novel, its assumption of British superiority, and its polemic to the effect that wise Indians must recognize the God-given rightness of British colonial rule.1 A few scholars, among them Alan Sandison and Zohreh T. Sullivan, have suggested that both positions are supportable Buddhism and the Empire of the Self in Kipling’s Kim ~ 129 and limited; each is necessary, neither sufficient. Ian Baucom goes so far as to argue that “selecting either one of these interpretations amounts to an act more of censorship than of reading” (Baucom 99).2 Even so, the critical polarization persists to the extent that virtually no treatment of Kim, including the present one, now can avoid addressing it. The critical polarization, which of course I have had to simplify, emerges most clearly in relation to two central interpretive questions: (1) how to read the character of the Teshoo Lama, and (2) how to read the ending of the novel, which amounts to how to read the character of Kim. Those who adhere to the first position read the Lama as a sage scholar of Buddhism, a devout pilgrim, and the most significant of Kim’s father figures. They argue that the Lama’s search is equally if not more important for plot and for theme than Colonel Creighton’s Great Game of espionage, noting that the novel ends with the Lama’s sacrifice of nirvana in order to return and guide Kim and gives him the closing words: “Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance. Come!” (289). Those who adhere to the second position read the Lama at best as a well-intentioned but childlike old man and at worst as an infantile dupe, a pawn in the Game whose “naiveté suggests an atrophied absence of adulthood” and whose “absence of anxiety must be similarly read as an expression of complicity in...the imperial enterprise” (Suleri 117, 120). They build upon Edward Said’s paradigm-shifting argument that the contest for Kim’s allegiance between Creighton’s Game and the Lama’s Way is in fact no contest at all because the latter is simply subsumed within and reduced to the former.3 In reading the ending of the novel, these critics focus on Kim’s penultimate crisis of identity and interpret the moment when he feels “the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without” as confirmation of his vocation in the “active” world of the British Secret Service and necessary rejection of the “passive” world of Buddhist renunciation (282). Prior to Said, Irving Howe attempted to maintain a balance by concluding that “the parallel lines” of the Great Game and The Way “cannot meet,” for they are “two ways of apprehending human existence, each of which is shown to have its own irreducible claims” (Howe 334). This balancing act, no less than the criticism on both sides of the divide, utterly solidifies the dichotomy. What interests me is the persistence of this polarization. The too ready explanation is, “It’s in the novel—don’t you see that the novel itself juxtaposes The Game and The Way?” But I question whether the text makes an exclusive choice between the two either necessary or obviated by either side. Why has the assumption of a dualism—whether agonistic, one-sided, or irreducible— been virtually automatic in Western criticism? An overarching agenda would be to argue that this polarization, regardless of the position taken, is symptomatic...