The Buddha of the North: Swedenborg and Transpacific Zen

RELIGION and the ARTS Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 brill.nl/rart he Buddha of the North: Swedenborg and Transpacific Zen Devin Zuber* University of Osnabrück Abstract he Scandinavian scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) has had a curious relationship to the history of how Western literature has responded to Buddhism. Since Honoré de Balzac’s claim in the 1830s that Swedenborg was “a Buddha of the north,” Swedenborg’s mystical teachings have been consistently aligned with Buddhism by authors on both sides of the pacific, from D. T. Suzuki to Philangi Dasa, the publisher of the first Buddhist journal in North America. his essay explores the different historical frames that allowed for this steady correlation, and argues that the rhetorical and aesthetic trope of “Swedenborg as Buddha” became a point of cultural translation, especially between Japanese Zen and twentieth-century Modernism. Swedenborg’s figuration in the earlier work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake, moreover, might begin to account for the peculiar ways those two Romantics have particularly affected modern Japanese literature. he transpacific flow of these ideas ultimately complicates the Orientalist critique that has read Western aesthetic contact with Buddhism as one of hegemonic misappropriation. Keywords Swedenborg, Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, Philangi Dasa, literary history T he works of Emanuel Swedenborg, though largely unfamiliar to most readers today, had a surprisingly broad impact on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An Enlightenment polymath, Swedenborg made significant contributions to the fields of mineralogy and crystallography, as well as advancing the study of human physiology. He was perhaps *) I am very grateful to Nicholas Marino (C.U.N.Y.), Wakoh Shannon Hickey (Duke University), and Jane Williams-Hogan (Bryn Athyn College) for their insightful comments, corrections and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as to Sara Meyer (Osnabrück) for her koan-like support. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/107992610X12598215383242 2 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 the first scientist to pinpoint voluntary motor control in the gray matter of the cerebral cortex, and noted in the 1750s that the right and left hemispheres of the brain performed distinctly separate mental functions—one associated with rational and intellectual processes, the other with emotions and intuition—well before this became accepted physiological fact.1 In the realm of cosmology, Swedenborg’s nebular hypothesis significantly anticipated Emanuel Kant and La Place’s by twenty years, and as Gustaf Arrhenius notes, Swedenborg’s descriptions of the Milky Way and its movement comes close to current assumptions made by astrophysicists on how magnetic galactic clusters form (181). Despite such remarkable prescience and prodigal success, Swedenborg underwent a profound existential crisis at the peak of his career. His attempt to locate the physical origins of the soul in the human body met a solid impasse, and he found himself vacillating between abject despair and a rushing sense of exhilaration that he was on the verge of something new. He returned to breathing techniques and meditational practices that he had first experimented with as a young boy, and took up again the Pietistic fervor that had characterized his father’s Lutheran household in Sweden. He became interested in Lapland shaman techniques that could reputedly separate the soul from the body (Dole and Kirven 90), and began noting how he detected “a certain mysterious radiation . . . that darts through some sacred temple of the brain” when he meditated on certain topics and ideas.2 After a series of visions that occurred during a trip to Europe, Swedenborg felt that his life’s vocation had finally become clear: from thence on he was to become a scientist of the human soul, directed by the Divine to write about the things “seen and heard” with his gifts of spiritual insight. Over 1) According to the neuroscientist and historian Charles Gross, Swedenborg’s work on the mind and brain anticipated the development of cognitive neurophysiology in three significant ways. First, Swedenborg posited the instrumental role of the cerebral cortex in sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, one hundred years before this became accepted scientific fact. Secondly, he articulated something akin to a neuron doctrine, even though neurons had yet to be scientifically described, primarily through his creative use of Marcello Malphigi’s earlier descriptions of cortical glands in De Cerebri. Finally, and perhaps most astonishingly, Swedenborg mapped out the somatotopic organization of motor functions to different regions of the cerebral cortex, outlining pathways of communication between each sense organ to parts of the cortex itself. his view was “totally unprecedented and not to reappear until well into the nineteenth century,” writes Gross (127). 2) Emanuel Swedenborg, Diarium Spiritualis [Spiritual Experiences], no. 2951. As is the tradition in scholarship on Swedenborg, all subsequent numerical references to his work refer to numbered sections of the text, and not page numbers. D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 3 the next twenty-seven years, until his death in 1772, Swedenborg prolifically wrote and published some twenty-seven theological works that defy easy categorization. Part speculative theology, part biblical exegesis, mixed with visionary accounts of things seen and heard in a spiritual world, these writings went on to cast a long shadow across the nineteenth century. For many Romantics, Swedenborg subsequently became a symbol of antiestablishment Protestant mysticism, and by 1850 Ralph Waldo Emerson had enshrined Swedenborg as the token representative of the “mystic” in human culture in his “Representative Men” series. At the same time that the complex shape of Swedenborg’s life was being eclipsed by his reputation as a mystic, Buddhist ideas were beginning to seep into the European and American conversation over non-Christian belief systems and the nascent emergence of comparative religion as a scholarly discipline. In a broad sense, it is no surprise that Swedenborg’s name became associated with Buddhism and other “oriental” religions in various heterodox contexts, be it the syncretic radicalism of French Rosicrucian and Masonic societies to the liberalism of the New England Transcendentalists. Upon closer inspection, the relation between Swedenborg’s ideas and the history of Buddhism in the West—particularly in its Zen and Shinto permutations—proves to be a much deeper and more sustained case of ideological symmetries unfolding across a broad span of world literature, than simply a matter of idiosyncratic amalgamation that saw equal radical potential in “Hindoo” scriptures, ancient Egyptian mythology, and Enlightenment discourses on equality and the individual. he affinities between Buddhism and Swedenborg intrigued Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the primary transmitter of Zen for Western readers and audiences in the twentieth century, and Swedenborg remained a touchstone to which Suzuki often returned. When asked late in his life by the religious scholars Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade to elucidate on the perceived parallels that Swedenborg seemed to exhibit with Mahayana Buddhism, Suzuki brandished a spoon from the dinner table, and smilingly emphasized that “this spoon now exists in Paradise . . . We are now in Heaven.” Swedenborg, Suzuki went on to announce to his European friends, “is your Buddha of the North.”3 3) Corbin, Alone with the Alone 356–57. Corbin relates this anecdote in Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, his seminal work on Sufi mysticism. It comes as no surprise that Corbin would discuss Swedenborg with Suzuki, as Corbin himself was fascinated by the connections between Swedenborg and notions of imagination 4 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 Suzuki was not the first to explicitly configure Swedenborg as a Western Buddha; Suzuki most likely knew of a bizarre, hybrid text entitled Swedenborg the Buddhist, or the Higher Swedenborgianism Its Secrets and hibetan Origin, that had first appeared in Los Angeles in 1887, and was subsequently translated into Japanese in 1893. Given Suzuki’s deep engagement with European Romantic literature, his words could be equally echoing Honoré de Balzac in Louis Lambert, published in 1833. In a long letter, written before he goes insane, Louis Lambert enthuses to his uncle that out of all religious figures in the world from Confucius to Christ, Swedenborg alone “will perhaps be the Buddha of the North” for modernity (237–38). While it is a mistake to forget the ironic frames of this novel and interpret Lambert’s words for Balzac’s own (as Rene Wellek once did), Balzac elsewhere in the 1830s published remarks that Swedenborg was a “Bouddha chrétien,” an iconic religious figure who straddled religious and cultural difference in such a way that seems to have attracted Balzac’s utopian interests in social reformulations.4 Between Balzac’s broad incorporation of Swedenborg into a general idea of “Buddhism” in the 1830s and Suzuki’s later brandishing of a spoon, there lies a one hundred and twenty-year history of Buddhist thought impacting Western literature. his essay explores how Swedenborg has functioned as a veritable raft of ideas between East and West within this time span, and argues that strands of Swedenborgian doctrines—ideas on time, consciousness, language, and epistemology— have enabled certain Western authors to approach and adumbrate Zen concepts, even if such authors were relatively unfamiliar with Buddhism as a distinct intellectual tradition apart from other “oriental” religions, like Hinduism. On the other hand, Swedenborg’s ideas can be seen to ferry in the other direction, towards the West from the East, in the precise ways that Swedenborg’s concepts became a point of focalization where Zen authors (or artists, as we shall see) adapted and translated Buddhist concerns into a Western Judeo-Christian framework. I begin with Balzac’s claim that Swedenborg was a Buddha who “spoke for all world religions,” held by various Sufi thinkers. Two of Corbin’s major essays on Swedenborg and Islam were posthumously collected and published in 1995’s Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam. 4) In addition to what various characters say in Louis Lambert and Séraphita, Balzac himself refers to Swedenborg as a “Christian Buddha” in the Avant-propos to La comédie humaine (I: 16). René Wellek claimed in his influential essay, “he Concept of Romanticism in Literary History,” that “a study of Balzac’s religious views reveals that he declared himself a Swedenborgian many times” (174), a distortion that has been most usefully corrected by Lynn Wilkinson (he Dream of an Absolute Language). D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 5 and work through aspects of Swedenborg’s theology that might have lent themselves to this sort of loose interpretation. Balzac’s sweeping statements on Swedenborg, though vague, do anticipate how Swedenborg became incorporated into early notions of religious pluralism and the related development of comparative religious studies, especially in America, where Swedenborgian theology shaped two key events in the history of Buddhism’s engagement with the West: the publication in 1855 of Lydia Maria Child’s he Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages, and the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. I will then consider the ways that D. T. Suzuki, Philangi Dasa (the publisher of the first Buddhist journal in the United States), and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi could be said to have engaged Swedenborg from within a fully Buddhist perspective. here is a historical weight and logic to ending with these figures, as all three were much swayed by Romantic authors who in their turn had been noticeably influenced by Swedenborg. Suzuki’s translations of Swedenborg into Japanese and his separate essays on the mystic were partially the ripple effects of his peripheral relation to the World’s Parliament of Religions, as well as his early stint as a lecturer in English literature with a specialization in William Blake. Before Dasa had published his influential Zen newspaper and his book, Swedenborg the Buddhist, Dasa had digested a theosophical stew of ideas that hearkened back to how Balzac situated Swedenborg as a Bouddha chrétien in La comédie humaine; some of Dasa’s self-posturing in his writings further deliberately evoke forms of horeauvian Transcendentalism. In turn, Noguchi’s young encounter with Swedenborgianism in Indiana is inseparable from his simultaneous first readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and both author’s words on nature and language left indelible marks on Noguchi’s symbolic consciousness. In surveying this span that stretches from Balzac’s “Buddha” to Suzuki explicating how Swedenborgian ideas bore homologies to Zen, we will ultimately arrive at a conundrum that lies at the heart of this history of readings and transpacific influence: the fact that Swedenborg himself had no direct access to Buddhism as a religious tradition. What, then, were the conditions that apparently oriented Swedenborg east? It has become almost a de-facto ritual for any scholarship that deals with Buddhism and Western literature to acknowledge (at the very least) Edward Said’s pioneering work on the discourse of Orientalism, and the problematic ways in which Western (mis)appropriations of Eastern religions often divorced traditions completely from their original social contexts and thereby contributed to 6 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 certain “structures of feeling” in imperial cultures (to quote Said, quoting Raymond Williams) that aided various colonial projects (Said 14). Are Swedenborg’s writings, then, simply parts in a machine of representation that projected certain stereotypes onto the blankness of the “other”? While Suzuki and Noguchi’s valuations of Swedenborg from outside the imperial boundaries of the West amply speak for themselves, it behooves dwelling on Swedenborg’s words in their eighteenth-century locations in an attempt to pinpoint whatever it was that allowed the later consistent mapping of his ideas onto Buddhism. Reinserting Swedenborg into the nineteenthcentury encounter with Buddhism, I argue, complicates a facile Orientalist critique that reads this as simply a tale of monolithic misappropriation, and further broadens a network of readings away from narrowing questions of nation, territorial aggrandizement, and ethnic identity into a much broader sphere of communication and reciprocity that is planetary in scope. We might even say that “Swedenborg-as-Buddha” functioned as a trope of cultural translation, and that this activity worked to dissolve the national and imperialist frames that have encrusted around certain Romantic figures—Emerson as the embodiment of American literature, or Blake as the anthemic voice of Great Britain—creating instead a global forum where these authors’ literary concerns intermesh with the later Zen of Noguchi and D. T. Suzuki. I Swedenborg and Nineteenth-Century Religious Pluralism hree of Balzac’s novels in the epic La comédie humaine are preoccupied with Swedenborgian theology, but it is especially in Louis Lambert that Swedenborg is depicted as the uniter of world religions. he strangeness of this novel’s gesture should not be forgotten; in early nineteenth-century France, Swedenborg held a kind of sub-cultural status, his name vaguely associated with the hermetic radicalism of Masonic societies that had fostered revolutionary sentiment in the 1780s and 1790s; other French writers had readily linked Swedenborg to the utopian theories of Charles Fourier.5 It was quite another matter to declare in a work of fiction that “Zoroaster, Moses, Bud5) his interface is thoroughly addressed by Alfred Gabay in he Covert Enlightenment; although Gabay’s focus is primarily on how Swedenborgian ideas influenced the pseudoscience of Franz Mesmer’s notions of the mind—and the ways this created a new paradigm of consciousness (and healing), which anticipates the psychology of Jung and Freud— Gabay does examine both eighteenth-century France, and particularly the impact of the Swedenborg-Fourier correlation in nineteenth century antebellum America. D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 7 dha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Swedenborg had identical principles” and that of them all, Swedenborg “alone brings man into immediate communion with God” (Louis Lambert 238). Lynn Wilkinson has carefully demonstrated that while Lambert’s enthusiasm here—a character whose sky-bound idealism ultimately drives him insane—is certainly not Balzac’s own, it is equally a mistake to assume that Balzac simply uses Swedenborg as a set-piece to signal Lambert’s loosening grip on reality (as we might say Edgar Allen Poe uses Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in “he Fall of the House of Usher,” conspicuously placing that book in Roderick’s dreary library). Rather, Balzac’s use of Swedenborg was related to a novelistic search for a superstructure of reality that lay beyond systems of language: that as Swedenborgianism appeared to mediate between hard science and the feeling, intuitive realm of aesthetics, it provided “a model for the mapping out of human consciousness,” as Wilkinson puts it (153), which is charted out in the evolution—or devolution—of Lambert’s character. Ultimately, Swedenborg’s attempts to “extend the taxonomic structure of natural history beyond the limits of perception” (Wilkinson 150) was attractive for Balzac’s own revulsion of Enlightenment materialism and the related ramifications of the French Revolution, a problematic legacy of social upheaval that charges the ambitious breadth of La comédie humaine. If Louis Lambert thus refracts Balzac’s desire for a certain kind of linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic stability, the novel also expands Swedenborg’s significance far beyond the borders of France and makes his role as a pan-cultural religious reformer contribute to growing discourse on “universal progress” which is inseparable from secular pressures in the early nineteenth century. Louis Lambert’s ideas about belief in the novel were typical of many Romantic authors who were deeply troubled by the challenge to scriptural authority being made by the Higher Criticism and the growing claims to ontological truth trumpeted by empirical science. Lambert, Balzac writes, thought that the mythology of the Greeks was borrowed both from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the sacred Books of India, adapted after their own fashion by the beauty-loving Hellenes. “It is impossible,” said he, “to doubt the priority of the Asiatic scriptures; they are earlier than our sacred books. he man who is candid enough to admit this historical fact sees the whole world expand before him. Was it not on the Asiatic highland that the few men who were able to escape the catastrophe that ruined our globe—if, indeed, men had existed before that cataclysm or shock? . . . he anthropogeny of the Bible is merely a genealogy of a swarm escaping from the human hive which settled on 8 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 the mountainous slopes of hibet between the summits of the Himalaya and the Caucuses.” (219) In this remarkable passage, the history of different religions is naturalized into a single story of human evolution—the Bible is but “a genealogy of a swarm.” What is most striking is the way that Lambert situates Swedenborg as the hermeneutic key uniting these religious traditions in explicitly scientific language; that “Swedenborg borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty that those four great religious books hold in common, and added to them a doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that may be termed mathematical” (238). How much Swedenborg could have really known about Zoroaster, Buddhism, or aspects of Hinduism that fell under a Western rubric of “Brahmanism” is debatable. Scholars have returned to this problem, in part, because Swedenborg enigmatically writes about a living, spiritual tradition, a lost remnant of an “Ancient Church” that was located somewhere in “greater Tartary” in Asia (see, for example, True Christian Religion no. 275). In Swedenborg’s concept of the “Ancient” and “Most Ancient church” that predated Judeo-Christianity, people had once thought and written in “pure correspondences”; that is, every aspect of language reflected deeper, hidden spiritual realities. Language and ritual became purely symbolic, and all of nature could function itself as a kind of sacred text, teaching the perceptive observer who knew how to look for deep spiritual truths. In Swedenborg’s ecclesiastical history of humankind, this Ancient Church had all but vanished, except for something that was vaguely east of Europe. “Seek for it in China,” Swedenborg challenged his Enlightenment readers, “And peradventure you will find it there among the Tartars” (Apocalypse Revealed no. 11). As Anders Hallengren has illuminated, it is possible that Swedenborg could have been familiar with a very general idea about the peoples and religions of southeast Siberia through his cousin Peter Schönstrom, a diplomat with Russian ties who collected manuscripts and curios from that region; Swedenborg also surely felt the general tug towards the Orient that Europe was beginning to experience, its decorating fad for chinoiserie, the growing appetite for tea and exotic spices. Hallengren further stipulates that in view of the symbolic frameworks and mythology that Swedenborg places within his construct of the Ancient Church, Swedenborg might be referring to certain aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly its heavy emphasis on symbolic ritual and esoteric ideas about D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 9 Shambhala, the secret kingdom hidden somewhere in the Himalayas that was also a complex metaphor for states of enlightenment located within the self (Hallengren 40–41). Nevertheless, one cannot forget that Europeans did not develop a sense of Buddhism as a distinct religious and intellectual tradition until well into the nineteenth century, with the publications of works like Eugène Burnouf ’s L’introduction à l’histoire du buddhisme indien, published in 1844 and perhaps the first comprehensive scholarly study on Buddhism written by anyone in the West. As the work of Donald Lopez and hierry Dodin has more recently made clear, Tibetan and tantric Buddhism are perhaps the most misunderstood—yet most often appropriated—variations of Buddhism in the West, and that before the twentieth century, there was virtually no standing body of solid knowledge on Tibetan Buddhism, especially in regard to its esoteric doctrines like the Shambhala. Going quite a bit further than Hallengren’s speculations, Martha Keith Schuchard has cavalierly claimed that Swedenborg was a lifelong practitioner of tantric yoga that involved elaborate sexual rituals, and that it was Swedenborg’s (previously unknown) ability to sustain an erection without ejaculating that brought on “an orgasmic trance state that elevated him to the world of spirits and angels” (52). While there are certainly examples of Western misappropriations of Eastern religion in the eighteenth century as a means to substantiate positions that were against the hegemonic norms (be they social or sexual), Swedenborg had no full grasp of “tantra” before the word even enters the European vocabulary, and Schuchard’s claim sounds more like New Age eclecticism that continues to divorce “tantra” from its original religious and cultural contexts in order to (over)emphasize its erotic potential. At best, Buddhism figures as a faint, possible glimmer in Swedenborg’s rare mention of the Ancient Church in Mongolia among the Tartars, and there is not a single reference in his enormous corpus to “yoga,” “tantra,” or “Buddhism,” that might support Schuchard’s assertions.6 What was it then, that nevertheless drew Balzac and others to posit Buddhism as a source influencing Swedenborg? Is 6) Much of Schuchard’s “evidence” seems a willful distortion of context, and rests on connecting Swedenborg to certain shadowy Kabbalistic and Moravian traditions and a sloppy method of interpreting Swedenborg’s texts. A brief mention in Swedenborg’s journal of spiritual experiences—the so-called “Spiritual Diary”—to a dream vision of Chino-Indians who sit with their legs crossed (no. 6067), for example, becomes corroborating proof that Swedenborg “had practical access to Yogic techniques” which he then practiced (Schuchard 57). None of the world’s leading scholars on Swedenborg have accepted Schuchard’s multiple contentions that he was a lifelong closet Kabbalist, expert in sexual Yoga, secret spy for 10 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 there something intrinsic in his texts that lends itself to this sort of misinterpretation? For one, despite Swedenborg’s Christology and theophanic orientation, Swedenborg was an emphatic religious pluralist. In 1758’s Heaven and Hell, which became Swedenborg’s most popular and influential single work, Swedenborg writes against the prevailing attitude of eighteenth-century Christianity by claiming that heaven was available and open to all who have led a selfless, good life, and was not contingent on the usual preconditions of baptism and belief. he idea of heaven, moreover, was not some otherworldly realm of post-Apocalyptic incarnation, but a state of mind “within ourselves” that was universal in its potential availability. Swedenborg writes: People can realize that non-Christians as well as Christians are saved if they know what constitutes this heaven in us; for heaven is within us, and people who have heaven within them come into heaven. he heaven within us is our acknowledgement of the Divine and our being led by the Divine. (no. 319) his chapter of Heaven and Hell—entitled “Non-Christians, or People Outside the Church in Heaven”—baldly asserts that “non-Christians come into heaven more readily than Christians these days,” and ends with a narrative account of Swedenborg encountering good-hearted Chinese in the spiritual world, and that of all the non-Christian peoples around the world, certain tribes from Africa are the most beloved by the angels in heaven. his might seem trite from our twenty-first century perspective; a saccharine dream of a politically-correct, multi-cultural spiritual utopia, yet it is important not to lose sight of how unusual such statements were in the middle of the eighteenth century. Predictably, most of Swedenborg’s Catholic and Protestant contemporaries treated non-Christian religious traditions as “heathen,” in need of conversion, as the numerous missionary projects of Swedenborg’s time attest. At best, “oriental” religious texts could provide evidence that would prove the historical authenticity of the Bible—such as corroborating accounts of a universal flood—and thus deflect the Deist and materialist attacks on the Bible’s representational the Swedish government, and an active member of Masonic lodges. Schuchard’s scholarly errors and lapses are catalogued in Talbot. D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 11 authority and its status as revelation. Jonathan Priestly’s optimism in 1799 was typical of liberal Protestant thinking at the time: It has long appeared to me that a fair comparison of the ancient heathen religions with the system of [Christian] revelation would contribute in an eminent degree to establish the evidences of the latter. Its superiority in sentiment and practice to any thing that the most enlightened of mankind have ever devised is so great, that it cannot be rationally accounted for, but by supposing that [the Bible] had a truly divine origin. (vii) his was precisely why the devout Unitarian minister William Emerson began publishing the first American translations of Sanskrit in the pages of the Boston Review in 1805; William’s seven-year-old son, Ralph Waldo, would later spend decades reading his way through the “Hindoo scriptures” and enthusiastically feeding them into his Transcendentalist philosophy (a use which would have surely made his orthodox father roll over in his grave). On the other hand, again in contrast to Swedenborg, where the heirs of Enlightenment rationalism did not relegate Buddhism or Hinduism to the same category of blind mythology as the institutional Christianity they were seeking to break away from, they tended to view Eastern religions in terms of a universal idea of progress that led to their own (post)Christian secular moment. As Arthur Versluis has shown, this was particularly the case for a number of German Romantics. G. W. F. Hegel, for example, was open to certain ideas from Hindu texts as being authentically “spiritual,” but more or less “believed that Eastern religions corresponded to a dead and past form that consciousness had left behind”.7 Despite Schopenhauer’s deep readings in Buddhism, he squeezed a certain reading of “nothingness” out of the concepts of sunyata and nirvana that supported his own negating arguments on the abolition of the will, and ultimately derived a pessimism which is quite different from experiencing the emptiness of sunyata as an enabling “zero of infinite possibilities,” as Suzuki has characterized it 7) Versluis 24. Hegel had a particularly complex and ambivalent relationship to the dialectical potential offered by the “nothingness” of Buddhism. Timothy Morton writes how Hegel ultimately “disavows something that rests uncannily close to his own philosophical scheme in what [he] construes as an almost maddening contentment and self-enclosure.” Morton, par. 3. 12 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 (Mysticism 23). As homas Tweed further illustrates, the Western misinterpretation of nirvana as a synonym for “atheism, nihilism, pessimism, and passivity,” ended up creating a space for cultural dissent and critique in the nineteenth century that was attractive for unorthodox thinkers like Schopenhauer (American Encounter 7). In Swedenborg’s theological writings, he neither uses Eastern religions to negate Christianity, nor does he absorb them into a strictly Christian or philosophic enterprise. Instead, his mystical image of the cosmos as a single human organism—a “Magnus Homo” or Grand Man—requires diversity for its overall health, so that each constitutive part needed to keep its respective difference and unique transcendental value for the good of the whole. Using words that reflect his earlier work in anatomy and physiology, Swedenborg writes in he Angelic Wisdom Concerning Divine Providence: We know that there are within us not only the parts formed as organs from blood vessels and nerve fibers—the forms we call our viscera. here are also skin, membranes, tendon, cartilage, bones, nails and teeth. hey are less intensely alive than the organic forms, which they serve as ligaments, coverings, and supports. If there are to be all these elements in that heavenly person who is heaven, it cannot be made up of the people of one religion only. It needs people from many religions . . . (no. 326) David Loy, a scholar of Buddhism, has argued that there is an inherent contradiction between Swedenborg’s theophanic Christianity and this image of a corporate, pluralistic spiritual body. Loy writes: Taken as a whole, Swedenborg’s writings contain a tension between two different positions that never quite become compatible. On the more orthodox side, he defends the uniqueness of Christ as God-man and the importance of accepting him as our savior. On the other, more ecumenical side, his emphasis on the influx of love and wisdom leads him to reduce the salvific role of Christ so much that he can be reconceptualized without much difficulty as one avatar among many, a view quite compatible with Buddhism. (23) Swedenborg’s doctrinal ambivalence, at any rate, permitted a nineteenthcentury reception to Buddhism as a legitimate spiritual tradition, and the D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 13 decades following Balzac’s original alignment of Swedenborg as global Buddha increasingly saw Swedenborgian theology worked into a lattice of comparative religion which gradually began to treat Buddhism on its own terms, and not just as a strange bastard of Hinduism, or as a completely negative theology that “only looks at the dark side of existence,” as one nineteenth-century pastor characterized it (qtd. in Tweed, American Encounter 13). his was particularly the case in the United States where the development of comparative religions was strongly linked to the evolution of popular, syncretic metaphysical traditions, as Catherine Albanese argued in A Republic of Mind and Spirit. An early landmark text that legitimated Buddhism as a “metaphysical” option was Lydia Maria Child’s he Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages published in 1855. Scholars generally concur that the book was “the most comprehensive interpretation of Asian religions, and Buddhism in particular, offered by a New England liberal between 1844 and 1857” (Tweed, American Encounter 3), in spite of Child’s problematic Neoplatonizing and theistic assumptions. It has gone unremarked how Child’s readings in Swedenborg may have affected certain aspects of he Progress of Religious Ideas, perhaps because the book’s debt to liberal Unitarian theology is also so prominent and clear. Child first encountered Swedenborg when she was a young schoolteacher in Maine, and became so intrigued that in 1828 she joined a Swedenborgian congregation in Boston, and regularly attended New Church services for a period of time (Karcher 183–92). Child’s personal religious convictions are a fairly clear arc, beginning with traditional Protestant Christianity, followed by a movement into more radical, less-orthodox circles such as the Swedenborgians, and by the end of her life, ending in a broad syncretic universalism that was typical for post-Civil War liberal intellectuals in the Transcendentalist milieu—a universalism that both anticipated and fed into heosophy and the dawn of the modern New Age movement. When Child wrote and published the three volumes of he Progress of Religious Ideas, she was more or less still within the Christian fold. While it has yet to be ascertained to what precise degree Swedenborg comprised her thinking at this point, as late as 1842 she was writing to a friend that because of Swedenborg, she had “lost the power of looking merely on the surface. Everything seems to me to come from the Infinite, to be filled with the Infinite, to be tending toward the Infinite” (Child 120). A recent dissertation has argued that Child’s reading of Swedenborg influenced her entire career, long after she left the Boston congregation of the New Church 14 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 (Anders); further investigations of Child’s enormous body of correspondence, much of it unpublished, might further clarify this question.8 If we conjecture that Swedenborg implicated, at the least, a more flexible theological framework from which Child furthered the development of a genuine comparative religious tradition in the United States, and that this constitutes a key moment in Buddhism’s mediated contact with American letters, then he Progress of Religious Ideas anticipates the specific ways that Swedenborgian thought lay behind the later 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, an event whose cultural and literary ramifications are hard to overstate. Anargarika Dharmapala, perhaps the most influential Buddhist in south Asia at the end of the nineteenth century, proclaimed that the Parliament was “the noblest and proudest achievement in history, and the crowning work of the nineteenth century” (Fields 120), and subsequent historians acknowledge that the platform it particularly gave to Buddhists was wholly unprecedented in the Western hemisphere: participants such as Sōen Shaku (Suzuki’s Zen master), Dharmapala himself, and Kinza Hirai, all went on to become the primary agents for the American encounter with Buddhism in the early twentieth century.9 he Parliament was largely the brainchild of Charles Carroll Bonney, a prominent Chicago-based Swedenborgian who desired to establish a “spiritual” alternative to the “material” panoply of the 1892 World’s Columbian Exhibition.10 Bonney made 8) Approximately 2,228 Child letters are available on microfiche as he Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817–1880, edited by Patricia G. Holland, Milton Meltzer, and Francine Krasno; more unpublished papers that mention Swedenborg lie in the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Department (MssCol 532), and there are surely more corners to investigate at any of the institutions scattered around the East Coast that hold substantial Child papers (such as the Houghton Library, Harvard, and the Boston Public Library). 9) As Poul Pederson points out, despite the Parliament’s broad roster of Buddhist speakers that hailed from Japan, Ceylon, and Siam, there was not a single representative of Tibetan Buddhism in attendance, a sign of how Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism were still more or less wholly “imaginary objects” for the West at the end of the nineteenth century (157). his is yet another clear indication of how unlikely it would be for Swedenborg, one hundred and forty years earlier, to have detailed information about tantra or Shambhala as some have intimated. 10) It is interesting to note that another person regularly attending Bonney’s Swedenborgian church at the same time was the architect Daniel Burnham, who, besides planning the socalled “White City” for the 1892 Columbian exposition, deliberately used Swedenborgian symbolism in his masterplan for the streets of Chicago (Fisher). D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 15 his motivational debt quite clear, writing later that it was Swedenborg who “taught the fundamental truths which made a World’s Parliament of Religions possible; upon which rested the whole plan of the religious congresses of 1893, and which guided the execution of the plan to a success so great and far-reaching that only the coming generations can fully comprehend and estimate its influence” (21). Bonney and his Swedenborgian background have been barely noted, however, in various accounts of the Parliament (Fields, Tweed), perhaps because his co-organizer, the Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows, ended up having a protracted debate with several Buddhist scholars over the alleged superiority of Christianity as a system of belief, an ethos which seemed to counter the Parliament’s founding ecumenicalism. Barrows published exchange with Sōen after the Parliament marks an important moment in the cross-cultural dialogues of American comparative religion, where a Zen master specifically deconstructs the standard, Christian critique of Buddhism—that is was unmoral, atheistic, empty—and Sōen challenged Barrows in the pages of he Monist that Jesus Christ never “attained to the calmness and dignity of the Buddha” (Sōen 140). For whatever reasons (perhaps because he saw himself as primarily a lawyer, and not a theologian), Bonney stayed aloof from this intercultural fray, and his name, and accordingly the role of Swedenborgian theology in the structure of the World Parliament, has been eclipsed by the scholarly attention given to Barrow’s smug hypocrisy. Sōen’s rebuttal of Barrows was collected several years later with other lectures on Buddhism that Sōen had given to American audiences, and published in 1906 as the collected Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot. he text was the first book on Zen printed in English, but it was the book’s translator—Sōen’s acolyte, the young D. T. Suzuki—who would go on to most profoundly shape the modern American response to Buddhism, especially for a number of New York artists and writers in the 1950s and 60s. II he Buddharay and Beyond: Dasa, Suzuki, and Noguchi he first juxtaposition of Swedenborg and Zen in ways that significantly influenced the conversation about Buddhism on both sides of the Pacific was not made by D. T. Suzuki, as one might ostensibly think, but by the obscure, now forgotten figure of Philangi Dasa. Born as Hermann Vetterling in Sweden, Vetterling became a member of the New Church, the institutional body devoted to Swedenborg’s teachings, soon after he had 16 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 emigrated to the United States. Vetterling went on to become an ordained minister in the Swedenborgian church; in ways that typify both fluid immigrant identity after the Civil War and also the period’s metaphysical restlessness, Vetterling was also a practicing homeopathic physician, a typesetter and printer, a farmer, and a heosophist, at the same time that he was serving different Midwestern communities as a Swedenborgian pastor. Perhaps because of some these activities, Tweed notes that according to New Church records of the period, “controversy and scandal” dogged Vetterling’s pastoral service (American Encounter 39). By the middle of the 1880s, Vetterling had formally left the New Church, officially joined the heosophical Society, and began to publish a series of articles on Swedenborg for he heosophist which are perhaps the first instances of Swedenborg’s theology being genuinely compared to Buddhist doctrines in a substantial way that goes deeper than Balzac’s generalizing remarks on Swedenborg as a Buddha. It was within this occult environment of heosophy that Vetterling first identified himself as a Buddhist, and began transforming himself into Philangi Dasa, the ascetic who lived in a little cabin in the mountains above Santa Cruz, California, the so-called “Buddharay.” From the wooden walls of the Buddharay, Dasa self-consciously announced that his cabin was “an historic place, being the first in the West, in a Christian land, from which the Buddha’s Noble Doctrine had been heralded.” Dasa sounds more than a little like horeau when he told his readers that his studying efforts consisted “of woodchopping, digging, hoing, planting, printing, etc.” rather than reading religious texts (qtd. in Fields 131). Dasa’s Buddhist Ray was published monthly for seven years between 1888 and 1895; although most of the material written by Dasa is quirky, and lacks the scholarly depth and intercultural perspectives that slightly later Buddhist journals in Los Angeles would soon exhibit, he Buddhist Ray was remarkably influential and had a broad circulation, despite its small size and humble origin. Subscribers included Buddhist readers in India, Japan, Ceylon, and Siam—as Wakoh Shannon Hickey notes, the crown prince of Siam and Ven. Sumangala, one of the highest ranking Buddhist monks in Ceylon, were regular readers (Hickey 9), and articles from he Buddhist Ray were often translated into Japanese for a number of fin-de-siècle Zen journals in Japan (Tweed, “American Occultism” 255). Each issue of he Buddhist Ray announced on the front page that the journal was “Devoted to Buddhism in General and to the Buddhism in Swedenborg in Particular.” Dasa’s intermingled representations of Swedenborg and Buddhism thus influenced perceptions not only in a D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 17 West that was looking east, but forms a node of communication in a complex web where syncretic adaptations of Buddhism fed and structured how Asian Buddhists regarded themselves, especially in a pancultural context. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Dharmapala—the most charismatic and popular Buddhist out of the Eastern contingent that had attended the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions—came to visit Dasa at the Buddharay in the same year as the Parliament. Dharmapala encouraged Dasa to speak in public and become a more visible propagandist for Buddhism in the West (Fields 132), but Dasa demurred, on the grounds that he looked too European to be taken seriously as a Buddhist by the Americans, or that his whiteness would come with an inevitable, unfortunate association to heosophy—an astute observation, in spite of Dasa’s deprecating humor here, that points to a racialized debate over Buddhist “authenticity” and conversion that began in the aftermath of the World’s Parliament of Religions and continues to this day.11 Dasa’s most unique production was the strange, three-hundred-page Swedenborg he Buddhist or the Higher Swedenborgianism Its Secrets and hibetan Origin, published in 1887, which takes the dialogic form of a series of dreamed conversations and debates that Swedenborg has with a motley assortment of religious and ethnic types, including an Icelander and Aztec. As the title suggests, Dasa claims Swedenborg’s whole corpus of teachings are really esoteric Buddhism in disguise, as Swedenborg had received secret instruction from spirits located in Tibet, China, and Mongolia. Much has already been said and written on Swedenborg the Buddhist (Tweed, Fields, Korum); there still remain certain basic questions to settle about just what kind of text the book is, and the sort of readership it envisions. Hickey writes that it is “a novel,” and there are indeed certain literary qualities to it that religious historians have not commented on. he book is punctuated by a spunky, irreverent wit, written in clipped, breathless sentences, as in this short example that sketches Swedenborg’s biography: Swedenborg sat in the House of Nobles. Sat? Not always: now and then got up; not however like Marat, to flourish a pistol and threaten political rogues with death and damnation, but to speak slowly, hesitatingly, stutteringly, but thoughtfully and persuasively, on Finance, 11) his was acutely the case for heosophy, and remains very much a matter of debate for how the New Age continues to absorb aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. See Frank Korom, 179–80. 18 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 Whiskey, and Popedom. . . . Swedenborg is one moment a Christian, another, a Materialist, a third, a Buddhist. Now and then a mixture of these. In reality, that is, at heart, he is a Buddhist, being so from his mother’s womb. (7) his colloquial, casual approach is wholly different from the obfuscating, pseudo-mystical rhetoric of the heosophists who wrote on Buddhism— the self-inflated seriousness of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled comes to mind— and Dasa conversely anticipates the jaunty style of the Beats who later penned so much about Buddhism. here are slangy, alliterated sentences in Swedenborg the Buddhist that almost sound like they belong in Jack Kerouac’s rushed prose—“better than all the earkissing arguments the teetotalers pour forth against brains bemused in the belly broth” (226). Swedenborg the Buddhist seems more than just an exercise in experimental closet drama, however; given the prolific allusions to numerous theological writings by Swedenborg, and the assumptions made by Dasa as to the reader’s familiarity with ideas and concepts expressed therein, much of the text reads like an attempt to convert Swedenborgians into Buddhists: a ploy which would not be far from Dharmapala’s efforts to make Dasa a propagandist for the Buddhist cause in America. Swedenborg the Buddhist received, predictably, nothing but vituperative scorn from New Church journals, even as it found a warm reception in further, far-flung contexts. In 1893 Swedenborg the Buddhist was translated into Japanese and published in Tokyo; Sōen appears to have been less than thrilled with it and several other works by Westerners on Buddhism which were then in-vogue among Japanese readers. In an introduction to he Gospel of the Buddha (another book which Suzuki subsequently translated into English), Sōen cautioned that while these new Western books, from Max Müller’s Nirvana to “Swedenborg’s Buddhism,” all displayed certain aspects of “genius,” yet, “as for the final and ultimate truth of Buddhism, I am not sure whether they had understood it or not” (qtd. in Fields 136). As Swedenborg, of course, wrote no text on Buddhism himself, it is almost certain that Sōen is referring to Dasa’s book. hus well before D. T. Suzuki went on to take Swedenborg seriously, he had already encountered the Swedish mystic in a Japanese context colored by Dasa’s unusual text, its claims that Swedenborg had been born “with a piece of an Asian in him” (Dasa 3). Suzuki’s work on Swedenborg has received new scholarly attention ever since Suzuki’s essays on Swedenborg were translated into English and col- D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 19 lected in 1996 into a single, posthumous volume, Swedenborg: he Buddha of the North, and the problem of where Swedenborg fits within the spectrum of Suzuki’s intellectual development has again opened the larger question as to what kinds of genuine synchronies there might exist between Swedenborgian theology and Zen. David Loy, for example, has expanded on Suzuki’s work to further show how Swedenborg’s treatment of the problem of evil (or selfishness) often looks like a “sophisticated kind of karma,” and the process by which spirits move through Swedenborg’s spiritual world after they die is much akin to how samskhara operates in most schools of Buddhism (26). More recently, Tweed has uncovered how Suzuki first responded to Swedenborg due to the efforts of his friend Albert Edmunds, a significant—if obscure—scholarly proponent of both Buddhism and Swedenborg (“American Occultism”). his corrects the earlier speculation that Suzuki had possibly become familiar with Swedenborg through his wife, Beatrice Lane, who had been a student of William James’s at Columbia, and may have stumbled into a Swedenborg reference in a Jamesian context.12 Tweed’s use of unpublished letters and annotated books from libraries and archives in Japan, Philadelphia, and Chicago has broken important new ground in demonstrating how crucial Edmunds was for Suzuki’s approach to Swedenborg over a sustained period of time, beginning with their first meeting in 1901 when Suzuki was living and working for Paul Carus in Chicago, and continuing as a transpacific friendship over the next several decades. As late as 1935, Edmunds was pleading with Suzuki to “please write an article on Swedenborg from your Mahayana standpoint,” presumably in English for a Western audience (Tweed, “American Occultism” 259). Suzuki did not take up Edmunds request, and Suzuki’s 1924 “Suedenborugu: Sono Tenakai to Tarikikan” (“Swedenborg’s View of Heaven and 12) One could further elaborate on a Jamesian matrix that hovers in the background of the meeting between Zen Buddhism and Swedenborgianism at the dawn of the twentieth century; in addition to William James’s teaching of Suzuki’s wife, and William’s own important contributions to the comparative religious dialogue after the World Parliament of Religions with his he Varieties of Religious Experience, his brother novelist Henry was much affected by their father’s idiosyncratic use of Swedenborgian philosophy. As Joan Richardson has recently demonstrated, Henry James’s 1903 novel he Ambassadors, creates a highly complex intertextual relationship to Balzac’s Louis Lambert that negotiates a web of Swedenborgian concepts, and plays further with the presentation of Swedenborg as a “Buddha of the north” (Richardson 167)—drawing yet another full circle back to Balzac. 20 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 ‘Other’ Power), became Suzuki’s last sustained treatment of the Scandinavian mystic. Why, then, does Swedenborg veritably disappear from Suzuki’s later writings, especially those crafted in English and aimed at a Western audience, where we might expect him to be naturally referenced as a point of familiarity? Suzuki’s public, professional engagement with Swedenborg spans roughly fifteen years, from 1910, when he translated Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell into Japanese at the behest of the London Swedenborg Society, to the later essay mentioned above. In between these capstones, he was quite active with three other substantial Swedenborg translations, and even served as a vice-president at the International Swedenborg Conference in London in 1910, where he was photographed (fig. 1). In later works where we might expect Swedenborg to be evoked, however, there is often silence. For his most important comparative work between Christianity and Buddhism in English, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, Suzuki turned to the late medieval mystic Meister Eckhart as the primary example of the Christian mystical tradition. here is a brief, casual allusion in Mysticism to Swedenborg’s concept of correspondence, noting an affinity with certain aspects of Buddhist karmic transmigration (and thus echoing Loy’s later observation)—but, beyond this there is no further development of any of the positions that the earlier Japanese essays on Swedenborg had established. here might be two reasons for this shift from Swedenborg to Eckhart. For one, Suzuki’s early twentieth-century engagement coincided with a global buzz of interest in the scientist-mystic that had been percolating throughout the nineteenth century, which likely stimulated Suzuki’s interest apart from Edmunds’s particular entreaty to treat Swedenborg seriously as a religious thinker. he name of Swedenborg had a particular resonance within the fin-de-siècle spate of “scientific” spiritualism, and Arthur Conan Doyle came to claim Swedenborg as the founder of modern spiritualist activity as he seemed to empirically verify psychic phenomena (Doyle). William Butler Yeats’s similar interest in the occult (and Buddhism, by way of Blavatskian theosophy) led to a long essay on Swedenborg. At one point in “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” Yeats uses a lengthy footnote on Japanese Noh Drama in order to illustrate the symbolic, illiteral space of Swedenborg’s spiritual visions, creating a dizzying moment of cultural flows and (trans)national inversions: Noh symbolism (the dramatic form of Zen, we might say) helps Yeats grasp how symbolic space operates in Swedenborg’s spiritual world, which is then deployed to make certain points about the literary qualities of rural Irish folktales and the D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 21 Figure 1. Portrait of D. T. Suzuki, 1910, taken at the International Swedenborg Congress in London. Image and copyright granted by kind courtesy of the London Swedenborg Society. 22 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 story-gathering efforts of the Irish Renaissance, activities which were explicitly ethnic and nation-building (Yeats 26). Yeats later eagerly read Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, and several critics have argued Suzuki’s brand of Zen is important for interpreting Yeats’s mature poetic processes and understanding of consciousness (Doherty); at this earlier period of composition around the time of the Swedenborg essay, Yeats’s understanding of Buddhism was still very much tinted by a mash of Blavatskian theosophy, as we might also say that Swedenborg’s early reception in Japan—clothed in the eccentric garb of Philangi Dasa’s translated essays and book—were similarly influenced by the popular-effects of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott in Asia.13 But by the time Suzuki began to accrue a reputation as the harbinger of Zen Buddhism, the heyday of heosophy, spiritualism, and the parlor séance had long faded. In the America of the 1930s and 1940s, as Suzuki’s series of Essays in Zen Buddhism made him more and more of a familiar name to American readers, the sociopolitical realities of the Great Depression, followed by the encroachment of a second World War, had rendered Blavatsky and her clairvoyant circles at best quaint relics from a bygone era. For Suzuki, Swedenborg was decidedly not “in the air” as he had been at the turn of the century. Moreover, some of the occult discourses of heosophy had developed into questionable aesthetic affiliations with different fascist projects, from Yeats in Ireland to Ezra Pound in Italy (who also held an esoteric interest in Swedenborg that dovetailed with his research on ancient language systems).14 At a level of grotesque kitsch, the ways the hird Reich flirted with the mystical and esoteric echoes of Romanticism, and were directly affected by certain forms of Aryan theosophy that had developed in Austria, further displayed this kind of political affiliation (Goodrick-Clarke). For Suzuki, who had remained in Japan throughout the 1930s and through World War II, and had largely responded to the social and political crises of his country by withdrawing into scholarly 13) It is worth briefly mentioning that Blavatsky had woven Swedenborgian ideas into the thousand-plus pages of her Isis Unveiled (1877)—but, considering the book’s attempt to incorporate every conceivable aspect of Western and Eastern esotericism, this is hardly a surprise, and it would almost be more interesting to explore what Blavatsky did not try to absorb into her occult lineage. 14) Pound’s references to Swedenborg are scattered in letters across several decades; for Pound’s interest in Swedenborg’s concept of “correspondence” and language theories, see Demetres Tryphonopoulos 7–15. D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 23 seclusion, evoking any shadow of these kinds of connections would have likely been undesirable. As Suzuki’s earlier work on Swedenborg never made overtures to contemporary spiritualist or theosophical movements, however, it is perhaps more pertinent to note—as Andrew Bernstein first pointed out—that Suzuki’s first essay on Swedenborg responds to unique cultural pressures in Meiji and Taisho Japan. he Swedenborg that emerges from the pages of Suzuki’s “Suedenborugu” is a publicly committed intellectual: someone who pursued a course of profound religious enlightenment in spite of the intense cultural materialism and rationalism of his time, and yet did not become a withdrawn ascetic, or otherworldly seer, and continued to pragmatically contribute to the good of his society. Swedenborg, Suzuki stresses, “serves as a model for the individual, teaching numerous lessons” (Swedenborg 6). According to Bernstein, these emphases subtly critiqued both the cult of Romantic individual who completely withdrew from the world— taihoshugi, or retirement—that was very popular with younger, educated Japanese at the turn of the century, as well as countering the public, forcefed morality of incipient Japanese imperialism that subordinated the individual and their transcendental pursuits to a “mindless statism” (Suzuki, Swedenborg ix–xx). Later, as Suzuki found himself writing for a Western audience that had very different needs, this utilitarian Swedenborg, with his role as spiritual exemplar, more or less vanishes—all future references to Swedenborg by Suzuki are to his ideas and doctrines, and not the facts of personal biography. In fact, Suzuki’s “apolitical” seclusion at the fervid height of Japanese nationalism ironically repeats the very taihoshugi he had earlier used the life of Swedenborg to chasten. here are suggestions that, contrary to this textual fade, Suzuki kept Swedenborg close at hand in his thoughts through the remainder of his life. Japanese scholars Tatsuya Nagashima and Kiyoto Furuno have both claimed that Swedenborg influenced Suzuki’s basic conception of religion and his pluralistic worldview. “Zen is not necessarily an offshoot of Buddhist philosophy alone,” Suzuki had written, “For I find it in Christianity, Mohammedanism, in Taoism, even Confucianism . . . Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect” (Swedenborg xvii). Suzuki’s private secretary has further said that as late as the 1950s, Suzuki would often say in response to a religious question, “Well, Swedenborg would say . . .,” which suggests a longevity far beyond his last 1924 essay in Japanese (Loy 14). Still, it is not wholly clear why and how Swedenborg vanishes from the public, textual 24 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 Suzuki, and closer examinations of the Edmunds-Suzuki correspondence and the complex political and cultural frames which Suzuki negotiated during and after World War II are worthy of further investigation in this regard. his essay has given so much attention to Suzuki because his importance for bringing Zen to twentieth-century artists and writers is writ so large.15 Beyond the pale of figures like Yeats, Suzuki made quite an impression on the New York circles when he moved to America in the 1950s, from the Beats (especially Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg) to John Cage. Indeed, Cage’s participation in Suzuki’s seminars on Zen were essential for Cage coming to perceive music “not as communication from the artist to the audience, but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves” (Cage 70), and Zen is thus seminal for properly understanding the evolution of avant-garde American music in the twentieth century. It is too diffuse to measure what shadowy vestiges of Swedenborg might have persisted in the stream of Suzuki’s seminar conversations; in regard to Cage and his dictum to “let the sounds be themselves,” perhaps it is relevant to recollect how some forty years earlier, Arnold Schönberg had found in Swedenborg’s concept of space and time an impetus for his own innovations in music that ultimately led to the creation of his atonal music system (Wörner and Horn 246, Covach 112). To evoke Schönberg as this essay draws to a close is also to draw a full circle of sorts, for Schönberg (as well as Yeats) first discovered Swedenborg through his reading of Balzac’s Louis Lambert and Seraphita. his might seem a trite point; however, I think it underscores the ways that Swedenborg’s ideas have formed a consistent point of engagement where Western authors and artists encountered different strategies of representation and ideas about the self, which sometimes opened or allowed for a further receptivity to the “other” of Zen Buddhism—a receptivity that became a locus for self-transformation, artistic innovation, and a replenishment of aesthetic forms. 15) It should be emphasized at the same time, however, that though Suzuki’s name became synonymous with Zen for Americans in the 1950s and 60s, Suzuki by no means was or is representative of mainstream schools of Japanese Zen thought. Suzuki never received credentials as a Zen teacher or priest, and his ideas reflect the biases of the Kyoto school of thought, which has been heavily critiqued for its alliance with Japanese political nationalism (Kirita). D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 25 his is by no means solely the domain of literature or music. For the question of how Zen has affected Western aesthetics along lines mediated by Swedenborg, the work of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi might come closest to embodying these transpacific circulations of meaning. Noguchi’s east-west trajectory closely mirrors that of D. T. Suzuki: at a young, formative age (15), his mother sent him away from Japan to be educated at a progressive school in the American Midwest. As the young Suzuki had been much affected by his years in Illinois under the aegis of Paul Carus (where he met Edmunds, and first took Swedenborg seriously), so, too, was Noguchi marked by his three years spent in the home of Dr. Samuel Mack, an Indiana Swedenborgian minister who “held the thoughts of Blake, Emerson, and Poe to be sacred” (Ashton 15). Noguchi’s artistic career has been rightfully interpreted as a modernist attempt to bridge—physically, spiritually, aesthetically—the gap between Japan and America; Noguchi was also candid in saying his years with Dr. Mack, the intense conversations that were held around the dinner table, were also fundamental for shaping his approach to art. Noguchi’s biographer writes: Noguchi’s lifelong interest in myth was inspired by his exposure to Swedenborgianism. “hey believe the Bible is a myth which has to be interpreted,” he explained, “hey reveal the artistic merit of the Bible.” His own preoccupation with “myth and the power of symbolic language,” he thought, derived directly from this early exposure to Swedenborgianism. (Ashton 31) his admission might change the way we approach certain symbolic aspects of Noguchi’s work. With his 1970 work “In Silence Walking,” for example, Noguchi began to experiment with what became a signature style of his late work, a formal grappling with voids and spatial emptiness: “I have carried the concept of the void like a weight on my shoulders,” Noguchi wrote at the time, “I could not seem to avoid its humanoid grip” (Noguchi 64). Ostensibly, most art historians have situated these voids in relation to the Zen articulation of sunyata (“emptiness”), that these spaces are not voids in the existential sense as they might be in a Minimalist work of the same period, but a Zen “positive energy in touch with everything, trapped by nothing,” as Roger Lipsey puts it (337). If we take seriously Noguchi’s statement about the longevity of Swedenborg for his sense of symbolic 26 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 language, there may be further implications that collect around “In Silence Walking” when we recall any number of passages in Swedenborg on the spiral, vortex forms of nature, or Swedenborg’s cosmology of the universe as a process of perpetual, incessant becoming.16 Noguchi’s regard for Swedenborg within the spectrum of modernism seems initially strange, displaced from another century. Ashton writes how Noguchi’s candor “certainly flew in the face of much twentieth-century thought, for who could still admire Swedenborg, whom Kant had already demolished so forcefully? Yet Noguchi remained faithful and approached Japan in 1930 with the symbolic consciousness of a Swedenborgian . . .” (31). his seems much less peculiar when Noguchi’s aesthetic dialogue is rooted in Swedenborg’s consistent transpacific figuration in the flow of ideas and acculturation between Eastern Zen and Western literature: Noguchi’s receptivity to Swedenborg joins that of Suzuki and Dasa’s, and also perhaps that of Blake and Emerson’s at earlier points in time. Both Blake and Emerson have been consistently aligned by modern critics as exhibiting “Zen” sensibilities in their poetics; yet, as almost all scholars must readily acknowledge, Blake had virtually no knowledge of Buddhism, and Emerson’s particular grasp of the distinction between Buddhism and other Asian religions was fuzzy at best—after reading the Bhagavad-Gita, Emerson wrote to a friend that it was “the most renowned book of Buddhism, extracts from which I have often admired but never before held the book in my hands.”17 As Robert Detweiler further notes, “none of the teachings of the early Zen masters was translated into English during Emerson’s lifetime (or into any European language, for that matter), [and] his restricted reading in Buddhistic thought of any kind makes it quite unlikely he was ever confronted with the interpretations peculiar to the Zen school.”18 What was it that nonetheless allowed the Japanese 16) For further commentary on Swedenborg’s use of the spiral, see Zuber, “Hieroglyphics of Nature.” For more on the ways in which Swedenborg’s cosmology operates as kind of unceasing process of becoming, see Benz and Jonsson. 17) Emerson, Letters 290. While it is true that Emerson’s error occurs early on in what became a serious and sustained attention to Eastern religious texts, Emerson continued to blur Hinduism and Buddhism together. As Arthur Versluis points out, as late as 1875— when religious historians had long established otherwise, and Emerson really should have known better—Emerson still wrote of “Hindoos . . . following Buddha” (Versluis 72). 18) Detweiler 423. See also Mark Lussier, who observes “anyone seeking direct ‘influence’ between Buddhist thought and practices and those developed within the full range of Romantic thought will quite likely only experience historical disappointment, since the D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 27 scholar Shōei Andō in 1970 to find Emerson “very close to Zen” (iv), or John Rudy to more recently argue that “Blake’s ontology . . . resonates generatively with that of Zen Buddhism and provides an opportunity for comparative cultural analytics” (104)? If Swedenborg indeed bears legitimacy as a Buddha of the north, a more sustained attention to the concrete and direct ways that Swedenborg influenced Emerson’s concept of nature, or Blake’s koan-like textual strategies, could clarify this problem. We could reframe this question that concerns a flow of ideas from a very different angle, and also ask how Swedenborg relates to Blake and Emerson’s position in the history of modern Japanese literature. he recent collection of essays on Blake’s influence on Japanese letters (Clark and Suzuki) suggests that Blake has had a sustained resonance for Japanese authors in a particular way that other, more well-known Romantics, such as Wordsworth or Coleridge, emphatically did not. Why? As already mentioned, D. T. Suzuki specialized as a lecturer on William Blake at different points in universities in Japan, notably during the period that coincided with his Swedenborg essays and Swedenborg translations; but this was just a small component of a wider web of readings and aesthetic interrelations that stretches from Sōetsu Yanagi’s ideas about art and readings in Blake, to the self-referential postmodern fiction of Kenzaburō Ōe, whose 1986 Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a two-hundred-and-fifty page meditative dialogue with Blake’s poetics. Ōe’s novel could be said to culminate in an emotionally-charged reading of Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgement, where the protagonist grapples with how the watercolor image represents “Swedenborg’s Great Man” in all its mystical implications.19 Emerson and the Transcendentalists occupy a similar singular place in the Japanese reading of Romanticism as Blake does. Suzuki wrote in 1959 that I am now beginning to understand the meaning of the deep impressions made upon me while reading Emerson in my college days. I was not then studying the American philosopher but digging down into the recesses of my own thought, which had been there ever since the awakening of Oriental consciousness. hat was the reason I felt so canon of the sutras was simply not available until the second half of the nineteenth century.” Lussier par. 15. 19) Ōe 223. Ōe’s protagonist is not quoting Swedenborg directly, but rather the Blake scholar Kathleen Raine—a critic who long maintained that “it is the doctrines of Swedenborg that Blake’s works embody and to which they lend poetry and eloquence” (Raine 89). 28 D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 familiar with him—I was, indeed, making acquaintance with myself then. he same could be said of horeau. Who would not recognize his poetic affinity with Saigyo or Basho, and his perhaps unconscious indebtedness to the Oriental mode of feeling towards Nature? (Zen Buddhism 343–44) In an astounding dislocation, Suzuki uproots Emerson and horeau from their embedded cultural and national contexts, and goes a step beyond acknowledging their influence or affinity: they become textual encounters for a Japanese Buddhist to find himself. Such points of Japanese engagement with the Western Romantic tradition, with Swedenborg’s presence ghosting on the perimeters of Blakean and Emersonian texts, destabilizes the standard Orientalist critique that has viewed Western literary contact with Asian religions as derivative and parasitic, irrevocably linked to projects of nation and empire. To bring the frameworks of Swedenborg and Zen into the productive space of an author like Emerson—or even the obscure Dasa, for that matter—evokes a scale of time that is much older and vaster than the historical construct of the United States. Wai Chi Dimock has written on the implications of bringing such a longue durée, a sense of ecological deep time, to the work of literary criticism and argues that it ultimately “denationalizes space.” To contextualize Emerson’s readings of Sufi poetry and the Bhagavad-Gita (and Swedenborg, we might add), “yield[s] some of the terms on which American literature bursts out of the confines of the nation-state, becoming a thread in the fabric of a world religion” (Dimock 32). Denationalized space is not depoliticized literature, as one might assume Dimock is implying, and to pay attention to the transpacific tangle of Swedenborg and Zen is not an aestheticized exercise in forgetting how the nineteenth-century American reading of Buddhism is inextricable from American imperial interests, especially the American warships commanded by Admiral Matthew Perry that forced Japan’s trade markets to open in 1854. Rather, the denationalizing that occurs within the scope of a literary longue durée runs in counterflows, back to authors in imperial centers like Emerson or Blake who have often been positioned at the center of literary canon-nation formations, and uproots them into a much larger field of signification which challenges the very question of how “American” or “British” such authors are quintessentially purported to be.20 In Emerson, Suzuki finds his Japa20) his is discussed at greater length in Zuber, “ ‘Poking Around in the Dust of Asia’.” D. Zuber / Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33 29 nese self, and Emerson is thus implicitly made part of Suzuki’s Zen journey towards satori, or enlightenment. As a “Buddha of the North,” Swedenborg occasionally functioned as a conduit into this deterritorialized space. Towards the end of the 1840s, at the same time that Emerson was reading the Bhagavad-Gita and hailing it as a “trans-national classic” in his journals—a neologism that uncannily anticipates Randolph Bourne and the modern critical valence given to the transnational21—Emerson reflected on Swedenborg’s place within a larger question of poetics that went beyond national boundaries and canons. “I have sometimes thought,” Emerson wrote, “that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg” (Essays 661). We might reframe Emerson’s enigmatic words to posit another thread of Swedenborgian relation that runs from Philangi Dasa and D. T. 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