"Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature": Book Review

While cross-cultural studies of the transmission and reception of Buddhism within historical and sociological contexts multiply, those examining literary aspects remain less common. These eleven essays examine American and British authors during the past century who have taken up Buddhist themes; some of them have taken refuge in Buddhism. Aimed at an academic audience, these entries generally remain accessible to a broad readership. This collection, despite its high price as sold by an academic press, may appeal to many inquirers intrigued by its wide coverage.

Introducing this book’s range, co-editor Lawrence Normand surveys the reception and adaptation of Buddhism in the West. He cites Donald S. Lopez and David McMahan. He supports their responses to the ways in which Buddhism has been reshaped for twentieth-century concerns. Lopez and McMahon have analyzed how meditation and modernism influence recent cultural trends. Normand notes more of an emphasis on the needs of the body. The contemporary insistence of concentrating on the breath focuses on the mental flow of images. This shift engages more than one of the authors investigated by Normand’s international colleagues.

Erin Louttit in “Reincarnation and Selfhood in Olive Schreiner’s The Buddhist Priest’s Wife and Undine” reminds readers that this South African writer, despite her late-Victorian period of production, looks forward in time. Both the story of the priest’s wife and Schreiner’s novella Undine humanize and normalize Buddhism. Death is blurred. The self survives the body in her post-Christian perspective. Schreiner considers and acknowledges possibilities of reincarnation.

 
Normand’s “Shangri-La and Buddhism in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6” contrasts two treatments of this earthly paradise. Thanks to its film adaptation, Hilton’s 1933 novel endures as certainly more popular than Auden and Isherwood’s ambitious if flawed drama. Incorporating historical crises and struggles of personal alienation, both channel the appeal of the late-Victorian romances which J. Jeffrey Franklin in The Lotus and the Lion (2008) investigated in imperial and colonial British literature. Hilton’s quest entices the reader as if possible; Auden and Isherwood’s satire demolishes the dream as futile. However, the limits of the duo’s Buddhist sources (including Alexandra David-Neél’s With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet) blunt the dramatic impact of their barbed points.

Via readings of D.T. Suzuki, Erin Lafford and Emma Mason take up another poet’s mid-century approach to Buddhist content. In “‘ears of my ears’: e. e. cummings’ Buddhist prosody,” the pair (sticking to that author’s conventionally unconventional spelling), looks at Cummings by way of Martin Heidegger. This philosopher’s challenge to the ego atomizes the sense of self. Similarly, Cummings’ poems, grounded in the breath’s rhythms, aspire not to human voice but to birdsong, in Lafford and Mason’s report on this poet’s craft. It rewards listening, meditation, and silence.

The center of this anthology finds many names repeating, as Cummings and Suzuki begin to sway other writers and thinkers. “Zen Buddhism as Radical Conviviality in the Works of Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton” features three leading advocates during the period during and especially after WWII who begin to react against conformity. Manuel Yang applies Ivan Illich’s “radical conviviality” as akin to the “creative spontaneity and non-attachment” connecting these three countercultural creators. (p. 72) Promoting “spontaneous convergence,” the trio shares a commitment to a “non-action, non-institutional” form of “spiritual assonance,” their non-conformity appealing to dissidents. Yet, many then conformed.

They conformed as the Beats. The appeal of Buddhism for 1950s seekers rebounded off of two other poets based in the Bay Area during this restive postwar period. “Radical Occidentalism: The Zen Anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen” offers James Patrick Brown’s analysis. He shows how the Beats adapted Suzuki’s teachings into a nascent counter-cultural milieu. Brown avers: “Suzuki translated Zen into an American idiom that hit some of the keynotes of American anarchism: a rejection of cultural conditioning, institutionalism, and traditionalism; an affirmation of individualism and radical self-reliance in the Thoreauvian vein; and a language of revolutionary aspiration.” (pp. 94-95) For more about these anarchist roots within American Transcendentalism, a translation of the Slovenian professor Ziga Vodovnik’s The Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism (Berkeley CA: PM Press, 2013) is recommended.

Unsurprisingly, “Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac’s Belief System” follows. Any analysis of American Buddhist literature should include Kerouac. What has been less examined, as it lacks pop culture appeal, is his retreat back to boyhood Catholicism after his 1950s immersion into Buddhism. Bent Sørensen explains the breakdown of his “hybrid system of faith,” triggered by a 1960 visit to those whom Kerouac called the “Mexican Fellaheen” or poor peasants. (p. 106) He pivoted from a romanticized fatalism to “a complete lack of compassion” for those who refused to better their condition. Kerouac, fueled by drink, flirted with madness as his guilt persisted and his sense of sin returned. His characters by the 1960s often entered silence, before death. Kerouac accounted for their dire straits by resorting to Christian rationales “as a punishment for sin.” (p. 118) Like their author, his protagonists try to move on, but samsara catches up with them and thwarts their doomed quests to escape justice.

Another gloomy fiction from the early 1960s depicts this “cyclical nature of suffering.” (p. 136) “Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The Influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett’s How It Is” displays Andy Wimbush’s recovery of Haeckel’s A Visit to Ceylon (1882). Beckett mentions this author in his grim 1964 novel (translated from Comment C’est (1961). Both versions plunge into an unsparing reduction of existence through an agonizing series of reincarnations. These enable torture of lower life-forms by the Sinhalese, witnessed by Haeckel. While the natives do not kill beasts and creatures, the Sinhalese justify treating them badly. For, they reason, if they had not merited life in such debased versions, they would not be such. This application of Buddhist concepts to real-world dukkha sobers the reader.

A return to Isherwood, now living in a more congenial incarnation in Southern California, finds him thriving. In “‘That Other Ocean’: Buddhism, Vedanta, and The Perennial Philosophy in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man,” Bidhan Roy shows how not only the author’s well-known immersion into Vedanta but his exposure to Buddhism and fellow British expatriate Aldous Huxley enters the 1964 novel, based on Isherwood’s own sojourn. Filtered through popular reinterpretations of Buddhism in vogue by then, Isherwood’s novel reveals his sympathy with Buddhism, contrasted with the arch satire he and Auden had deployed for The Ascent of F6.

For writers closer to our time, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Mahayana Meditation” finds Sarah Gardam examining Pure Land sutras and Mahāyāna emptiness doctrines. Gardam uses these to explicate Kingston’s Chinese “talk-story” in her 1986 memoir.

Elena Spandri’s “The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea” affirms another doctrine, that of the Middle Way, as a compliment to Murdoch’s philosophical career. This champions humanism rather than a Kantian or utilitarian ethics in her 1986 novel. A compassionate ethics wins out, in Spandri’s articulation of Murdoch’s plot and character choices.

The final entry tackles one more formidable topic, arguably more arcane than any philosophy. “Strange Entanglements: Buddhism and Quantum Theory in Contemporary Nonfiction” unravels the tangle of two popular if recondite genres. Anglo-American popularizations of physics and debates or attempts to reconcile debate between science and religion both, in Sean Miller’s energetic chapter, seek to posit parallels between physics formulae and Buddhist or Taoist descriptions of phenomena. Fritjof Capra, B. Alan Wallace, Matthieu Ricard, and Trinh Xuan Thuan typify decontextualized efforts. Miller doubts their truth-claims for dharma as science.

He finds futile their attempts to reconcile Sanskrit texts full of “imaginative parataxes.” (p. 205) Contemporary exegetes wind up at dead-ends. They wriggle in fudge factors and they refuse to admit their results, which tally only as logical incoherence. Miller pinpoints irony in the Vietnamese-born, American-educated astrophysicist Thuan’s deferral to the “ecclesiastical authority of a French-born Buddhist monk who resides in Nepal.” (p. 214) On the other hand, according to the French-language version of his eponymous website, Ricard earned a Ph.D. in cellular genetics in 1972, after which he entered monasticism.  Miller could have delved deeper into Ricard’s scientific training, as how much Ricard has kept up with his past field and that of astrophysics alongside his Tibetan adaptation and practice, granted, remains a relevant topic to debate. All the same, Miller relishes the chance to tackle a topic which diverges drastically in tone and approach from his predecessors, and this intriguing chapter deserves attention for that.

Miller concludes by summing up the current position of Buddhism in the West. “Stripped of its literary and cultural contingencies, in its mildest form, Buddhism becomes a form of self-help therapy contained by a consumerist market-logic, a happy face put on a liberal humanism purified of reductive materialism. And at its most stringent, Buddhism becomes a form of submission to a hierophantic theocracy, however benign.” (p. 213) This collection needed this voice calling out what some of these writers treated tended to sidestep or gloss over: the manner in which messages of Buddhism warp through our capitalist mindset into globalized commodity.
 

Normand in his introduction noted how pre-1945, the textual approach of T.S. Eliot and Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist “engagements” dominated Western reactions. (p. 15) But, neither Normand nor subsequent contributors elaborate sufficiently as to how these “engagements” entered texts during the last century. The earlier impact of Edwin Arnold’s bestselling life of the Buddha as The Light of Asia (1879), J. Jeffrey Franklin has begun to show, reverberated into the next century. This issue, likewise, does not earn any mention beyond Normand’s few references.

All the same, this book’s emphasis on the Beats, more than its scattered coverage of writers after the 1960s, should encourage more research by scholars. Additionally, Sean Miller’s divergent if necessary exploration of a dimension of Buddhism in non-fictional literature may encourage scholars to pursue the portrayals of Buddhism in other scientific and philosophical contexts, a subject needing as much if not more attention than, say, Kerouac’s appropriations of the dharma. For now, this anthology serves readers as a portal, opening up into a display of texts which have integrated Buddhist characters, settings, debates, and insights, gathered during the past century.

George Eliot's "Middlemarch": Audiobook review

I am reviewing Juliet Stevenson's reading of the entire book, over thirty hours. She captures the nuances of expression in George Eliot's ruminating, satiric, painful, and idealistic visions as filtered through an omniscient narrator who creates a chronicle of this small English town's families. You get, this being a high-Victorian novel about the years just before the Queen ascended her throne, an immersion into the gentry. The poor tend to be backdrops, and the goings on of a doctor, a banker, a scholar, and their wives comprise the stories.

My favorite character is Causabon, who attracts Dorothea early on. Their relationship is fraught with sadness as well as dreams. Eliot pins down the lure of learned lore in an unforgettable way, even as she lets us see the folly of the grand scheme the couple follow.

This is one of the most famous novels in English, so the summaries of the plotlines and interspersed chapters examining the protagonists can be found easily. Stevenson captures the varied accents, male and female, deftly. A woman's voice open to emotion but steeled by intellect fits Eliot's own outlook well. This novel, true to triple-decker form does go on, and modern readers may need more patience than that of audiences long ago for such steady attention to the intricate observations Eliot conveys.

Hearing this, one gets caught up in the flow. The immense detail may or may not be lost on a listener rather than a reader. The various languages of the quotes opening each chapter are communicated faithfully and Stevenson and Eliot match each other in terms of the tone this novel takes, sometimes arch, sometimes sensitive, sometimes impassioned. It's a lot to follow.

Having studied this novel decades ago in college and then always meaning to return to it, I found this on audio a pleasant experience. No spoilers, but highlights are three deaths that play crucial roles here. All captured with wheezes, faltering voices, and growing weightiness well by Stevenson. Now, it is her voice I will hear in these pages if I see them again. (Amazon US 6-20-15 + Audible)

Judith Flanders' "The Victorian City": Book Review

London epitomizes the Victorian city. It doubled in population between 1800 and 1850, and this growth spurt was witnessed by its most famous author, who moved there at the age of ten, in 1821. Gleaning the most informative or entertaining evidence from the author's many books, Judith Flanders combines Dickens' life and works with archives as a "perfect optic through which to see the city's transformation" during the reign of Queen Victoria and Dickens' life span. While these do not align perfectly, as the queen reigned between 1837 and 1901 while Dickens died in 1870, the general fit proves neat enough here.

This is thick, and therefore a congenial match for Dickens' own sometimes voluble texts. Well illustrated with period lithographs and engravings, prefaced by helpful maps reminding us how much that capital does and does not match the layout of the ever-congested megapolis today, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London keeps to the streets themselves rather than the interiors and domestic duty. These streets prove noisy, as horses clopped and cabs rattled. Sellers shouted, carts crashed, horses neighed and cattle bellowed, from what seems before dawn until midnight, daily.

Flanders opens with a look at how early many had to wake up. By two or three in the morning, some had left home miles away, even in the countryside, to hike in to the markets and to set up stalls in near-blackness. Many returned home in the same lack of light, through dim, dangerous, and unpaved streets, after twelve- or fourteen hour days. Saturdays some might leave work at ten p.m. They were condemned by Sabbatarians who chided those who dared to shop in turn on Sundays for their scanty provisions. Lives lived in the open meant that few of the poorer classes kept food at home, where storage was lacking and vermin abounded. Instead, people ate on the go, many trudging everywhere.

The ratio of black cabs today to people in London is over 1:400. 160 years ago, there was about one horse-drawn cab for every person. The traffic had to, at Temple Bar which divided the City from the West End, narrow to a space twenty yards wide, and coaches and livery jammed into what was likely a perpetual bottleneck. Such situations multiplied over the city, as the poor had to live near their jobs and the rich sought to travel if possible by more amenable transport than on foot. But these rides could be harrowing, and the mud, rain, smoke, fog, and excrement that abounded meant whatever one's rank, the weather and the smells took their toll on one's health, one's clothing, and one's nerves.

Some sights jolt us by familiarity. Traffic clogged, even as a lunchroom promised free delivery within a ten-mile radius. Grand illuminations lit up London with huge displays, even if this same city could be so dark before streetlights that firemen tried to put out a blaze they kept glimpsing beyond, which turned out to be the Northern Lights. Other features remind us of distinctions. Waiters had to pay for their laundry, supplies, and a place at the chophouses where they then had to count on tips for their wage. Oysters were craved as then as now, but back then, were a cheap source of food for the poor.

What differs is the diminution of animals from these dense streets today. The horrors of Smithfield Market with its braying of terrified livestock sent to slaughter, the din of those goading them with whips, the escape of maddened bulls, the press of cattle and sheep in the small pens, the stench: this created a scene that as the animals were herded through the streets few could fully escape, or forget.

However narrow, streets certainly have widened in the never-ending construction which marks London for two centuries and more now. This also led to slum clearances, as either well-intended or speculative interests sought to raze medieval warrens and tiny alleys where filth emanated, among humans and beasts and factories. Yet, this pushed the poor, who still had to walk to their work--often on the streets themselves--into nearby neighborhoods, accelerating their decline even as the inner city (then as now) soared in desirability. Even the Tube followed this pattern; Flanders reminds us that unlike Paris, London's planners kept many underground lines out of the innermost ring of London (or at least diverted from regal proximity). The Underground in turn sparked more sprawl, more crowds.

It can surprise us how frequently Queen Victoria survived no less than seven assassination attempts, given the proximity of herself to these very crowds. She, perhaps appropriately, rarely appears in these pages, although other royals do, often at clubs separated from the pubs where lowlier folks flock. While Flanders' survey suffers from a shortcoming of not entering as many interiors, beyond the public gaze, as a reader eager to discover Victorian minutiae might anticipate, she examines in a frisky chapter the veracity of claims for prostitution by a considerable number of women on London's streets. She avers that although such a profession was attributed to milliners, that occupation's required hours of fourteen or sixteen hour shifts meant that even if  those women still had the energy after work to pursue liaisons for profit or pleasure (the two could blur), they likely had not the time.

The challenge no matter the labor most Londoners had to eke out was how to stay healthy, dry, shod, and fed. Until nearly 1850, Westminster and surrounding areas were supplied with drinking water from sewers. Dregs from the glasses rinsed in a pub were sold again to the poor. Scraps similarly were fed to the same. Cholera spread, and infection grew. The conditions under which Londoners breathed, dined,a and drank prove the dismal nature of the fog-bound and soot-showered streets. On these, everyone appears to have plied a trade, licit or otherwise. Watercress-girls, cats' meat vendors with horse chunks on skewers cut to order, dog-carts (alas no canine-power), touts for dolly shops (unlicensed pawnbrokers), crossing-sweepers, costermongers with strawberries sold in paper cones, match-sellers, hot-potato vendors, chum-masters in charge of who was jailed with whom for debt or for crime, and pimps consorted in the mews or shoved each other at Covent Garden or on the Strand.

The circle of who sold what comprised its tidy if ironically drawn economy. Tea leaves after stewing were rinsed, dried, and sprinkled on carpets to draw up dust before sweeping. "Once this had been done, some charwomen sold the leaves to unscrupulous dealers who mixed them with new tea leaves, selling the tea at bargain prices. It was these very women and their kind who were most likely to purchase the lowest-priced tea, and who were drinking what they had lately swept up." (148)

Flanders sprinkles such observations throughout. She sets up one theme per chapter and moves within from topic to topic carefully. Occupations or their lack, health or its lack, entertainment for all, and nighttime temptations and dangers create the four foundations upon which her solid scholarship rests, in brisk, clear prose. She opens each chapter with a dramatic vignette from an elaborate hoax, a fire on the Thames, a skating disaster at Regents Park, and the funeral of the Duke of Wellington to conjure a fitting mood.

I did close this still pondering a few questions I had expected to be answered by the conclusion, as so much detail fills this book. What about the cultural impact of the Great Exhibition, and of the museums and galleries which already had begun to be built?  What did the fabled Leadenhall Market look like? In an era torn between reason and faith, surely these debates of the Victorian era must have generated friction on the street among preachers and debaters, and left their mark on passersby.

While some of the amassed data may overwhelm a casual reader, Judith Flanders admirably avoids jargon and keeps this always pitched at a general reader. A hundred of the just over five hundred pages are notes, a bibliography, and an index, assuring its value as a reference as well as a narrative. (PopMatters 7-22-14

William T. Vollmann's "The Rifles": Book Review

Returning to the lands of ice and snow, this third-published (1994) if sixth in the series of Seven Dreams of the North American landscape "straddles the gap between fiction and documentary history" (409) as it crunches by. Compared to "Fathers and Crows" (1992) and "Argall" (2001), "The Rifles" tells its narrative proper in 340 pages, little more than half, on average, of those two epics.

William T. Vollmann's ambition in this and his life's formidable work investigating violence and power remains towering, but for how long, and among how many? In lengthy, insistent, sprawling books before and after this, he confronts the rationalizations people make for conquest, whether of a prostitute's body or of a proud culture. He was about thirty during this polar travelogue, and begins to shift from cockiness to introspection. He wonders early on, as he sidles past his youth: "Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories." The bulk of this Dreams project for posterity (and since then, the time it's taken from or among related projects as massive or more so over twenty years) may bridle his impulsive chronicling. He muses about book-shaped, sulphurous stone slabs, stacked by icy pressure, but easily skipped into a lake to be smashed. "All books are like this; they stand shoulder to shoulder in the library stacks; perhaps they are 'popular' at first. perhaps not, but eventually they stand anonymous, unread, forgotten, and this is how it should be, for this is how it is with lives." (15)

He means to spend as much of his life as he can tracking down human frailty and natural force in remote places. Like the first saga of "The Ice-Shirt" (1991), this tramps into the Arctic. It focuses on the Inuit, who were introduced in that initial Dream, but moves between Vollmann's 1988 and 1991 visits to the Canadian north more evenly. Allowing contemporary insights to contrast with those on Sir John Franklin and crew's doomed expedition of 1845-1848 as they sought a Northwest Passage, again we witness, as in all four installments so far, an attempt to break through the frozen or forested continent. The French traders of Québec, and the English colonists of Virginia, failed to find Cathay, as they traded in respectively iron kettles and copper ones, along with guns, to divide and conquer.

The power of repeating firearms (in a doubled meaning), spirals from the faint impacts of the Norse intruders, eight centuries before. As the narrator asks, "because iron axes had almost decided things in Vinland, because arquebuses had taken command in Kebec, what must rifles have done here?" (45) Within this historical adventure, Vollmann seeks his own maturation. He longs for understanding, becoming a consciously farcical but decently meaning intruder himself as "Captain Subzero" hands out cookies to kids on Cornwallis Island. Older people look through him; older boys shrink back. Three girls (after parental permission for outings) play along with William's earnest exchanges. "He wanted so desperately to be loved; he gave more things away." (33) He's yet another trader there.

One particularly returns his affection, a commodity he laments as so elusive to obtain or share. Reepah's "mouth tasted like the bubble gum she'd sold her tooth for" as Bill, or "John" puts it. For, after he assumes the role of Captain Subzero in his antics with the local girls, Vollmann finds in Reepah's friendship his polar twin, Captain John Franklin. Cleverly, as he (presumably) fictionalizes himself as procreating protagonist, he conflates Franklin's wife left behind, Lady Jane, with "John"'s Inuk lover.  Vollmann, with little pretension and anguished awareness, expands this "grave-twin" trope. Gradually over the first hundred pages, Captain Subzero speaks on behalf of Franklin, until the English explorer's venture intersperses with Vollmann's own, a century and a half later in the Arctic.

The author realizes he may romanticize the region. So might its now aging first Inuk inhabitants, for they were relocated to Resolute by the Canadian police to settle there a hundred years after Franklin's arrival. The indigenous presence ensures the protection of its natural resources against Norwegian claims. The displaced natives look back fondly on their Northern Québec homeland, compared with desolate Nunavit. After all, "the reason we love Eden is that we've been expelled from it". (82) Reepah's past or present suitor staggers in with bloody mouth and black eyes to leer at the teller; the pop songs or television blares; her child cries; she goes to prison; she becomes pregnant by "John".

Within this disconcertingly bleached domain, full of blue water and sometimes sky, green and yellow rocks, and the red Maple Leaf flag, as well as a ruined airplane, Vollmann admires its terrain. "The islands were mottled in all distinction, like the forehead of a Nobel prize winner, the moon through a rich man's telescope." (95) Sparing in descriptions, he freshens them to convey his presence. He enters this Fourth Dream dramatizing his own quest, as the third (at least, among his main male Dream characters to date) hesitant white man courting a native girl, uncertain of his claims on her.

The predicament of the native, entangled along with those who seek to master the people and their land, mirrors Franklin's ice-bound position. Yet, "Subzero enjoyed 'being' Franklin, being now occupied by only physical constraints", for in this paring down to the elemental, the essential lesson emerges. "Captivity frees one from the anguish of a liberty bereft of the good", he asserts. (116) That is, the reason ex-prisoners and ex-soldiers return to wax nostalgic among like comrades lies in the fact that then, the "future" with "all that" for better or often worse still lay ahead, as yet unknown. Yearning within the imprisoned or conscripted soul, in Vollmann's view, enables inner liberation.

Excited by the prospect of a Northwest Passage, the Victorian-era crew feels "on the edge of something new, moving with an ice-horizon that was banded like some grey Easter egg, frilled and starred with most subtle lacings". Certainly, dazzling horizons stimulate those new to them, then or now. The narrator shares in them "to the extent that" he is Franklin; but "to the extent that" he is Subzero, he cannot escape the "daily ache like old ice, knowing as you did that Reepah was in need, that seals were dying for nothing, that Fox and Raven were rotting in the dump at Pond Inlet, that PCB contamination had been reported at Yellowknife:-- the agony was not moot as for earlier pages of our continent". The Greenland Norse, the Québec French, the Virginia English have long lost their colonies. This fourth of the Dreams jolts more. The teller blames himself for some of this vast loss. "When you hear someone screaming for help and you do not know what to do, it is much worse than when she is already dead. This is the reason to get stuck in ice." (137) Vollmann reiterates Franklin's uneasy freedom, for soon his crew find themselves unable to move, trapped for seasons in the Arctic.

On an earlier expedition, about to leave behind a native girl he has impregnated, one of Franklin's crew, facing depleted supplies, worries. "Just as Mr. Franklin was doing with the others of her race, he used her only as a temporary source of meat. He said this to himself, and yet it was not true. He loved her. That made his helplessness more miserable than ever." (180) Another kindred spirit preceding Captain Subzero. He compassionately relates dragging a drunken Reepah through a (New York?) city, blurring her into Hood's consort Greenstockings, abandoned by Hood, pined after by a rival officer, Back. Soon, around the Arctic Circle to find a passage, Franklin's men starve.

They will again, on their last journey which deepens the despair on that second doomed foray. Vollmann enlivens the weary imagination of weakening Hood, near the polar Barren Lands. "Somewhere the caribou were so numerous that their antlers were a moving forest and their dark shoulder-bumps were tussocks; their legs were grass and suddenly the barrens grass was gone and a moving forest came galloping across the rivers." (197) On their arrival, the English had given out rifles, and shot caribou as the sailors meandered past the shore. Now, they scout each other, to devour.

Franklin, by the last third of this narrative, stands with his men "watching the open water die" (241). As Subzero muses, it's always lead, in the repeating rifles--bringing dependency, decimation of the native ways of life, and destruction of the native habitat--or, in the case of Franklin's men, the lead-soldered tins of meat that slowly poisoned some over three years, and addled the reasoning of the survivors, none of whom lasted for long, The final sections, after the set-piece of Subzero's ten days in an abandoned weather station near the North Magnetic Pole as he tries not to freeze to death, peter out into a blur of white pages and black print, as the memories of men merge and wander off.  I liked this better than "Ice-Shirt" but the willfully, if fittingly, vague concluding pages may not please those wanting closure. (2-18-14 to Amazon US)

"Walter Potter's Curious World of Taxidermy": Book Review

"Anthropomorphic tableaux" entertained Victorian audiences; when I was at a 2001 revival of Victoriana at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I turned a corner of the crowded exhibit to find under glass a fantastic scene. Twenty stuffed cats, arranged in 1890, at "The Kitten's Wedding." I burst into laughter (a rare occurrence) and summoned my wife and sons (then at an impressionable age) to this must-see display. As we chortled, other museum goers looked at us and the display, askance, silent.

This anecdote illustrates the changes between the time that Walter Potter crafted hundreds of animals, amphibians, and birds into intricately assembled dioramas for the delight of his fellow Britons, and today's more uneasy reaction (well, for most people, perhaps) to taxidermy that so faithfully and eerily mimics our own rituals. Potter sought, from boyhood, to teach himself how to dramatize nature surrounding him in rural West Sussex. London-based taxidermy expert Pat Morris and Brooklyn curator of The Morbid Anatomy Library and Museum, Joanna Ebenstein, present an illustrated compendium of her photos and his brisk text to explain what we know now about Potter.

First of all, born in 1835 and dying in 1918, this naturalist was no relation to Beatrix Potter. Her own renderings of animals resemble strongly the real ones Walter gutted, stuffed, and wired, but the authors surmise that since Beatrix's first book did not appear until 1902, any supposed influence was from him to her, and not vice versa. As a lad, he "tamed jackdaws and taught pet starlings to speak". In his village of Bramble, he began to collect the critters who comprised a tourist attraction, aided by a local brewery who saw such marvels as "The Athletic Toads" as a draw for consumers of their ales.

How did Walter create his displays? He began with cardboard models "until suitable animals became available" as Morris and Ebenstein diplomatically phrase the reality. I preferred when seeing those wedded felines to pretend they were all lovingly resurrected from kittens who had passed away peacefully. While a similar fiction was perpetrated by the museum curators who succeeded Potter, the facts prove that the beasts and birds arrived in less placid ways. Visitors brought in birds killed by cats or found on roads. Surplus kittens from farm litters were put to death. Stillborn rabbits and, at Potter's own self-taught hand, rats and toads contributed to the skin and fur out of which he made art.

Nearly fifty rabbits crowd a village school, with classes on needlepoint, math, sewing, and writing. "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin" (as pop art pioneer Peter Blake comments upon in a preface) represents one of Potter's most ambitious efforts. It took him seven years of spare time to build up all the birds needed to play out this nursery rhyme's plot. Croquet and tea, squirrels at cards and rats at gambling, kingfishers within their underground lair, "The Babes in the Wood", "The House that Jack Built", and, fittingly or ironically, ferrets hunted by miniature figurines fill out the tableaux depicted.

Part two of this short book reveals the details of these tableaux. Unlike the one at the V+A, where the minutiae of the crowded ceremony could not be seen from a distance and under glass, the vivid color and captions help the reader envision Potter's meticulous attention better than a museum display may. For instance, the authors point out one blue-clad fellow. "This male cat looks disgruntled at the matrimonial proceedings. He once held a book open at the wrong page and glued to the stumps of his paws, but it is now lost." This passage verifies the next lesson of this book: the fate of this collection.

As part three tells, the museum at Bramble was sold in 1970. Moved first to nearby Brighton and then Arundel, next to faraway Cornwall, after 150 years the collection, having been turned down by the National Trust, was auctioned off. No purchaser summoned up the funds to keep it all intact. A few postcards, many showing the "freaks of nature" that also engrossed past audiences more than present, flesh out these curious contents of Walter Potter's now-scattered world, attesting to its eccentricities.

PopMatters 4-15-14; Walter Potter Taxidermy book site;  in shorter form 4-17-14 to Amazon for US version and British printing

Adam Thorpe's "Ulverton": Book Review

Readers of "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell (2004) or even the far less known debut novel by the well-known Alan Moore "Voice of the Fire" (1995) may admire this 1993 predecessor in the same mode of storytelling (I reviewed both). Over time, voices and registers shift as a locale takes in generations who convey overlapping themes, concerns, mysteries, items, and predecessors. Thorpe even fits himself into the final chapter from 1988. This circles back neatly to the start, where in 1650 a soldier from Cromwell's depredations in Ireland returns to Ulverton, a vaguely placed hamlet in the southwest of England (think of Hardy's Wessex).

That takes place in an efficient style nearly our own, but most chapters after will hearken to the tone and vocabulary of the period. Similar to Moore, this will challenge the reader, as it forces you into dialect and regionalisms. Facts tying each section to others flit across the page, but rarely and briefly. Considerable concentration is needed, perhaps too much in one part which as with other chapters seems to go on too long for the detail and the mood necessary to place the reader within the situation, and some of this moves slowly--if fittingly so for a rural account, after all.

1689 comes with a more Bunyanesque feel, set on the barren places in a terrible winter. A religious revelation bursts in, as an Anglican clergyman must tell of a Quaker's conversion in grotesquely twisted circumstances. 1712 brings in a fussy tone about a diligent landowner's earnest attempts to modernize as the land's enclosed and its farmers set later to toil for the gentry and the wealthier class who have taken over the commons. Thorpe introduces here an effect I like and which he uses later, hesitation by a narrator: brackets here fill in what the writer loses control over or leaves illegible.

In epistolary style, one side of an exchange between a lady of the estate and her departed lover happens in 1743. Pay attention already to items that are repeating in later chapters. 1775 I had to read to myself aloud in parts. It's a barely literate tailor's transcription of a phonetic rendering of dialect and while compelling--a mother's plea for her son sentenced for stealing a hat to Newgate prison in London--it demands very close attention, but it rewards the same. This can be said of the entire novel. Few passages leap out, but the accumulative effect pleases in incremental, subtle, and embedded fashion.

I felt the 1803 part an amusing if moral shaggy-dog story--and a long one set in a tavern suitably over a long if one-sided conversation-- but it does in retrospect show how the cutting down of so much of England's woodlands altered the landscape and furnished its houses in a time of fuel and expansion. In 1830 a backlash against mechanization by farmers sets laborers to revolt, as taken down by a legal functionary, as he intersperses the testimony of those arrested and facing execution or transportation to Van Diemen's Land with his appeals to his beloved. Thorpe plays off the concerns of the law and gentry skillfully, as they attend to agrarian matters as they must, but often in offhand fashion compared to their domestic concerns, as their own jobs interfere with their own pleasures, as with us all.

A female photographer's 1859 commentary on the plates she takes around Ulverton as well as in Egypt captures Thorpe's ability to channel his chosen styles well--here a George Eliot phrasing comes across very smoothly. Light in the Middle East hits her differently: glare makes a scene "as unintelligible as newsprint in a foreign country." (188) A stream-of-consciousness 1887 poacher's ruminations take the most effort, even more than that of the prisoner's mother, to decipher. A short part, it felt much longer.

Still, these set up if laboriously the impacts of the last century. Here, the sections start to coalesce, as surnames you've seen from centuries before repeat and as places sound more familiar. 1914 juxtaposes an amateur archeology dig at the barrow through an official retired from India with the recruitment by the squire of the local lads to enlist and fight. As if a parlor opened once a year for visitors, so, the narrator reflects, are the mentalities of the villagers, exposed to an idea beyond their workaday and parochial concerns. "To reveal the dead is not to release them." (245) A standalone chapter, it successfully dissects imperial imperatives and ironies.

Following is another intriguing perspective: a 42-year-old woman transcribes the fulsome and tiresome obsession of a cartoonist to record his life and times before it all blows up in 1953. A bonfire of old carts and farming tools commemorates the Coronation and the passing of agrarian ways as the motor car and the plastic wonders of the modern age enter the markets and the streets. She demurs: "Why can't folk leave the past alone?" (289)The ellipses and hesitations of the narrator assume a poignant role and the starts and stops in her own asides challenging or easing her honesty grow as this section unfolds. This modulation memorably displays Thorpe's control of character.

Finally, Thorpe makes a cameo as in 1988 a native son turns developer. It's a post-production script for a documentary as a housing estate is built and the barrow makes another appearance, so to speak. Thorpe tells the two sides fairly, the need for saving a village's economy by ensuring jobs to build houses aimed at young families able to keep a few businesses there going, and the need for preservation and respect for fading folkways in a place where every field stands for so much more and where every field bears a telling name.

It's a challenging novel. While parts slow you down, and some of this proves too prolix, the experience of immersion in a dialect and a thought pattern foreign to us makes the lessons Thorpe labors long to inculcate convincing. For its prose experiments and as a novel of ideas, this will appeal. (8-13-13 Amazon US ... or here )

J. Jeffrey Franklin's "The Lotus and the Lion": Book Review

How did writers in Victorian Britain react to the discovery of Buddhism, and how did that impact cause a "cultural counter-invasion" as concepts of karma, nirvana, reincarnation, non-theism, and compassion entered into British depictions of all this, in novels, Theosophy, and lives of the Buddha?

J. Jeffrey Franklin's The Lotus and the Lion (2008) examines these topics in a straightforward and accessible fashion. He navigates through what for me have been conventionally eye-glazing subjects when Theosophy is concerned, and he adroitly shows how this theme took up the appearance if not the substance of scholarship, and how it tried to adapt an "esoteric Buddhism" more amenable to British tastes, which had been schooled by Christianity into preferring the Buddha as if preaching a more proto-Protestant reform of castes and cults to advance a humanistic, merciful, yet just recompense for human failings. Franklin shows this various methods of "textual appropriation": a Buddha life by Richard Phillips contrasted with The Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold, two adventures of Rider Haggard and two bestsellers of Marie Corelli, and finally after Theosophy the natural case study of Kipling's Kim  how Victorians understood Buddhism. Some coupled it with social Darwinism and feared its power; others feared it as nihilistic and negative, deploying it as a scapegoat on which to lay the sins of materialism and capital within an Empire that ignored Christian critics of these same depredations.

Franklin imagines a map drawn by Theosophists eager to bring Oriental wisdom into a milieu where Spiritualism found a ready audience among Britons uneasy about the modernist debunking of faith: there, India would loom large. He explains the gradual role Buddhism came to play as by about mid-century its teachings began to be appreciated apart from Hinduism, and how its holy places and historical traces had begun to be found. Crediting Charles Allan's The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India's Lost Religion, Franklin agrees that this part of colonialism, on behalf of European scholars, may have appropriated its relics and statues, but that at least a civilizing mission on Britain's behalf advanced textual and cultural understandings of the Buddhist origins on their own terms. He triangulates what Victorians knew with what modern scholars and practitioners do, and he uses this as a corrective in turn for the distortions in the texts he studies from the later nineteenth century. He applies this structure most appealingly to study Kim as a exemplar of the dharma.

He urges critics to read Kipling's novel as neither the facile reduction to a celebration of imperialism's Great Game or a post-colonial condemnation of its protagonist's complicity to support the Empire. Instead, as a Buddhist interpretation, he avoids a dichotomy and shows Kim O'Hara as embodying the Middle Way. Despite Kipling's inevitable bias, within an author who appears to have fallen far from the esteem lauded him a century ago,  Franklin argues that Kipling realized with more insight than he has been granted by harsh contemporary critics the predicament of his character, caught between his Anglo-Irish parentage and his Indian, and in turn Muslim-Buddhist-and so on (Franklin charts five or six intersections with other identities and belief systems in the novel which Kim takes on or considers) allegiances. This portrayal steps aside from an either-or decision, and Kim acts out in Buddhist terms the refusal to define himself by imperialist, conquest-and-conflict oriented standards.

Rather, Kim conquers his self by evading these binary distinctions. As the Lama teaches him, he subtly models what Franklin's afterword considers as it looks at nirvana in later Victorian and early twentieth-century British literature. That is, Buddhism offers a model of eschewing dualistic thinking, and in an interdependent manner, it critiques the ecological and economically devastating capitalism that elevates the pursuit of individual freedom regardless of collective harm and moral sustainability.

This could have sparked another book in turn, and I hope that Victorianist Professor Franklin returns to this subject to track it into more contemporary evocations in literary culture. The consideration of nirvana opens up an inviting vantage point from which to look at nihilism and existentialism, as well as philosophical and political pursuits in recent times, and it deserves more space than provided as a closing section here. Despite a few typos, this book conveys his thesis clearly and it can enrich any reader curious about this fresh topic, one of increasing relevance today. (4-23-14 to.Amazon US )

Laurence Cox's "Buddhism and Ireland": Book Review

Marxist sociologist of social movements Laurence Cox’s Buddhism and Ireland expands into nearly four-hundred lively pages what to him first appeared to take but a chapter. In fact, this topic elicited his first dissemination in 2009 in JGB 10. His astute interpretations and groundbreaking research stretch into a sustained grappling to pin down a phenomenon that presents a case study beyond any insularity. One end of Eurasia connects with the other/ Other, for far longer and with more traffic than arguably any previous scholars or practitioners have surmised.

Professor Cox contrasts the academic focus on who controlled the means of intellectual production with “grey literature” in Asia (tracts and agitprop as produced by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish bhikkus who deployed anti-Christian polemic to rouse natives against missionaries). He elaborates how “experience breaks up the smooth flow of discourse” as authors and activists wander East to West and back again unpredictably.

He highlights his investigation as “a history of people in relationships, rather than a history of ideas; it is a history of empire not so much as ideology but as lived practice, and it is a history of social change as anti-colonial struggle and as counter-cultural transformation.” (pp. 39-40) He arrays his findings, drawn from testimony and texts, for a stress akin to what E. P. Thompson asked about Marx: “the question is not whether we are on Marx’s side but whether he is on ours.” (p. 14) That is, Cox confronts the academic bias for textual domination. However reliant upon the written record for his quest, he prefers whenever possible to interpret decisions as carried out or mooted by those Irish who, having found out about Buddhism, acted on it.

Similarly, Cox asks “whether particular choices and actions mark a step forward in relation to people’s previous situation and in the direction of greater personal clarity, interpersonal solidarity and capacity for transformation” regarding globalizing systems and ideologies, from the two tips of Eurasia -- and everywhere beyond and between as the dharma spread, up to nine centuries delayed in transmission. (pp. 14-15) He distinguishes ancient and medieval glimmers of Buddhist content as consumed by Westerners from more recent contributors (as Orientalists, as missionaries, but also a few introduced here as converts turned propagandists). Since the middle of the last century, he locates a shift back to Westerners consuming Buddhism. He cautions against overly reliant textual emphases for interpretation; trinkets, retreats, or travel may as they do nowadays convey for many far more product labeled “Buddhist” rather than books. If agency rather than doctrine, as with many New Religious Movements tends to dominate over dogma or “official” devotees regarding the prevalence of Western Buddhists who primarily identify through meditation, this too needs reiteration, for the fluid nature of identification with Buddhism leads many to a revolving door, challenging census data. In the Irish case, where some interviewed here still fear “outing,” the pressure of conformity and the impositions or allegiances of a dominant culture must be included, and the ability of Buddhist identification and practice to elude facile equivalences. Cox never assumes a devotee of a certain sangha can be summed up by the precepts of that sangha, as if affiliation sums up one's outlook.

Cox cautions that two millennia of Buddhism accumulates vast knowledge and claims, but that these “make it harder for researchers to hear the ‘needs’ which bring people to Buddhism, the problems they are grappling with in their own lives or the hegemonies they are attempting to dismantle.” Rather, organizations step in to “impose their own interpretation and articulation of these needs.” This occludes what people on the everyday level mean by Buddhism, and “we cannot take accounts formulated within this language at face value-- contra both the guardians of Buddhist orthodoxy and the left-feminist critique of ‘religion’ per se.” (p. 33) Cox explains how Westerners often drift into Buddhism as converts or fellow travelers and insert or fixate their own naive or filtered predilections.

These may often not be what sanctioned ministers desire. Teachers, schooled and approved as the establishment no matter their often promoted counter-cultural claims, may crack down on the earlier experimenters. This imported hierarchy may arrive years or decades later as a witting or unwitting force to push heterodox practice towards uniformity, and this in turn clouds subsequent understanding of how ordinary people as well as those in charge of imposing order or recording dogma reacted to Buddhism. Cox suggests instead examining practice “as a pointer to needs,” as a corrective to too much text. While this proves difficult given the paucity of material for many Irish encounters, the reminder that Buddhism appeals or repels many based on their own pressing conditions grounds this invigorating approach while it justifies the humanist and Marxist theoretical framework Cox applies.

Curious readers, to take one persistently purported Irish Buddhist encounter, that of pre-Roman influence on Celtic monasticism from (quasi-)Buddhism, will find that here, the material basis is thin and the testimony muddled.  Cox documents well in his survey how some scraps of “what-ifs” enticed those in the distant and recent past. The gap in transmission is itself a sobering corrective; as much as nine centuries between the East and the farthest island of the West attenuated even a glimmer of the dharma. However, as Cox finds, the core of the "misrecognised biography" within Barlaam and Josaphat medieval legend does prove (at least for once) semi-cohesion of that popular, transmitted ur-tale. Contrasting what W. B. Yeats invoked in “Under Ben Bulben” as “Swear by what the sages spoke/Round the Mareotic Lake” near Alexandria, the Therapeutae rumored (wrongly) by Eusebius as the original monks, Cox finds attempts at claiming Buddhist forebears for Christian monasticism (or Celtic nature poetry by implicit concatenation) inconclusive. He gently shelves fervent attempts at “origin relations” alongside Graves’ The White Goddess as “poetic myths." (p. 63)

The second chapter collects many examples of how the West consumed Buddhist accounts. Testimony from clerics, soldiers, diplomats, pilgrims, and tale-spinners as expressed by learned texts, romances, and chapbooks dominated. The Irish learned more than scholars have claimed. Networks (as Cox examines the Anglican holdings at Trinity College, Dublin and the Catholic equivalents at his home campus, now the National University of Ireland, Maynooth) joined the small farmer or laborer, who might have heard a newspaper account of the East recited by a local priest or merchant, in turn informed reliably or otherwise by Jesuits, Dissenters, traders, or journalists, via communication from China or India. French-language reports enriched Enlightenment discourse in Ireland which began to attempt to make more than mythical sense out of the East. Yet, constrained by conformity to Irish denominational and ethnic allegiances, "being Buddhist" did not appear for pre-modern readers back home or for curious travelers in those Asian realms as a viable or comprehensible personal option.

The "circuits of distribution" for Buddhist material into Ireland as mapped by Cox overlap. A Protestant, "English," and imperial system intersects with the Catholic, "Irish" and diasporic one. By the eighteenth century, a middle-class or plebeian readership itself blends with an orally dispersed set of listeners in cities and towns. Steadily if slowly, the sphere of Buddhist transmission widened. A "more restricted distribution of medieval and classical knowledge before that" period gave way to hedge-schools for Catholics under Penal Law, mass education under Protestant reformers, and then empire-building in which the Irish themselves, once colonized, took part via the military and trading.

All the same, active interest in Buddhism had to wait for opportunity. This came when "the rising power of Catholic nationalism created a new kind of crisis for old affiliations." (p. 97) The nineteenth-century agitations for Home Rule, loyalty to, or freedom from the British Crown eventually forced what exposure alone to texts or hearsay about Buddhism could not invite or suggest. Conversions began only when Buddhism "became an attractive 'Other' for some Irish people," and a choice became feasible, "possible and meaningful." (p. 96) Cox estimates that this choice to legally register as a Buddhist did not occur until a decriminalization of "blasphemy" which occurred after the (partial) independence of the Irish nation, and nearly none took advantage of it, .
at least as far as the historical records, always only part of the Irish Buddhist chronicle, document.

Part two of this study offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Ireland as a case study for European reception to, and propagation by a few of, Buddhism. Contrasted with the (unmentioned by Cox) 1994 attempt by Stephen Batchelor in The Awakening of the West, Cox's work remains on firmer terrain as he constructs his case with care. He cites often another popularization of Buddhism's globalization, Lawrence Sutin's All is Change (2006), but he applies J. Jeffrey Franklin's "cultural counter-invasion" thesis from The Lion and the Lotus (2008) best to posit Buddhist hermeneutic challenges to Christian mindsets, as Cox unveils this "minor moral panic." Avoiding when possible any sole reliance on textual evidence for earlier centuries, Cox places knowledge of Buddhism within wider networks. These expand exponentially as Asian anti-imperialism plays off of concurrent Irish colonial tensions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the choice to convert or sympathize loomed.

As formal sanctions declined even while "informal social costs" accrued, a few Irish people contemplated taking refuge in, or encouraging the promotion of, Buddhism. Cox emphasizes the impacts of this decision. Most of those so inclined early on were from the Anglo-Irish establishment, and if they served overseas in Asian locales, their careers would have to shift, languages had to be mastered, and new networks had to be found to replace those freethinkers cut off from ecclesiastical or imperial enterprises. Outmarriage usually met with disinheritance, and within what Cox labels Dissident Orientalism, the decision to separate from a matrix where "religion, ethnicity, career and social identity were intimately connected had enormous implications for one's whole life." (p. 110)

His third chapter pursues Irish participation in the British Empire and missionary efforts. The Irish "used religion to critique empire and their own culture," and as with other colonies caught up in the running of the royal realms, ambivalence about what was carried out overseas in relation to what was perpetuated back home continued among a few, driven to chastise what most did without complaint. Soldiers and missionaries brought into Ireland many stories and images from Buddhist culture, and among intellectual Catholics at the turn of the last century, these messages met with interest and dread. Cox charts a "minor moral panic" by papal pundits recoiling from Buddhism's nihilistic aura, even as plain Catholics were kept from knowledge of its energies, a process Cox finds akin to Gramsci's "firewalling" by an Italian clerisy of ideas labeled as too volatile for parishioners to handle.

Meanwhile, the Catholics charged with converting the Asian pagans quailed. Overestimating Buddhists to be forty percent of the world's faithful, they blundered into mission territory severely unprepared. The Columban Fathers entered China not knowing its language. They failed to sway many to the Church, and Cox compiles their incomprehension of the religion they met as their foe. Buddhism tended by the intelligentsia to be handled with care for its prestige and lineage, but consigned by Christian evangelists to the bin of racial stereotypes and character flaws of its adepts.

However, Irish awareness in a less stigmatized form of Buddhism filtered down, if obliquely, into popular culture. Sir Edwin Arnold's successful poem on the Buddha, The Light of Asia (1879), found itself publicized in the Dublin press in bowdlerized or blinkered fashion as a story of a prince's reformation. Cox locates in its coverage no mention of the Buddha. Conversely, most Irish instances then to Arnold's title "are to racehorses or greyhounds, indirectly attesting to its popularity." (p. 169)

Another encounter with the East, the best-known instance for Western readers, has been analyzed far more widely over the past century and more. Theosophy earns a chapter devoted to three concerns. First, it beckoned some Anglo-Irish away from the "service class" (in Marxian terms), to pursue esoteric concerns. Next, it forced followers to choose between Blavatsky and Olcott's Eastern variety or the Western occult tradition in what became the Order of the Golden Dawn. The careers of respectively Æ (George Russell) and Yeats epitomize this bifurcation among this Irish class. Finally, as Indian contact deepened Western awareness of key distinctions between Hindu and Buddhist concepts as actually practiced rather than as textual claims, theosophical divisions widened.

Cox situates his subjects, marginalized yet inextricably tied to identity, within their era, 1850-1960: "For most Irish people, politics was spoken of as religion, as it was in India or Ceylon." (p. 195)  His fifth chapter features the stories of many less heralded than Yeats or Blavatsky, "those who resisted sectarian closure at its height" as "solidarity activists" and agents outside Irish or British confines.

Cox and his colleagues Brian Bocking and Alicia Turner continue to investigate an enigmatic working-class hobo-turned-bhikkhu, born in Booterstown, Dublin to an Irish Catholic family. He covered his perhaps subversive tracks as he wandered across America and took the name, after he wound up in Rangoon to go sober and get religion, of U Dhammaloka. Well into middle-age when in 1900 he burst into notoriety as a preacher against Christian missionaries, his career, until it just as suddenly vanishes after 1914, enlivens a memorable case study. He promoted by his Buddhist Tract Society what Cox superimposes as importing Daniel O'Connell's Irish model of cultural nationalism, defending the popular religion (this time, Burma) against the colonial elite (again, Protestant Britain).

While more from Dhammaloka himself would have jolted what remains a jaunty chapter, a snippet from a sample polemic, The Teachings of Jesus Not Adapted for Modern Civilization (1910), conveys his flair. Denouncing "the necessity of a vast host of able-bodied, well-fed Sky-Pilots" as "managers of matters between men and the big Papa in the Clouds," the BTS "holds that if a man's soul is to [be] saved by man's work, the man that has the soul has got to do the work." (p. 251) As Cox's "classic Irish Buddhist" by his defiance of the norm and his sustained reinvention in a different guise and a different realm, to this reviewer, Dhammaloka furthermore appears to fit Gramsci's model of an "organic intellectual": this formation of such a wry, self-confident figure suggests further application.

These Irish Buddhists at home and abroad comprise a memorable faction. Their numbers may have been larger than what can be surmised up to a century later, given that reliance on the "means of intellectual production" limits research to those who have published, as had Dhammaloka and his ilk. Many of those who can be verified emerge, moreover, from the educated elite. Even a shortlist of those who can be verified finds Cox resorting to the modifier "eccentric" more than once. Their common roles found them on the fringes, relegated there for counter-cultural (in the 1890s sense as well as the more recent usage) claims that featured republicanism, the avant-garde, mandarin poses, a spurious if bestselling claimant (Lobsang Tuesday Rampa for a while had fled to Ireland to evade British demands for his purportedly Tibetan passport) of transmigration, and, in Michael (born Laura) Dillon's case, the first female-to-male transsexual through plastic surgery. A doctor, he shifted from Theosophy as he traveled East. Remaking himself into Lobzang Jivaka, his life commemorates total devotion to breaking barriers first of gender, and then, as Cox narrates movingly, those of class and race as he sought to become a humble Gelugpa novice in Ladakh, before his untimely death in 1962.

Bedeviling identification now as then, the pressure for Irish Buddhists to "pass" as Catholics leaves Cox's study necessarily reticent regarding who can be singled out. Allegiances being fluid, those officially Buddhist tally as its smallest cohort, most likely. "Hinduism, paganism and ritual magic" appealed to mavericks who could creolize these practices more accessibly, given purported Christian or Celtic affinities as imagined or invented by Irish adepts. Cox avers that the "sub-Theosophical version" of Buddhism edged too close to Victorian beliefs for its adoption by seekers, while its "orthodox Asian versions" remained too risky for public identification until a few Buddhists stepped forward in 1971. Historically, "most survived by their pen and died poor" even among the smattering, usually those who had left an intolerant Ireland, who admitted their devotion to the dharma. (p. 281) 

Such intolerance, as Catholic hegemony over the southern part of the island crumbled between the 1960s and the 1990s, ebbed. The patrician Protestant service class, after the British Empire faded, retreated or emigrated. Educational opportunities and economic expansion drew working-class Catholics into the (sub-)urbanized, and somewhat secularized (if far less than the rest of Western Europe until very recently) middle class. While midcentury Victorians knew more about Buddhism, gleaned from imperial information, than almost any Irish people did between the 1920s and 1950s, the counter-cultural turn beckoned a handful towards a hesitant, perhaps furtive, move towards practice. Wearied by sectarian verities and stagnant piety, Dissident Orientalists from among disaffected Catholics revived within Irish culture, as communities formed in remote retreats as well as Dublin and Belfast. Blow-ins from Britain and Western Europe conveyed "imported Buddhism" during the 1970s-1980s. Then Irish inquirers, often self-taught solitaries who had tended to lay low, invited missionaries with their "export" version of Buddhism in the 1990s. By the millennium, "baggage Buddhism" increased as Asian immigrants contributed to Ireland's globalizing economy.

Cox parallels these changing Catholic reactions to Buddhism with the "Brezhnev era." That is, "following a brief period of openness and self-criticism, an institution turning back to internal certainties and organisational routine, relying on increasingly greying cadres to sustain itself." (p. 316) Syncretism, meditation mixing Christian and Buddhist approaches, and ecumenical dialogue after Vatican II capitulated as Rome turned away from liberation theology and Eastern-inspired practices, and as conservative Irish clerics denounced "cults," yoga, and the New Age in the 1980s.

The American-Irish Dublin student-turned-Zen monastic in Japan Maura O'Halloran attests in her journals to the power of activism, as socialist, feminist, and anti-capitalist campaigns across the world engaged her while fueling her practice in the late 1970s. Cox aligns such awareness with contexts which, while they kept Irish Buddhists marginalized due to sectarian pressures, allowed networks along alternative politics to flourish, even if their precarious nature meant they often had to start from scratch and may not have lasted for long. Still, they managed better than those in the North during the Troubles. Buddhists in the British-occupied province often have emigrated (before as after the partition of the Irish Free State in 1921), yet the identification of "peace and tolerance" with Buddhism, conversely, has appealed to a few daring to defy deeply divided lines. This topic begged for far more space, but the reserve of many Irish, from the North or South, persisting among certain interviewees demonstrates the difficulty that Buddhists there have had, via the diffidence they show.

The final chapter elaborates Jan Nattier's "baggage, import, and export Buddhism" models. Cox distinguishes the Irish from the American differences. Migrants comprise so tiny and so recent a cohort that nearly no Asians in Ireland have sufficient numbers to build their own Buddhist institutions. Western European teachers exported Buddhism into Ireland from the late 1980s on. Importing Buddhism relied on lay rather than monastic trainers, while "Mind-Body-Spirit" circuits construct "informal Buddhisms in private contexts." (p. 328) Moreover, the domestic or occluded nature of Irish Buddhism by many still in the "closet" or who mix its precepts with other spiritualities evades clearer academic scrutiny of its hybrid, creole, and characteristically dissident manifestations.

Cox estimates a third of such practitioners lack affiliation, and the global dependence of the Irish on British and international "imported knowledge" and contacts means that groups may gather at a home to listen to tapes or meditate rather than, say, flock to Rigpa's Dzogchen Beara on Cork's coast, Samye Dzong or the Zen/Insight group in suburban Dublin, or Black Mountain Zen Centre in Belfast. Less-educated and more female contingents, depending on commercially distributed product for their Buddhist connections, increase among importers in Ireland, Cox confides "anecdotally" if relevantly. Current varieties of Irish exporters, by contrast, gravitate towards hierarchy, rely on tighter doctrine and ritual, appeal to those making a "spiritual career" out of the quest, and may suit male ambitions.

Most seekers aiming at a career train abroad. Most teachers serving the Irish move there from abroad. Immigrant communities also recruit overseas their leaders. Cox analyzes O'Halloran's choice to leave 1970s Dublin for Japan as representative. Rejecting home, family, and a job, the option to travel to an enduring Buddhist enclave in its traditional heartland or at least already solvent Western settlements carried more weight than trying to build a sangha or a monastic manifestation within Irish society.  Very recently, while the strain of pursuing the dharma openly in Ireland may be easing, the daily difficulties of professionally sustaining a Buddhist enterprise limit opportunities all over the island.

The copy for this book claims that since the 1960s, "Buddhism has exploded to become Ireland's third-largest religion." This boom echoes as a whisper. The progression from under a hundred self-identified Buddhists in the Republic's 1991 census to nearly ten thousand (estimating too the North) in 2011 reveals a dramatic, if still infinitesimal leap forward, to 0.19 percent of those reporting a recognized denomination. Converts make up less than half, with fewer than forty percent of these Irish nationals; nearly half of the Buddhist E. U. immigrants hail from Britain, trailed by Germany and France. Cox reckons these total about a third of Irish Buddhists, however loosely defined by their own affiliations. Reacting against their nation's past, more persist in autonomy and/or "reflexivity in all fields of life" as part of their counter-culture. For instance, nobody polled among local Irish adepts appears to want to establish a  Buddhist school. In a country where pedagogy may likely fall under  Catholic or Protestant supervision or intervention, this suggests a fresh start for its nascent Buddhists.

Over ten thousand Chinese immigrants dominate the numbers of ethnic Buddhists. But no temples or organizations exist; the sangha remains within the home or family. Falun Dafa/Falun Gong, contested as to its Buddhist claim, emerges as the most visible Chinese denomination in Ireland, where many students and a turnover population may weaken a more elevated base for Buddhism in public view. Sōka Gakkai International, typically, blurs or breaks down ethnic and convert distinctions, boosting its modest Irish beginnings one-on-one in 1978 by way of a growing Japanese presence during the 1990s. A Dublin Thai center opened in 2011; Cox suggests the recession may spur greater cooperation between immigrants and converts, drawn together by dependence and common ground.

Commonalities with Catholic, Christian, or Celtic and pagan outlooks creolize Buddhist adaptation. Samye Dzong in the 1990s tried to link Tibetan doctrine with Celtic lore, and Sanskrit with Irish-language parallels (however sketchy given evidence). A few Celtic Buddhists invented a lineage, emanating through the aegis of an English-born, American-Canadian émigré butler of Chögyam Trungpa back to Tibetan origins, blending ecological and pagan elements into a hybrid vocation.

In turn, engaged Buddhists agitate alongside Catholic Workers against U.S. military planes at Shannon, raise funds for Tibet, build cross-community outreach in Belfast, or carry out prison visits. Buddhists, as ever enmeshed in their set and setting, have sidled away from Maura O'Halloran's affirmation of socialism as the proper response to injustice and inequality. Reflecting "mindfulness" mantras marketed by seminars to corporations, many Buddhists seem readier to turn inward to transform themselves first, rather than to reduce suffering. "Service-class romanticism," Cox chides, pays less attention to "changing social relationships" while perpetuating the endemic Irish entanglements thwarting equality, given monolithic "ethnic and religious community structures." (p. 369) The "neoliberal boom" harnessing all to relentless workplace productivity finds Irish of all sects or none confronting long privation after pursuit of quick profit, so Buddhism may appeal to restless seekers. Whether this brand of Buddhism becomes a narcotic or a shock to the system remains open, as this far Western island ponders how to integrate, share, peddle, or disguise lore from the Far East.

New Age adherents propel many contemporary innovations branded Buddhist, stirring meditation and mindfulness mantras into an eclectic mission of "self-development" aligned with holistic medicine and psychotherapy. Cox avers that today's status of Buddhism as "tolerated and timid challenger" may not last as Irish Catholicism weakens and the Celtic Tiger slinks. He asserts that Buddhists will fare better not to defend religion as placid allies from "spirituality." Given the mordant Irish experience with organized power controlled by clergy, Buddhists should rally "those who seek an end to suffering in the world." (p. 377) Rather than compromise, they must contend and confront.

If change will occur, Buddhists need to stand among those refusing to step aside when churches or states shove back. Rejecting both the "moral monopoly" assumed by clergy and the "consumption as a way of life" which for many Irish as for most in the rest of the world has become the new creed, Cox pushes Buddhists into the front lines, using their momentum gained by an association with "downshifting" out of the rat race. Like the evanescent presence of many past Irish Buddhists, these activists may flicker and fade from the present or future as well, unless published and recorded, for scholars such as Cox to track down and promote. Small flaws (a welcome index and bibliography, but inconsistent inclusions and indentations; Maura O'Halloran's Asian years ended not in 1992 but 1982 with her sudden death [p. 324]) will not discourage any inquirer opening this to learn so much. Professor and practitioner Laurence Cox's survey of Irish Buddhism shines as the first light projected into a dim space nearly every colleague might have dismissed as all but vacant. Instead, this lively book sparks energies within texts, interviews, tracts, tapes, filled by traces he delineates and connects.

(P.S. Some of my citing from and musing upon Dr. Cox's opening chapter was shared on Speculative Non-Buddhism . See comments #11 and #24 [to #14 {cf. #26}] by Patrick Jennings and #17 by Glenn Wallis in response to his "Non-buddhist blotter, anyone?"  I thank them for suggestions; their fuller consideration awaits my further elaboration on this study, which will appear at The Non-Buddhist. My review appeared in pdf (via JGB homepage), edited from the 4300 words above to less than 3900, in the Journal of Global Buddhism 15 (2014):79-86. At about 1100 words, 3-17-14 to Amazon US)