The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

Light from the East

Series: 

Author:
Antony Goedhals
The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East by Antony Goedhals offers radical rereadings of a misunderstood and undervalued Victorian writer. It reveals that at the metaphysical core of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings is a Buddhist vision as yet unappreciated by his critics and biographers. Beginning with the American writings and ending with the essay- and story-meditations of the Japanese period, the book demonstrates Hearn’s deeply personal and transcendently beautiful evocations of a Buddhist universe, and shows how these deconstruct and dissolve the categories of Western discourse and thinking about reality – to create a new language, a poetry of vastness, emptiness, and oneness that had not been heard before in English, or, indeed, in the West.
Copyright Year:
2020
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-43033-4
Publication:
20 Apr 2020
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-43032-7
Publication:
01 May 2020
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Antony Goedhals, Ph.D. (2018), University of Pretoria, is a Lecturer in English literature at that university. He is a generalist and teaches texts from the medieval through the modern periods. He has published on Chaucer and on Hearn.
 Preface
 Acknowledgements
 List of Illustrations
 Notes on the Text and Conventions Adopted

1 A Metaphysics of Buddhism and Its History in the West
 Introduction
 Core Issues Outlined: the Letters of George Milbry Gould and Basil Hall Chamberlain
 Dr George Milbry Gould
 Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain
 Hearn’s Reception in the West
 The Existing Scholarship on Hearn’s Buddhism
 The Advent of Buddhism to the West
 The European Discovery of Buddhism in ‘British’ India
 Buddhism a Radical Metaphysic
 Buddhism a Construct, a Story
 Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879)
 Conclusion

2 Biographical and Critical Studies of Hearn
 Introduction
 The ad hominem Nature of Biographical and Critical – ‘Bio-critical’ – Works on Hearn
 The Bio-critical Memes of Hearn Studies
 Biographies and Bio-critical Works on Hearn
  Elizabeth Bisland’s Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906)
  George Milbry Gould’s Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (1908)
  Hearn’s Work Denigrated by Attacking the Man
  Hearn’s Ancestry and Vision Attacked
  Hearn’s going ‘Fantee’ and his Abandonment of a Loving Father-God
  George M. Gould Collection of Hearniana: a Testimony to Obsession and Fearfulness
  The History of Gould’s Encounter with Hearn and Gould’s Deprecation of Hearn on Grounds of Defective Vision
  Hearn is ‘the Poet of Myopia’
  Gould’s Fatherly Theism
  God as ‘Biologos’ Creating out of Dead Matter the Garden of the World
  ‘Karma’: a Tale Told for its Teller
 Post-Gould, pre-World War I Critical Biographies of Hearn
  Joseph De Smet’s Lafcadio Hearn: l’Homme et l’œuvre (1911) and Edward Thomas’s Lafcadio Hearn (1912)
  Nina Kennard’s Lafcadio Hearn (1912)
  Yone Noguchi’s Lafcadio Hearn in Japan (1910)
  Setsuko Koizumi’s Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn (1918), Kazuo Koizumi’s Father and I: Memories of Lafcadio Hearn (1935), and Re-Echo (1957)
 Critical Biographies of Hearn Written between the Two World Wars
  Edward Larocque Tinker’s Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (1924)
  Jean Temple’s Blue Ghost: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn (1931) and Oscar Lewis’s Hearn and His Biographers: The Record of a Literary Controversy (1930)
  Hearn – An Interpreter of Buddhism
  Kenneth Kirkwood’s Unfamiliar Lafcadio Hearn (1936)
 Critical Biographies of Hearn Written after World War II
  Vera McWilliams’s Lafcadio Hearn (1946)
  Orcutt William Frost’s Young Hearn (1958)
  Elizabeth Stevenson’s The Grass Lark: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn (1961)
  The Dorothea McClelland Papers
 Critical Biographies of Hearn in the 1960s and 1970s
  Albert Mordell’s Discoveries: Essays on Lafcadio Hearn (1964)
  Beongcheon Yu’s An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn (1964), Arthur Kunst’s Lafcadio Hearn (1969), and Kenneth Rexroth’s The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1977)
 Contemporary Biographies of Hearn
  Paul Murray’s Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1993)
  Jonathan Cott’s Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (1991)
  Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (1988)
 Conclusion

3 Buddhism in the American Writings and ‘Seeking the Orient at Home’
 Introduction
 Hearn’s First Encounters with Buddhism
  Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia
  Atheism and Individual Responsibility in The Light of Asia
  Causation, Karma, Reincarnation, and the Interrelation of all Phenomena in The Light of Asia
  Buddhism a Revisioning of ‘the Self’
  Buddhism a Revisioning of the Problem of Death
  Hearn’s Buddhism Ontological, not Moralistic
 Articles about Buddhism
  The Times-Democrat a ‘Buddhist Newspaper’, an ‘Infidel sheet’
  ‘The People We Send Missionaries To’
  ‘The World’s Worships’
  ‘What Buddhism Is’
  ‘Recent Buddhist Literature’
 Articles about the Hindu-Buddhist Matrix and Other ‘Oriental’ Subjects
  ‘Edwin Arnold’s New Book’
  The ‘Neo-Buddhism of the Theosophists’
 Herbert Spencer’s ‘Synthetic Philosophy’ and Buddhism
 Hearn’s Translations of Buddhist Stories and His Neo-Buddhist Fictions
  Stray Leaves From Strange Literature
  ‘The Legend of the Monster Misfortune’
  ‘A Parable Buddhistic’
  ‘Pundari’
  ‘Yamaraja’
  ‘The Lotus of Faith’
 Hearn’s ‘fantastics’ and Ghost Stories: Meditations on Love and Death
  Background to the ‘fantastics’
  ‘When I was a Flower’
  ‘A Dead Love’
  ‘His Heart is Old’
  ‘Hereditary Memories’
  ‘Metempsychosis’
  ‘The Undying One’
  ‘The Story of Ming-Y’
 Hearn’s Cosmic ‘fantastics’
  ‘Subhadra’
  ‘The Life of Stars’ and ‘The Destiny of Solar Systems’
  ‘The great “I-Am”’ and ‘A Concord Compromise’
 Conclusion

4 Japan and the ‘Romance of Reality’
 Introduction
 ‘Popular’ or ‘Lower’ Buddhism
  ‘From the Diary of an English Teacher’
  ‘The Writings of Kōbōdaishi’ and ‘Jizō’
  ‘A Pilgrimage to Enoshima’
  ‘At the Market of the Dead’, ‘By the Japanese Sea’, and ‘From Hōki to Oki’
 Shinto
  ‘Bon-Odori’ and ‘The Household Shrine’
 Individual Observations of Reality: Hearn’s Buddhist Meditations
  ‘My First Day in the Orient’
 The ‘Shock of Emptiness’
  ‘From a Traveling Diary’
  ‘In the Twilight of the Gods’
 Three Central Essay-Meditations
  The ancestors, karma
  ‘The Idea of Preëxistence’
  ‘Some Thoughts About Ancestor-Worship’
  ‘Nirvana: A Study in Synthetic Buddhism’
 Three Central Story-Meditations
  ‘Dust’
  ‘The Stone Buddha’
  ‘In Yokohama’: closing the cycle of the ‘Buddhist papers’
 The Buddhist Writings of the Last Years
 ‘Insect-Studies’
  ‘Story of a Fly’, ‘Fireflies’, ‘Gaki’, ‘Kusa-Hibari’, and ‘Mosquitoes’
 Stories with Buddhist Settings
  ‘Within the Circle’
  ‘The Story of a Tengu’
  ‘A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu’
  ‘Fragment’ and the Fenollosas
  Ernest Fenollosa’s Attack on Hearn in The Atlantic Monthly
 Oneness
  ‘A Drop of Dew’
  ‘Of Moon-Desire’
 The Paradise of Possible Worlds
 Time-Travel and Ghost Stories
  ‘The Reconciliation’
  ‘The Story of Itō Norisuké’
 Conclusion

5 Conclusion

 Bibliography
  Hearn’s Writings
  Secondary Texts
 Index
Anyone interested in Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), Meiji Japan, Buddhism, Buddhist modernism, Victorian literature and culture, literary bio-criticism, post-colonialism, or the history of science and philosophy in the nineteenth century.
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