I first had a look at this book (2004, The Edwin Mellen Press) in the year it was published, as an undergraduate in a course Dr. Rudy himself taught on critical theory at Indiana University Kokomo. His purpose in using the work was to demonstrate the close reading of literary texts. Back then, that’s what it showed me, and it helped to prepare me for graduate school. This second time through, it’s helped to prepare me for life.
To summarize, badly: in Romanticism and Zen Buddhism, Rudy proposes an alternative to the prevailing critical approach to British Romantic poetry, one that isn’t grounded in the enervating opposition between subject (the poet, the reader) and object (Nature, the poem), but that is instead guided by the notion of selflessness as conceived by Zen Buddhists. Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, who lived five centuries before Christ, believed in no such thing as self or ego. The illusion that ego exists, however, is persistent, is strong, and leads always to suffering. Only by moving beyond it and toward a state of mind that makes no distinctions between self and other— among other things — can one begin to mitigate that suffering and to become one’s true self, which is, paradoxically, one’s no-self. The Romantics may not have had direct knowledge of this in particular, or of Buddhism in general, but their poetry provides evidence that they knew intuitively, as Rudy writes, what lay at the heart of its philosophy. Read in this light, their poetic output yields a deeper understanding of the nature of the mind and its relationship to Nature and the absolute.
Rudy makes his case through close analyses of several of Romanticism’s most recognizable poems: the Intimations Ode by William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” and three odes by Keats, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” Alternating between explication of these works and discussion of pertinent Zen Buddhist thought, he relies on sources both primary and secondary, ancient and modern, from Bodhidharma to Dōgen and from Thomas Merton to D.T. Suzuki. Illustrative of Rudy’s method are these lines, which he offers after quoting the opening to “Mont Blanc,” in which Shelley writes of the movement of “The everlasting universe of things / Flow[ing] through the mind”:
Like the “philosophic mind” of Wordsworth’s Ode, the “mind” Shelley presents here is unsituated, resistant to perspectives that would align it with either the human or the cosmic. Insofar as the mind can be said to exist, it exists in the form of moving, interanimative functions. The universe…flows “through” the mind. … The mind is an enabler, or source, of the flowing of the universe — a cause of, as well as a means by which, the universe moves. (47–48)
In this assessment, the mind and the universe aren’t dichotomized into self and other, perceiving subject and perceived object. The mind isn’t its “own place,” after all, despite Milton’s assertion to the contrary. “[M]ind is a generative priority,” Rudy writes, “that eludes definitive location and formal antecedent” (48). It’s everywhere and nowhere, an effect without a cause; it both creates the universe and keeps it moving, spins it round, and not just once, but in every moment.
The line between self and other is further obliterated in Chapter Six, “An Aesthetics of Thusness,” where Rudy offers a short poem by the Japanese writer Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241): “Looking out / Past where there are / Cherry blossoms or crimson leaves, / To the grass-thatched huts by the bay / Clustered in the descending autumn dusk” (167). While a traditional reading of this piece might begin from the perspective of “a subject,” such an agent is one, as Rudy notes, “which the poem itself neatly avoids” (167). The poem is, rather, a longish participial phrase, an action performed without an actor. There is no observer. There is no observed. There is simply the act of observing — nothing more, nothing less.
To get there, though, requires a radical change in perspective. This development, one from “self-forgetting to selfless awareness,” Rudy traces in the three poems by Keats (177). The first, “Ode to a Nightingale,” demonstrates the failures of desire and seeking fulfillment in external sources. Keats’s initial reflections on the titular bird reflect his “headlong drive to appropriate [its] voice as a vehicle of transport [in a way that] privileges the human over other life forms” (179). The search for liberation here remains grounded in an opposition, “an indication of [Keats’s] inability to deal with greed, or craving, the first of the three major causes of suffering”; for this reason, “misery prevails” (179–180). But Keats soon comes to realize, “intuitively, perhaps,” Rudy writes, “that one cannot transcend suffering through escape into ecstasy” (180). Ultimately fleeting, ecstasy is just another cause of suffering. Instead, Keats sees that he must move beyond the realm of opposition altogether.
Keats’s meditation “On a Grecian Urn” makes manifest this evolving understanding, a process which is not without its conflict. Rudy observes that the poem “begins in a sense of perceived harmony and moves to a set of questions which disturb that sense of oneness and tranquility” which Keats has achieved by the end of “Nightingale” (193). The conflict raised by such questions is a crucial step on the path to our true (no-)self. In a society as self-centered and materialistic as ours, one whose roots can, as Terry Eagleton points out, be traced back to the time in which Romanticism flourished, emerging from the conflict faced by Keats in “Grecian Urn” toward a different mode of being is difficult, if not impossible. Yet this is exactly what the poet does, in Rudy’s reading, in “To Autumn”:
[Here] Keats is himself the absoluteness of autumn voicing itself through the textual variant of gnats, lambs, crickets, red-breasts, and swallows. The poem, correspondingly perceived in terms of its moving absoluteness, is…enlightenment itself, the world’s sound at one with the poet’s in the aesthetic space where the infinite cuts into the finite through the continuity of sounds that, like warm days to bees, “o’er-brim” the event of the moment. (207)
Self and other, perceiver and perceived, are no longer in opposition; they are one and the same, and it’s only through this realization that one achieves, if not enlightenment, then at least a form of peace that would have otherwise remained out of the question.
These insights, among others that Rudy provides in Romanticism and Zen Buddhism, have steered my thinking in a welcome direction these past two weeks. Like many, I’ve been struggling of late with the state of the world and with my place in it. Worse still, I’ve found myself grasping for fulfillment and validation from external sources — and coming up emptier than ever. Attaining the selfless perspective reached by Keats and Zen Buddhist practitioners isn’t easy, especially in a materialist culture in which we’ve been raised to believe we are the center of the universe. But it’s worth attempting, even if we’re not Buddhists, and even if we don’t succeed completely. Nearly twenty years after the last class I took with him, Dr. Rudy has inspired me yet again: to be a better thinker, a better writer, and a better person, one who, if not at peace, has at least moved into a place where, because he’s not expecting anything from the universe, is not currently at odds with it.
