Thomas Michael LeCarner

T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum:

Buddhist Lessons in The Waste Land

M any critics have argued that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a poem
that attempts to deal with the physical destruction and human
atrocities of the First World War, or that he had somehow expressed the
disillusionment of a generation. For Eliot, such a characterization was
too reductive. He replied, “Nonsense, I may have expressed for them
their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of
my intention.” He did not want to be the poet of a “lost generation”
of war survivors, but rather, he wanted, like most poets, to write for all
ages. To that end, Eliot sought to transcend time and space by bringing
to The Waste Land scores of literary, cultural, and artistic allusions from
a variety of sources including the Upanishads, Greek mythology, the
Bible, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci.
Ironically, within this menagerie of literary homages, Eliot has created a
vast emptiness, a world of pain, suffering, desolation and despair, as if to
suggest that even in the presence of all the greatest artistic and cultural
achievements of mankind, we must understand that life is transitory and
material things ephemeral.
The idea that life is fleeting and filled with suffering is at the core of
Buddhist thought and one that Eliot surely learned from his graduate
studies at Harvard. Several scholars have examined the influence of
Eastern philosophy, and in particular Buddhist thought, on Eliot’s work,
largely in the past forty years.1 My argument departs from this scholar-
ship in two significant ways. First, I will read The Waste Land through
the lens of Eliot’s graduate studies, and in doing so will show how the
poem functions as a didactic, artistic representation of the Buddhist
doctrine of samsa\ra, an idea that views the world as transitory, overcome

Philosophy and Literature, © 2009, 33: 402–416

 Thomas Michael LeCarner 403

with lustful desires, and forever bound to a cycle of life, death, and
rebirth. From this perspective, we can see how Eliot’s understanding
of the original Buddhist texts, which informed much of his writing of
The Waste Land, allowed him to see through the all-too-common mis-
conceptions about Buddhism during the early part of the twentieth
century. Lastly, we will see that Eliot looked at these misconceptions
as a psychological projection of Europeans’ discontent with their own
lives in an uncertain time.
Over the past three decades an increasing number of scholars have
studied Eliot’s graduate work. In 1985, Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck
published a study that examines the impact that Eliot’s coursework and
professors had on during his studies at Harvard.2 Perl and Tuck point out
that Eliot devoted nearly one third of his graduate program to the study
of Asian philosophy and philology. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali under
C. R. Lanman, the preeminent Sanskrit specialist of the age. In his third
year, Eliot took a course entitled “Schools of Religious and Philosophi-
cal Thought in Japan” with Professor Masaharu Anesaki, a course that
had a profound impact on him. Eliot was exposed to several schools of
Buddhism in his studies including the Kegon, Shingon, and Tendai, which
are characterized as “descendants of the Madhyamika School, which was
founded in the second century a.d. by Na\ga\rjuna, the Indian Buddhist
philosopher.” Na\ga\rjuna is widely considered the most influential Bud-
dhist philosopher after Siddhartha Gautama himself and is the leading
proponent of the Ma\dhyamika (“Middle Way”) philosophy.
The central teaching of Na\ga\rjuna was the doctrine of s;u\nyata\, or as
it is often translated, “emptiness.” For Maha\ya\ha Buddhists, all things
are totally empty of any defining essence. Thus, all things are void of
any fixed identity or inherent existence and remain in a constant state
of impermanence, change, and flux. This is the fundamental premise
of Maha\ya\ha Buddhism. Only through the realization of this emptiness
in material things can one achieve Buddhahood. According to one
standard text, “the real knowledge of Buddha nature is empty of empiri-
cal content, and it is the discovery of that emptiness or void, s;u\nyata\,
of the true Buddha nature that is to become the way to Nirvana. The
phenomenal world, the self, and all that is taken by the ordinary person
to be “real” are said now to be s;u\nyata\.”3
Inextricably linked with s;u\nyata\ is the doctrine of samsa\ra. Samsa\ra
literally means “wandering on” or “flowing through” and it signifies
the cycle of birth, suffering, and death in which we find ourselves—
at least those who are unenlightened. Samsa\ra is often referred to as
404 Philosophy and Literature

the “wheel of life.” We remain tied to this “wheel” because we cannot

overcome our desires, our cravings, our lust, or our hatred. The way in
which s;u\nyata\ and samsa\ra come together is in the belief that the “real
world” is in fact real. As long as we see the world and everything in it
as permanent, as having intrinsic existence, we will remain fixed to our
wheel. That is to say, so long as we continue to deny s;u\nyata\ (that the
world is empty), we will be stuck in samsa\ra. The essence of samsa\ra lies
in the idea that the world is not only ephemeral, but also a source of
pain and suffering. As the Buddha himself states, “The Noble Truth of
the origin of suffering, O monks, is this: it is this thirst (craving) which
produces re-existence and re-becoming, bound up with passionate greed.
It finds fresh delight now here and now there, namely thirst for sense
pleasures; thirst for existence and becoming; and thirst for non-existence
(self-annihilation).”4 My first contention here is that The Waste Land is
an artistic representation of this “wheel of life” or samsa\ra.
We need only look to the very famous first five words of The Waste
Land to see samsa\ra in the poem: “April is the cruellest month.”5 April,
the beginning of spring, the month of rebirth, is paradoxically character-
ized here as “the cruellest” month, thereby suggesting that the process
of rebirth and renewal is a source of pain and cruelty, precisely as it is
in samsa\ra. It is desire or “thirst” that leads to rebirth, which leads to a
life of suffering and subsequently to death. In the first few lines of the
poem we can visualize this thirst in the lilacs desperately rising, clinging
to life, out of a scorched earth that longs for the past, mixing “memory”
(of past lives) and “desire.” To begin the poem with a memory is nostal-
gic; we start from a place of longing for something that cannot be had,
which, the Buddha tells us, inevitably leads to suffering.
From this sullen beginning the narrative shifts and asks: “What are
the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?
Son of Man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap
of broken images, where the sun beats, /And the dead tree gives no
shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water”
(WL, 18–24). The roots are “clutching” to life, despite the adverse con-
ditions. The image of a lifeless, “stony rubbish” entwined with “roots
that clutch” results in a twisted, Salvador Dali-esque portrait of a “heap
of broken images,” a “dead tree [that] gives no shelter,” and a desolate
landscape devoid of water, the very source of life. Yet life, represented
by the “branches” and “roots” that attempt to grow out of stones, will
not be denied. This cycle is necessary because “craving” or “thirst”
produces “re-existence”; as long as there is thirst and desire, there will
 Thomas Michael LeCarner 405

be rebirth and death; it is a learning process. The “desire” that Eliot

is referring to here is perhaps better understood as a “craving for life
which is a clinging to material existence and a demanding for renewed
and enhanced existence.”6 In this context, desire goes beyond humanity
and becomes part of nature itself.
The clairvoyant Madame Sosostris, who sees “crowds of people, walk-
ing round in a ring” gives us an image of nameless zombies drifting in
a circular pattern, which is specifically referred to as “the wheel” (WL,
51). This is echoed in the next stanza: “Under the brown fog of a win-
ter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not
thought death had undone so many” (WL, 61–63). The imagery here is
brooding and depicts the crowd as a mass of walking dead, “each man
with his eyes fixed before his feet” (WL, 65). The reference to Dante’s
Inferno, whose own version of hell is also made up of circles, suggests
that the crowd is in limbo, a transitory place where you’re neither truly
alive nor dead; it is a place, as Virgil explains, where “they have no hope
of death, and so abject is their blind life that they are envious of every
other lot.”7 Eliot’s image here calls to mind a passage in Na\ga\rjuna’s
Mahaya\navimsika: “Those perceiving permanence, self and enjoyment,
among things which are without self-nature, drift about in this ocean of
existence, surrounded by the darkness of delusion and attachment.”8
The crowd of walking corpses, which is a symbol for all of humanity, is
doomed to “drift about in this ocean of existence,” because they can-
not see through their own desires. Eliot sees the modern world as one
steeped in craving.
Eliot has constructed a world within the poem of constant change
and flux. We move narratively from the desperate lilacs to a mountain-
side in Germany, and back again to the “roots that clutch” (WL, 19).
From there we shift narrators to the “hyacinth girl” who “was neither
/ Living nor dead” (WL, 39–40). Yet another spatial and narrative shift
takes the reader into the den of a fortune teller, and finally, we are in
London surrounded by the walking dead—all of this in just the first
section. The poem is riddled with dissonance, sudden transitions, refer-
ences to Greek mythology, French poetry, paganism, Christianity, jazz,
Eastern religions, and is marked with narrative cuts that seem disparate,
disconnected, and fragmented. Eliot moves through space and time in
the poem, interweaving the ancient and the modern as if to suspend
time itself, while also showing us the cyclicality of life.
The suggestion of being in “limbo” in the first section is echoed in
the dialogue found in “The Game of Chess” wherein we find the artistic
406 Philosophy and Literature

representation of the ennui and ignorance of samsa\ra: “What is that

noise now? What is the wind doing? / Nothing again nothing. / Do /
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing? /
I remember / Those pearls that were his eyes. / Are you alive, or not?
Is there nothing in your head?” (WL, 119–27). This dialogue is about
nothingness; it is about the void in which the couple is living. They do
not know whether they are alive or dead, they do not know what they
know or don’t know. Their material possessions such as the “burnished
throne,” the “satin cases,” and the “glitter of her jewels” mean nothing
anymore. They once saw these things as permanent, as intrinsically real,
which has left them, as the husband suggests, “in rats’ alley” (WL, 115).
The elegant description of the boudoir is peppered with hints of mel-
ancholy and ennui, with references to “synthetic perfumes / Unguent,
powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused / And drowned in the sense in
odours”; the candles Flung their smoke” and in the “sad light a carved
dolphin swam” (WL, 87–96, italics added).
The jaded couple of high society, however, is no different from the
women we meet in the pub who discuss infidelity, missing teeth, and
abortions. From the elegant boudoir, an emblem of upper class society,
Eliot descends into a working-class world, symbolically represented in the
pub. Walter Sutton writes of this section, “Neither the aesthetic décor
of the drawing room nor the fellowship of the pub can relieve the anxi-
ety, boredom, and despair of the women’s lives. The meaninglessness
of mere biological fertility amid the cultural sterility of The Waste Land
is underlined by the abortion sought by Lil, the unwilling mother of
five.”9 Eliot has painted a world of flux that, regardless of one’s station
in life, rich or poor, life has lost its meaning.
At the literal and symbolic center of the poem is the “The Fire Ser-
mon,” which serves to further emphasize the role of desire in keeping
us tied to the wheel of samsa\ra. The fact that he chose to place “The
Fire Sermon” at the very center of the poem suggests that desire, and
in this case perverse, sexual desire, is what lies at the bottom of society’s
ills. The actual “Fire Sermon” of the Buddha uses the symbol of fire
to describe the destructive force of desire: “The body is aflame. Tactile
sensations are aflame. Consciousness at the body is aflame. Contact at
the body is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on
contact at the body—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-
nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire
of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say with
 Thomas Michael LeCarner 407

birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses,

and despairs.10
Following the Buddha’s lead, Eliot features desire, lust, and the
ensuing despair as the central themes in his rendition of “The Fire
Sermon.” Beginning with the reference to the Thames and the anach-
ronistic allusion to Spenser, Eliot paints a picture not of weddings and
nymphs, for they are long “departed,” but rather, one where the Fisher
King sits beside the water and hears “The rattle of the bones” and sees
the creeping rat “Dragging its slimy belly on the bank,” all the while
fishing in “the dull canal” and surrounded by “White bodies naked on
the low damp ground” (WL, 186, 188, 189, 193). Eliot uses this fetid
image of death and decay to set up the key scene of destructive desire
in “The Fire Sermon,” which is the apathetic date rape of the typist
that Tiresias foresees.
In this scene, the typist, a neat and orderly woman who “lays out food
in tins,” entertains the “young man carbuncular” who is painted as a
predatory scavenger awaiting the “propitious” time for his assault (WL,
223, 231, 235). The young man sees his opportunity in that she is “bored
and tired” and he “endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still
are unreproved, if undesired” (WL, 238). At the opportune moment he
strikes, “Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; / Exploring hands
encounter no defense; / His vanity requires no response, / And makes
a welcome of indifference” (WL, 238–42). This scene powerfully demon-
strates why most people are entrenched in samsa\ra. Samsa\ra is a result
of craving, desire, and lust, and this scene shows that even if our desires
are satiated momentarily, the result is mere apathy or “indifference,”
which will only perpetuate the cycle. Eliot is quick to note the fallout:
“She turns and looks a moment in the glass, / Hardly aware of her
departed lover; / Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: /
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’” (WL, 249–52). The act of
the young man’s uncontrollable lust, which results in the illicit sex, has
left them both utterly void of feeling; her thoughts are “half-formed”
and she’s “glad it’s over”; and he “Bestows one final patronizing kiss”
before groping his way into the symbolic darkness of the “stairs unlit”
(WL, 248).
The centrality of desire can also be found in the song of the Thames
daughters. Eliot compares their song with that of the “Rhine-daughters”
in Wagner’s opera, Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods). The
nymphs in Wagner’s opera guard a lump of gold in the river and their
408 Philosophy and Literature

repeated cry of joy is “Weialala leia wallala leialala.” After the leader of
the Nibelung dwarfs demands that they satisfy his lustful desires, they
mock him, force him to flounder in the waters, and remind him that
only someone who has overcome the lusts of the flesh (i.e., desires) can
hope to possess the Rhine gold.11
Within The Waste Land, desire and suffering are depicted as universal
characteristics of everything in nature. Individuality has no place here;
escape from the wheel seems impossible, rich or poor, modern or
ancient, prophet, king, or typist, we are all united in suffering, and all
of these are united in the character of Tiresias. As Eliot himself tells us,
Tiresias is the “most important personage in the poem, uniting all the
rest. All the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.
What Tiresias sees, is in fact, the substance of the poem” (WL, Note 7,
480). This raises the obvious question, what does Tiresias “see”? As a
human, he “sees” nothing because he is blind, as we all are in samsa\ra.
However, as a prophet or an “enlightened one,” he sees suffering and
despair as a result of human desire; he is “throbbing between two lives,”
he has “foresuffered all […] and walked among the lowest of the dead.”
What he “sees,” of course, is samsa\ra: that is the substance of the poem
in Eliot’s own words.
In the eight lines of the fourth section of the poem, “Death by Water,”
the circular images resurface again in the haunting echoes of the sea:
“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, / Forgot the cry of gulls,
and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss / A current under the
sea / Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell / He passed the
stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool / Gentile or Jew /
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward / Consider Phlebas,
who was once handsome and tall as you” (WL, 312–21).
From the first line of the section we are brought within the circle of
samsa\ra; Phlebas is reborn of the “drowned Phoenician sailor” found in
the first section of the poem; he is reborn yet again in the form of Mr.
Eugenides the Smyrna merchant in part three. Thus, as Eliot notes, “just
as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the ­Phoenician
Sailor, the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples”
(WL, Note 7, 480). These characters are recycled in the poem, they
have transmigrated, as the human essence does in Buddhism; they are
different, but share something intangible; they are each dependent on
the origination of the previous one, precisely as Na\ga\rjuna tells us: “In
recitation, in a lamp, in a mirror, in a seal, in a rock-crystal lens, In a
seed, in a tamarind, in a shout and even in the transmigration of the
 Thomas Michael LeCarner 409

components of personal existence the learned understand that there is

no transference taking place.”12 There is nothing substantial that transfers
from one character to the next, they are all simply necessary agents in
the wheel of life and death; without one, the other could not exist.
“Death by Water” is replete with references to the “wandering” of
samsa\ra. For example Phlebas’ body is drifting helplessly; he is rising and
falling with the current as he “passed the stages of his age and youth,”
a clear reference to the cycle of life, which is followed by his “Entering
the whirlpool” (WL, 318), yet another circular image. Eliot then reminds
us that, whether “Gentile or Jew,” we are all destined to “turn the wheel
and look to windward” (WL, 319–20). All of these images are bound
together under the myths of the ancient Phoenician fertility cults, which
see the entire world in terms of the cyclicality of the seasons.
The final section of the poem reaffirms Eliot’s intention to depict
a world bound by desire. In “What the Thunder Said” Eliot continues
to draw a barren portrait of the world with images like the “mountains
of rock without water” and “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth
that cannot spit / Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit / There
is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without
rain” (WL, 339–42). The greatest cities of antiquity, “Jerusalem Athens
Alexandria / Vienna London” are nothing but “Falling towers” and,
in accord with s;u\nyata\, are without intrinsic essence, and thus are ren-
dered “unreal.”
As the questing Fisher King arrives at the chapel, he sees nothing,
“only the wind’s home,” but he hears the cock, which, as Cleanth
Brooks points out, “in the folklore of many people is regarded as the
bird whose voice chases away the powers of evil.”13 The bird crows “Co
co rico co co rico” and “In a flash of lightening. Then a damp gust /
Bringing rain” (WL, 393–95). Here, and elsewhere in the poem, water
functions as both a negative and a positive symbol. It brings life to the
lilacs and clutching branches in the beginning; it brings death to the
Phoenician sailor. The rain comes here too, however, it brings only the
renewal of desire, as “Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / Waited
for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant, over Himavant”
(WL, 396–98, italics added). The rain leads only to the waiting for more
rain; it is a constant circle of desire. As Eloise Knapp Hay notes, “After
the words on the emptiness of the chapel, the thunder speaks, and the
wisdom achieved in the poem is revealed. The voice in The Waste Land
recognizes that if he could give more, sympathize more, control his life
more, the fires would abate.”14 But the speaker cannot give, sympathize
410 Philosophy and Literature

or control any more than he already has, and is resolved to simply sit
“upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me” and asks
somewhat rhetorically, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (WL,
324–26). Tiresias, the “seer” in the poem, has come to the realization
that samsa\ra is inevitable. Moreover, by using the Holy Grail legend
as the symbolic scaffolding for the poem, Eliot is confirming that the
thirst for life in the poem, akin to the unending search for the grail,
will never cease.
Having looked at Eliot’s depiction of samsa\ra, or the “wheel of life,”
we must then ask why. Having read these texts in their original lan-
guages, Eliot wanted to teach us something about the oddity that was
Buddhism. Given the repeated images of despair, it is not surprising that
many have interpreted the poem as nihilistic and as a desperate attempt
to grapple with the hopelessness of a post World War I world. That
interpretation, limited and confining as it is, parallels precisely the one
that most Europeans had of Buddhism during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. While in our postmodern world, Buddhism,
in its various forms, is considered a religion or philosophy of peace, of
temperance, and of passivity, there was a time when the Western world
looked at Buddhism as something to be feared. Roger-Pol Droit, notes
that Europeans were quick to jump on early Orientalists’ interpretations
of Pali Buddhist texts. He writes, “Europe was discovering Buddhism’s
teachings and wondering if it was a religion or a philosophy […] they
saw it as a nameless danger. The Buddha became the symbol of a night-
mare. His basic teachings, they said, contained something impossible:
the human spirit could not really desire its own loss.”15 Europe, for so
long intrigued by the mystic qualities of India, so passionately drawn
to its exoticism, found in the earliest translations of Buddhist texts
something unimaginable, something to be feared. To these early inter-
preters, “Buddhism’s primary goal was the annihilation of any thinking
principle.” Droit continues: “That it [Buddhism] was presented . . . as
a daze where consciousness is dissolved, as a negation of the will, as a
desire for a death without return, . . . an impossible doctrine where the
human’s only aim is to be no longer anything . . . and that they man-
aged to see an unimaginable felicity in their annihilation—that is what
was so completely unthinkable.”
This misconception was fairly universal among Europeans, lay and
academic alike. Philosophical titans such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche all considered Buddhism to be nihilistic. In fact, for philosophy
in general during the late nineteenth century, Buddhism was tantamount
 Thomas Michael LeCarner 411

to “worshipping nothingness.” Nietzsche, as Droit notes, was particularly

critical of the concept of nirvana, describing it as the “Oriental nothing-
ness” he found at the heart of Buddhism a way of thinking that, in his
opinion, was even more pessimistic than Schopenhauer’s, who sets the
pessimism bar rather high. Buddhism, for Nietzsche, was “nothing more
than a vast negation of the world.” The idea that Buddhism was a “cult
of nothingness” spread throughout the academic halls of Europe and
engendered skepticism and fear that were based entirely on misinter-
pretations and poor translations of Sanskrit and Pali Buddhist texts.
After the turn of the century, however, more accurate translations of
these texts began to surface and scholars began to contemplate the mul-
tiple meanings of words like “emptiness” and the inherent inadequacy
of language to describe some of these more elusive Buddhist concepts.
To that end, Eliot took up his study of Buddhism, and upon coming
to the realization that what had been assumed about Buddhism was, in
fact, the exact opposite of what was actually found in the original texts,
he sought to subvert this common misunderstanding of Buddhism as
a “cult of nothingness.”
Eliot once commented that the influence of Buddhist thought upon
Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hartmann, and Duessen, had
largely been through “romantic misunderstanding” and that the “only
hope of really penetrating to the heart of the mystery would lie in forget-
ting how to think and feel as an American or a European.”16 He stated
further that the “middle way” of Na\ga\rjuna is “a coherence which cannot
be formulated, at least not without recourse to paradox, metaphor, and
the techniques of art,” which is precisely what Eliot did in writing The
Waste Land. It was the only way he knew how to explain it.
What Eliot discovered was that this “nothingness” was in truth, every-
thing from a Buddhist perspective. He learned that the emptiness of
s;u\nyata\, which leads to nirvana, was anything but nihilistic; it was the
purpose behind everything. This, of course, was an inescapable paradox
in the minds of Europeans, who were looking through a Eurocentric,
Christian lens. For how could “nothing” be “everything” at the same
time? But, as Eliot came to understand Na\ga\rjuna’s texts, he discovered
the central pillar of his teachings: “Samsa\ra is nothing essentially differ-
ent from nirvana. Nirvana is nothing essentially different from samsa\ra.
The limits of nirvana are the limits of samsa\ra. Between the two, also,
there is not the slightest difference whatsoever.17 This “emptiness” is a
“wondrous state wherein dynamic events and dramas can take place.
True realization of emptiness is a state free of all types of clinging, a
412 Philosophy and Literature

state encompassing all and unifying all.”18 To understand this concept,

Eliot discovered, requires two simultaneous perspectives of the same
reality, which is why he chose Tiresias as the central figure of the poem;
he is the only one who can see, Janus-like, from the male and female
perspectives. Na\ga\rjuna articulated two categories of perspective from
which the world may be viewed: the standpoint of the absolute (the
enlightened perspective) and the standpoint of the conventional (the
unenlightened). The enlightened see nothingness not as nothingness,
but as everything; they see through the nihilistic surface meaning of the
world and come to realize that “emptiness” is “fullness.” In the words of
the Buddha: “Those for whom lust and hatred / Along with ignorance
have been expunged / The arahants with taints destroyed: / For them
the tangle is disentangled.”19
The unenlightened, however, see nothingness as something to be
feared, it is “Other,” and it is terrifying. As Na\ga\rjuna describes, “Some-
one deluded in worldly existence is much like a painter frightening
himself with a terrifying image of a goblin he himself has created.”20
The two types of people described here, the “disentangled” and the one
“deluded in worldly existence” are looking at the same world, however,
because of their perspectives; they see it in diametrically opposed ways.
The very moment we see that the phenomenological world is “emptiness”
and impermanent; once we see that nothing exists “in and of itself,”
we find in that very realization that samsa\ra becomes nirvana; there is
no duality, there never was a duality, they are and become one simul-
taneously. In recognizing samsa\ra as emptiness, we absolve ourselves of
desire, and the cycle of birth, suffering, and death comes to an end—by
recognizing that what we desire is nothingness, we no longer desire it,
because it is nothingness.
What Eliot concluded from his graduate studies was that early inter-
pretations of Buddhism as the worship of “emptiness” were nothing
more than a series of psychological projections of Europeans’ own
discontent with their place in the world. Westerners everywhere at this
time were trying to grapple with Darwin, the haunting echoes of Nietz-
sche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” and the all-too-real apocalypse
of WWI. Rather than face their own plight, they projected their despair
onto this “new” religion from the East that encompassed everything that
they feared in themselves: that their world was meaningless. But Eliot,
at this point in his life, was neither a philosopher nor a psychologist;
he was a poet, and through his art he sought to subvert the common
misconceptions about Buddhism. He wanted to show, poetically, that
 Thomas Michael LeCarner 413

the world of desolation and despair that so many Westerners imagined

was in fact an illusion, that through the veiled reality of a fallen world,
peace might very well be right in front of us.
Through the many images already outlined of fragmentation and
despair, Eliot gives us glimpses of the possibility of life through death,
a suggestion that in our dying we might find peace, or to use the Bud-
dhist lexicon, in our escape from samsa\ra, from the wheel of life, from
desire, from thirst and craving, we will at last come to a true happiness—
nirvana. Eliot prefaces the poem with this very thought:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla Pendere,
et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σΐβυλλά τί θέλεις; respondebat Illa: άποθαυεΰ
θέλω.21

Sibyl is the embodiment of human desire; she wants (“desires” or

“thirsts”) to live forever. She is so blinded by that desire that she fails to
foresee the possible consequences of such a request; she forgets to ask
for perennial youth, thus, her craving for everlasting life having been
granted, she is left only to beg for death: “I want to die.” For Sybil, as
for us all, desire was the direct cause of her suffering. It is only through
death, that is to say, through her escape from the incessant rotation of
the wheel of life, that she will ever find enlightenment.
Another example can be found in our drowned Phoenician Sailor.
One cannot ignore the irony of the sailor’s death by water. Water is the
very source of life itself; that is he is reborn in the poem implies that
the way to lasting peace is through death—a final death. In the paren-
thetical reference to Shakespeare “(Those pearls that were his eyes)”
Eliot evokes the song of Ariel: “Full fathom five thy father lies. / Of his
bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing
of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something
rich and strange.”22 The last three lines clearly imply that through death,
that is to say, through the “sea-change,” nothing “of him” will dimin-
ish or “fade” but rather, “something rich and strange” will result. The
implication being that beyond this life, beyond the circular whirlpool in
which the sailor is trapped, lies something more rewarding, something
“rich” and “strange”: beyond it all lies nirvana.
The last section of the poem provides the most compelling evidence of
Eliot’s belief in our ability to find peace after death. As the Fisher King
contemplates his fate with the “arid plain” behind him, he asks, “Shall I
at least set my lands in order?” Knowing that he is about to die, he quotes
414 Philosophy and Literature

from a variety of poets, against whom he will shore his “ruins.” The last
six words of the poem are in Sanskrit, “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. /
Shantih Shantih Shantih” (WL, 433–34). As the Fisher King is about to
die, he is reminded here of the “peace which passeth understanding”
that will come as a result of his death; at the end of the poem, just as
at the end of the cycles of life, we will find unimaginable peace.
There can be no question that Eliot’s graduate work greatly influ-
enced his writing of The Waste Land. Apart from the obvious references
to the Buddha’s “Fire Sermon” and the ominous voice of the thunder
in Sanskrit, the poem is replete with more subtle references to Bud-
dhist teachings. As a poet reading these texts in the original languages,
Eliot had greater insight into their multiple and elusive meanings and
sought to hold up a mirror to contemporary society to demonstrate
that this “nothingness,” that was thought to be the ultimate goal of
Buddhism, was in fact a gross misreading of the texts, and amounted to
a projection of Westerners’ own sense of desolation and fear in a post
WWI world. He presents a vision of the modern world that, through its
own secularization, has mired itself in samsa\ra, in a deafening cycle of
life, suffering, death and rebirth. He transcends spatial and temporal
constraints with allusions to ancient literature and cultures as well as
contemporary life to signal the repetition of all things. It is, in many
ways, a poem of impermanence, of suffering, and at the core of it all
is human desire—these are the central teachings of the Buddha. Bud-
dhism teaches us that suffering is part of life, and that suffering can be
transcended only by progression through the cycles of life, death and
rebirth. It is the quest motif that unifies the poem; it gives us hope,
however subtle, that in death there will always be the possibility of
Shantih—not of nothingness, not of emptiness, but of a “peace which
passeth all understanding.”

University of Colorado, Boulder

1. As early as 1951, Harold McCarthy was exploring Buddhist ideologies in Eliot’s work,
focusing, as others have, on “The Four Quartets.” In 1982, A. N. Dwivedi examined
the Indian sources in Eliot’s work as a basis for the spiritualism found in his poetry. In
1985, P. S. Sri published an excellent study entitled “T. S. Eliot, Vedanta and Buddhism,”
which looks at much of Eliot’s oeuvre and examines both the Vedanta and Buddhist
ideologies found throughout. While the study does ruminate on “The Waste Land,” the
 Thomas Michael LeCarner 415

poem is treated as one among many; for in a study that considers both Vedanta and
Buddhism in all of Eliot’s published works, including his prose, poetry, and drama, one
is necessarily confined by the breadth of the project itself. Also, in 1987 Cleo McNelly
Kearns, in “T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions, A Study in Poetry and Belief” looks at the
confluence of Indic and Western thought in many of Eliot’s works. To date, however,
there has been no extensive study of Buddhist philosophical influences focused solely
on The Waste Land.
2. Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the
Significance of Eliot’s Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West 35(1985): 116.
3. A. L. Herman, An Introduction to Buddhist Thought (Lanham, Maryland: University
Press of America, 1983), p. 210.
4. Sri Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Bedford: Gordon Fraser, 1959), p. 108.
5. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol.
1, ed. Jahan Ramazani et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), line 1. Further references
to The Waste Land are to this edition and are cited with lines as “WL.”
6. Harold E. McCarthy, “T. S. Eliot and Buddhism,” Philosophy East and West 2 (1952):
31–55.
7. Dante, The Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), Canto
III, 41–43.
8. R. C. Jamieson, A Study of Nagarjuna’s Twenty Verses on the Great Vehicle (New York:
Peter Lang, 2000), p. 10, italics added.
9. Walter Sutton, “Mauberly, The Waste Land, and the Problem of Unified Form,” Con-
temporary Literature 9(1968): 28.
10. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha a New Translation of the
Samyutta Nikay (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000), p. 717.
11. Lawrence Rainey, ed., The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 110.
12. Jamieson, Nagarjuna’s Twenty Verses, p. 16.
13. Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: Critique of Myth,” in A Collection of Critical Essays
on The Waste Land, ed. Jay Martin (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 105.
14. Eloise Knapp Hay, “T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way,” in Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land, eds. Lois A. Cuddy and David Hirsch (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), p. 201.
15. Roger Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, trans.
David Strieght and Pamela Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003), p. 4.
16. McCarthy, Eliot and Buddhism, p. 35.
17. Sri Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Bedford: Gordon Fraser, 1959), p. 50.
18. C. C. Chang, ed., A Treasury of Mahayana Sutras (University Park: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 475.
416 Philosophy and Literature

19. Bodhi, Connected Discourses, p. 101.

20. Jamieson, Nagarjuna’s Twenty Verses, p. 9.
21. “For I saw with own my eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the
acolytes said, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die’” (Petronius Satyricon,
ch. 48). Apollo had granted the Sibyl eternal life, but because she had forgotten to ask
for eternal youth, her body shriveled up until she could be put in a bottle. Epigram and
corresponding footnote to The Waste Land, p. 474.
22. William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Stamford: Londmeadow Press, 2000), act I,
scene ii.