Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. (“The Plot”)1
Infinite stories, infinitely branching. (“An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain”)2
Borges’s essays on Buddhism are contemporaneous with one of his most important essays, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, a spirited defense of literary cosmopolitanism. The coincidence in time points to intersecting preoccupations in Borges’s intellectual life. Why Buddhism? The legend of Siddharta who left his palace for a life of asceticism, a story that Borges repeated in each of his essays (as well as subsequent lectures and interviews on Buddhism), held aesthetic appeal as a “traveling” story—adapted and transformed into multiple cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts—at a time when Borges was forcefully rearticulating his position on the universality of literature. One essay alludes to Goethe’s “morphology ” (the study of the evolution of forms, driven by the intuition of the unity of all living forms), a model which accounts for both archetypal unity and dynamic transformation, in nature and in art. This allusion remained unelaborated: Borges never devoted a full-fledged essay to Goethe’s morphological theory. Nevertheless, the affinities with his own views of literature as infinite transformations of a finite number of fundamental forms seem unmistakable, as well as the resonances with his own “decidedly monotonous” practice of literature.3 The Buddhist Renunciation story provides a good case study for Borges’s quasi “Goethean” intuition of literature as transformation and circulation of archetypes, and more generally invites comparison of Borges’s literary universality with Goethe’s Weltliteratur . The story’s metaphysical appeal (particularly the denial of individualism) is no less important, as impersonality was a prominent Borgesian theme from the beginning (“The Nothingness of Personality” was first published in 1922). Ultimately, the Buddhist Renunciation legend also held a powerful existential appeal for Borges, particularly in the fifties: the story of a king leaving the palace, retold in multiple variants, suggests an underlying anxiety common to all Borges’s writing at a politically fraught time which was also a major turning point in his life, when his blindness became nearly complete. The infinitely metamorphic Buddhist story lends itself to a meditation on the ways in which the accidents of life transform literature, and are transformed by literature in return. By following the thread of universal circulation and transformation that runs through the essays on Argentine literature and on Buddhism, as well as several fictions that can be read as transformations of a narrative type, this study reveals the Renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism as an exemplary nexus of key Borgesian interrogations on the reading and writing self .
1 A Borgesian Morphology
1.1 “The Universe Is Our Birthright”: Buddhism and the Cosmopolitan Ideal
In a strong statement against literary nationalism (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, given as a lecture in 1951), Borges unambiguously claimed that Argentines should embrace cosmopolitanism: “I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture (…) we must believe that the universe is our birthright and try out every subject” (SNF 426–427).4 This attraction toward the foreign was perhaps not unexpected coming from a bilingual intellectual who had grown up in a multicultural environment—Borges was part English on his father’s side; he had spent vitally formative years in Switzerland, England and Spain, becoming fluent in French and German and even publishing his first poems in French.5
But “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” does not just advocate transcending national themes. It makes a far more ambitious claim: free circulation of literary themes and images is a prerequisite of national innovation. Borges ironically exposes the paradoxes of the quarrel: it would be unimaginable to deny Racine “the title of French poet for having sought out Greek and Latin subjects”, or Shakespeare the right “to write Hamlet, with its Scandinavian subject matter”: indeed “The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult that nationalists should reject as a foreign import”. The camel paradox reinforces this point. The Koran does not mention camels, because it is an authentic Arab book in no need of local color: likewise, Argentines should “believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color” (SNF 423–424).6
The universal circulation of literary themes, so forcefully articulated in the 1951 lecture, is also thematized by the diversity of topics covered in the essays: Flaubert , Homer’s translators, the poetry of tango, Walt Whitman , the Kabbalah, the kenningar, the Thousand and One Nights , and much more. In addition, Borges’s fictions from beginning (A Universal History of Infamy) to end (Shakespeare’s Memory) illustrate the principle of the circulation of stories across cultural spheres, typically by providing variations on a single basic plot. One such basic plot, the story of a king who leaves his palace to become a beggar—the Buddha legend—recurs throughout Borges’s work in various avatars: it provides a good case study for the paradigm of transcultural appropriation and circulation.
1.2 Borges’s Essays on Buddhism, Narrative Circulation, and Morphology
Borges’s lifelong interest in Buddhism crystallized in the fifties in a cluster of essays (“Forms of a Legend”, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King”, “Personality and the Buddha”), followed by the 1976 book coauthored with Alicia Jurado (QB), and lectures, interviews, and conversations where many of the same paradigms recur.7 His engagement with the renunciation motif (which is mentioned in each one of the three essays and also features, with multiple variants, in Borges’s fictions, particularly in parable form),8 is integral to his view of literature as variations on archetypes and as a network of circulation.
In “Forms of a Legend” (1952) Borges tells the Renunciation story in some detail, highlighting the key moments of Siddharta’s life: “the 29 years of illusory happiness (…) dedicated to sensual pleasures”, during which the young prince lived behind the palace walls, sheltered from the pain of the world on his father’s orders, and the four life-changing discoveries extra muros: old age, disease, death, and finally the peaceful life of the ascetic which determined him, likewise, to renounce the luxury of his palace. “On another outing, the last, he sees a monk of the mendicant orders who desires neither to live nor to die. Peace is on his face; Siddharta has found the way ” (SNF 374).9
“Forms of a Legend” focuses on the story’s cultural transformations. “Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legends recreate it in a way that is only accidentally false and which permits it to travel through the world from mouth to mouth”, Borges stresses in his introduction (373). He goes on to trace the story’s transcultural circulation: a seventh-century Christian version, the novel of Barlaam and Josaphat (374), filtered into Christendom through an earlier Islamic retelling, the legend of Bilawar and Budasaf.10 This Christian legend, in which prince Josaphat is converted by the hermit Barlaam, was itself subsequently translated into many languages including Icelandic, whe...