Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present by Kyle Gorton-Gundling (review)
Peter B. Olson
Rocky Mountain review/The Rocky Mountain review March 1, 2023 DOI: 10.1353/rmr.2023.a904893 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Review Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Buddhism |
| Key findings | Argues that the Beat generation drew on Buddhist and Hindu traditions, including Zen meditation and ideas of dharma and the nonself, to detach from mainstream American conformity, producing what Gorton-Gundling calls "enlightened individualism." The book contends that this outlook critiques American individualism and exceptionalism while preserving a partial sense of self, and it examines earlier East-West exchanges and modernist concerns about cultural appropriation. |
Abstract
Reviewed by: Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present by Kyle Gorton-Gundling Peter B. Olson Kyle Gorton-Gundling. Enlightened Individualism: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from the Beats to the Present. The Ohio State UP, 2019. 217p. A recent entry into the subfield of transnational American studies, Enlightened Individualism draws its methodology from literary and cultural studies. It has the earmarks of a revised doctoral thesis since it presents an extensive introductory section contextualizing the idea that Buddhist and Hindu concepts entered American culture gradually. They then flowered when the post-WW2 Beat generation (at least the authors treated) encountered Asian religious traditions that prompted new ways of understanding their relationships to an American identity that historically had been shaped by the European Enlightenment. These new encounters prompted an ideological revision that Gorton-Gundling terms “enlightened individualism.” The subtext of this revision finds a subtle excoriation of the idea of American individualism as culpable in failing to resolve the paradoxes of American exceptionalism and the “enlightenment project.” Hence, Gorton-Gundling suggests that it was in the complacent and conformist 1950s that the Beat Generation looked to Asian religious traditions as a means of personal nonalignment with the American mainstream through several modes of transcendence via Zen meditation and a core of Buddhist philosophical concepts: dharma (the illusory nature of reality), a renunciation of suffering, and the transcendental self. It is clear that these philosophical ideas offered ways to detach oneself from the cycle of mainstream American thought. That detached intellectual [End Page 93] position seeks an authentic self, transcending foundationalism (an impersonal order of reality associated with monotheism). Enlightened Individualism implies that foundationalism relies on the premise of subject-object dualism that undergirds social class hierarchies compounded by capitalism. In short, Buddhist nonduality and the nonself simply eliminate foundationalism, or so it is argued. Nature is, thus, undifferentiated, and from there, one might conclude, a totally fresh approach to ecology emerges: a rhizomic structure of nature that historicizes natural law, no longer timeless. The American parallel to enlightened individualism, though not mentioned in the text, emerges with Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening of the 1740s in Northampton. The text does return momentarily to Emerson and Thoreau and the antebellum transcendentalism movement. Cultural exchanges between East and West are witnessed in the arts as early as mid-19th century with Degas and Monet. Still, the World Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 resulted in a wave of translations of Asian religious texts by several lecturers, such as Swami Vivekananda’s San Francisco lectures of 1900 that helped familiarize some American audiences with Hindu Vedanta concepts in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-gita, and Buddhist sutras of the Dhammapada. The translations attempted to address American audiences, mindful of Western notions of the “immanent frame” of instrumental reason (subject/object duality) and the impersonal order of nature (Christianity and divine election). These Western concepts conflict with Eastern metaphysics. Here one realizes the juxtaposition of an Eastern influenced enlightened individualism, a “soft dualism,” (my term) where the individual engages imaginatively with a metaphysics of nonduality and the nonself, though partially, and preserves a full-on sense of individualism stemming from the empiricist tradition and further back to the notion of “subject.” The paradox of “soft dualism” arises in modernism with T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, in which Western decadence is too entrenched for Hindu scripture to resolve its shaky foundations. With modernism, it agonizes over the question of “Orientalism” with its implicated potential for cultural appropriation. Readers might consult Edward Said’s Orientalism for a more extensive discussion. With that background in mind, Enlightened Individualism turns to the emergence of Buddhist literature published in English [End Page 94] beginning with D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (1949) and Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). Garton-Gundling sets up Alan Watts’ influential article “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen” (1958) as a transition to his interesting excursion into the Beat movement. Following WW2 and Japanese internment, the author cites F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (1946...
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