The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

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