Lafcadio Hearn’s Proto-Buddhist, ‘Oceanic’ Caribbean Vision

Abstract

Lafcadio Hearn’s early writings relating to the sea and evolution are precursors to what I call the cosmic or oceanic meditations of the later work, where the (Buddhist) oceanic quality of time and space takes a central place in his thinking about the universe. As has been shown, Hearn was one of the first European Victorians to imaginatively engage with Buddhism, fitting his own lived experience to ancient ideas newly (re)discovered and conveyed to the West from Indian, Ceylonese, Chinese, and Japanese texts, made available by the work of academic Buddhologists like Eugène Burnouf and Max Müller.[i] Such works introduced a whole new paradigm of thinking, enabling new ways of conceiving reality, which has continued for nearly two centuries with the gradual transmission and transculturation of Buddhist concepts out of its heartlands and into other fields and cultures the world over. In this article I address some of Hearn’s earliest Buddhist tendencies in his Caribbean writings, his painterly descriptions of land- and sea-scapes, and how these meld into vast synaesthetic mindscapes, intimations of deeper and timeless truths – of borderless infinity and incessant change, and the transitoriness of experience. Once these writings begin to be seen within the framework of the developing Buddhist ontology in Hearn’s œuvre, as outlined in The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Hearn’s early tropical writing takes on a deeper significance and dimension – as a precursor and preparation for that greater framework, that deeper ontology that flowers in Japan.

[i] John Antony Goedhals, The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East (Brill, 2020), p. 141.