Examining the Science and Supernaturalism of Buddhism

Buddhism has had a series of strong recurrent presences in America, and, though Wright doesn't stop to trace them, they might illuminate some continuities that show why his kind of Buddhism got here, and got “true.” Its first notable appearance was in late-nineteenth-century New England, where, as Van Wyck Brooks showed long ago, Henry Adams was “drawn especially to the lands of Buddha.” Another New England Buddhist of the day was William Sturgis Bigelow, who brought back to Boston some twenty thousand works of Japanese art, and who, when dying in Boston, called for a Catholic priest and asked that he annihilate his soul. (He was disappointed when the priest declined.) These American Buddhists, drawn East in part by a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, recognized a set of preoccupations like those they knew already—Whitman's vision of a self that could shift and contain multitudes, or Thoreau's secular withdrawal from the race of life. (Jon Kabat-Zinn's hugely successful meditation guide, “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” is dotted with Thoreau epigraphs in place of Asian ones.) The quietist impulse in New England spirituality and the pantheistic impulse in American poetry both seemed met, and made picturesque, by the Buddhist tradition.