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.

• PrefaceAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsNotes on the Text and Conventions Adopted1 A Metaphysics of Buddhism and Its History in the WestIntroductionCore Issues Outlined: the Letters of George Milbry Gould and Basil Hall ChamberlainDr George Milbry GouldProfessor Basil Hall ChamberlainHearn’s Reception in the WestThe Existing Scholarship on Hearn’s BuddhismThe Advent of Buddhism to the WestThe European Discovery of Buddhism in ‘British’ IndiaBuddhism a Radical MetaphysicBuddhism a Construct, a StoryEdwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879)Conclusion2 Biographical and Critical Studies of HearnIntroductionThe ad hominem Nature of Biographical and Critical – ‘Bio-critical’ – Works on HearnThe Bio-critical Memes of Hearn StudiesBiographies and Bio-critical Works on HearnElizabeth Bisland’s Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906)George Milbry Gould’s Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (1908)Hearn’s Work Denigrated by Attacking the ManHearn’s Ancestry and Vision AttackedHearn’s going ‘Fantee’ and his Abandonment of a Loving Father-GodGeorge M. Gould Collection of Hearniana: a Testimony to Obsession and FearfulnessThe History of Gould’s Encounter with Hearn and Gould’s Deprecation of Hearn on Grounds of Defective VisionHearn is ‘the Poet of Myopia’Gould’s Fatherly TheismGod as ‘Biologos’ Creating out of Dead Matter the Garden of the World‘Karma’: a Tale Told for its TellerPost-Gould, pre-World War I Critical Biographies of HearnJoseph 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 WarsEdward 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 BuddhismKenneth Kirkwood’s Unfamiliar Lafcadio Hearn (1936)Critical Biographies of Hearn Written after World War IIVera 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 PapersCritical Biographies of Hearn in the 1960s and 1970sAlbert 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 HearnPaul 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)Conclusion3 Buddhism in the American Writings and ‘Seeking the Orient at Home’IntroductionHearn’s First Encounters with BuddhismEdwin Arnold’s The Light of AsiaAtheism and Individual Responsibility in The Light of AsiaCausation, Karma, Reincarnation, and the Interrelation of all Phenomena in The Light of AsiaBuddhism a Revisioning of ‘the Self’Buddhism a Revisioning of the Problem of DeathHearn’s Buddhism Ontological, not MoralisticArticles about BuddhismThe 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 BuddhismHearn’s Translations of Buddhist Stories and His Neo-Buddhist FictionsStray 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 DeathBackground 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’Conclusion4 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-MeditationsThe 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 FenollosasErnest Fenollosa’s Attack on Hearn in The Atlantic MonthlyOneness‘A Drop of Dew’‘Of Moon-Desire’The Paradise of Possible WorldsTime-Travel and Ghost Stories‘The Reconciliation’‘The Story of Itō Norisuké’Conclusion5 ConclusionBibliographyHearn’s WritingsSecondary TextsIndex