Sublime Disappearances

feeling Buddhism in late-nineteenth-century Western music

Julian Butterfield

Stanford University

pp. 75-93

in: Laura Langone & Alexandra Ilieva (eds), Dynamic Encounters Between Buddhism and the West, East Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1), 2024.

Abstract

This essay explores how the Buddhist-inspired works of two late-nine-teenth-century western composers, Richard Wagner and Dudley Buck, interpret Buddhist source material through the aesthetic discourse of the sublime dominant in post-Romantic music. In the opera Parsifal (1882), Wagner develops his philosophy of nirvāṇic sound into experimental passages intended to provoke spiritually intense feelings of transcendence, while Buck’s 1886 musical adaptation of Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia derives the sublime style of Handelian oratorio to engage his audience in a grand celebration of moral renewal. Despite their different approaches to mediating the sublime, both Wagner and Buck use it to present Buddhism directly to the feelings of their listeners, while by the same token dissolving its troubling foreign embodiment into sound. Ultimately, this essay argues that such appeals to feeling represent a significant yet under-explored dimension in Buddhism’s history and experience in the west, contributing to its subjectivization and detraditionalization.