Revisioning Reality: Transcending Space and Time in the Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Victorian writer Lafcadio Hearn has been credited with being one of the first Westerners to adopt “Eastern”, specifically Buddhist, ideas about reality. The effect of Hearn's neo-Buddhist, quasi-scientific vision is to deconstruct Victorian certainties and generate new ways of thinking – new metaphors for constructing an understanding of the world. Hearn's engagement with Buddhism and science caused him to revision his understanding of time and space – of our place in the universe. The effect of his meditations is to change the way he conceives of the self – and also the way he understands the very fabric of reality. This essay outlines the scientific and religious theories that interested Hearn and looks at Hearn's coming to terms with some of these ideas in selected Buddhist writings from his oeuvre. The new metaphors for describing reality apparent in them – though they are now commonplaces of both New Age and of scientific discourse – were radical at the time, and potentially played a part in the fundamental reconceptualisation of reality that took place in the early twentieth century, especially in the fields of physics and cosmology.