Journeys of Transformation: Searching for No-Self in Western Buddhist Travel Narratives, by John D. Barbour

One of the most central, disturbing, and unique features of Buddhist thought and practice is the concept of no-self. In what is now known as the Anatta Lakkhana Sutta in Pali, or “The Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic,” the Buddha taught that all the things we normally think of as ourselves—our bodies, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness in general—are in fact not. This does not mean that the Buddha denied that we exist as selves, but that our sense of self, as tangible as it may seem, is like a cloud or flash of lightning, ephemeral and ungraspable, an effect of innumerable past causes and present conditions. Therefore, our sense that our selves are substantially discrete, permanent, and graspable is a delusion—perhaps the most fundamental delusion of all—and this delusion, the Buddha taught, is the root cause of suffering.In his fascinating and deeply researched study, John D. Barbour asks how might real human beings come to terms with this difficult, counterintuitive, and paradoxical teaching. For unlike thought experiments in the philosophy classroom, the Buddha’s claim about the self was intended to register at the very base of one’s being and to transform the way one lives one’s life. Therefore, Barbour asks, how does the concept of no-self play out not in the dense philosophical treatises of Buddhist monastics but in lay Western travel writing into Buddhist Asia? How do Westerners, and especially Western travel writers committed as they are to the autobiographical I, come to question the ingrained notion that the self is substantially discrete, permanent, and graspable?Journeys of Transformation is the first scholarly book to identify and examine a major literary genre that has evolved during the past century: Western travel writing into Buddhist Asia. The book’s first scholarly contribution, then, is a compelling reevaluation of autobiography as a major genre of twentieth-century literature. The second scholarly contribution would be Barbour’s methodology. While he does not discuss his critical method in detail, perhaps owing to his academic background in religious rather than in literary studies, Barbour’s work fits squarely into what literary critics and theorists may recognize as reparative reading practices as developed especially by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick via Paul Ricoeur. Barbour’s critical method, in other words, is to go deeply into the authors he examines by trying to understand their own perspectives on their journeys and providing glosses in their terms. While Barbour does employ a hermeneutics of suspicion at times, especially when the authors he examines uncritically display their economic, gendered, or racial privilege while traveling in often very poor and disadvantaged communities of color, his stance in general is sympathetic toward the complex affective and spiritual lives of his subjects, in some sense taking the journey along with his authors. His generous readings, then, seek not only to understand and learn from other writing selves but to teach his own readers about the journeys of others.What is especially fascinating about Barbour’s work is the focus on the Buddhist concept of no-self to help wrangle in an incredibly unruly body of literature, a vast array of texts that “depict religious transformation as both a matter of new intellectual understanding and a radical reorientation of life” (2). In bringing to light this important corpus of work through the lens of no-self, Barbour looks to moments of autobiographical “unselfing” that he explains as “incidents that dislodge a person’s ordinary and conventional sense of self and elicit some other form of consciousness” (14). Interestingly, Barbour borrows this term unselfing from Iris Murdoch, the English philosopher, who in a gloss on Plato connects unselfing with virtue. In this line of thinking, when we encounter something truly beautiful—an ice-capped mountain range, say, or an exquisite sunset—we are snapped out of ourselves, experiencing a sudden awareness of what virtue might be. The beautiful, in other words for Plato and Murdoch and indeed in some ways for Romantic theorists of the sublime, can elicit an experience of unselfing whereby our deluded sense of self-importance dissolves and we are connected ethically to the bigger picture. While there are some major differences between Murdoch’s Platonism and the Buddha’s teachings, Barbour is quick to point out that, like Buddhists, Murdoch “sees an experience of self-transcendence as a crucial moment in the development of right understanding and moral goodness” (14).Barbour chooses to focus on travel narratives to go deeper into moments of unselfing because traveling is very often an exercise in dislodging a sense of self we thought was so permanent. Not only can travelers experience self-transcendence in encountering something new and beautiful à la Plato and Murdoch, but they must constantly wake up to ever changing internal and external realities as they move through very unfamiliar physical space. “At its best,” Barbour says, “travel fosters alert and discriminating attention; it leads not only to seeing new sights but also to recognition of alternative ways of seeing the world and, so to speak, seeing how one sees” (19). Despite the very clear potential value of traveling to understand the Buddhist concept of no-self, Barbour is no naive critic. Both he and many of the authors he analyzes are deeply conscious of the potential pitfalls of Western writers narrating their travels into the East. These pitfalls have been detailed in postcolonial studies during the past several decades, especially in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). “Encountering a foreign culture,” Barbour warns, echoing the concerns of postcolonial critics, “also poses the risk of projecting onto it a shadow self that one uses to shore up or define one’s own identity and to justify political and economic structures from which one benefits” (20). He continues by acknowledging the special risk in the religious travel narrative: “The ideal of transcending self leads all too often to self-deception and exploitation of other cultures in the name of one’s own spiritual advancement.” Despite these potential pitfalls and risks, the texts Barbour covers in Journeys of Transformation are significant for personal and scholarly study. Autobiographical travel narratives colored by the Buddhist philosophy and practice of no-self, Barbour writes, “are valuable because they give us a first-person subjective account of events, show the larger temporal context of pivotal events, and disclose not only an ideal of enlightenment but also the messy, inconclusive, and confusing aspects of transformative religious experience” (7).After a lengthy introduction in which Barbour discusses the concept of no-self and unselfing, the importance of religious autobiography and travel writing as a literary genre, as well as the historical and geographical scope of his project, Barbour moves into the nine chapters of his book. These chapters are mostly organized around Buddhist lineage and locale: the Mahayana, especially the Zen/Chan of Japan and China; the Vajrayana of Tibet and Tibetan exiles in India, Nepal, and Bhutan; and the Theravada of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. Organizing the book in this way allows Barbour to go deeply into each tradition as it has historically formed alongside national identity in certain places, and the different experiences of Western writers as they enter the specificity of lineage and locale. What clearly emerges with Barbour’s method is the vast range of beliefs, temperaments, and practices that ostensibly operate under the umbrella term “Buddhism” but would probably be better understood in the plural form of “Buddhisms.” The conclusion synthesizes the argumentative threads of the book, presents a more philosophical exposition of the concept of no-self (which perhaps should have come in the introduction), and details the implications of Journeys of Transformation for our understanding of religion as such.Barbour’s book offers in-depth treatment of thirty-one authors, by my own count, the experiences of thirty-one writing selves coming to terms with no-selves in Asian Buddhist countries. The texts, written in English mostly by British and American citizens, range in historical scope from John Blofeld’s The Wheel of Life: The Autobiography of a Western Buddhist (1959) to Gesshin Claire Greenwood’s Bow First, Ask Questions Later: Ordination, Love, and Monastic Zen in Japan (2018). Some writers and works are canonical, such as Peter Mattheissen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), but most would probably be unfamiliar to scholars of twentieth century literature. After the lengthy introduction, Barbour calls his first chapter “The Origins of the Genre: John Blofeld and Lama Govinda.” These two writers, like many of Barbour’s other subjects, are committed and long-time practicing Buddhists. They also demonstrate the ways Western Buddhist writers employ the genre of Christian religious autobiography, which centers around confession and conversion such as Augustine’s Confessions (397-400), but adapt the genre to encompass Buddhist religious belief such as reincarnation. Blofeld, for example, sees his conversion to Buddhism more like a “reconversion” (27) since he understands his initial taking of refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, to have taken place in a previous lifetime. In this instance, as in many others, Barbour’s hermeneutic method is reparative—Ricoeur calls it restorative—rather than suspicious. His method, in other words, is sympathetic towards his subjects’ complex affective and spiritual lives and he extends a generosity of understanding to their unique points of view. A very questionable religious belief from a Western perspective such as reincarnation for Barbour is not a symptom of false consciousness or delusion or cultural appropriation but a legitimate path of religious seeking for the British Blofeld in a Buddhist monastery in Sikkim, as it is for the German Lama Govinda in Tibet.Another chapter, “Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard and Nine-Headed Dragon River,” analyzes a canonical American author in terms of his commitment both to the genre of travel writing and to Buddhism in the Zen tradition. The Snow Leopard traces Matthiessen’s physically and emotionally harrowing trip to Nepal with biologist George Schaller to document the Himalayan blue sheep in 1973; whereas Nine-Headed Dragon River (1985) covers a thirteen-year span of Matthiessen’s nomadic life that ends with a journey to Japan. The idea of moving forward both in terms of physical space and along the spiritual path, for Matthiessen, is deeply problematic and paradoxical, and Barbour describes a “pattern” in the writer: “Passages suggesting genuine and increasing understanding of the dharma are juxtaposed with remarks denying that the author has made any progress in comprehending or practicing Buddhist wisdom” (44). Matthiessen turns to the Japanese Zen master and prolific poet-philosopher Eihei Dogen (1200–1253) to help him make sense of this paradoxical problem, and Barbour provides the gloss: “Dogen advises both relentless self-examination and forgetting the self as equally necessary for enlightenment” (58).“In a Zen Monastery: Ambiguous Failure and Enlightenment” continues this theme of success and failure, attainment and nonattainment, in Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Empty Mirror (1973), the memoir of a Dutchman’s two-year experience with Rinzai Zen and koan practice in a Kyoto monastery beginning in 1958. Barbour interprets Wetering’s experience as his learning “to interpret the world by framing puzzling events and encounters as if they are koans” (65). According to Barbour, the writer “starts to see his life as a series of situations calling for an immediate, intuitive response rather than a controlled, rational one.” This analysis of a Western writer living and learning in a Japanese Zen monastery continues in the chapter as Barbour turns to Maura O’Halloran’s Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind: The Life and Letters of an Irish Zen Saint (1995), David Chadwick’s Thank You and Ok!: An American Zen Failure in Japan (1994), and Greenwood’s Bow First, Ask Questions Later. In this chapter especially, the importance of gender differences among the authors Barbour studies comes to the fore. “Western Buddhist travel narratives by women tend to be more aware of the dangers of no-self than are those by male writers,” Barbour notes and explains: “Perhaps having struggled in a patriarchal society to find and express an identity, women authors are more skeptical about the ideal of giving up self” (94).The answer, at least for one of the women writers under consideration here, is not a total embrace of the Buddhist understanding of no-self but a reconfiguration of selfhood. “Greenwood,” Barbour writes, “sets the ideal of loosening the hold of ‘small self’ alongside the goal of strengthening her ‘best self’” (95). A similar critique of no-self and its attendant solution comes up in Barbour’s reading of Jan Willis who in Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey (2001) details the unique experience of a Black woman coming into being as a Buddhist in the Vajrayana tradition. “If no-self is taken to mean the denial of personhood,” Barbour warns, “it is a pernicious doctrine rather than an insight that brings liberation from suffering” (197). The ugly histories of sexism and racism not only in the West but also in Buddhist dogma, ritual, and institutional structures make the concept of no-self not a universal spiritual aspiration that means the same thing to all people everywhere but a very questionable concept that authors approach very differently according to their own gendered and racialized identities.“Thomas Merton and Christian and Jewish Pilgrims in Buddhist Asia” focuses on the American Trappist monk’s posthumously published book The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973). Merton, who long explored the convergence between Buddhist thought and Christian theology died in an electrocution accident in 1968 in Thailand. The writings in his Asian journals before his untimely death especially engage with the question of travel and the Buddhist thought and practice of no-self. As Barbour explains it, “a pilgrim’s temporary homelessness can teach important lessons about finitude, impermanence, mutual human dependence, gracious acceptance of hospitality, and nonpossessiveness” (103–4). The chapter concludes with a comparison of Merton’s work with a Jewish American writer, Rodger Kamenetz, whose The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (1994) narrates the historical meeting and interfaith dialogues between prominent Jewish rabbis and writers and the fourteenth Dalai Lama in India. What emerges especially in this chapter on the Christian Merton and the Jewish Kamenetz is the hesitancy of non-Buddhists to embrace the Buddhist teaching on no-self.Many religious traditions—if not all of them—understand the higher calling of human life as transcending our ordinary sense of self and its almost unavoidable tendency toward conceit and selfishness. The ethical dimension of most religious traditions must start, then, with a critique of egocentrism and show the harmful effects of human self absorption and self-centeredness, the greed and hatred that stems from an insistence on me, myself, and mine. The Buddhist concept of no-self comes out of this more general trajectory, though its claim is not simply about selfishness but about the self itself. The Buddhist concept of no-self, in other words, is as ontological as it is ethical. Its claim, especially as it is thought and practiced in the Mahayana traditions, is radical and profound: the self is essentially empty of self-nature. And many Western travel writers to Asia, as curious and receptive as they are to Buddhism in general, cannot or will not make that conceptual leap, and perhaps for good reason.Journeys of Transformation: Searching for No-Self in Western Buddhist Travel Narratives will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century literature in a number of subfields. As an important contribution to the intellectual history of Buddhism in the West, especially the underappreciated ways Buddhism has helped shape twentieth-century literature, Barbour’s book will interest scholars working in global, comparative, and postcolonial literature. In addition to its scholarly value, the book will be pedagogically useful for scholar-teachers interested in incorporating Buddhist texts and themes into the college classroom. And finally, Barbour lays the groundwork for further research and writing. Comparative analyses of other genres, such as poetry, fiction, and film, would be an especially fruitful way to extend Barbour’s work, as would a more thorough engagement with how Buddhism might intersect with Western philosophy (Lucretius, Spinoza, and Hume, for example), deconstructive or psychoanalytic theory, or contemporary cognitive science in the wake of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. For these lines of inquiry and many more, Barbour’s important book can serve as a powerful touchstone.