Fantasy and reality in western views of the East
THE LIGHT OF ASIA
A history of western fascination with the East
CHRISTOPHER HARDING
464pp. Allen Lane. £30.
THOMAS CORYATE was an annoying minor aristocrat, who in 1611 published Coryat’s Crudities, an account of his adventures travelling in Europe on foot. John Donne was not amused by his account, declaring him a “great lunatic” and suggesting he take his thirst for tall tales to Asia. Which Coryate then did, setting out on a journey to India from which dysentery cancelled his return. When his notes from India appeared in print posthumously in Traveller for the English Wits, the publisher started with a picture of Coryate riding an elephant, something he surely never did. Donne was not immune to imagining the otherness of the East – he even parallels “India” with “Paradise” in his poem “To M. S. B.” – but of Asia he wanted facts, not crudities.
Christopher Harding features Coryate in The Light of Asia to introduce the English fascination with the East, but Coryate is not the only lunatic in his pages. Jack Kerouac called his real-life friends, whom he turned into characters in The Dharma Bums, “Zen lunatics”. Harding surveys a long history of Europeans’ fascination with Asia, starting with Herodotus and ending with Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk whose exposure to Vedanta philosophy during his years in India led to the Christian Ashram Movement. But, as the author knows, the history of East-West relations across the millennia between the fifth century BCE and Griffiths’s death in 1993 is too vast to squeeze between the covers of a single book. Instead he selects the theme of spirituality and follows a motley assortment of men and women in the West whose curiosity about Asia set them whirling in the metaphysical gap between European and Asian religious norms.
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as Harding writes, the Jesuits were careful to develop ways to accommodate Christian beliefs to Asian practices, for which they were shut down for a time by Pope Clement XIV. We are shown how later philosophical doubts about Christian doctrine in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed the balance of accommodation the other way, as some Europeans revised Christian practices to conform to Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist ideas. That surge in spiritual hunger produced many Romantics and theosophists and, later still, Beat poets and new-age gurus who wanted to bring Asian practices to the West. Harding takes this story up the 1970s, via the Beatles and Ravi Shankar.
In the 1970s, when I was in my twenties, I saw something of this world among European Buddhists and from a course in Buddhist philosophy in my native Canada, before I took up the s
