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"The Circular Ruins"

Article · June 2019

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Claudia Patricia Moros

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Jorge Luis Borges and Zen Buddhism in Two of His Stories: “The Immortal” and
“The Circular Ruins” By Claudia Patricia Moros Martínez (Fragment)

Abstract:

This work establishes some of the influences and Buddhist traits of the Zen line
participating in Borgean fiction, especially in the 1950s. Two stories, “The Circular Ruins”
and “The Immortal,” will be analyzed by retrieving part of the intellectual context expressed
by Jorge Luis Borges in oral and written speeches on Buddhist theology. Therefore, this
inquiry is essential to appreciate his literary production, to locate the theoretical field in which
he is inscribed, to locate where his figures and topics come from, and to understand the
ultimate meaning of part of his literary canon. Although Buddhism does not have a palpable
presence in the Borgean narrative, numerous theological aspects of this religion were,
presumably, suggestive for the Argentine poet. Given the plethoric richness of Buddhist
concepts, the impact of some of the premises of Zen Buddhism is specifically analyzed: the
suspicion that reality is a hoax and the probability of producing a satori in the reader by using
paradox and perplexity, following guidelines of the koan in the stories “The Circular Ruins”
and “The Immortal”. Borges' first incursions into Buddhism, intertextuality, discourses and
metaphysical theories chosen by the Argentine drifted with those precepts and influenced his
fiction and the literary artifices of his affinity are characteristic of Buddhist theology. This
study attempts to establish patterns of Buddhist manifestation in Borgean fiction as part of
his fantastic literature.

Keywords: Buddhism, Borges, satori, koan, Immortal and Circular Ruins

Introduction

At the origin of all writing there is an accumulation of dynamic knowledge of the

author that acquires different connotations as the words are being unraveled from
significances and inferences by the readers, who in turn, access them according to different
vital learning, revealing meanings with each reading while reassessing what is apprehended
in their conscience, especially the fundamental beliefs, those related to personal alignment,
and that, in the case of some Borges stories, incline to inner enlightenment, to the intimate
search for answers to questions as shocking as “Who am I?”

The stories of Borges foment the perplexity and the doubt before the solidity of the
mental universe and the individual personality, making one feel, with each metaphor and
paradox, an internal tension that excites the mind to fold towards other dimensions, religious
some, empirical others, philosophical some, and in general, all disturbing and schismatic.
Borge’s writings intrigue by the questioning that engender and vital for its emotional
channeling force towards the change of perspective in the perception and interpretation of
the world.

And when Borges poses in "The Circular Ruins" and in "The Immortal" the
philosophical questions: “Who am I? Am I real or illusion of others?” Braided with
postulated images and counter images and answers typical of Zen Buddhism in order to offer
to the reader concerns, and to stir up emotional conflicts that, with some luck and probability,
will end in an illumination, a satori.

The thematic nuclei chronologically narrate the most significant events that marked
the introduction of Zen Buddhism in Borges' work, organizing information in five parts. The
first section is the state of the art. In this section the analysis, interpretations and exhaustive
studies of diverse authors are displayed, leading to demonstrate the influence of the eastern
literature in the work of Borges. Several authors converge in highlighting the ascendancy of
Buddhism in both the theoretical and stylistic aspects that took shape in various stories,
essays and literary investigations.

Among such a complex academic approach, it was necessary to study in greater detail
the interweaving of Buddhist philosophy and practice in Borges' texts. Now, a crucial issue
was to establish, from among the multitude of interpretative branches of Buddhism, which
of them could be detected with greater force and how it was embodied in at least a fragment
of the very extensive Borgean work. To give the most emblematic precision, we proceeded
in this work to follow the trail of Buddhism in Borges from childhood to clear the way in
which he went into the complex plot of postulates and literary elaborations of this theological
current.

Thus, in the first chapter it was detected that in Borges's child mind the Buddhist ideal
began to filter through the translations of Edwin Arnold on the life of the Buddha, with all
the imaginative load of the English orientalists fascinated by an all-embracing Indian culture
of fantastic symbols, loaded with meaning. On this infantile foundation, Jorge Luis Borges
accumulated personal inquiries and discoveries made in discussions of intellectual circles.
The doubts and curiosities thus accumulated led Borges to immerse himself in Buddhist and
philosophical readings such as Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Hume, in an attempt to answer
his existential doubts.

Little by little, he mixed the different philosophical orientations and created his own
vision of being and concentrated his attention on the problem of the Self, a circumstance that
led him to consider the propositions of Zen Buddhism as a kind of salvific balm for the
intoxicated Western conscience, or at least, to offer such a system as a source, a reflection on
the problems of the illusion that it is to take for granted the existence of a reality, of a truth.

Approaching the Borgesian vision of Zen involved including a second chapter on

generalities of Zen Buddhism and its most important literary expression, the koan. In this
section it is shown that most of the Zen postulates are critical to the belief in an individuality,
an ego-ego that subsists thanks to the systematic destruction of the cosmic unit, deceiving
itself over and over again while reproducing with the gift of create symbols and images,
words and more words, knowledge and more knowledge, without even knowing who it is.

Now, according to Zen Buddhism, the mind can discipline itself to understand the
need to let itself fall into the abyss of nothing, the salvific gaze without empirical ego-ego,
and reach transcendence. One of the mechanisms used in this process of causing the
elimination of the illusion is the koan, a short story created to demolish conceptual thinking
 by displaying a paradoxical, surprising and disconcerting language that leaves the reader
without logical support and induces an emotional trembling.

Borges is interested in the koan, studies it, dominates and adapts the Western mind to
spread his particular assimilation of Zen Buddhism, which is explained in the third chapter,
in which it is clear that Borges intellectually dominated this current of thought and intuitively
embodied in at least two stories, "The Circular Ruins" and "The Immortal", said knowledge
in order to promote emotional disturbances that at least gave room to the probability of
inducing a transformation in the vision that the reader had about the reality.

This observation guided the interpretation of the stories mentioned in the fourth
chapter. In both was the record of Zen Buddhism, not as a historian could do, in precise
historiographical sequences, but in a literary game of antithetical images with a pendula
description of the stormy swing of the illusions in the mind, so that, with that imaginary
information, the reader could access the counter image in his conscience and thus enable a
probability of interrogation and mystical discovery of another point of view about reality. In
both cases the final questioning is disconcerting, one searing and another stirring up the fear
of death. In both literary elaborations Borges takes for himself the character of Zen master
and gives the reader the option of becoming a disciple and advances through the never-traced
and unknown path of contradictory communication, of language without words, until
reaching the mystical vision of fantastic fullness, in which the self merges into an
omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent nothingness; a being that recognizes itself as divine.

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