Ch'an Buddhism and the Prophetic Poems of William Blake
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Description: An essay discussing the relation between William Blake's poetry and Zen.
CH'AN BUDDHISM AND THE PROPHETIC POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE CH'AN BUDDHISM AND THE PROPHETIC POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE Copyright @ 1997 by Dialogue Publising Company, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A. . PP.59 The similarities between William Blake's philosophical system and that of Buddhism (particularly the Ch'an(a) or Zen School) are no less than astonishing. One is struck by a fundamental similitude underlying the teaching of the Ch'an school and that of Blake's radical epistemology. Scholars are aware that William Blake (1757-1827) knew the BhagavadGita in its first English translation by Sir Charles Wilkins (1785). Blake's A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809) even has an entry for a piece called "The Bramins-A Drawing." Moreover, Kathleen Raine suggests that Blake knew "some of the Proceedings off the Calcutta Society of Bengal promoted by Sir William Jones."(1) Further, Blake believed fundamentally All Religions are One (1788). He wrote, "As all men are alike (tho, infinitely various) So all Religions & as all similars have one source."(2) It was also his opinion that"The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception."(3) Although the above constitute enough evidence to suggest Blake's familiarity with the East (particularly Indian thinking as found in the Vedic tradition) they do not fully explain the strange parallelism of thought between the English poet-painter's mythic philosophy and that of Mahayanna Buddhism. A supremely important component of Blake's prophetic mythological writings, especially Jerusalem (1804-20) and Milton (1804), is the concept of the Four Zoas. Briefly, these Four Zoas make up the unified psyche of Albion, the Universal Man. Each of the Four Zoas represents an aspect of the personality of Universal Map. Christine Gallant equates the Four Zoas with the four aspects of the personality in Jungian psycho- P.60 logy.Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition).(4) Urizen is
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