BUDDHISM COMES WEST 301garded their study ofBuddhism as a labor oflove, whereas others have taken it
on more as a labor of hate.
However, for a large part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
most creative answers to the question of what Buddhism has to offer the West
have come from outside the academic world. Some of these answers have been
only tangentially related to actual Buddhist teaching, but they touch on al-
most all areas of Western intellectual and artistic life. A thorough account of
this process would fill a book, so here we will simply note a few of the more
striking examples.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the first
westerner to declare publicly his affinity for Buddhism, seeing in the First
Noble Truth an expression of the thoroughgoing pessimism he advocated in
his own philosophy. Schopenhauer in turn influenced Richard Wagner, who
in the latter part of his life tackled the project of writing an opera on the life of
the Buddha but was stymied by the problem of finding a leitmotiv, a dramatic
and musical theme, for a character free from passion, aversion, and delusion.
Neither Schopenhauer nor Wagner were Buddhists in the sense of taking
refuge in the Triple Gem, but the eclecticism they exemplified has played a
prominent role in the West's appropriation of Buddhist ideas. One of the most
influential examples of this trend is Carl Jung's theory of psychological arche-
types in the collective unconscious of the human race. This theory he devel-
oped in the 1930s by taking the doctrine of karma and rebirth that he had
encountered in Buddhist and Hindu texts and transforming it into a theory of
psychic heredity from the collected karma of one's ancestors. A more modern
example of the appropriation of Buddhist ideas is the role that Zen has played
in the art and aesthetic theories of avant-garde composers such as John Cage,
and of writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder (Strong EB,
sec. 9.3), and]. D. Salinger. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), for
instance, is structured as a koan meditation on the question, "Where do the
ducks in Central Park go in the winter?" No answer is given, of course, and
the resolution of the koan lies in the lessons in compassion that the main char-
acter has learned by the end of the book.
In many cases, the appropriation ofBuddhist ideas has led to what might
be called "extrapolated Buddhism," in that themes are taken out of their orig-
inal framework and extrapolated to radically different contexts. A prime ex-
ample of this tendency is the way Catholic contemplatives have adopted Zen
teachings and techniques to aid them in the search for God. Pioneers in this
process were Father Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle (1898-1990), a German Jesuit
missionary to Japan, and Thomas Merton (1915-68), an American Trappist
monk. Father Lassalle underwent Rinzai training, became recognized as a
master in 1978, and later returned to Europe, where he led Zen retreats draw-
ing koans from the Bible. Awakening, he taught, was a culturally neutral ex-
perience that could be interpreted in terms of any worldview. Thus, for a
Christian, it could lead one "along the line that ends in the vision of God."
Another contemporary example of extrapolated Buddhism is "engaged Bud-
dhism," which interprets Buddhist teachings on the interdependence of all