Wagner, Buddhism and Parsifal

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Wagner and Buddhism Parsifal and Indian Literature Wagnerian Buddhism in Parsifal Left: Buddha image by © Nyo Wagner and Buddhism

ith any other composers of opera, one would naturally regard exotic settings or other exotic elements as colouring or atmosphere. Therefore it would be natural to regard the Moorish settings and oriental elements in Parsifal as part of the same phenomenon, the search for novel and exotic factors, that is seen in the chinoiserie of Turandot or the japonerie of The Mikado. There are instances of Indian settings contemporary with Wagner's Parsifal: notably Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles (1863), Massenet's Le roi de Lahore (1877) and Delibes' Lakmé (1883). It hardly seems inappropriate, then, for Wagner to have sketched an opera set in north-east India, which he called Die Sieger (The Victors). The location and visual features of these Wagnerian dramas were not, however, chosen for their novelty. For Richard Wagner, opera (or more properly, music-drama or musical drama) was a medium for the communication of aesthetic and philosophical ideas. Even before his encounter with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, according to the Indologist Carl Suneson, Wagner had shown an interest in oriental thought and literature. This interest was stimulated by the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and continued until the end of Wagner's life. On the evening before he died, Wagner expressed a wish to emigrate to the Buddhist island of Ceylon.

agner was introduced to Buddhism first in Schopenhauer's books, and secondly, in late 1855 or early 1856, by Eugène Burnouf's Introduction à l'histoire du buddhisme indien. This book was in large part based on Maháyána Buddhist texts that had been sent to Paris from Nepal in 1837. Later he read, with some irritation, Carl Friedrich Köppen's Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung. An unedifying book, was Wagner's verdict. But to Burnouf's book, Wagner was to return repeatedly during the rest of his life. Wagner's interest in Indian literature might also have been encouraged by conversations with his brother-in-law, Hermann Brockhaus, who edited and partially translated the compilation of Hindu stories, Kathasaritsagara.

Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nirvana

chopenhauer believed that he had found parallels between his pessimistic philosophy and Buddhism. With the availability of older Buddhist texts, and better translations, in the West, together with 150 years of scholarship, we can now see that Schopenhauer misunderstood many aspects of Buddhism. In particular, his initial identification of the Buddhist state of existence called nirvana with non-being was quite wrong and misled Schopenhauer's followers, including Richard Wagner. Nirvana is intrinsically undefinable and inexpressible, but is still a dharma and as such a "something"; so it cannot be regarded as non-being or nothingness. Of course Schopenhauer and his contemporaries cannot really be blamed for this mistake, because the Pali texts that fully expounded the philosophy of dharma (factors or variables of existence that apply, or which have particular values, at each instant) were not translated into western languages before the end of the century. Schopenhauer's philosophy regarded the will (to live) as fundamental, and advocated the denial of the will-to-live as the path of deliverance. Wagner accepted these ideas and sought to express them in his dramas Tristan und Isolde, Die Sieger and Parsifal:

The true geniuses and the true saints of all ages ... tell us that they have seen only suffering and felt only fellow-suffering (Mitleid). In other words, they have recognized the normal condition of all living things and seen the cruel, eternally contradictory nature of the will to live, which is common to all living things and which, in eternal self-mutilation, is blindly self- regarding; the appalling cruelty of this will, which even in sexual love wills only its own reproduction, first appeared here reflected in that particular cognitive organ which, in its normal state, recognized itself as having been created by the will and therefore as being subservient to it; and so, in its abnormal, sympathetic state, it developed to the point of seeking lasting and, finally, permanent freedom from its shameful servitude, a freedom which it ultimately achieved only by means of a complete denial of the will to live.

This act of denying the will is the true action of the saint: that it is ultimately accomplished only in a total end to individual consciousness -- for there is no other consciousness except that which is personal and individual -- was lost sight of by the naïve saints of Christianity, confused, as they were, by Jewish dogma, and they were able to deceive their confused imagination by seeing that longed-for state as a perpetual continuation of a new state of life freed from nature, without our judgement as to the moral significance of their renunciation being impaired in the process, since in truth they were striving only to achieve the destruction of their own individuality, i.e. their existence. This most profound of all instincts finds purer and more meaningful expression in the oldest and most sacred religion known to man, in Brahmin teaching, and especially in its final transfiguration in Buddhism, where it achieves its most perfect form. Admittedly, [Brahminism] puts forth a myth in which the world is created by God; but it does not praise this act as a boon, but presents it as a sin committed by Brahma for which the latter atones by transforming himself into the world and by taking upon himself the immense sufferings of the world; he is redeemed in those saints who, by totally denying the will to live, pass over into nirvana, i.e. the land of non-being, as a result of their consuming sympathy for all that suffers. The Buddha was just such a saint; according to his doctrine of metempsychosis, every living creature will be reborn in the shape of that being to which he caused pain, however pure his life might otherwise have been, so that he himself may learn to know pain; his suffering soul² continues to migrate in this way, and he himself continues to be reborn until such time as he causes no more pain to any living creature in the course of some new incarnation but, out of fellow-suffering (Mitleid), completely denies himself and his own will to live.

he extract above is from a letter Wagner wrote in 1855 from London, where he had been sick and had spent his convalescence reading Adolf Holtzmann's Indiske Sagen¹, and before he read Burnouf. There is undoubtedly some confusion (initially on the part of Schopenhauer; Wagner is paraphrasing the account of the doctrine of transmigration given in chapter 63 of The World as Will and Representation) here between the Buddhist teaching that Schopenhauer referred to as palingenesis and the Hindu (Brahmin) belief in metempsychosis. Schopenhauer only understood the Buddhist doctrine of palingenesis after reading the Manual of Buddhism, as he explained in the third (1858) edition of his World as Will and Representation. The essential difference is that Buddhism does not recognise the existence of an individual soul that could be reincarnated². This confusion did not prevent Wagner (before reading that third edition), in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, declaring a belief in reincarnation (Seelenwanderung). The libretto of his Parsifal contains at least one direct reference to reincarnation (Gurnemanz in the first act wonders aloud about whether Kundry carries a burden of sin that results from actions in a previous life -- an odd speculation for a Christian to make; although a Buddhist might have spoken of negative karma, akusala, rather than of sin) and there are some indirect, ambiguous references to rebirth (in the first act Parsifal reveals that he has had many names but forgotten them all; in the third act he speaks of all that lives and will live again).

n general, it is fair to say that Schopenhauer at first misunderstood the Buddhist teachings and their relationship to those of Hinduism (Brahminism), in particular the best-known Hindu school, vedanta. As a result of dharma theory not being available (at least not until Schopenhauer read Spence Hardy, who discussed the dharmas as they appear in the Ceylonese tradition), false connections were made between Buddhism and Hinduism (Brahminism), such as the identification of the Buddhist nirvana with the vedantic Brahman, and the Schopenhauerian concept of the will-to-live was used to interpret both concepts. Later scholarship has shown this to be inaccurate: in theistic Brahminism, deliverance (moksa) consists of absorption into the supreme being Brahman; in atheistic Buddhism, deliverance consists of translation to the state of being called nirvana. The misinterpretation of the Buddhist state of nirvana as the land of non-being led to an association with the romantic concept of death -wish:

The suicide of two lovers, which touches me, brings from R. the remark: "It is in fact the highest affirmation of the will -- they would rather not live than not find satisfaction. Why do they not defy all the obstacles? This shows that the tendency toward suicides is something preordained; here one could call it a deep insight, in the sense approximately of: What help would it be to us to overcome all obstacles? For such cases there should be convents, such as the Buddhists have, in which complete resignation as well as complete togetherness would be possible. But our civilization offers nothing." 

t is not surprising that Buddhism came to be regarded in the West as a pessimistic religion (which is quite the opposite of Buddhism in reality), so that Nietzsche could write, Er schmeichelt jedem nihilistischen (-buddhistischen) Instinkte ... [Der Fall Wagner], as though nihilism and Buddhism were almost synonymous. Buddhism is not, in fact, nihilistic, although to Western scholars (who had difficulty in distinguishing between emptiness and non- existence) it might have appeared so.

Mathilde

agner became increasingly preoccupied with Buddhist and Brahmin philosophy and literature during the 1850s, one of the most difficult periods in his life. It might be that he sought an authentic, true religion. In the relatively late texts of Buddhist literature that were available to him, Wagner thought that he could discern an ancient and authentic teaching. It seems that during this period he had turned away from Christianity, which for Wagner had been corrupted by Jewish influences. He even speculated that the roots of Christianity might have been in eastern teachings that had reached the Near East during the third century before Christ.

uring these years Wagner's marriage to Minna Planer had become intolerable to him. Then he met a woman who shared his interests and was eager to discuss his ideas. This was Mathilde, the wife of his patron Otto Wesendonk. Mathilde had interests of her own: she was a passionate opponent of vivisection (today, we would call her an "animal-rights activist") and a poet. Recently W. Osthoff has drawn attention to her poem about Buddha and the wounded swan, which he regards as significant in relation to the swan incident in Parsifal (Richard Wagners Buddha Project 'Die Sieger': Seine ideellen und strukturellen Spuren in 'Ring' und 'Parsifal').

The Ring, Tristan and Die Sieger

Only with the greatest caution should one attempt to stipulate Indian models for Wagner's works, of course with the exception of Die Sieger, which is entirely derived from an Indian source of inspiration.

his drama was to be based on an avadana (a tale of heroic and miraculous acts performed by the Buddha in any of his incarnations) from the collection Divya vadana, called Sardulakarna vadana. From some of Richard Wagner's letters to Mathilde Wesendonk, the reader might form the impression that Wagner was well on the way to completing the poem of Die Sieger (The Victors). By 16 May 1856 he had written a short prose sketch, but then the project seems to have stalled. Wagner's attention turned back to Siegfried, to Götterdämmerung and forward to a new project, Tristan und Isolde.

As an independent composition, [The Victors] progressed no further than that sketch. Asked about the work two decades later, Wagner responded that its essence had been pressed into his Parsifal. It it not altogether clear, however, what essence he had in mind. Suggestions have also been made that certain passages in Die Götterdämmerung [sic], Tristan and Parsifal were originally noted for the Buddhist opera.

ere, it should be noted, Guy Welbon is one of many commentators on Wagner's later dramas who notes that the essence of Die Sieger was adapted for Parsifal but is unable to define exactly what it is that Wagner carried over from the drama that was not completed to the one that he did complete. Welbon goes on to make an important observation:

More important than an attempt to find Buddhist scenes in parts of the other operas will be the effort to identify a pervasive influence traceable to his conception of Buddhism. And one must be prepared to look for this musically as well as dramatically.

nder the influence of Indian thought, Wagner yet again changed the ending of Götterdämmerung, that is, the valedictory oration given by Brünnhilde before she ascends the funeral pyre. In the existing text, she declared that now she knew everything, which could be taken to mean that the Rhine daughters had explained to her about the ring and the potion that Hagen had given to Siegfried. But now, in the 1856 version, her knowledge was to be expanded: now she declared that she became die Wissende, which, Carl Suneson suggested, we are to interpret in the Buddhist sense of a bodhisattva.

The New Path of Salvation

By the end of autumn in 1854, Wagner had swallowed Schopenhauer's material whole, not excluding the latter's bitter tirades against those who had ignored him. It is clear, however, that Wagner had by no means digested all that Schopenhauer said. He appropriated a major idea -- denial of the will -- and affixed it to his own lebensphilosophie ...

agner's admiration for Schopenhauer did not prevent him from attempting to correct the philosopher:

During recent weeks I have been slowly rereading friend Schopenhauer's principal work, and this time it has inspired me, quite extraordinarily, to expand and -- in certain details -- even to correct his system. The subject is uncommonly important, and it must, I think, have been reserved for a man of my own particular nature, at this particular period of his life, to gain insights here of a kind that could never have disclosed themselves to anyone else. It is a question, you see, of pointing out the path to salvation, which has not been recognized by any philosopher, and especially not by Sch., but which involves a total pacification of the will through love, and not through any abstract human love, but a love engendered on the basis of sexual love, i.e. the attraction between man and woman ...

Now it is clear -- if, indeed, it has not been so all along -- that the Buddha of [Die Sieger] is Schopenhauer and Ananda, Wagner. Prakriti could be taken as Mathilde, of course; but I suspect that the so-called affair with Mathilde was as much a creative projection of Wagner's imagination as Prakriti or Isolde. Perhaps, in fact, Mathilde is the least real of all.

agner never completed his Buddhist drama Die Sieger. The most likely reason for him not developing his scenario into a drama was the failure of his related attempt to correct the philosophy of Schopenhauer so that it would accommodate the possibility of a total pacification of the will through love. In other words: Wagner was forced to abandon the idea of redemption through love, one that is found through many of his earlier operas. In the interpretation of App the corresponding idea that appears in the post-Schopenhauer dramas of Tristan and Parsifal is that of redemption from love, where love is identified with mankind's fundamental desire (Grundverlangen).

Parsifal and Indian Literature

"Parsifal" is in my opinion, of Wagner's completed music-dramas, that in which the Indian influence is most demonstrable.

Parsifal Beneath the Bodhi Tree

nyone who encounters Wagner's Parsifal, previously knowing Wolfram's MHG epic poem Parzival, will most likely be puzzled by the second act of the music-drama. (The drama and the poem have been compared by Jessie Weston). The magician who lives in a tower of the castle has a similar name to the castrated sorcerer Clinschor who, in Wolfram's poem, controls the Castle of Maidens. In this castle, however, the maidens are not imprisoned princesses, but nymphomaniac vegetation. Wagner's magician, Klingsor, has castrated himself; whereas Wolfram's Clinschor suffered this indignity at the hands of an outraged husband. He has in his power the seductive Kundry, whose double nature is not shared by Wolfram's Condrie (although there are two Condries in the epic poem: one of them is a sorceress and the other one Gawain's sister, a captive of Clinschor). Kundry encounters Parsifal, who resists her, and in this episode, Kundry has been related to Wolfram's Orgeluse; but Wolfram makes no connection between Kundry and Orgeluse.

o there are points of contact, but also significant differences, as Wagner himself acknowledged, between the drama Parsifal and the epic Parzival. In particular, the action of the second act of the music-drama is not closely related to Wolfram's epic. Approaching this act of the music-drama from an Indological perspective, a consistently Buddhist theme can be detected at the level of deep structure. Also in surface details there are several points of contact with the life of the Buddha, suggesting that here Wagner is portraying his hero as a bodhisattva or even as an incarnation of the Buddha or as another future Buddha. This apparently radical interpretation is, as we shall see, well supported both by internal evidence and Wagner's own writings. Here is Wagner's description of his intended treatment of the Buddha in the opera that never was, Die Sieger.

The difficulty here was to make the Buddha himself - a figure totally liberated and above all passion - suitable for dramatic and, more especially, musical treatment. But I have now solved the problem by having him reach one last remaining stage in his development whereby he is seen to acquire a new insight, which - like every insight - is conveyed not by abstract associations of ideas but by intuitive emotional experience, in other words, by a process of shock and agitation suffered by his inner self; as a result, this insight reveals him in his final progress towards a state of supreme enlightenment.

his is, of course, exactly what happens to Parsifal! In his case, the shock that induces Welthellsicht is Kundry's kiss. As with Brünnhilde (see above), it may have been Wagner's original intention that the knowledge imparted to Parsifal was limited; in this case, to understanding what he had seen at the Grail Castle; an understanding gained by Parsifal himself experiencing the same seduction that had been the downfall of Amfortas. Then Wagner's scheme became greatly expanded, as it had been with both Brünnhilde and the Buddha, so that Parsifal was now to be granted, through Kundry's kiss, the hidden knowledge or vidya.

So war es mein Kuss,
der welthellsichtig dich machte?
Mein volles Liebes Umfangen
lässt dich dann Gottheit erlangen.
Die Welt erlöse, ist dies dein Amt;
schuf dich zum Gott die Stunde,
für sie lass mich ewig dann verdammt,
nie heile mir die Wunde!

So was it my kiss
that gave you world-perception?
Then the full embrace of my loving
surely will raise you to godhead!
Redeem the world, if that's your mission;
let me make you a god, for just an hour,
rather than leave me to eternal damnation,
my wound never to be healed!

his suggests that Parsifal is a Bodhisattva in the Buddhist tradition, one who attains vidya, knowledge, and pragnyáma (Pali) or paramartha (Sanskrit), highest wisdom or ultimate reality, that level of truth which is known only to a Buddha. At the end of his path, the bodhisattva (as he has been described by Western scholars) stands on the edge of nirvana. Pragnyámá is one of the sankhárokhando, categories of discrimination. Another of these is karuná, pity or compassion, that which desires the destruction of the sorrow of the afflicted. One of the virtues (páramitá) of the Bodhisattva is prajñápáramitá, the virtue preceding from wisdom or the perfection of wisdom, in which that wisdom becomes available to other sentient beings.

There is a kind of wisdom called chintá-pragnyáwa, which is received by intuitive perception, and not from information communicated by another. It is possessed in an eminent degree by the Bodhisats; but the wisdom that discovers the four great truths is received only by the Pasé-Buddhas and the supreme Buddhas in their last birth.

ut if we look more closely at the events of Act 2, we can even see parallels with the enlightenment of the Buddha. Klingsor attempts to prevent this enlightenment, even to destroy Parsifal, in the same way as Mára (Lord Death, Lord of Illusion, Lord of Pleasure³) attempted to prevent the enlightenment of the Buddha and to destroy him. Mára sends his warriors against Buddha, but they cannot harm him. Klingsor sends his knights against Parsifal, but he defeats them. Mára sends his seductive daughters to Buddha, but he does not allow himself to be seduced by them. Klingsor conjures up his magic maidens and sends them to Parsifal, but he cannot be seduced. Mára does not have a Kundry, it is true, and the attempted seduction of Parsifal by a woman must have been inspired by something else (see below). Finally, Mára attacks the Buddha by hurling a discus (not, as D.W. Dauer mistakenly states ⁴, a spear) at him. It seems highly probable that this version of the Mára-Buddha contest, drawn from Ceylonese tradition (not, as D.W. Dauer mistakenly states, from the Buddhacarita), was the source of Wagner's suspended spear.

Klingsor appears on the rampart and prepares to throw the Spear towards Parsifal... He hurls the Spear, which remains hanging over Parsifal's head.

Wagnerian Buddhism in Parsifal

Die Erlösung des Weibes

olfram's epic poem Parzival refers many times to a Queen Secundille, who rules the land of Trîbalibôt beside the river Ganges. Thus even in Wolfram, there is a remote connection between India and the adventures of Parzival and Gawan. The name Trîbalibôt has been derived from the Greek Βαλιβοθρα, in turn derived from the Sanskrit Pataliputra (the modern Patna), which was the capital of Magadha in eastern India. Hearing of the Grail, and wishing to know more, Secundille sent to Anfortas gifts, including one of her people as a page, the dwarf Malcreatiure. Wolfram tells us that the sister of this dwarf was Condrie. So Wolfram's Condrie is, by a remarkable coincidence, a native of India, a point which Wagner might have noted.

here is a strange tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, which appears to have originated with Christian missionary expeditions to India. It has been suggested that the name Josaphat is derived from Bodhisattva and Barlaam from Bhagavan. The original was probably composed in the seventh century of the Christian era. In the form in which the tale was eventually written down, it concerns a convert to Christianity, called Josaphat. In an attempt to persuade him to renounce this faith, a nameless woman is sent to seduce him. Of course she is by no means the only seductive woman in literature. The relevance of this particular "Indian" tale is that a German edition of the story, in a version by Rudolf von Ems and from 1325-1330, was published in Leipzig in 1843; and a copy was present in the library that Wagner abandoned when he left Dresden in great haste. Wagner's recollection of the attempted seduction of Josaphat could have been one inspiration for the attempted seduction of another Bodhisattva, Parsifal.

n Cosima Wagner's diary entry for 8 January 1881, she notes that Wagner speaks again of his intention to compose Die Sieger. Also that both this work and Parsifal address the same theme, the redemption (Erlösung) of women. Although, as we noted earlier, the resolution is quite different in the respective cases of Kundry and Prakriti. The theme is similar, however: Kundry is a despised servant, treated like an animal by the male society of the Grail knights, and Prakriti is a despised low-caste (Chandala) maiden in a society dominated by male Brahmins, whose admission to the Buddhist community is not even considered, initially, because of her sex. Each of these women carries the burden of a sin she had committed in an earlier life.

Kundry Must Sleep

Then someone chances upon her in a cave, or in dense undergrowth, in a deathlike sleep, lifeless, numb, bloodless, with all limbs rigid.

his description of Kundry's sleep suggests the state of susupti described in Indian (Brahmin) scriptures. It is described as a state in which the soul, or átman, is temporarily released from the bands of matter. It might be that Wagner intended each awakening to be regarded as a kind of rebirth, a return to the wheel of life, samsara.

Samsara

There is nothing whatsoever differentiating samsara from nirvana. There is nothing whatsoever differentiating nirvana from samsara. The limit of nirvana is the limit of samsara. Between the two, there is not the slightest bit of difference.

agner's interpretation of Buddhism was as idiosyncratic as his personal form of Christianity. The former was partly based on his repeated reading of Schopenhauer, and therefore on the numerous misunderstandings of Buddhist concepts in the writings of the philosopher (which are understandable given the limited source material available in the west), conflated with Wagner's earlier beliefs in, for example, redemption through love. Like many of his contemporaries, it appears that Wagner perceived Buddhism as rather more negative than it really is; and wrongly understood the goal of nirvana as a desire for extinction. It could be said that Tristan und Isolde was the result of this mistake. Wagner's Tristan can be understood as a drama of unsatisfied desires, above all the desire for extinction. Like all forms of desire, Wagner knew from reading Schopenhauer and Burnouf, this desire causes suffering.

et unlike many of his contemporaries, Wagner realized that there was an authentic core to Buddhism that could not be seen, at least not clearly, in the limited material available. In his last stage-work Parsifal he portrayed the enlightenment of a Buddha, not in the semi-historical representation he had intended for Die Sieger, but in an allegorical or symbolic fashion. On first encountering Parsifal, it might be possible to regard it (indeed many commentators have regarded it) as a treatment of Wolfram's epic poem Parzival. On better acquaintance, however, it becomes clear that the themes of Wolfram's bildungsroman are only incidental to Wagner's work. On the surface there are both Christian and Buddhist symbols, even elements that could be considered Manichaen (Cathar, Gnostic or Persian in origin) or Hindu. At a deeper level, however, it deals with fellow- suffering as (for Parsifal at least) the path to wisdom, even to supreme enlightenment, and with Kundry's release from the endless cycle of rebirth. Wagner's drama is an account of a spiritual journey, in which the seeker finds and follows the path of deliverance.

Postscript

Parsifal and Buddhism

ince I wrote the article above, in November 1999, my understanding of the Buddhist ideas and symbolism in Parsifal has been significantly improved and expanded as a result of intensive studies in the related literature, combined with visits to Bayreuth and Zürich in the summer of 2000. The outcome of these investigations is an article written in the autumn of last year which has now appeared in the journal Wagner, volume 22, number 2, July 2001. The inquiring reader is directed to that journal for further details.