Deronda and the Tigress: Buddhism, Compassion, and National Consciousness in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

Authors

Josh Moats

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Many scholars have written about George Eliot's treatment of Judaism in Daniel Deronda (hereafter DD), but no one has yet explored why George Eliot includes Buddhism in the novel. Eliot engages with Buddhism most explicitly in chapter thirty-seven when Mirah compares Deronda to the Buddha: 'Mr Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you hardly wanted anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful story of Bouddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her little ones from starving. And he said you were like Bouddha. That is what we all imagine of you' (DD 399). Eliot probably draws her inspiration for this passage from a Buddhist legend in Eugene Burnouf's 1844 text Introduction to Indian Buddhism:

A young Brahman who has retired into the depths of a forest to give himself over, in the interest of living beings ... gives his body as food to a starving tigress that just gave birth to cubs. At the moment of committing this heroic sacrifice, he exclaims: 'How true it is that I do not abandon life for kingship, or for the enjoyments of pleasure, or for the rank of Sakra, or for that of sovereign monarch, but rather to reach the supreme state of a perfectly accomplished buddha. (Bumouf 185-186)

The Brahman's driving desire is not the political aspirations of an exclusive culture but rather the enactment of a universal compassion for all living things - a perfectly accomplished Buddha. Mirah attributes these qualities of renunciation and compassion to Deronda, but Deronda rejects the analogy. He contends that the Buddhist legend underestimates personal desire and that the myth 'is like a passionate word ... the exaggeration is a flash of fervour. It is an extreme image of what is happening every day - the transmutation of self' (DD 4(0). Deronda dismisses the Buddhist legend, but he admits that the story captures a truth of everyday life: transmutation of the self. Eliot never elaborates on this cryptic exchange between Deronda and Mirah about Buddhism in DD, but she does reflect on Buddhism and compassion numerous times in her notes for the novel.

Between 1872 and 1874 George Eliot recorded notes about Buddhism for her upcoming novel Daniel Deronda in what are now called the Pforzheimer Notebooks (Notebooks 224). These notebooks reveal Eliot's interest in Buddhism as an ethical system centered on compassion and inclusivism with multiple worldviews. It is important to remember that by all current biographical accounts, Eliot never interacted with Buddhists in an anthropological sense nor did she read primary Buddhist texts in Pali or Sanskrit. Eliot derived her knowledge about Buddhism from French and German linguists such as Eugene Burnouf and Max Mueller. Thus, Eliot's Pforzheimer Notebooks often portray Buddhism in abstract, humanistic terms familiar to Eliot rather than parsing complex Buddhist theological questions, such as the nature of suffering and the Karmic cycle. Eliot focuses mostly on the Buddha as an exemplar of human virtue and not his celestial status.