The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

The Light of Asia, or The Great Renunciation appeared in 1879. It is a narrative poem in eight books of English blank verse, telling the life of Siddhartha Gautama from his birth at Lumbini through the sheltered palace years, the four sights, the departure, the years of austerity, the night under the tree, and the teaching career that followed.

The formal decision that shapes everything is the narrator. Arnold does not write as an Englishman describing an Asian religion. He voices the poem as an imagined Indian Buddhist recounting the life of his own teacher, which means the whole thing is written from inside a devotion Arnold did not personally hold.

That choice removed the condescension standard in Victorian writing about Asian religion, and it is a large part of why Indian readers took to the poem as they did.

The Sales Phenomenon

The scale is hard to convey now. The poem went through dozens of editions in Britain and America within a few years, was translated widely, was set to music, was adapted for the stage, and sold in numbers that make it one of the most commercially successful long poems of the nineteenth century.

For roughly fifty years, if an English speaker knew anything about the Buddha, they knew it from this book. Not from a scholarly translation, not from a temple, not from a monk, but from a poem by a newspaper editor.

That fact governs how the book should be read. Its accuracy matters less than its consequences, and its consequences were enormous.

What Arnold Worked From

The poem has often been described as a translation of the Lalitavistara, and that is close enough to be misleading.

The Lalitavistara is a Sanskrit Mahayana life of the Buddha from roughly the third or fourth century, elaborate and full of marvels, and it is central to Arnold's narrative. But scholarly work on the poem's construction has shown a more complicated assembly. Robert Spence Hardy's A Manual of Buddhism, drawing on Sinhalese sources, supplied a great deal. So did Henry Thomas Rogers's translation of Buddhaghosha's Parables. Ashvaghosha's Buddhacarita, the second century Sanskrit epic on the same subject, is a further presence.

And a substantial part of the poem is Arnold's own observation. The descriptions of Indian villages, fields, animals and weather come from his years in the country, and they are the passages where the writing comes alive.

The Victorian Buddha

Arnold's Buddha has a distinct personality, and it answers a specific need in the audience that received him.

He is rational. He arrives at his conclusions by observation and reasoning about suffering rather than by revelation, and he tells his followers to test what he says.

He is ethical above all, and the ethics are of a kind a Victorian liberal recognised: compassion for animals, opposition to caste, refusal of blood sacrifice, kindness to the poor, gentleness toward women.

He makes no claim to be a god. This was the poem's most useful feature for its readers. Educated Britain in 1879 was in the middle of a long crisis about miracles, biblical criticism and the doctrine of the atonement. A founder who taught a demanding ethical path without requiring assent to anything supernatural was exactly the figure that moment wanted.

All of this is present in the sources. Arnold did not invent an anti-caste Buddha or a compassionate one. What he did was select and emphasise, and the selection produces a figure who could have sat down comfortably with the more advanced members of a London literary club.

What Is Not in It

Three absences shape the poem's picture more than anything it contains.

The monastic institution. The Buddha of history founded an order with an elaborate disciplinary code governing property, conduct, ordination and community decisions. The poem gives you a teacher with followers and almost none of the institution, which suits a readership that wanted the ethics without the monks.

The doctrinal architecture. The four noble truths appear and the eightfold path appears, in outline. Dependent origination, the twelve-link analysis of how suffering arises, is sketched rather than worked. The abhidharma tradition is absent entirely. A reader finishes the poem with the ethical teaching and very little of the analytical machinery. Our guide to the Dhammapada gives an early text where the teaching is much more compressed and much less decorated.

The teaching on self. The doctrine that there is no permanent, unchanging self is the most difficult and most distinctive Buddhist position, and it is the hardest to render in a devotional English poem about a beloved teacher. Arnold does not omit it and he does soften it, and the softening is where the poem's doctrinal trouble begins.

The Eight Books, and Where the Poem Lives

Knowing the shape helps, because the poem is uneven and the good parts are locatable.

Books one and two give the birth, the prophecy, and the palace years, with King Suddhodana arranging a life from which every disturbing thing has been removed. Arnold is excellent here. The father's project of building a world without old age, sickness or death in it, out of love, and the way that project guarantees the outcome it was designed to prevent, is the strongest psychological writing in the poem.

Book three carries the four sights: the old man, the sick man, the corpse, and the wandering ascetic. This is the sequence everyone knows, and Arnold handles it with restraint, letting each encounter land without commentary.

Book four is the renunciation itself, the night departure, the last look at his sleeping wife and son. It is the emotional centre and it was the passage Victorian readers quoted.

Books five and six cover the years of extreme austerity, the collapse, the girl Sujata with her bowl of rice-milk, and the turn toward a middle way. The rejection of self-mortification is given real weight, which matters, since it is the point where the Buddha departs from the ascetic traditions around him.

Book seven is the night under the tree, the assault by Mara, and the awakening.

Book eight is the teaching, the return, and the close. It is the weakest, for the reason all the doctrinal passages are weakest, and it is where the trouble with nirvana arrives.

The Nirvana Problem

The closing passages of the poem drew fire from two directions at once, which is usually a sign that something interesting is happening.

Christian critics objected that Arnold had presented a religion without a personal God in glowing terms, and that a poem making the Buddha this attractive was a threat. Some of them wrote replies in verse.

Scholars and Buddhists objected to the opposite thing. Arnold's language about the final state reads, to a great many readers, as absorption into a universal ocean of being, the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea. That is a Vedantic image and not a Buddhist one. Buddhist accounts of nirvana are consistently careful to refuse both annihilation and merger with a universal self, precisely because there is no permanent self on either end of the transaction.

Whether Arnold understood the distinction and blurred it for effect, or did not fully grasp it, is arguable. What is not arguable is the result: a great many English readers came away with a picture of nirvana that Buddhist teachers have spent a century and a half correcting.

Who It Reached

The list of readers is the strongest argument for the poem's importance.

Gandhi encountered it as a law student in London in the late 1880s, at the same period he was first reading the Bhagavad Gita in English, and he remained attached to it. Nehru read it. Ambedkar, who would lead the mass Buddhist conversion movement of 1956, read it. Tagore read it. So did T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Kipling.

It also worked institutionally. The Theosophical Society took it up, and Henry Steel Olcott's involvement in the Buddhist revival in Ceylon ran alongside the poem's popularity there. Our articles on the Theosophical Society and Blavatsky cover that organisation's complicated role in transmitting Asian religion westward.

And the poem is part of the run-up to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where Asian teachers addressed a Western audience directly for the first time in numbers. An audience already existed because a poem had made one.

The Women in the Poem

One feature separates Arnold from most Victorian writing about Asian religion and deserves noting.

Yasodhara, the wife left behind, is given real interior life. Arnold does not treat her as an obstacle the hero overcomes or as a figure whose grief is scenery. She is present, she is intelligent, she loves him, and the poem does not pretend that what he does to her is costless. Her later reconciliation with him is handled with more tact than the sources require.

Sujata, the village girl who gives him rice-milk when the austerities have nearly killed him, is another. In the traditional accounts her offering is the turning point that makes the middle way possible, and Arnold keeps that weight on her rather than treating her as an incident.

This matters for a book that shaped Western impressions for fifty years. A great deal of nineteenth century writing about Asian religion presented women as either exotic or invisible, and Arnold's refusal to do that is one reason Indian readers received the poem as something other than another Englishman's account of them.

Arnold Himself

Edwin Arnold was a working journalist who became editor of the Daily Telegraph, which at the time meant editing one of the largest newspapers in the world. Before that he had spent years in India as principal of Deccan College in Pune, where he learned Sanskrit and encountered the material directly.

He translated the Bhagavad Gita as The Song Celestial, which is how Gandhi first read the Gita in English, so Arnold's influence on modern Indian thought runs through two separate books.

He then wrote The Light of the World in 1891, a companion poem on the life of Christ, hoping to do for one figure what he had done for the other. It failed. The reason is instructive: an English audience did not need a poem to introduce them to Jesus, and the freshness that carried the earlier book was structurally unavailable.

Is It Any Good as Verse

The honest answer is that it is competent and occasionally fine, and that its reputation rests on its subject rather than its craft.

Arnold writes fluent Victorian blank verse with a strong forward motion and a good ear for a closing line. The descriptive passages are genuinely good: the Indian countryside, the animals, the heat, the village life, all observed rather than imagined. Those sections are why the poem is still readable.

The doctrinal passages are weaker. When the Buddha teaches, the verse becomes sonorous and general, and paragraphs pass in which nothing happens except a rising tone. Readers who bounce off the poem usually bounce there.

It reads considerably better aloud than silently, which is true of most Victorian narrative verse and was how much of its original audience received it.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you are interested in how Buddhism arrived in the West, in which case this is the primary document and nothing else comes close.

Read it after a modern life of the Buddha rather than before, so the Victorian additions stand out.

Read Jairam Ramesh's study, The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined the Buddha, if the poem's reach interests you more than the verse. It traces the sources, the publishing history and the reception across colonial India in detail.

Read Hesse's Siddhartha alongside it for the twentieth century European version of the same impulse, and D.T. Suzuki's introduction to Zen for what happened when the transmission was taken up by someone from inside the tradition.

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