After reading Wordsworth’s "Tintern Abbey," I couldn’t help but see the poet as a modern "Bodhisattva," the Romantic interpretation of an enlightened being striving for wisdom in the likes of Buddha himself. In this particularly piece, the poet focuses on the issues of time and memory, and how the effects of each have ultimately changed his perspective on the essence of nature. He sits silently under a sycamore tree, viewing the landscape he once experienced in his younger days (an allusion to the Buddha meditating under the bodhi tree) and he notes: "For nature then, the coarser pleasures of my boyish days, and their glad animal movements gone by, to me was all in all. I cannot paint what I was then." He points to the faults of his "thoughtless youth," taking nature and its beauty for granted. Consequently, he laments over his current inability to recapture the same sense of joy and "dizzy rapture." After meditating on these thoughts, Wordsworth concludes that nature should not be regarded so cavalierly; it should not be objectified as a transient charm. Instead, the poet argues that the power of nature lies in its ability to "chasten and subdue" the soul over time, and its function is to provoke the "still, sad music of humanity" through its sheer magnificent presence. Nature, over time, moves from object to revered subject.
Immediately I drew parallels between the revelations of "Tintern Abbey" and the philosophical mission of Buddhist enlightenment. Nature exists as an important lens through which one can draw larger conclusions about existence, and Wordsworth's "meditation," sitting silently, overlooking the changed landscape of the Wye Banks, results in a philosophical stance on the issue of transience. According to Buddhist philosophy, one's path to enlightenment begins when he or she has accepted the suffering consequences of attachment, letting go of the sadness associated with loss or nostalgia. In "Tintern," Wordsworth does just that. He realizes that the land itself, as opposed to the changes made to it, represent "something far more deeply interfused" beyond passing joy. He pronounces a "far deeper zeal" for nature than he has ever felt before. In the end, the Romantic Boddhisattva echoes the tenets of Buddha himself: the world is nothing beyond essential existence.
Immediately I drew parallels between the revelations of "Tintern Abbey" and the philosophical mission of Buddhist enlightenment. Nature exists as an important lens through which one can draw larger conclusions about existence, and Wordsworth's "meditation," sitting silently, overlooking the changed landscape of the Wye Banks, results in a philosophical stance on the issue of transience. According to Buddhist philosophy, one's path to enlightenment begins when he or she has accepted the suffering consequences of attachment, letting go of the sadness associated with loss or nostalgia. In "Tintern," Wordsworth does just that. He realizes that the land itself, as opposed to the changes made to it, represent "something far more deeply interfused" beyond passing joy. He pronounces a "far deeper zeal" for nature than he has ever felt before. In the end, the Romantic Boddhisattva echoes the tenets of Buddha himself: the world is nothing beyond essential existence.
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