Tolkien and Buddhism

TOLKIEN AND BUDDHISM

Has this topic been explored yet by anyone? Urthona will be doing so in our next issue (summer 2024).

Meanwhile here is an article that opens up many interesting parallels with Tolkien and western estotericism. Many Buddhists I imagine would focus more on Tolkien’s moral vision, but there is much to think about in this rich essay written by a traditionalist writer in the lineage of Rene Guernon.

Essay: Tolkien and the Primordial tradition

Joscelyn Godwin does mention Buddhism however…

Godwin picks up the key point that for Tolkien it is men alone, and not the in many ways superior elves who aspire to escape from the rounds of incarnation on the earth (slain elves can be reborn in middle earth). For Tolkien (in his pious Christian framework) this escape was in later history of Middle Earth to be guaranteed by Christ – as obliquely hinted at in the Silmarillion. For Buddhists of course this only comes about through remarkable spiritual practice (or the grace of Amitabha in Far Eastern Buddhism!). For Tolkien even the angels / gods / devas, and the elves, remain bound to conditioned existence, they have a different fate to human beings. There is a poetic flavour to Tolkien’s myth which embodies longing for transcendence, as well as the unique advantages of human birth, and has much to admire. Here is the key passage form Godwin:

“Tolkien accords to Man a unique position and a relationship with death that seem to find its closest echo in Buddhism. Of all the beings of the Universe, according to Buddhist doctrine, only Man can achieve Enlightenment and final liberation from the Wheel of Existence. Even the Long-Lived Gods who dwell in bliss, for a myriad of years must eventually descend and take on human incarnations in order to become enlightened, or else must continue to be reborn on the Wheel in inferior and even hellish states. When Ilúvatar (Tolkien’s creator God) decided to make Men he promised to give them a new gift: ‘Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else (S, p. 41). ‘It is one with this gift of freedom that the children of Men dwell only a short space in the world alive, and are not bound to it, and depart soon whither the Elves know not Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.” (‘The Silmarillion’, p. 42).