Sudden Awakening in Buddhism and the Effect of Gothic Literature: Developing Literary Criticism with an East-West Comparative Philosophy

Abstract

This paper, in light of the sudden enlightenment in Mahayana Buddhism, explores how the sublime that Gothic fiction produces affects the reader giving him a glimpse of ultimate reality. All postmodern ways of reading literature disprove of traditional thematic approaches that depend on subjective interpretation. Therefore, I first argue, in detail, how literature is, like Buddhist meditation that goes with kongan, hwadu, and the experience of sudden awakening, a privileged ground for the realization of the ultimate reality or Emptiness (Sunyata). Especially the Gothic sublime awakens us to the fundamental affect or impersonal sensibility all of a sudden with a great impact as we are shocked, thrilled, and lose the sense of security that our ego has. Finally, the last part of the paper turns to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray to demonstrate how the Gothic sublime experience of the novel offers us a deconstruction of binary opposition.