The Enlightenment of Fu Manchu: Buddhism and Western Detective Fiction

Abstract

The Yellow Peril! … The peace of the world is at stake.—Sax Rohmer 1913, The Insidious Dr. Fu ManchuOur inner lives are something we ignore at our own peril.—The 14th Dalai Lama 2011, 75, Beyond Religion: Ethics for the Whole WorldThis essay is concerned with the contemporary convergence of Western and Eastern metaphysical paradigms as witnessed in and expressed through detective fiction written by Western writers, but with settings in, and influenced by, historically Buddhist cultures of East and Southeast Asia. The essay argues that the traditional Western detective fiction novel is symptomatic of a scientific-materialist mindset that has reached an existential dead end with its loss of faith in the possibility of self-transcendence, a mindset that has become trapped in a deterministic world in which evil and violence, perpetually arising, inducing guilt, require perpetual dissipation and solution. In their various manners, each of the three novelists discussed in the essay puts forward the Buddhistically endorsed proposition that the only and ultimate solution to such a grievous existential condition is to fundamentally alter one's perception by acknowledging the living potential of self-transcendence and cultivating enlightenment.