The speaking garden in William Blake's The Book of Thel: Metaphors of wisdom and compassion

Abstract

Summary Responding to the reductionist and objectifying dualisms of scientific mechanism and authoritarian Christianity, Blake's work evokes a view of being in which “everything that lives is holy”. In The Book of Thel (1789) this is exemplified in the representation of an ecologically interdependent Garden of speaking subjects. In this environment, the insubstantiality and impermanence of all subjectivity (which for Thel is a source of distress) is shown to be the necessary condition for love and reciprocity. This article is an appreciative reading of Thel in relation to the late modern predicament of eco‐social crisis, and in conversation with (simultaneously deconstructive and affirmative) views of subjectivity and liberation in Mahayana Buddhism. My purpose is to represent it as what might be called a “teaching text” for contemporary readers with regard to both the dualisms of self versus nature which habitually carve up the nondual world, and the dualistic oppositions of absolutism versus relativism and essentialism versus nihilism. In the imaginative space of the Garden, the jewelled network of what in Buddhism are called emptiness (sunyata) and dependent arising (pratitya‐samutpada) is recognised as an interdependent network of care; for the speaking plants and animals, no‐self means selflessness; the radical insight into impermanence and interdependence is shown to be inseparable from love; wisdom and compassion are inextricable. Blake's metaphors for this are simple and instructive.