Buddha in Glory by Rainer Maria Rilke

First published: 1908, “Buddha in der Glorie,” in Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil; English translation collected in Rainer Maria Rilke:Fifty Selected Poems, 1940

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Buddha in Glory” (or as one translator titles it, “The Buddha in the Glory”) is a short poem of twelve lines divided into three stanzas of four lines each. The original poem is predominantly in trochaic meter (with alternating stressed and unstressed final syllables in each line); it begins in trochaic pentameter and ends in trochaic tetrameter. The original German rhymes abab, cdcd, efef.

The poem’s title calls up visions of Eastern religion, mysticism, and meditation on the right path to Nirvana or salvation. Buddhism is a religion of eastern and central Asia that developed from the teachings of Gautama Buddha. The name Buddha is Sanskrit for “the enlightened”; the goal of the Buddhist is to arrive at a state of perfect spiritual fulfillment. This mental and moral self-purification is said to free one from the suffering that is inherent in life.

While Rilke undoubtedly had this religious history in mind as he wrote the poem in Paris in the summer of 1908, he was also probably working from a particular statue of Buddha that was located in the garden of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, to whom Rilke was personal secretary for several years. Rilke described this sculpture in a letter to his wife Clara on September 20, 1905:

Then the huge blossoming starry night is before me, and below, in front of the window, the gravel path goes up a little hill on which, in fanatic silence, a statue of Buddha rests, dispensing, with quiet discretion, the unutterable self-containedness of his gesture under all the skies of day and night. C’est le centre du monde [It is the center of the world], I said to Rodin.

Buddha is clearly a subject that fascinated Rilke, who wrote two earlier Buddha poems in the first part of the Neue Gedichte (1907; New Poems, 1964); “Buddha in Glory” is the closing poem of New Poems, Part II.

While the poem seems mystical in tone, speaking of the “center of all centers” and the “kernel of all kernels,” one can follow the general movement of its imagery. In the first stanza, the persona of the poem acknowledges Buddha as the center of all being and compares this central position to an almond centered within its shell. Buddha is like a vital and dynamic almond, the fruit of which encompasses everything, including the heavens themselves. The persona clearly admires this spiritual accomplishment and salutes Buddha. The poem is addressed directly to the Buddha.

In stanza 2, Buddha’s consciousness and the almond which serves as a metaphor for it continue to expand and to grow beyond time into infinity. The sap that fills the almond’s fruit and Buddha’s veins presses on infinity itself. The image of Buddha finally subsumes even the heavens, which are filled with Buddha’s own suns that send their rays to assist the sap that drives through the almond’s flesh. Having enveloped time and space, in stanza 3, Buddha participates in the heavenly realm itself as the rays of his own suns now burn and glow. Yet these external symbols are nothing compared to the intensity of consciousness that burns within the Buddha and that will long outlast the external glory of the sun: “But in you is already begun/ that which will outlive the sun.” The spiritual growth of consciousness within Buddha is thus more crucial than any image of physical expansion.

Forms and Devices

Perhaps the most striking device Rilke uses in this poem is that of the double metaphor. Buddha himself is an image of spiritual perfection and expanded consciousness, but Rilke adds a second level of metaphor by comparing the statue of Buddha to the living system of the almond. The technique of embodying spiritual meaning in a specific physical object (often an artwork of some kind) is typical of many of the poems in New Poems. In this case, Rilke complicates matters further by using a metaphor from the natural world (the almond) to explicate the vital spiritual significance of the sculpture, which in turn symbolizes the perfected consciousness of Buddha himself. Sitting silently and self-contained at the center of time and space, Buddha resembles the seed or kernel at the center of the almond. This usually limited germ or nucleus expands along with Buddha’s consciousness to encompass all of space, including the starry skies, as well as all of time as the almond’s (and Buddha’s) physical shell swells into infinity. The almond’s casing (or Buddha’s body) no longer serves to limit the consciousness it contains. The metaphors allow the spiritual world to subsume the physical world and thus to eliminate all physical boundaries. The idea of perfected spirituality is embodied in the perfectly taciturn statue but then linked to a natural image that can grow to include all of time and space. By describing the unfolding of his image, Rilke is able to symbolize a very complex and mystical spiritual development.

A second technique Rilke employs in this poem is that of constant expansion of his poetic vision. Rilke begins the poem at a single point of extreme concentration: “Center of centers, seed of seeds.” From this single point, his image of the almond and of Buddha’s spiritual perfection constantly expands until it envelops the heavens themselves. The image of Buddha thus unites many levels of existence. The Buddha statue is made of stone and embodies the inanimate world; the metaphor of the almond represents the natural world; Buddha as a historical figure brings in the human world; and finally, Buddha’s spiritual perfection encompasses the transcendent realm of the heavens or the divine. Rilke thus accomplishes in his imagery his own unification of realms and of levels of consciousness. The poem itself becomes an act of spiritual unification and perfection.

To emphasize this unity, Rilke employs a rhyme scheme in German that links Kerne (seeds, kernels) and Sterne (stars) in lines 1 and 3 of stanza 1. His rhyme connects the concentrated point of the nucleus or seed to the stars, the infinitesimal to the infinite, just as his description does. In lines 2 and 4 of stanza 2, Rilke rhymes Schale (shell, husk) and Gestrahle (rays) to produce the same effect of breaking open the image so that it becomes boundless.