The Four Zoas: William Blake’s “Enlightenment”

The concept of enlightenment is typically associated with Eastern philosophies of Buddhism, entangled in the jargon of “karma” “afterlife” and overall “mystery” with which the West characterises the East. Over time, various accounts of enlightenment have arisen, not all of which function in accordance with the Buddhist ideas.

Coming up with his own schema of mythology, Blake recounts the enlightenment not in relation to any existing religion or symbolic framework, but through use of his own ideas in the form of the Four Zoas. What strikes me as a reader, with this pre-existing knowledge on the history of enlightenment, is how although Blake’s mythology is altogether separate in symbolic, historical, and social context to Buddhist thought, there are undeniable and uncanny similarities.

Ferrera takes note of this coincidence of thought, stating that a “strange parallelism” exists between Blake and Buddhism, one which defies “a purely historical explanation” and hints at a larger connectivity between distinct philosophies. The symbolic interplay more generally between Romanticism and Buddhism is termed by Lussier as “grounded in an international Buddhism that transcends cultural and national boundaries.” 

In his discussion of the text, Hamilton fittingly described The Four Zoas as a ‘poetic mandala’ drawing attention towards the fact that the narrative exhibits the unification and totality of self which the mandala prominent in Buddhist religion also resembles. Further, The Four Zoas was termed by Lussier as a ‘Romantic description of Enlightenment’ which resembles that of Buddhist texts emerging in this time.

The reason that Buddhist philosophy appears to be so embedded in Blake’s works lies in the fact that both systems contain the same fundamental beliefs and reductive perspective – both systems engage in the view that all doctrines belong to the same irreducible source, originating from one and the same, where ‘the universe itself is that doctrine and that statement’ for both Blake and Tibetan Buddhism, and this doctrine – the irreducible oneness of all the universe – ‘is the essence of all doctrines’ .[1]

[1] Kathleen Raine. Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W.B. Yeats. (NY: Barnes & Noble, 1990). p.239

Painting Urizen

The characteristics of Urizen emanate from Blake’s painting ‘Ancient of Days’ (1794): holding a compass, he bursts through the clouds to designate ratio and degree into existence.

Urizen appears enveloped in clouds of a somewhat humanoid shape; the clouds appear as silhouettes of people spectating. To the left and right of Urizen appears the faint form of backs of heads, and directly beneath his right foot the arched shadow of a slumped over person.

This observation is perhaps corroborated by the fact that Urizen’s hair blows in the wind abruptly to the left, urging me to approach the painting from a different angle. Only the earthly world subsists in flatness, where Urizen’s eternal existence is omniscient: as such, the painting should not be considered from the one angle imbued in the world of logic, but as an omnipotent spectator.

In the background radiates beams of light, separate and distinct from the circumference of Urizen and the plane of material worldliness, equating to the ‘shining radiance’ and ‘Clear Light’ of Buddhist/enlightenment epistemology.

Starting William Blake

Entering into discourses about one of the most elusive writers of the past three hundred years does not come without it’s steep precipices: Blakean scholars are passionate, and each has their own interpretation. But it is precisely this unclear and mystified nature of Blake’s writing that lends him the title of “poet-artist-prophet” – where each reader must interpret the unfixable symbols into their own schemas.

It is with this awareness and trepidation, then, that I enter into writing my dissertation on William Blake’s metaphysics, his uncanny connections to Buddhist philosophy, and ultimately, analyse the evidence drawing towards his conclusion that “all religions are One.”