Overview

In a pond next to the cottage where Rilke stayed on Rodin's property in Meudon was a stone Buddha statue from Borobudur that the sculptor had bought from the Paris Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) in 1900. Rilke could sit and contemplate the statue of the Buddha sitting and meditating. ""He is the center of the world,"" he told Rodin. Three of Rilke's New Poems are contemplations of Buddha statues. Rilke's fascination with the Buddha evolved along with his practice of ""seeing,"" which resembled the Buddhist meditation of calm abiding while focused on an object. Yet seeing alone was not enough: he had to turn inward as well, toward ""heart-work,"" to find empathy and compassion in the face of impermanence. Rilke turned to the Greek myth of Orpheus as the uniter of life and death in the ""unending ground"" that includes both. Even now, through his poems, Rilke still urges us to rise again singing, in harmony with, and in praise of, that unending yet immanent ground, the vibration of being/not being. This personal selection of Rilke's poetry, not meant as an academic study, explores Rilke's affinities with the Buddha and the mythic Greek hero, Orpheus.

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