At the moment of committing this heroic sacrifice, he exclaims: 'How true it is that I do not abandon life for kingship, or for the enjoyments of pleasure, or for the rank of Sakra, or for that of sovereign monarch, but rather to reach the supreme state of a perfectly accomplished buddha. gives his body as food to a starving tigress that just gave birth to cubs. Eliot probably draws her inspiration for this passage from a Buddhist legend in Eugene Burnouf's 1844 text Introduction to Indian Buddhism:Ī young Brahman who has retired into the depths of a forest to give himself over, in the interest of living beings. That is what we all imagine of you' (DD 399). He told us a wonderful story of Bouddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her little ones from starving. Eliot engages with Buddhism most explicitly in chapter thirty-seven when Mirah compares Deronda to the Buddha: 'Mr Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you hardly wanted anything for yourself. Many scholars have written about George Eliot's treatment of Judaism in Daniel Deronda (hereafter DD), but no one has yet explored why George Eliot includes Buddhism in the novel.
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