Buddha in Glory
Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet–
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.
– Rainer Maria Rilke –
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Photo: Buddha Statue in Rodin’s Garden, Meudon, France
Photograph from Georg Treu, ‘Bei Rodin’, in Kunst und Künstler 3 (1905)
Rilke wrote this poem inspired by a statue of the Buddha in the garden of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke lived on Rodin’s estate in Meudon from September 1905 until spring 1906. In a letter to his wife, Clara Rilke-Westhoff, Rilke wrote: “Soon after dinner I retire, at half past eight am finally back in my cottage. Then before me is the vast blossoming starry night, and below, in front of the window, the gravel path climbs a small hill, upon which, in tremendous silence, a Buddha-portrait rests, in quiet reticence imparting the unsayable containment of his gestures under all the skies of day and night. C’est le centre du monde, I said to Rodin. And then he looks at me so endearingly, in utter friendship. That is very fine and a great deal.”
–Rilke to Clara Rilke-Westhoff, Meudon, 20.09.1905. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Der Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente zu Rilkes Begegnung mit Rodin, ed. Rätus Luck, pp. 111-112.
