SOURCE: "T. S. Eliot, Buddhism, and the Point of No Return," in The Placing of T. S. Eliot, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker, University of Missouri Press, 1991, pp. 128-35.

In the following essay, McNelly Kearns contends that T. S. Eliot's study of Buddhism facilitated the development of his critical theory and allowed him to become "the supreme expositor of Buddhist wisdom in our poetic tradition."

In a notorious and perhaps exaggerated remark overheard by Stephen Spender, Eliot mentioned once that at the time of writing The Waste Land he "almost became" a Buddhist. I suspect that this remark bears about the same relationship to reality as Eliot's other famous pronouncement that he had later become "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion," though the latter has oddly enough caused far more alarm. Eliot always enjoyed the game of épater le bourgeois and these disconcerting declarations...