A Partial Enlightenment

Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world.

Avram Alpert teaches writing at Princeton University. He is the author of Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki (2019). He is also coeditor of Shifter magazine and has written cultural criticism for outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Brooklyn Rail, and Truthout.

Gauri Viswanathan, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief:
Avi Alpert's timely book makes a significant contribution to re-evaluating Buddhism's role in engaging with the struggles and complexities of the postcolonial world. The book is at once a personal chronicle of disenchantment and discovery and a literary history that charts global Buddhism and the aesthetics of human fragmentation and connectivity. Alpert's compelling readings of modern novels uncover a simple truth of Buddhist ethics at their core: we may be limited in our understanding of the universe, but we have the power to act kindly towards living beings. An ethics of social relationality emerges as the book's most profound insight, making its innovative readings indispensable for students and scholars of religion and literature.

Justin Thomas McDaniel, author of The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand:
In this stunningly sincere and groundbreaking work, Alpert takes the reader on a strange journey, often personal and always provocative, through a forest of literature to see how Buddhist thought and practice is embedded and intertwined with modern fiction. He shows the reader through novels as diverse as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Severo Sarduy's Cobra, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility, among many others, that literature doesn't neatly present Buddhist truths, but complicates the very way Buddhism is received and taught. It is a story of disenchantment and tentative re-enchantment with Buddhist ideas and meditation practices with a healthy dose of Beckett's robust existential despair. It is a story of intellectual struggle and imperfect readings that enlightens, as well as forces the reader to simply lift her head, breathe deeply, and dive back in. No study of the modern encounter with Buddhism is complete without reading this truly refreshing and wonderful book.

Ruth Ozeki, New York Times best-selling author of A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel:
A groundbreaking contribution to Buddhist literary studies, A Partial Enlightenment provides a new lens through which to examine the influence of modern Buddhist themes in twentieth-century world literature. In his role of scholar-seeker, or contemplative critic, Avi Alpert performs a complex, inclusive, and personal practice of literary exegesis, one that will enlighten academic and lay readers alike.

Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award:
The stories about the Buddha, with their promise of awakening and liberation, are among the richest and most inspiring tales ever told. By focusing on the creation and complexities of a new, twentieth-century Buddhism, and the novels it has produced, Avram Alpert's A Partial Enlightenment delivers a brilliant work of literary history less concerned with the mythology of absolute perfection than the embedded, political, and existential realities that make modern Buddhism—an authentic way to 'fail better'—relevant for our lives today.