Jainism of the Lake Poets

Summary

K. B. Jindal’s essay “Jainism of the Lake Poets” argues that English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley intuitively embraced core Jain principles. Jindal notes that one need not be born into Jainism to practise its ideals and suggests that early nineteenth‑century poets developed an outlook on life shaped by non‑violence, reverence for all living beings and spiritual evolution. Drawing on poems like Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality,” and Shelley’s “Alastor,” he shows that the poets preached ahimsa and saw divinity pervading animals, plants and even inanimate objects. They believed that plants and animals possess souls and that the soul transmigrates through different forms until karmic bondage is shed. Jindal interprets verses that describe the soul’s rebirth and immortality as reflecting Jain doctrines of karma and samsara. He observes that the poets regarded man as his own redeemer, denied a creator God, and viewed Godhood as a state of pure knowledge and bliss achieved through self‑discipline. Their cyclical view of time, in which eras of bliss and misery succeed one another endlessly, parallels Jain cosmology of six ascending and six descending eras. By compiling these parallels, Jindal concludes that the Lake Poets reached, through intuition and reflection, ethical truths that Jainism has long upheld and that their poetry offers a Western expression of a Jain outlook on life.