Empson (and the ambiguous smile)

Who is Empson? This will tell you a lot:

"‘my pupils [in Japan] often ask me to explain about methodology, and I always tell them I have no idea what the word means’: you can only teach criticism by grappling with the demands of particular texts and contexts.”

World-minded literary critic. Inhabited language with grace and intelligence.

And why do I care? Because my manuscript “How to make a Buddha Smile’ is incomplete without a chapter on Empson’s interest in Buddha faces. It would simply be obscene not to have it.

The best place to begin, is Haffenden’s biography, where he recovers more material than we possessed. (Among the Mandarins). But there is, perhaps, more. The so-called lost book of Empson on the asymmetry in Buddha faces has purportedly been found.

“And there's more to come, with the recovery of a lost manuscript about Buddhist sculpture: the ‘little Buddha book’, as Empson calls it in a letter of 1949.”

So Kermode, reviewing volume 1 of the Haffenden biography:

…[I]n pursuit of a serious new interest he began to make notes for a study of the ambiguous faces of the Buddha, and even went to Korea to do more research on this. He came to know the subject thoroughly, and eventually got his ideas into a book, which was later, most unhappily, lost in London.

And in his review of the second volume of the biography:

From his Chinese days he retained the interest in Buddhism which had prompted his book on the faces of the Buddha, a work long said to be lost, but happily now recovered. No doubt the indefatigable Haffenden will soon be editing it.


I hope that this is in fact the case. Haffenden was far too busy, I suppose, or important, to bother with an email query from a lowly PhD candidate, and one studying what I study. Marginal my interest surely is, but no less an itch deserving of being scratched.
(The reception of Buddhism through the optic of art is simply incomplete without a consideration of this book--)


Empson travelled not only in Japan and China but also in Burma, Cambodia, Indo-China, India, and Ceylon to see and photograph statues for his work in progress, The Faces of Buddha. The typescript was lost by a friend, who left it in a London taxi after the Second World War. Haffenden has recovered from Empson's notes a page giving the theoretical basis (the face's fundamental ambiguity), but, as often with Empson, the substance would have been in the detail. How deeply he was drawn to Buddhism is shown by a wonderful account of an epiphanic moment hearing Buddhist song in a cave near Kweilin.



Included in (29. Haffenden, John. Introduction to The Royal Beasts and Other Works (21), 1986) is an account of Empson’s manuscript about this, Asymmetry in Buddha Faces, which he had worked on for more than a decade and finished in London at the end of the war, ‘decked out’ with photographs ‘gathered on his travels’, but that ‘unhappily, through no fault of his own and to his lasting disappointment’, was lost in London after he returned to China in 1946. In addition to correspondence with George Sansom (see D22), Arthur Waley (D26), and T. S. Eliot, Haffenden refers as well to unpublished materials that demonstrate that Empson spoke or corresponded with many others about his theory, including, in 1939, Langdon Warner, who had been Assistant Curator of Oriental Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1906 to 1913, and, in 1940 or 1941, Rabindranath Tagore. For a slightly different account of circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the manuscript, see 26a. =

Raine, Kathleen. ‘Extracts from Unpublished Memoirs’. Raine recalls moments from her friendship with Empson and mentions in passing his letters to her from Japan. She notes that as an undergraduate he was drawn to the ‘oriental gods’ at the British Museum, and that Arthur Waley (see D26) was often in attendance at his parties at Cambridge. Raine was as well one of the few who read the complete manuscript of Asymmetry in Buddha Faces (see 29), and recalls here a passage from that work, though recounts slightly different details about its loss than those noted in Haffenden. Reprinted, with minor revisions, in Raine’s The Land Unknown (New York.: Braziller, 1975).







6. ‘The Faces of Buddha’. Listener 15 (February 1936): 238-40. (by William Empson)

Some of a lost book-length manuscript about the ambiguity of Buddhist iconography (see Haffenden, 29) is prefigured in this short piece. The work does not trace the theoretical underpinnings of the lost work, but does include comment about the lack of a ‘merely racial’ influence in Buddhist iconography. This is a point Haffenden traces to Empson’s experience in Japan, for ‘having witnessed [there] in the early 1930s the effects of a fiercely misplaced nationalism, he became concerned to minimise the importance of national differences and to emphasise what different countries held in common through their religious myths and art, and through their mixtures of race’. A fuller outline of Empson’s theory of Buddhist iconography may be found in 21b3, and further Empson comment about Japanese racialist theories in 11.

I think this can be found in:

Sir W. Empson, “Faces of Buddha” in W. Empson and J. Haffenden, ed., Argufying: Essays in Literature and Culture, (Iowa City, 1987).

From ‘Asymmetry in Buddha Faces’. In the opening page of his lost book-length study (see 29) Empson outlines his theory that representations of the face of Buddha combine incompatible elements of ‘repose’ and ‘active power’ in a ‘startling and compelling’ unity, and demonstrates that much of the theory that occupied him for more than a decade was set in motion in Japan. European experts have not often addressed the subject of the ‘magnificent’ faces, Empson notes, but he ‘had a chance [while] in Japan’ ‘timidly’ to suggest his theory to Anesaki Masaharu (see BD33), expecting him ‘to treat it as a fad’. Instead, Anesaki accepted the idea ‘as something obvious and well known’, and told Empson to compare the masks of the nô stage for ‘historical evidence’, for there as in Buddhist iconography ‘the tradition of the craftsmen has not been lost’, and without question the faces ‘have been constructed to wear two expressions’.

4. To John Hayward, 7 March 1933. Empson’s letter written in Japan includes discussion of his passion for Buddhist images, which he calls ‘the only accessible art I find myself able to care about’.

5. To T. S. Eliot, July 1937. Concerns Empson’s manuscript about Buddhist effigies.


See also, for further biblio,



Pollott, R. The Poet's Response: William Empson and the Faces of Buddha (PN REVIEW, 2006, No. 167, pages 54-56, XL PUBLISHING SERVICES. Great Britain)

Further research materials:


Empson, William, 1906-. Papers: Guide.
Houghton Library, Harvard College Library

* (184) The Harvill press. 1 letter; 1955.
With copy of a 1955 letter to George Fraser concerning Empson's lost manuscript on Buddhist sculpture.
* (337) Phillip, Rodney. 2 letters; 1955.
Item 1 is fragment; both concern Empson's book on Buddha sculpture.
* (911) Asymmetry in Buddha faces. TS. with A.MS. revisions; [1937-1938 ?]. 1 folder.
Fragments of an essay or book (not The listener 1936 article); includes notes from Khmer observations and passages on Noh and Kabuki drama from a draft of Ballet of the Far East (published in The listener, 7 Jul 1937).
(1026) Two Buddhist sights [in Rangoon and Pegu]. TS. with A.MS. revisions; [ 193- ]. 1 folder.
* (1037) Journal No. 5. A.MS.; 1932. 1 item.
Notes on Buddha faces and India; with loose sheets with notes on dragon dances.

* (1038) Buddha notebook. A.MS.; [n.d.]. 1 item.
Notes on faces of Buddha statues in a museum.

* (1042) British Broadcasting Company journal. A.MS.; 1941. 1 item.
Includes notes from British Broadcasting Company classes, "Liars' school" journal entries, Buddha drawings.

* (1043) Journal. A.MS.; 1946. 1 item.
Reading notes on literature and criticism; comments on Communism and Socialism; includes drawings of Buddha faces.

(1071) Pocket notebook: topics include Milton, speed of flight, Buddhism, drawings of faces of Buddha. 1 item.
(1074) Pocket notebook: topics include diagrams of the Globe theatre, drawing of the face of Buddha. 1 item.
(1089) Pocket notebook: topics include Milton, Donne , Galileo , drawings of faces of Buddha. 1 item.
(1138) Notes on Buddhism. Loose sheet torn from a notebook, with notes on British Broadcasting Company broadcast times in China. 1 folder.
(1139) Notes on Shakespeare. Loose sheets; includes leaves from a printed book with notes on Hamlet and drawing of face of Buddha. 3 folders.


(These would be especially interesting, if the drawings were by Empson himself).


* H. Visual material gathered by Empson
o pfMS and bMS (1148) Photograph and postcard collection. 24 folders.
Collection of images ( photographs and postcards ) assembled as part of Empson's study of the faces of Buddha : primarily statues of Buddha in Japan, China, Korea, India, Cambodia, London, and Paris, including postcards, photographs provided by museums, possibly a few photographs by Empson and 1 negative ; also postcards and images of western art and of sites in Europe, England, and the Far East.
Folders 1-6 are bMS and folders 7-24 are pfMS.
o bMS (1149) Additional photographs. 1 folder.
Includes: photograph of a faculty/student group in Japan ; photograph of a seated Buddha in a garden, signed by Empson; photograph inscribed "Skiers' Paradise on Mt. Zao [item 2];" theatrical photograph [Lear? Waiting for Godot?], Newcastle ; mounted clipping of a Times 13 May 1961 photograph of a Colombian Indian annotated by Empson.
o MS (1150) Additional Buddha research material. 1 folder.
Brochures: Banteay-Srei, two sites in Japan , Handbook of the department of oriental art of the Art Institute of Chicago ( 1933 ), and Berkeley Galleries catalogue no. 15: Chinese Sculpture May-Apr 1946 .
o pfMS (1151) Faces of the Buddha: research photographs. 5 folders. Photographs of two statues altered by Empson to demonstrate the asymmetry of the faces. 1 folder.

MS and bMS (1195) [Compositions by others: offprints, copies of journals, and pamphlets, many with presentation inscriptions]. Print; [v.d.]. 51 folders.
Includes guide book to the Buddhist section of a [the Indian museum in Calcutta?]


At one point in The Structure of Complex Words, Empson remarked “ it would be convenient to have a simple rule by which corrupt language could be recognised”, adding with dispassionate aplomb, “However I do not think we can get it”. He never gave a rule, simple or otherwise, to distinguish the “corruption” of the doctrine of the Trinity from paradoxical utterances such as his own piercing description of the Buddha’s face as “at once blind and all-seeing”