“What Empty Eyeballs Knew”: Zen Buddhism in “The Statues” and the Principles of A Vision

Abstract

Various scholars have proposed sources for the line “Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show” (VP 610), in “The Statues”. That poem was completed by June 1938 and first published in the London Mercury in March 1939 (NC 412). Robert Snukal believes the image is a variation on Coleridge’s “mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass”, Yeats’s preferred symbol for the encroaching mechanistic philosophy of the eighteenth century onwards.¹ Shiro Naito opts for the mirror from Hui-nëng’s Zen quatrain, written on the monastery walls at Anhui.² That mirror, which Yeats identified with Berkeley’s immaterialism, and which would be for him the antithesis to Coleridge’s mirror, affirms that “nothing exists”. I suggest that the source is to be found in three passages in Daisetz Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism.³