Parsifal's Progress: the spiritual development of Wagner's hero

n some respects, Parsifal is the typical Wagnerian hero, related closely to Siegfried in his initial innocence and readiness to destroy whatever and whoever stands in his path. He is also related to Siegfried (and even more closely to his father Siegmund) in his life of painful wandering and to both Siegfried and Tristan in his musings about his parents: like them both, he feels guilt for the death of his mother. But at the start, unlike these other heroes, he is not in search of anything or anyone in particular, wandering aimlessly, unaware of the possibilities of life and of his own potential. Hence Gurnemanz's surprise when Parsifal returns to Monsalvat:

e seems to be quite unpromising material from which to make a knight. Like Siegfried, he has been brought up in the isolation of a deep forest and by a conscious decision of his mother, he has been shielded from all concepts of chivalry and warfare. Furthermore, she seems to have neglected both his moral training and instruction in basic etiquette: in the romantic poems, he mistreats the first woman he comes across, taking her ring and stealing a kiss; when he has need of arms, Parzival kills the knight Ferris for his red armour and weapons. Wagner emphasizes moral development: Gurnemanz's questioning of the boy reveals that he cannot distinguish between good and evil. He is unable to comprehend the suffering of Amfortas because, in his sheltered childhood, he had been kept from all knowledge of suffering. There is a strong suggestion here of a parallel with the Buddha (Gautama Shakyamuni), who was brought up in ignorance of old age, sickness and death. It could even have been the realization that the youth of the Buddha, traditionally an Indian noble or prince with an over-protective widower father, about whom Wagner had been reading in 1856-7, resembled the youth of Wolfram's Parzival, a Welsh noble or prince with an over-protective widowed mother was the seed from which the drama developed.

olfram's poem has two poles: at one is the chivalric ideal of triuwe (treue), constancy or faithfulness; at the other, zwivel (zweifel), inconstancy or wavering. He begins his poem, If inconstancy dwell with the heart, then the soul will not fail to find it bitter. The ignorant and foolish boy has to learn faithfulness to something (the Grail) which on his first visit to the Grail Castle he did not understand; only after he has understood what the Grail represents and why Amfortas suffers, through his faith and by paths of suffering he is able to find the place again; only then, by the wisdom gained through compassion or fellow- suffering, is he able to heal. Wagner shows us a young man growing in compassion, from the first inarticulate stirrings of compassion for the dead swan (Parsifal cannot find words, so he shows his remorse by breaking his bow), through his evident sympathy for the suffering Amfortas (Parsifal presses his hand to his heart) and his remorse for the suffering that he had caused his own mother, to the compassion for Kundry that he is able to express after experiencing her kiss.

arsifal is also like Siegfried in that he appears to accomplish things for himself; although in some mysterious way, the Grail is acting in the background to bring about its (or perhaps we should say, his) own redemption (the release of the Grail and with it the regeneration of the Grail community). If we consider this parallel further, it could lead into deep waters. As a free agent, Siegfried might (as Wotan thinks) be able to achieve what Wotan, the least free of all, cannot achieve; applying the same pattern to Parsifal, he might be seen as a free agent who is able to accomplish what the Christian God cannot. It is possible to read Wagner's text as a return to the Gnostic or Manichaen roots of the legend. Whereas Siegfried forges his own destiny, Parsifal redeems himself, not just by faith but by his actions. For a Christian, this sub-text is a far more serious objection to Parsifal than the representation of the Mass on a stage; and therefore, in spite of all of the Christian symbolism and allusions to Jesus Christ and to Mary Magdalen in the poem, it is hard to agree with Lucy Beckett's assertion that this is an intrinsically Christian work.

n Wolfram's work, as it would most likely have been in Chrétien's poem had he finished it, the development of the pure fool culminates in a perfect knight. Parzival has acquired the necessary wisdom, not only to heal his maternal uncle, but also to assume his throne as king and guardian of the sacred relics. In Wagner's text and music, we find the same development, but it seems to go even further than in the chivalric romances, even beyond Wagner's initial conception. Originally, it would seem, Wagner had introduced Kundry's kiss as the mechanism by which Parsifal would be awakened to an understanding of the suffering of Amfortas (with all that it entails); he would understand by an emotional identification after reliving what had happened to Amfortas. During the development of Wagner's ideas, something diffused into the part of his mind that was occupied with Parsifal, from the part that was simultaneously concerned with Die Sieger. In the latter, the Buddha, sitting under the tree, experienced supreme, unsurpassed enlightenment.

his idea was merged into Kundry's kiss, so that Parsifal now, in the third act, attained an enlightenment similar to that of the Buddha: not only the suffering of Amfortas but that of all creation, in its striving and cycles of existence, was revealed to him with crystal clarity: Welthellsicht, perhaps even Satori or Bodhi. Like the Buddha too, before his enlightenment, Parsifal is tempted by beautiful women:

discussed in another article, the words of Gurnemanz in the second scene of the last act and the events of the final scene (especially as presented in some modern stagings) suggest a comparison between Parsifal and Christ; a parallel that Wagner repeatedly disavowed, but which he himself suggested to King Ludwig, for whom this was a profoundly Christian work.

his parallel is underlined by the presentation of Kundry in Act 3 as a Magdalen, anointing the pure one with oil of spikenard and washing his feet, which she then dries with her long hair; and by the appearance of the dove at the end of the opera. This is, it is true, an element taken from Wolfram, perhaps originating with his source Kyot as a religious symbol; it too has a strong resonance with the Gospel of St. John.

arsifal's progress, it seems goes beyond the state of perfect knight. This is the most significant difference between Wagner's poem and Wolfram's Parzival, the story of a fool who became a knight. Wagner's Grail king is a spiritual hero on the same spiritual plane as the Buddha and the Christ. Whose teachings, Wagner believed, were essentially the same.

Postscript

Parsifal and Buddhism

ince I wrote the article above, my understanding of the Buddhist ideas and symbolism in Parsifal has been significantly improved and expanded as a result of intensive studies in the related literature, combined with visits to Bayreuth and Zürich in the summer of 2000.

t is now clear to me that Wagner's original conception involved a merging of the respective stories of Parzival and the Buddha Shakyamuni; and that it was inherent in Wagner's concept, from its beginning on a spring morning in 1857, that his hero Parsifal would progress to the level of Buddhahood. It should not be thought, however, that Wagner identified his Parsifal with the Buddha Shakyamuni, any more than he was identified with Christ. Wagner's inspiration, I firmly believe, was found in his observation that the early life of Wolfram's Parzival resembled the early life of the Buddha, about whom Wagner had been reading in 1856-57. Wagner's hero progresses from fool to sage. At the end of his path Parsifal takes the last step (der Rettung letzter Pfad) and with it achieves the level of enlightenment that Wagner believed was common to both the Buddha and the Christ.

Footnote 1: Wagner did not have access to the Buddhacarita, which was not available in any European language until a decade after his death. Up to 1865, when he wrote the first Prose Draft of Parsifal, his sources of information about Buddhism, Brahmanism and other oriental religions (in addition to references made by Schopenhauer) included the following:

Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, Eugène Burnouf, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1844. The book that inspired Wagner's Die Sieger. Burnouf was the first writer to give a broad and relatively accurate account of the origins of Buddhism, with the first detailed account in any European language of Maháyána teachings, drawn from Burnouf's own translations of Sanskrit manuscripts newly sent to Paris from Nepal.
Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung, Carl Friedrich Köppen, Berlin, Schneider, 1857. Read by Wagner in 1858; he found it an unedifying book; instead of sterling features from the oldest legends, which I expected, for the most part a mere account of development in girth ....
Indische Skizzen, Albrecht Weber, Berlin, Dümmler, 1857. Of particular interest in this book, of which (like the two books listed above) a copy is present in Wagner's Bayreuth library, is the 1856 lecture Über den Buddhismus. In Weber's view the Buddha was both a religious and a social reformer, a view that Wagner might have found consistent with his view of Jesus as expressed in his own Jesus von Nazareth. In this lecture Weber expressed the opinion that the concept of karma was brought to India by the Aryan invaders, i.e. that it was part of the Vedic tradition from the beginning.
Articles about religion in India, China, Ceylon, Tibet and Mongolia, recommended by Schopenhauer in the Sinologie chapter of On the Will in Nature.

His later reading included Anquetil-Duperron's translation of the Oupnekhat, a favourite book of Schopenhauer, Burnouf's translation of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and the following books in English:

A Manual of Buddhism in its Modern Development, Robert Spence Hardy, London, 1853. Another of the books recommended by Schopenhauer and probably consulted by Wagner. Hardy's account of Buddhism is mostly drawn from books available to him during his twenty years in Ceylon (as a Christian missionary) and dialogue with Buddhists there. Suggested by Karl Heckel as the source of Wagner's spear that stops in mid-air, a detail that did not appear in the 1865 Prose Draft.
Sutta Nipáta or dialogues and discourses of Gotama Buddha : translated from the Páli, with introduction and notes, M. Coomára Swámy, Trübner, London, 1874. Wagner's copy can be seen in his Bayreuth library at Haus Wahnfried.