The Waste Land
Buddhism

The Waste Land also contains allusions to Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which Eliot came into contact with while studying as a postgraduate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard in 1911–1914. The title of "The Fire Sermon" takes its name from the Buddhist discourse of the same name, which uses the metaphor of fire to mean both the inherent pain of physical existence and the process of purification to transcend that pain. Eliot juxtaposes the Buddha with St Augustine, both representing historical figures who turned away from worldly pleasures to follow a life of asceticism. Their combined voices blend into the poem's narrator at the end of the section ("Thou pluckest me out"), becoming the voice of prophecy, and the section tails off in a meditative fashion, losing the narrator "me", then "Lord", leaving only "burning".
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