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her sense of identity becomes, if anything, more monolithic and less ludic, and as a last resort
she envelopes it within the safe but cold confines of progressive materialism.
8.3. Eastern Philosophical Keys to the Australian Puzzle
Considering these strengths and weaknesses in the available corpus of criticism of the
Asian novels of d’Alpuget and Koch, there does seem good argument for a more careful
analysis of some of the important Eastern concepts which d’Alpuget and Koch evidently are
sourcing for their novels.
8.3.1. The Bhagavad Gita and the Spirit of Re-enchantment
The Bhagavad Gita is one episode of the great Indian national epic, the Mahabharata.
Heinrich Zimmer finds the Gita’s importance in its synthesis of the two ancient traditions in
Indian thought—that of the Vedas of the Aryan invaders, and that of Jainism, Sankhya and
Yoga—, which had been competing over the thousand years since the Aryan shepherd/warriors
migrated southward into the subcontinent. The Brahmanical Vedic system was monistic,
vigorous, and joyously life-affirmative. Ritual and sacrifice sanctified all activities of
everyday life in the practice of Brahmanism, making the actions of all men glorifications of the
Supreme Being. The goal was to attain the realisation of the Self (Atman), the true and unique
reality (Zimmer, 1969, 379-80). The more philosophically profound but terribly pessimistic
non-Aryan systems were characterised by a dualistic life process in which the polluting,
darkening principle of the material world was continuously at odds with the pure essence of
the individual. The goal was to separate these antagonistic principles through a strict regime of
purification, thereby halting the infernal, corrupting life process, and allowing one to reach an
ultimate state of perfect motionlessness (Zimmer, 1969, 379).
Zimmer calls the Bhagavad Gita the ‘classic doctrine’ of this rapprochement of systems.
Although an ‘esoteric document’, he says that it ‘has become the most popular, widely
memorized authoritative statement of the basic guiding principles of Indian religious life’
(Zimmer, 1969, 380). The Gita is well known, if neither well read nor understood, in the
West. Writers like Emerson and T. S. Eliot have drawn extensively from its poetics and
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