El Peregrino Kamanita

In the great mythic novel, Pilgrimen Kamanita (1906), which contains a history of Buddha’s era, Gjellerup has elucidated the essential characteristics of the Buddhist conception of the world, its doctrine of renunciation, its effort toward perfection, and its dreams of paradise, of Nirvana, and of universal destruction. Kamanita is the man in search of earthly satisfactions who, after seeing the fragility of all things, desires instead eternal treasures. We follow him not only during his earthly life but also during the different transformations he undergoes in the “Western Paradise”, in which the tropical sumptuousness of India is rediscovered.

Above description excerpted from a presentation by Sven Söderman, Swedish Critic published in Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969