Oriental Lawrence

"Oriental Lawrence: The Quest for the Secrets of Sex" explores D.H. Lawrence's engagement with Eastern systems of thought, especially Buddhism and Yoga, which were his main sources of interest. It tracks their impact on his thinking and their influence on his fiction. Lawrence looked to the East less for social, political, or cultural resolutions to the chronic problems that beset the West, but to engage with "limit-situations" - moments of radical transformation when the self sheds its social accoutrements and discovers dynamic new ways of being-in-the-world. He sought those new levels of awareness, new modes of desire, new ways of transmuting the self, and new soteriological goals that the West seemed unable to offer.