Borges today is a global phenomenon; his stories have been translated into dozens of languages and made into films. The adjective “Borgesian” is almost as familiar as “Kafkaesque” or “Proustian.” The story of Borges’s move from the relative periphery of Argentina to the centrality of literary fame is a textbook example of the pattern described by Pascale Casanova in her celebrated World Republic of Letters. Borges achieved global status through translation, first into French in the 40s, then, decisively, into English beginning in the 60s, after he shared the Formentor prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961. The final three decades of Borges’s life crystallized the iconic image of the peripatetic blind writer, endlessly touring the world and packing auditoriums from Harvard to Tokyo.

But of course, cosmopolitanism had been foundational to Borges’s inspiration from the start. Half English on his father’s side, Borges spent his formative years in Switzerland and Spain; bilingual from birth, he learned to read in both English and Spanish; a polyglot, he learned German, French and Latin as a youth in Geneva, later adding Italian and Old Norse; he devoted his last weeks, as he was dying of cancer in Geneva, to learning Arabic. Although he lived most of his life in Buenos Aires, his literary references were similarly broad. His stories take us from medieval Spain to nineteenth century Uruguay, from China to Ireland, from Nazi Germany to the Roman empire. The same is true of his essays, which range from Flaubert to John Wilkins, from tango to the Kabbalah. An enduring interest was Buddhism, the subject of one of his earliest essays (“The Nothingness of Personality,” 1922) to one of his last lectures (“Buddhism,” in the Seven Nights, 1980) and much in between. Borges’s knowledge of Buddhism was shaped by his father’s library, which contained a wealth of nineteenth century Orientalist scholarship.¹  Although he later updated some of his sources,² his knowledge of Buddhism was deeply rooted in Victorian materials. These were not only scholarly: he first discovered Buddhism as a child in Sir Edwin Arnold’s best-selling poem The Light of Asia, or the Great Renunciation. This work, a retelling of Buddha’s life in a long romantic narrative poem, made a profound impression on him.

If Buddhism was a lifelong engagement for Borges, the essays he wrote in the 1950s appear to be especially significant, as they were written during a decade of deep personal and political crisis. Politically, Argentina was in the grip of Perón’s authoritarian, populist, hypernationalist regime. Borges found himself in the opposition, lost his job, and was publicly humiliated, while his family was harassed or jailed. On a personal level, his blindness became nearly complete, bringing about an inward turn in his writing style (now more dependent on memory), yet also an outward turn in his lifestyle as he became a reluctant international celebrity. Among the essays on Buddhism, two stand out as especially meaningful: “Forms of a Legend” (1952), devoted to the transcultural adaptations of the Buddha legend, and “Dialogues of Ascetic and King” (1953), focused on the archetypal recurrence of this confrontation. Central to Borges’s reading is a focus on the Renunciation story’s global circulation. These two essays in turn intersect meaningfully with the famous polemical essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (1951), which takes issue with the stifling nationalist aesthetics championed by Perón supporters and claims for Argentine writers the right not to limit themselves to Argentine themes, but to borrow freely from any tradition. “We must believe that the universe is our birthright and try out every subject,” Borges defiantly proclaims.

Clearly, in Borges’s mind, the story of the Great Renunciation, as a story, is connected to larger aesthetic, theoretical, and formal questions. Not coincidentally, “Forms of a Legend” discusses a tale that travelled globally, generating large numbers of texts in numerous languages: the story of a king who leaves his palace to become a wandering ascetic. Borges traces the legend’s itinerary from East to West, giving an elegantly streamlined version of the story’s circulation in space (from India to Iceland) and time (from the Jataka tales to the medieval Golden Legend and beyond). From its Indian source, the story passed into Muslim and Christian culture, transforming itself into the story of Bilawar and Budasaf and the story of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, with multiple variants from Italy to Scandinavia. “Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legends recreate it in a way that is only accidentally false and which permits it to travel through the world from mouth to mouth.” Sir Richard Burton, translator of the 1001 Nights and one of Borges’s heroes, put it more succinctly: “Tales have wings.”

Thus, the Borgesian “speculation”—a favorite word in Borges, who always wears his erudition lightly—on the global circulation and transformation of archetypal forms such as the Renunciation story is richly woven into the intellectual conversations of the time, especially the beginnings of structuralism. Morphology also provided Borges with a serviceable method of composition. Stories branch off into other stories by variation, repetition, recombination of patterns. See, for example, the recurring stories of royal abandonment resulting from the confrontation of a king and a poet (a Borgesian variant of the ascetic): “Parable of the Palace,” “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths,” and “The Mirror and the Mask,” written decades apart and set respectively in China, the medieval Islamic world, and ancient Ireland. All of them can be read as variations on the Buddhist Renunciation story.

Stories travel along the Silk Road like material goods. That Diogenes’s famously rude dismissal of the powerful Alexander (“Get out of my sunshine!”) owes something to the Buddhist legend of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic is a compelling thought, because it speaks to a transcultural impulse—what Geoffrey Galt Harpham called the “ascetic imperative”—that leads us to structure our idea of power in terms of dialectical absolutes. Ultimately the two figures are reversible. Borges reminds us of their “secret kinship” by alluding, repeatedly, to “another king of the Sanskrit era who left his palace to beg alms in the streets, and who said these dizzying words: ‘From now on I have no kingdom, or my kingdom is limitless’.”

Leaving the palace to wander the world is what Borges’s writings do. The archetypal king-and-ascetic trope applies metatextually to the Borgesian view of world literature: like the king wandering out of his palace to beg from strangers, a writer leaves behind the comfort but also the limitations of national tradition to “beg” from other languages and literary cultures. No longer tied to one tradition, his kingdom becomes the world, his birthright, the universe. The Borgesian model, where stories morph and circulate across time and space, resonates with contemporary strategies of global reading, anticipating David Damrosch’s definition of world literature as not a corpus or a canon, “but rather a mode of circulation and of reading,” or Wai-Chee Dimock’s description of the centrifugal trajectory of canonical texts. It is also rather more radical, proposing an image of literature as impersonal, metamorphic, and globally replayed.