“After dinner I retreat quite soon to my little house, where I am by 8:30 at the latest. Then before me is the great blossoming night filled with stars, and below me in front of the window the pebble path rises to a small hill on which in fanatical speechlessness stands the likeness of a Buddha, dispensing the inexpressible unity of his gesture under all of the skies of day and night in silent reserve. ‘C’est le centre du monde,’ I said to Rodin.” Rilke, who feels exceptionally happy during this stay in Rodin’s world, recognizes himself in the Buddha figure. But instead of remaining in “fanatical speechlessness,” Rilke will take from this “silent reserve” the strength to express the “inexpressible unity” of life and death, heaven and earth, himself and the other in his own words.

This way of communicating from the very center of his being, and thus without abandoning or moving away from it but by keeping it in “silent reserve,” is the essence of Rilke’s correspondence. He can both stay himself and yet give himself to others. In his poetry, he seeks to strike the perfect balance between a given object’s interiority and the poet’s and the reader’s necessarily external consciousness. The process often involves a series of complex rhetorical reversals that obscure and ultimately efface any possible starting point, with the effect that the poem seems to begin at once strictly within its own images yet also in a reality it seeks to represent. In his letters, however, this complex exchange seems entirely natural and is easily followed by the reader: Rilke can expend and yet withhold himself, and the privacy afforded to him occasions the deepest intimacy.

By 1908 Rilke includes a total of three poems about Buddha in New Poems. These are probing poems, examining Rilke’s faith in his capacity to enter into an object fully and grasp its position and true significance in his life, rather than just chronicling his emotional response to it. But Rilke would not accept another teacher. His “Buddha in Glory” is the final poem in New Poems. It begins with “Center of all centers, core of cores” and ends “Yet already there is begun inside of you / that which lasts beyond the suns.”

In the very embodiment of an “inexpressible unity,” which is for Rilke the apotheosis of the work of art, there is a magnificence that exceeds this unity. The completion of the Buddha’s glory is a task Rilke set to accomplish in his poetry; his letters bear witness to this attempt. That is why he thanked his wife for the Speeches of GotamaBuddha, immediately shut the book, and continued writing his own guide to life that cannot be reduced to another’s teachings, image, or text.

Rodin did not last as Rilke’s teacher, ultimately showing the ambitious and needy poet the door rather than the path to enlightenment. Many of Rilke’s poems in New Poems were written because Rodin had sent the young poet to the zoo where he was instructed to spend hours looking at the animals and to spend those same hours away from Rodin’s studio, where the master needed to work unobserved for a while. Eventually, Rodin dismissed Rilke abruptly from the task of his assistant owing to a misunderstanding. (Rilke had signed his name to a letter addressed to one of Rodin’s buyers with whom he had become friendly; Rodin erroneously assumed that Rilke was abusing his role as scribe to forge his own connections.) Rilke took the firing in stride and penned a remarkable letter the next morning to Rodin where he prophesied— correctly—that the two men would resume their friendship. In the brief letter, Rilke suggested to Rodin that although the reasons for firing Rilke were hurtful and wrong, Rodin had been right in doing so. He had removed the person who proved a momentary distraction from the “work” and unwittingly liberated Rilke from his unspoken dependency on the master. Precisely because it was painful and disappointing, Rilke was prompted to take the break seriously and recognize it as a challenge to become an artist in his own right.

Rilke was disappointed a second time when Rodin lost, in his eyes, his dignity by falling in love late in life with a far younger admirer. Even if Rodin ultimately disappointed Rilke, however, he triggered in Rilke an urgent desire to find out what it means to commit oneself to a meaningful pursuit. Rodin constituted for Rilke what Schopenhauer had been for Nietzsche and what Rilke has become for many: the unanticipated occasion through another’s life or text, as Nietzsche put it in 1874, some thirty years before Rilke met Rodin, “to come to oneself out of the bewilderment in which one usually wanders as in a dark cloud.” And like Nietzsche, who ultimately dropped Schopenhauer when he recognized that to face himself was the true challenge, Rilke also turned inward after his stay with Rodin.

W. H. Auden was not alone in mocking Rilke’s cult of solitude. But Rilke did not fetishize the rewards of loneliness. When he describes the retreat into the self to follow paths that he did not know existed, he does not bring only welcome news. What he does do, however, is explain the human psyche in ways that are all but unrivaled in the history of ideas. Ultimately, all of these descriptions and analyses chart a way out of Rilke the person, the biography, the man, into what he describes in “Buddha in Glory” as “that which lasts beyond the suns.” It’s not nirvana—we have seen that Rilke never read the book on Buddha, despised organized religion, and stringently sought to develop his proper terms for that to which he wished to bear witness: life in all of its glory and magnificence and abundance and sheer horror and also the uncertain, wavering search for it. Take down every word of the “dictation of existence,” without skipping even the tiniest “and” or “but,” Rilke admonishes himself—which means that in one’s actual search for meaning, as long as one diligently transcribes each step on this path, there might be already the key to discovering one’s being. This “meaning of life” is spelled out already before our eyes and will not be supplied from elsewhere.

Rilke experienced the anonymity of everyday existence as a painful contraction of an individual’s world.