Wallace Stevens's “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” follows a tripartite structure (“It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure”) similar to the “Three Imponderables” of Buddhism (selflessness of phenomena, impermanence, and the truth of suffering), the three bases of the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma. The poet's receipt in October, 1941, of Nyanatiloka's “Essence of the Buddha's Teaching,” a transcript of a radio lecture distributed by the monk's Island Hermitage in present-day Sri Lanka, a year before Stevens's publication of the “Notes” through Cummington Press, rules out mere coincidence, especially considering his love of all things Ceylonese.

This Buddhist reading of Stevens's long poem reveals the interdependency of his three poetic injunctions while developing a workable understanding of an implicit fourth “It Must Suffice.” The present work demonstrates that Stevens's “later reason” refers to “inferential cognition,” to be used in conjunction with the internalized reality of the imagination as a “pleasure body” toward gaining access to the “first idea.” According to this reading, the “Reality limit,” the “first idea” is revisited again and again, throughout Stevens's “Notes” in a multi-masked performance of an eternal recurrence (unending until Buddhahood is reached).

Throughout this comparison, Nyanatiloka's particular Buddhist view is distinguished among others. The German monk's teaching the “Four Noble Truths,” in the present work discussed first along with Stevens's injunction, “It Must Give Pleasure,” to follow the sequence of teachings as delivered by the Buddha for the sake of putting the simplest arguments first, is discussed in the context of the tradition of the teaching on suffering, extending to the Sutras of the Pali Canon, the oldest available source for the Buddha's teachings. Further, the teachings of selflessness or emptiness of phenomena, discussed here in conjunction with Stevens's “It Must Be Abstract” provides a seeming conflict with the above teaching of suffering that is resolved only by the complex paradoxes of the Third Turning. Stevens's repeated return to the “first idea” through the realization of ultimate truth through conventional truths as indices or metonymies additionally demonstrates the underlying unity of the “Two Truths.”