Beyond the Edge of Madness: Buddhist and Sufi Traditions in the Age of Cryptocurrencies

In a world increasingly shaped by digital economies and decentralized networks, contemporary fiction discovers in Buddhist and Sufi mysticism new avenues of critique and reflection. This paper explores how Don DeLillo’s Silence and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day draw on Buddhist and Sufi mysticism to critique the hyper-velocity of late capitalism and cryptocurrency markets. DeLillo imagines cryptocurrencies dissolving into syllables of a new temporal grammar, while Pynchon’s vision of Shambhala transcends capitalism’s time regimes, offering a mystical, elusive realm of escape from the global politics of money.

By engaging with Eastern philosophies and (Techno)-‘Orientalism,’ these works suggest spiritual refuge and self-awareness as antidotes to the madness of financialization. This paper argues that through interreligious motifs, DeLillo and Pynchon develop contemplative frameworks that reclaim language critique as wisdom, providing a counterbalance to consumerism, resource depletion, and privatization, while inviting readers into “unmapped, sacramental places” beyond the games of modern capital markets.