Buddhist Romanticism

CHAPTER SIX
The Transmission of Romantic
Religion
People at present rarely read Schleiermacher. Most have never even
heard of his name, and the same holds true of the other early German
Romantics. Nevertheless, their ideas on art and religion have influenced
many thinkers in the intervening centuries, thinkers whose names are more
familiar and who have had a widely recognized influence on current
culture—in the areas of literature, humanistic psychology, comparative
religion, comparative mythology, and perennial philosophy. A short roster
of these more recognized thinkers would include Sir Edwin Arnold, Helena
Blavatsky, Joseph Campbell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, G. W. F. Hegel,
Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, William James, Carl Jung, J. Krishnamurti,
Abraham Maslow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolph Otto, Huston Smith,
Henry David Thoreau, Swami Vivekananda, and Walt Whitman. And there
are many, many others. These are the people who have transmitted
Romantic religion to the present, and who—through their influence—have
made Buddhist Romanticism possible.
Part of the Romantics’ continuing influence can be explained by the fact
that, even though some of them could be quite obscure in expressing their
more abstract thoughts—William Hazlitt started his review of A. W.
Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur with the quip,
“The book is German,” to give an idea of how impenetrable it was—they
found champions in a number of English and French writers who, in the
early 19th century, developed an enthusiasm for German thought and were
able to popularize it with greater clarity in their own languages. Among the
English, Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
were the foremost advocates of German Romantic thought; even Hazlitt
(1778–1830), when writing about Shakespeare, borrowed heavily from the
very book he had savaged for being German. Among the French, Madame
de Staël (1766–1817), whom we have already met, was an early admirer of
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