Buddhist Romanticism

Then, however, the essay shifts gears:
“It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact
without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge
very cheap.… The path of science and of letters is not the way into
nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer’s boy
stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the
dissector or the antiquary.”
In other words, records of the past may have their uses, but they pale
next to nature as a guide to true religious inspiration. This shift in gears
makes the essay an “idea” in Schlegel’s sense of the term.
Even when sacred texts do offer sustenance during one’s dark hours,
Emerson felt that they should be read, not as statements of fact, but as
myths and poetry: symbols and allegories whose meanings the reader is
free to interpret creatively as he or she sees fit.
“[One] must attain and maintain that lofty sight where poetry and
annals are alike.” (“History”)
“The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gideon, is poetry
thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we
have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven as an immortal
sign.” (“History”)
If granted too much authority, religious texts can get in the way of true
intuitions.
“The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps… If, therefore, a man claims to
know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in
another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which
is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into
whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of
the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
authority of the soul.” (“Self-reliance”)
Emerson also shared the idea, advocated by the Romantics, that the
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