Buddhist Romanticism

many of his essays—in particular, “The Over-Soul”—were printed in India,
where they inspired educated Indians who were in the process of
developing a new universal Indian religion, now called Neo-Hinduism,
based on the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gīta. We will return to this point
below.
As a transmitter of Romantic religion, Emerson deviated from his
German mentors on only two major issues: the moral rather than aesthetic
import of religious experiences, and the role of Eros in inducing such
experiences. Otherwise, his thought differed from theirs primarily in terms
of four points of emphasis.
• He tended to dwell more than the Romantics had on the point that
there can be no categorical standards for judging the reliability of religious
experiences or of the sense of duty that one gained from them.
• Related to this point was his recasting of authenticity as a moral rather
than an aesthetic quality: the ability to remain true to one’s own sense of
right and wrong, regardless of how inconsistent it might be from day to
day, and regardless of what society might say.
• This further related to his implied definition of freedom as license to
flaunt social norms in the name of one’s inner nature, whatever that nature
might be. He also placed more emphasis than the majority of Romantics on
the idea that actions, in ultimate terms, have no real consequences in the
overall economy of the universe.
• And he wrote more fervently than they in celebrating the constant
evolution of the world and the soul as the highest aspiration of human life.
From the Buddhist perspective, all these points of emphasis are
problematic.
• To say that there can be no standards for judging right or wrong is, in
the Buddha’s words, to leave people unprotected (§8). They will have no
way to judge one intention as superior to another, and no way to protect
themselves from engaging in unskillful actions. Emerson assumed that
people can clearly distinguish between their individual notions and their
trustworthy perceptions, but experience shows that this is not the case.
• Similarly, to deny that there are constant standards for judging one’s
daily intuitions of right and wrong, and to deny that there is anything of
worth to learn from others, makes it impossible to learn any sense of skill in
the conduct of one’s actions.
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