Buddhist Romanticism

As for religion, the Europe of the Romantics was much more monolithic
than the Buddha’s India. One religion—Christianity—dominated, and most
religious issues were fought within the confines of Christian doctrine. Even
anti-religious doctrines were shaped by the fact that Christianity was the
one religion with which they had to contend. The century prior to the
Romantics had witnessed the rise of a rationalistic anti-Christian
worldview, based on the mechanical laws discovered by Isaac Newton, but
as the Romantics were gaining their education, new scientific discoveries,
suggesting a more organic view of the universe, were calling the
Newtonian universe into question as well.
In addition to political and religious upheavals, though, the Europe of
the Romantics was also going through a literary upheaval. A new form of
literature had become popular—the novel—which was especially suited to
exploring psychological states in ways that lyric poetry and drama could
not. Having been raised on novels, young Europeans born in the 1770’s
tended to approach their own lives as novels—and in particular, to give
great weight to exploring their own psychological states and using those
states to justify their actions. As we will see in the next chapter, it’s no
accident that the term “Romantic” contains the German and French word
for novel, Roman.
For all the social differences separating the Buddha from the Romantics,
an even greater difference lay in how they tried to resolve the spiritual
dissatisfaction from which they suffered. In other words, they differed not
simply because they were on the receiving end of different outside
influences. They differed even more sharply in how they decided to shape
their situation. Their proactive approach to their times explains a great deal
about the differences separating their teachings.
There is something both fitting and very ironic about this fact. It’s fitting
in the sense that the Buddha and the Romantics agreed on the principle that
individual human beings are not merely passive recipients of outside
stimuli from their environment. Instead, influences are reciprocal. People
interact with their environment, shaping it as they are being shaped by it.
What’s ironic is that even though the Buddha and the Romantics agreed on
this principle, they drew different implications from it—which we will
examine in Chapter Four—and they disagreed in action on how best to
apply it to their lives, a point that we will examine here. Acting on their
environments in different ways, they came to drastically different
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