Buddhist Romanticism

psychological health. Among his fellows in
this movement he counted Jung, Horney,
Rogers, and a host of others.
One of Maslow’s primary contributions to
this approach to psychotherapy was the
concept of self-actualization: the principle that
human beings are born with certain
potentials that they need to actualize to the
full in order to achieve genuine happiness.
For Maslow, this observation carried an
imperative: “What man can be, he must be.”
In other words, the fact that biology has
endowed people with certain potentials
carried a value: Society should be ordered so
that those potentials can be actualized.
In the course of articulating what those potentials are and how they can
best be actualized, Maslow drew heavily from James, Jung, and Otto. In
doing so, he adopted many of the Romantic assumptions about religion that
their writings contain. He also adopted a number of Romantic assumptions
from Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, a book we will discuss in the last
section of this chapter. In addition, he was familiar with the writings of the
New England Transcendentalists. And as we noted above, he was living at
a time where he felt that serious scientists had come to regard the universe
as an organic, unified whole, evolving with meaning and purpose. In other
words, he felt that science had returned, in principle at least, to the universe
inhabited by the Romantics.
As a result, just as Jung had incorporated more Romanticism into his
writings than he had acquired from either James or Otto, Maslow
incorporated more Romanticism than he had acquired from any of the
three. The fact that Maslow’s Third Force has now come to dominate
American psychotherapy has meant that these Romantic assumptions
continue to thrive in American culture, where they have played a direct role
in shaping Buddhist Romanticism.
Maslow’s most accessible book on the topic of religion is Religion, Values,
and Peak Experiences, which he published in 1964 and then revised in 1970,
shortly before his death. The book centers on the issue of how to derive an
objective set of spiritual values that can underlie an educational system in a
225