Buddhist Romanticism

modern democratic, pluralistic society. He did not define the term spiritual
value, but he did provide a list of questions that spiritual values should
answer: “What is the good life? What is the good man? The good woman?
What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my
obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is justice? Truth?
Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness?
How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? What is my
responsibility to my brothers? Who are my brothers? What shall I be loyal
to? What must I be ready to die for?” 24
Maslow noted that modern society had reached an impasse on these
questions, an impasse he traced to the fact that religion and science,
narrowly defined, had carved out mutually exclusive areas of concern.
Science, in a quest for objectivity, had declared itself value-free, and in fact
had dismissed questions of value as not worth answering. Religion had
retreated from science and so offered no intellectually respectable, objective
source for its answers to these questions. All it could offer were unverifiable
supernatural claims.
Maslow’s proposed solution to this problem was to offer an expanded
vision of science based on his assumption—taken from his organic view of
the universe—that human potentials carry an inherent, objective imperative
to be actualized. But just as science would have to be reconfigured to adopt
this assumption, so would religion. Following Jung, Maslow felt that the
progress of society required religion to relinquish its authority in the field
of values and hand it over to psychotherapy, just as in earlier centuries it
had relinquished its authority in cosmology to the physical sciences.
“Just as each science was once a part of the body of organized
religion but then broke away to become independent, so also it can be
said that the same thing may now be happening to the problems of
values, ethics, spirituality, morals. They are being taken away from
the exclusive jurisdiction of the institutionalized churches and are
becoming the “property,” so to speak, of a new type of humanistic
scientist… This relation between religion and science could be stated
in such a dichotomous, competitive way, but I think I can show that it
need not be, and that the person who is deeply religious—in a
particular sense that I shall discuss—must rather feel strengthened
and encouraged by the prospect that his value questions may be more
firmly answered than ever before.” 25
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