Buddhist Romanticism

experience, he closed off the possibility that an awakening like the
Buddha’s could have anything of unique and higher value to offer the
world.
Nevertheless, in spite of these weaknesses in his theory, Maslow’s
attitudes about religions, values, and peak-experiences were not only
adopted by many therapists in the field of humanistic psychology, but also
—through those therapists—made their way into the thought of modern
Dhamma teachers, providing the underlying structure for a large portion of
Buddhist Romanticism.
HISTORY OF RELIGIONS
As we noted in Chapter Four, the early Romantics were among the first
European thinkers to call for a new way of studying religion in the
university: what Schelling called a “supra-confessional” approach. Instead
of simply teaching Christian theology, they argued, professors should
approach the study of the world’s religions with an eye to the way in which
all religions played a role in the unfolding drama of the evolution of the
cosmos.
The three early Romantics who wrote most extensively about this
proposed line of study—Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel—agreed
that religion had to evolve in line with the progressive evolution of the
cosmos, but they approached this idea from different angles. Each of these
angles ended up influencing the ways the study of the history of religions
developed in Europe and America in the succeeding decades.
Schelling was convinced that religious ideas, over time, had to evolve in
objectively better ways as part of the general evolution of divine
consciousness—from unity, through diversity, to unity containing
diversity. For him, this conviction was an objective truth. He was also
convinced that human beings, in helping religion to evolve, had no choice
in the matter. They were simply acting in line with the laws of organic
change that drove the entire cosmos. Thus any effort to understand the
evolution of religion had to find its place in a larger philosophy of history—
like Schelling’s—that tried to explain the laws of the evolution of the
universe as a whole.
In contrast, Schlegel—in line with his high regard for a sense of irony—
thought that the idea of progressive change in religion was simply a useful
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