Buddhist Romanticism

as a form of nihilism, and so Hegel in his religion lectures summarized its
teaching as, “It is from nothing that all comes, and to nothing that all
returns.” Further, “Man must make himself into nothingness”; and
“holiness consists only to the extent to which man in this annihilation, in
this silence, unites with God, with nothingness, with the absolute.” 32 This
interpretation fit neatly with Hegel’s assertion in the Science of Logic that the
initial conception of Being is undifferentiated, and thus is actually a concept
of nothingness. Interpreting Buddhism as nihilism allowed him to cite it as
an example of this primitive stage in his story of the dialectic of human
thought.
As more Buddhist and Hindu texts were translated into German in the
succeeding years, Hegel moderated some of his views on Indian religions,
but he continued to assert that even though Indian religions had formed a
concept of the infinite and proposed an identity of the finite with the
infinite, they had no clear, concrete conception of how the infinite could be
fully realized on the level of the finite. As for Buddhism, he continued to
present it as a form of nihilism even though newer research showed clearly
that it wasn’t.
We might excuse Hegel’s intransigence on these points by assuming that
he simply wasn’t keeping up with the scholarly literature in these areas, but
in at least one case we know that this wasn’t so. The case involves August
Schlegel, Friedrich’s brother, one of Hegel’s acquaintances from his earlier
days at Jena.
August had been appointed professor of literature at the University of
Bonn in 1818. In 1823, he published—together with Wilhelm von
Humboldt, one of the founders of the University of Berlin—a full,
annotated translation of the Bhagavad Gīta. In it, he noted that when the
Gīta was read in full, it did not support Herder’s facile interpretations of
Indian religion and instead presented a more complex view of the relation
between God—Viṣṇu—and the cosmos.
In 1827, Hegel himself wrote a review of the book. Then, four years later,
he neglected to mention in his 1831 lectures the fact that this text, predating
the Christian Bible, mentions a divine being who had become fully human
in the person of Krishna, who taught that his incarnation had a universal
plan with implications for all of humanity. Instead, Hegel continued to
insist that Indian religion had created no necessary connection between
beings and their underlying Being. Thus Indian religion was nothing but
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