Buddhist Romanticism

people to join its celibate order, had brought India to ruin as well. At the
same time, he also used Spencerian principles to advance a program for the
strengthening of the Indian race so that it could throw off its European
oppressors.
From Hegel, Narendranath had learned that social progress is led by the
evolution of Mind, and that this evolution follows the dialectical pattern of
moving forward by digging back into the most ancient assumptions
underlying earlier thought. Thus the way to lead India forward—so that it
would develop, in his words, “muscles of steel and nerves of iron”—was to
return to the deepest principles underlying Indian religion, which he came
to believe lay in Advaita Vedanta. Narendranath also learned from Hegel
the idea that the history of the religions of the world is a vast drama in
which all cultures and religions play a distinctive part, culminating in a
unitive knowledge of the One Mind or One Soul at work both within and
without. Given that the Upaniṣads were older than Christianity, and that
Vedanta taught monism in much more definitive terms, it is easy to see
how, as Vivekananda, he could put Hegel’s principles together in such a
way that Vedanta, rather than Christianity, was to be the religion of the
future. This explains why he went on lecture tours not only throughout
India, but also twice into the West before his early death at age 39.
In the West, he encountered resistance from conservative Christians but
he also found a select, receptive audience whose attitudes had been shaped
by the Romantics. By extolling India as the source of spiritual inspiration,
by claiming that vitalistic monism was the most advanced spiritual
teaching, and by portraying the religions of the world as part of a common
quest to realize the monistic vision, the Romantics and their transmitters
had paved the way for Vivekananda’s teachings to take root in the West.
In teaching Vedanta both in India and the West, Vivekananda
formulated the principle that was to provide the underpinning for Huxley’s
perennial philosophy: that when comparing different religious traditions,
the differences are of no account; only the similarities matter. Thus he was
able to brush over the many differences not only among Indian religions,
but also the religions of the world. In this, he followed the Romantic
program that attributed differences among religions to the accidents of
personality and culture, whereas the core religious experience for all was
the same: union with the infinite. The main point of difference was that, for
the Romantics, the infinite was totally immanent; whereas for Vivekananda,
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