Buddhist Romanticism

took pains to express admiration for the Buddha as a man, but not as a
philosopher.
2) In “Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism” (1893), Vivekananda
insisted that the Buddha was misunderstood by his followers, and that his
teachings were really meant to be in line with the Vedanta—which
Vivekananda, like many Indians of his time, believed to have predated the
Buddha. For example, when the Buddha taught not-self, Vivekananda
claimed, he was denying the existence not of the True Self, but of the false
separate self. The implication of this claim, of course, is the Buddha’s
discourses are not to be taken at face value when they say that the idea of a
universal self is completely foolish (§21). Like Hegel, Vivekananda was
convinced that his beliefs gave him insight into intentions that lay below
the surface and subverted the meaning of the surface.
3) In “The Vedanta Philosophy” (1896), Vivekananda claimed that the
true essence of the Buddha’s teachings was to be found in the Mahāyāna—
what he called the Northern School—and that the Southern School could
simply be dismissed.
Huxley, in dealing with the problem of the Buddha, fleshed out all three
strategies and used them to support one another. This is clearest in his
treatment of the teaching on not-self.
In one instance, Huxley adopts the first strategy, treating the not-self
teaching—in its interpretation as a no-self teaching—as simply inadequate
to answer the questions that would animate a metaphysician, in particular,
those around the question of an intelligent design to the cosmos:
“Hume and the Buddhists give a sufficiently realistic description
of selfness in action but they fail to explain how or why the bundles
ever became bundles. Did their constituent atoms of experience come
together of their own accord? And, if so, why, or by what means, and
within what kind of a non-spatial universe? To give a plausible
answer to these questions in terms of anatta is so difficult that we are
forced to abandon the doctrine in favour of the notion that, behind
the flux and within the bundles, there exists some kind of permanent
soul by which experience is organized and which in turn makes use
of that organized experience to become a particular and unique
personality.” 48
Here Huxley is adopting the Romantic view of causality, in which
259