Buddhist Romanticism

Hölderlin, asserted the duty to allow one’s aesthetic intuitions to govern
one’s search for the peace of inner integration; Hegel and Huxley followed
Schelling in asserting one’s duty to abandon one’s individual will in favor
of the universal will.
Transmitters of Romantic religion have also transmitted the paradox at
the heart of Romantic religion: On the one hand, it asserts the individual’s
complete freedom to create his or her own religion, a religion that no one
else is in a position to judge. Emerson is the prime exponent of this side of
the paradox. On the other hand, Romantic religion proposes an objective
standard for judging religious views, stating that individuals are free to
create their own religions only because they are an organic part of a
monistic, vitalistic cosmos. This view of the cosmos, in their eyes, is the
most advanced—and thus objectively the best—worldview that a religion
can teach. Maslow and Huxley are the prime exponents of this second side
of the paradox.
In fact, among the 20th century thinkers we have considered, only one
principle of Romantic religion cannot be explicitly found: the idea that the
immanent organic unity of the universe is infinite. Huxley comes close, but
his infinity is ultimately transcendent, in that part of it lies beyond time and
space. This gap in the transmission of Romantic religion, however, is not a
major one. The infinitude of the universe, for the Romantics, meant
ultimately that its purpose could not be fathomed, an idea that remains
common in our culture for other reasons. So for all practical purposes, the
tradition of Romantic religion is still intact. And although Buddhist
Romanticism follows the 20th century transmitters of Romantic religion in
dropping “infinite” from its description of universal organic unity, it
follows the Romantics in seeing the ultimate purpose of that unity as lying
beyond the powers of the human mind to fathom.
Some of the transmitters of Romantic religion have introduced a few
innovations in the tradition. Emerson and James, for instance, have
redefined authenticity in moral, rather than aesthetic terms, although
Emerson’s approach to morality meant that this concept retained its sense
of being authentic to oneself—in all one’s inconsistencies—and not to any
consistent principles of reason.
Also, different transmitters have added their own variations to the
already varied Romantic ideas of what inner integration means. As we
noted in Chapter Four, the early Romantics regarded inner integration as a
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