Buddhist Romanticism

matter of reestablishing unity to heal two inner splits: between the body
and mind on the one hand, and between reason and feeling on the other. As
the transmitters of Romantic religion brought these ideas into the present,
some of them—such as Jung and Maslow—were more explicit than others
in discussing the unity of body and mind. All, however, offered their own
ideas of what unity within the mind might be and how it might be found.
For Emerson, it meant staying true to one’s intuitions, wherever they might
lead; for James, it meant developing a coherent will, giving order to one’s
overall aims in life. For Jung, inner unity meant opening a dialogue among
the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. For
Maslow, inner unity was an affair of unitive consciousness, which he
defined in terms reminiscent of Novalis: the ability to see the ordinary
affairs of the world as sacred. Huxley also defined inner unity as unitive
consciousness, but for him this concept meant a mode of knowing in which
knower and known are one. In other words, inner unity meant seeing one’s
unity with the world outside.
What this means is that the Romantic idea of inner oneness has come to
carry a wide variety of meanings—so wide that it’s possible to say inner
oneness to, say, ten people and for them to hear ten different positive things.
This fuzziness in the concept has lived on in Buddhist Romanticism.
Yet the process of transmission has brought about still another change in
Romantic religion that has had an even more important effect on Buddhist
Romanticism. That is the change effected by James and Jung. Both of these
thinkers showed that even though Romantic thought originally depended
on a particular view of the physical universe, many Romantic principles
about the psychological value of religion could survive even when the
dominant paradigm in the physical sciences changed. To allow for this
survival, both men had to reinterpret them, not as principles built into the
fabric of the cosmos, but as principles useful from a phenomenological
point of view: solving the problems of consciousness as felt from within.
However, neither James nor Jung, despite their broadmindedness, tested
alternative principles for achieving psychological health, such as those
offered by the Dhamma, most likely because they were not aware that these
alternatives might exist. They simply picked up the principles that—both
from the limited perspective of their personal religious experience and in
the limited range of the Western philosophical and religious tradition—
seemed most useful for their purposes. The limits of their personal
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