Buddhist Romanticism

CHAPTER SEVEN
Buddhist Romanticism
Buddhist Romanticism is a result of a very natural human tendency:
When presented with something foreign and new, people tend to see it in
terms with which they already are familiar. Often they are totally unaware
that they are doing this. If emotionally attached to their familiar way of
viewing things, they will persist in holding to it even when shown that they
are seeing only their own myths and projections, rather than what is
actually there.
In most areas of life, this tendency is rightly regarded as a form of
blindness, something to be overcome. However, in the transmission of the
Dhamma to the West, even when people are aware that they are reshaping
the Dhamma as they study and teach it, the Romantic principle that religion
is an art form—creating myths in an ever-changing dialogue with everchanging
human needs—inclines them to regard this tendency as not only
natural but also good. In extreme cases, they believe that there really is
nothing “actually there.” In their eyes, the Dhamma itself is a body of
myths, and they are doing it a favor by providing it with new myths in step
with the times. There is very little recognition that something crucial and
true is being lost.
Granted, there are some points on which Romantic religion and the
Dhamma agree. Both see religion as a means for curing a spiritual disease;
both regard the mind as having an active, interactive role in the world,
shaping the world as it is being shaped by the world; both focus on the
phenomenology of experience—consciousness as it is directly sensed, from
within, as a primary source of knowledge; and both reject a deterministic or
mechanical view of causality in favor of a more interactive one. But these
points of similarity disguise deeper differences that can be recognized only
when the larger structural differences separating the Dhamma from
Romantic religion are made clear.
Those differences, in turn, will be acknowledged only when people can
see that the Romantic viewpoint is actually getting in the way of their well-
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