Buddhist Romanticism

an effort to shape their Romantic ideas into a coherent worldview; others
don’t. Some—and, ironically, these are among the most consistently
Romantic in their own thought—misunderstand Romanticism to be nothing
but anti-scientific emotionalism or egotism, and so have explicitly
denounced it. But the tendency to Romanticize the Dhamma is present, at
least to some extent, in them all.
We will follow the twenty points defining Romantic religion listed at the
end of Chapter Four. However, because many of the passages quoted here
cover several points at once, those points will be discussed together. Some
of the points have been rephrased to reflect the fact, noted in the preceding
chapter, that Buddhist Romanticism has followed such thinkers as James,
Jung, and Maslow in dropping the idea of infinity from its view of the
universe. Otherwise, only Point 18 in the original list is not explicitly
present in the Theravāda version of Buddhist Romanticism, although it is
strongly explicit in the Mahāyāna one. Still—as we will see—it is sometimes
implicit in Theravāda Romanticism too.
These are the principles by which Buddhist Romanticism can be
recognized:
The first three principles go together, as they describe both the basic
question that the Dhamma is said to answer, and the answer it is said to
provide.
1) The object of religion is not the end of suffering, but the relationship of
humanity with the universe.
2) The universe is a vast organic unity.
3) Each human being is both an individual organism and a part of the vast
organic unity of the universe.
“[W]ith the spiritual path, what we are aiming at is to penetrate
the question of what we are.”
“According to the world’s great spiritual traditions and perennial
philosophy, both East and West, the critical question that each of us
must ask ourselves is ‘Who am I?’ Our response is of vital importance
to our happiness and well-being. How at ease we feel in our body,
mind, and in the world, as well as how we behave toward others and
the environment all revolve around how we come to view ourselves
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