Buddhist Romanticism

possibilities, new expressions of art, music, and life-forms by the
millions. It is only because everything is changing that such bountiful
and boundless creativity exists.”
“Our mission is not to escape from the world… but to fall in love
with our world. We are made for that, because we co-arise with her—
in a dance where we discover ourselves and lose ourselves over and
over.”
The idea that no human being can awaken to a transcendent dimension
is sometimes inferred from the fact that the Buddha himself, even after his
awakening, kept encountering Māra, the embodiment of temptation. In line
with some modern psychological theories, Māra is understood here not as
an actual non-human being but as a symbol of the defilements still lurking
in the Buddha’s heart.
“Unless we are prepared to regard the devil as a ghostly
apparition who sits down and has conversations with Buddha, we
cannot but understand him as a metaphoric way of describing
Buddha’s own inner life. Although Buddha is said to have
‘conquered the forces of Mara’ on achieving awakening, that did not
prevent Mara from harassing him until shortly before his death forty
years later. Mara’s tireless efforts to undermine Buddha by accusing
him of insincerity, self-deception, idleness, arrogance and aloofness
are ways of describing the doubts within Buddha’s own mind.”
“No matter what version [of the Buddha’s awakening] we read,
Mara does not go away. There is no state of enlightened retirement,
no experience of awakening that places us outside the truth of
change.… All spiritual life exists in an alternation of gain and loss,
pleasure and pain.”
In other cases, the immanent view of awakening is simply asserted as
superior to the transcendent, which—the argument goes—is dualistic and
tends to foster indifference to the world at a time when the world is in
urgent need of our love and attention.
“Buddhism also dualizes insofar as this world of samsara is
distinguished from nirvana.… the contrast between the two worlds
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