Buddhist Romanticism

inevitably involves some devaluation of the lower one: so we are told
that this realm of samsara is a place of suffering, craving, and
delusion… the ultimate goal is individual salvation, which involves
transcending this lower world by doing what is necessary to qualify
for the higher one…
“Buddhists don’t aim at heaven: we want to awaken. But for us,
too, salvation is individual: yes, I hope you will become enlightened
also, but ultimately my highest well-being—my enlightenment—is
distinct from yours. Or so we have been taught.…
“Needless to say, that is not an adequate response [to the ecocrisis].”
“Notions have arisen, and even been ascribed to the Buddha… that
suffering is a spiritual mistake… These errors have perpetuated the
popular stereotype of Buddhism as a world-denying religion, offering
escape from this realm of suffering into some abstract, disembodied
heaven.…
“The gate of the Dharma does not close behind us to secure us in a
cloistered existence aloof from the turbulence and suffering of
samsara, so much as it leads us out into a life of risk for the sake of all
beings.”
* * *
9) Although the religious experience is not transcendent, it does carry with it an
ability to see the commonplace events of the immanent world as sublime and
miraculous. In fact, this ability is a sign of the authenticity of one’s sense of unity
with the larger whole.
“To know ourselves as emerging from earthlife doesn’t in any way
deny our divinity: it only seems to deny our exclusive divinity. The
sacred is alive not just in us, but everywhere.”
“In relinquishing the obsession of being an isolated self, Buddha
opens himself fearlessly and calmly to the tumult of the sublime.”
“Fear of being unspiritual puts up walls, isolates our heart from
living, divides the world so that part of it is seen as not holy. These
interior boundaries must be dissolved. There is an underlying unity
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