Buddhist Romanticism

ealization, is inadequate to our current needs. Such an orientation
has led to a sharp division of duties that puts our future at risk.…
This division also opens the doors of influence over our communal
institutions to religious dogmatists and fundamentalists.
“As I see it, our collective future requires that we fashion an
integral type of spirituality that can bridge the three domains of
human life.”
In other cases, the Darwinian need for Buddhism to change is bolstered
by an appeal to the Buddha’s own teachings on change:
“Since all schools of Buddhism also arise from conditions, they
share the very nature of the conditioned things they tirelessly
describe as transient, imperfect, and empty. This is true even of the
original Indian form of the dharma at the time of Gautama himself.
To say that Buddhism is empty is to recognize how it is nothing but
an emergent property of unique and unrepeatable situations. Such an
insight into the nature of things is entirely in keeping with the central
Buddhist understanding of the inescapable contingency of existence
(pratitya-samutpada [paṭicca samuppāda]).… This core insight into
contingency emphasized how everything emerges from a
shimmering matrix of changing conditions and is destined to change
into something else.… In this way the non-essential vision of the
dharma converges seamlessly with a historical and Darwinian
evolutionary understanding of life.”
“This strongly held view [that Buddhism should not change]
seems a bit odd in a religion that also teaches that resistance to allpervasive
change is a root cause of misery.”
Some of the strongest statements of the need to change Buddhism come
from teachers who, following the example of the more politically involved
Transcendentalists, give high priority to social action in their understanding
of the spiritual life.
“In each historical period, the Dharma finds new means to unfold
its potential in ways precisely linked to that era’s distinctive
conditions. Our own era provides the appropriate stage for the
transcendent truth of the Dharma to bend back upon the world and
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