Buddhist Romanticism

of a framework that doesn’t derive from becoming at all. Its perspective is
phenomenological, meaning that it describes processes as they are
immediately experienced. From that perspective, it shows how ignorance
gives rise to concepts of “self” and “universe,” how those concepts lead to
suffering, and how suffering ends when ignorance of those processes is
brought to an end. To reframe this teaching, limiting it to a description of
what occurs in the universe or in the self, prevents it from leading beyond
the universe and beyond the self.
The second reason why it’s ironic for Buddhist Romanticism to present
dependent co-arising as a description of the Oneness of all things is that the
Buddha explicitly cited dependent co-arising as a teaching that avoided the
question of whether things are One or not (§25). In other words, his
rejection of the teaching of the Oneness of the universe was so radical that
he refused to get involved in the issue at all.
There are two possible reasons why the Buddha did not want to describe
the universe as One. The first is that although he affirmed that
concentration practice can lead to states of non-dual consciousness in which
all experience is viewed as One, he noted that such states are fabricated
(§24) and thus fall short of the goal. Only when a meditator learns to view
all objects of awareness as something separate (§23) can he or she regard
them with the detachment needed to overcome any clinging to them—an
issue that we will discuss in more detail below, under Point 5. To regard the
universe as One closes the door to this sense of separateness needed to
reach to freedom.
The second possible reason for not wanting to describe the universe as
One can easily be surmised from what we have repeatedly seen of the
Romantic problems concerning the issue of freedom. There is no convincing
way to explain how a part of a larger Oneness can exercise freedom of
choice. At most, such a part can be allowed by other parts to follow its inner
drives, but it cannot choose what those drives are. Otherwise, it would be
like a stomach suddenly deciding that it wanted to switch jobs with the
liver or to strike out on its own: The organism would die.
At the same time, given that all parts of an organic system act in constant
reciprocity, there’s no way that any part of a larger whole can lay
independent claim to its drives as truly its own. When a stomach starts
secreting digestive juices, the signal comes from somewhere else. So if
freedom means only the ability to follow one’s inner nature or drives, the
296