Buddhist Romanticism

teach them? And why should they bother to listen to what other people
say? Thus the Buddhist Romantic answer to one of the Buddha’s even more
basic questions—Does the idea of a path of practice make sense?—
contradicts itself. On the one hand, Buddhist Romantics teach meditation as
a path of practice; on the other, their underlying assumption that the
universe is One denies the freedom of choice needed for there to be the
possibility of following a path.
The early Romantics, even though they couldn’t provide a satisfactory
answer to the question of how freedom can be reconciled with a universal,
interdependent Oneness, did at least grapple with the issue. Buddhist
Romantics, however, never give it serious attention. At most, some of them
assert the possibility of freedom and describe how malleable the causal
connections in dependent co-arising can be—portraying them, for instance,
as a jeweled net or shimmering matrix—but rarely pursue the issue further
than that. If these images are examined carefully, though, they prove
wanting in two ways.
The first is simply a matter of consistency: If all factors in the web are
easily manipulated, then you yourself are easily manipulated. If you are
nothing but a cipher in a shimmering matrix, what means do you have to
exert a freely chosen force on any other part of the shimmer?
* * *
• The second way in which these images are wanting is less a matter of
internal consistency and more a matter of truth, directly related to Point 4,
the basic cause of suffering and its solution.
The Romantic idea that we suffer because we feel separate from the
world, and that suffering stops during moments when we have overcome
that sense of separation is, from the point of view of the Dhamma, only a
partial—and very poor—understanding of suffering and its end. Even if we
could constantly maintain a sense of Oneness with the causal connections
that constitute the world, would that really end suffering? Is the world
really a shimmering net of jewels, content simply to reflect one another and
needing nothing else for their sustenance?
As the Buddha pointed out, we live in a world where the basic
interaction is one of feeding off one another, emotionally and physically.
Inter-being is inter-eating. If we’re jewels, we’re jewels with teeth—and
those teeth are diamond-tipped, strong enough to shred other jewels to
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