Buddhist Romanticism

pieces. This is what it means to be a being, someone who has taken on
becoming in a world where other beings have also become and have their
sights on the same sources of food.
The Buddhist Romantic equation of suffering with a sense of a discrete,
separate self is sometimes justified by the idea that such a sense of
separateness is by its nature unstable. This, however, assumes that a
connected sense of self—or a sense of oneself as a process-being, rather than
a discrete being—would be any more stable. As the Dhamma repeatedly
states, every sense of self is a fabrication, and all fabrications are unstable
(§19, §22). They always need to feed. Even process-beings need to feed to
keep the process going. And there is no single mouth in the interconnected
universe that, when fed, would send the nourishment to all parts of the
universal organism. Each process feels its own hunger and needs to feed
itself from a limited range of food. So the switch from a discrete, separate
sense of self to an all-embracing process-self would not solve the problem
of suffering.
The image of the world that drove the Buddha to practice was one of fish
competing for the water in a diminishing pool (§27). And as he famously
said, even if it rained gold coins, that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy our
sensual desires (§29). Only if we train the mind to a dimension where there
is no felt hunger and no need to feed will we ever reach a genuine
happiness. The need to feed cannot be ended simply by seeing ourselves as
jewels reflecting a shimmering light. We have to uproot the source of our
hunger by overcoming the need to be a being. If we choose to stay
immersed in a web of conditions driven by hunger, we close ourselves to
any possibility that suffering can be brought to an end.
* * *
• Point 5, the nature of the religious experience: As noted in Chapter Five,
Schleiermacher’s belief that there was a single religious experience,
identical for all human beings, grew from his own monotheistic, Pietist
background, in which only one religious experience—a feeling of God’s
presence—was possible. When translated into Romantic terms, in which the
ultimate truth about reality was the infinite unity of the cosmos, this meant
that the only possible religious experience was a feeling of that unity. And
as we saw in Chapter Six, even as the West gained more knowledge about
non-monotheistic religious traditions, the transmitters of Romantic religion
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