Buddhist Romanticism

ought on an attack of dysentery, instead of being reproached for the meal,
would be praised for having given such a meritorious meal. After
encouraging his disciples to achieve consummation in the practice through
being heedful, he entered the various stages of concentration and then was
totally unbound from becoming of every sort.
After seven days of funeral celebrations, his followers cremated his
body. The relics were then enshrined in monuments in the major kingdoms
of northern India. In the Theravāda tradition, the Saṅgha of monks that he
established has lasted until the present day.
FIVE EARLY ROMANTICS
When discussing the early German Romantics, one of the first problems
is determining who counts as a member of the group and who doesn’t.
Here our task is made somewhat easier by the fact that we are focusing on a
specific aspect of early Romantic thought—Romantic views on religion—so
we can limit our discussion to those Romantics who focused on issues of
religion in light of the Romantic worldview.
The obvious candidates to include in any discussion of early Romantic
religion are Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel, as they were
the Romantics who wrote most prolifically on the topic. In fact,
Schleiermacher’s Talks on Religion for Its Cultured Despisers (1799) was the
first major book to treat religion from a Romantic standpoint. It is the
defining text of Romantic religion.
Another obvious candidate for inclusion is Friedrich von Hardenberg,
who is better known under his penname, Novalis. Novalis was Schlegel’s
philosophical and literary partner in the years during which both of them
worked out the implications of the Romantic worldview, and his ideas on
the topic of authenticity seem to have been a major influence on
Schleiermacher’s thought.
Two other candidates for inclusion are somewhat more controversial.
One is Friedrich Hölderlin. Although his views on religion were very
similar to Schlegel’s, he is sometimes excluded from the category of early
Romantic on the grounds that he was only tangentially connected to the
circle of friends who, during the late 1790’s, gathered in the university town
of Jena at the home of August Schlegel, Friedrich’s brother, and to whom
the appellation “Romantic” was originally applied. However, Hölderlin’s
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