Buddhist Romanticism

that could not possibly belong to the self. If you think you are One with
your neighbor’s tree, try cutting it down and see if it’s really yours (§21).
On the other hand, if the concept of self is stretched to include the cosmos,
you won’t look for the way “self” as a mental action forms around desires
on a moment-to-moment basis. If you don’t examine your sense of self on
this level, you won’t be able to work free of it (§22).
So there are important practical consequences for adopting the Buddhist
Romantic position on these points over the Buddha’s. If you believe that
there is only one religious experience, then when you have an impressive
unifying experience, you will not apply the Buddha’s tests to it. If you are
satisfied with a feeling of Oneness, you will not look further to see whether
that feeling—like all other feelings—is fabricated or not. In this way, you
risk settling for much less than second best.
* * *
• Points 6 and 7, the immanence of the religious goal and the limited freedom it
can bring: The idea that the religious experience leads only to an immanent
dimension, and not to a transcendent one, is drawn from the Romantic
definition, under Points 2 and 3, of what a human being is: an integral,
organic part of a cosmos with no transcendent dimension. As part of such a
cosmos, there is no way that you could experience anything transcending
the cosmos. Even in a mechanistic model of the cosmos, the same
limitations prevail. When Buddhist Romanticism accepts either of these
worldviews, it is forced to accept those limitations as well.
This approach is the reverse of the Buddha’s. Instead of starting with a
definition of what a human being is, and then deducing from that what a
human being can know, he worked the other way around: exploring first
what a human being can know through experience, and then—in light of
how the best possible experience was attained—drawing conclusions about
how to answer the question of what a human being is. His conclusion was
that holding to any definition of what a human being is would ultimately
stand in the way of that experience, which is why he developed his
teachings on not-self, while at the same time refusing to answer whether or
not the self exists (§§15–16).
In this sense, the Buddha’s approach is somewhat like the approach that
James and Jung followed at a time when the mechanistic model of the
universe was ascendant: Instead of starting with the laws of the cosmos
301