Buddhist Romanticism

• Instead, Buddhist Romanticism teaches that modern Buddhists are
actually doing the Dhamma a favor by changing it to suit the needs and
suppositions of modern culture, in line with Point 20: the duty to alter one’s
religious tradition in line with the times.
Here it’s important to remember the Romantic assumption underlying
this principle: that the universe is an organism with a purpose, and that its
purpose is becoming more fully realized with the passage of time. Thus
evolutions in society are good, and religions should evolve in order to keep
up with them. This assumption receives strong reinforcement in a culture
such as ours where technological progress leads people to believe that the
culture as a whole is evolving far beyond anything the world has ever
known.
But there is very little to support this assumption. In fact, the Pāli suttas
present the opposite picture: that human life is getting worse as a sphere for
Dhamma practice, and will continue to deteriorate until the Dhamma
disappears entirely. And it’s easy to cite features of modern life that
confirm this picture. To begin with, Dhamma practice is a skill, requiring
the attitudes and mental abilities developed by manual skills—such as
patience, respect, humility, and resilience—and yet we are a society whose
manual skills are fast eroding away. Thus the mental virtues nurtured by
manual skills have atrophied. At the same time, the social hierarchy
required by skills—in which students apprentice themselves to a master—
has mostly disappeared, so we’ve unlearned the attitudes needed to live in
hierarchy in a healthy and productive manner.
We like to think that we’re shaping the Dhamma with our highest
cultural ideals, but some of our lower ways are actually dominating the
shape of Western Dhamma: The sense of neurotic entitlement produced by
the culture of consumerism is a case in point, as are the hype of the mass
media and the demands of the mass-market for a Dhamma that sells.
So just because Buddhism has been changed in the past doesn’t mean
that those changes were good, or that they should be taken as an example
or justification for new changes now. Here, again, the organic notion of
change has created confusion. All too often Buddhism is presented as an
organism that wisely adapts itself to its new environments. But Buddhism
is not a plant or an animal. It doesn’t have a will, and it doesn’t adapt;
people adapt Buddhism to their various ends. In some cases, those ends are
admirable. Some novel elements—in terms of language and imagery—have
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