Buddhist Romanticism

often explicitly extolled:
“As one matures in spiritual life, one becomes more comfortable
with paradox, more appreciative of life’s ambiguities, its many levels
and inherent conflicts. One develops a sense of life’s irony, metaphor,
and humor and a capacity to embrace the whole, with its beauty and
outrageousness, in the graciousness of the heart.… When we embrace
life’s opposites, we hold our own birth and death, our own joy and
suffering, as inseparable. We honor the sacred in both emptiness and
form.”
Applied to the Buddhist tradition, irony would mean maintaining that
there are many paths to the goal, and that freedom is to be found, not by
following any particular Buddhist path, but by standing above the confines
of any path and exercising one’s freedom in being able to move lightly and
easily among many.
In some cases, this attitude of irony is justified from within the Buddhist
tradition itself by pointing to instances where the Buddha warned about
attachment to views.
“[F]lexibility understands that there is not just one way of practice
or one fine spiritual tradition, but there are many ways. It
understands that spiritual life is not about adopting any one
particular philosophy or set of beliefs or teachings, that it is not a
cause for taking a stand in opposition to someone else or something
else. It is an easiness of heart that understands that all of the spiritual
vehicles are rafts to cross the stream to freedom. In his earliest
dialogue, the Buddha cautioned against confusing the raft with the
shore and against adopting any rigid opinion or view. He went on,
‘How could anything in this world bring conflict to a wise person
who has not adopted any view?’… The flexibility of heart brings a
humor to spiritual practice. It allows us to see that there are a
hundred thousand skillful means of awakening, that there are times
for formal and systematic ways and times for spur-of-the-moment
and unusual and outrageous ones.”
However, in making this argument, this passage—like many others with
a similar point—misrepresents what the Buddha actually said. He drew a
clear line between the role of views when one is still on the path and their
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