Buddhist Romanticism

creation.
For Novalis, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher, the act of creation was
pleasurable. To create art, they said, one simply had to induce within
oneself an attitude of open receptivity to nature, and to trust that the
feelings that welled up within that state were expressions of nature as well.
If those expressions broke all the established rules of what art should be,
well and good. Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, it was actually a
sign that they were at the forefront of the evolution of consciousness. This is
why these writers tended to write spontaneously with a minimum amount
of editing.
The important point in their eyes was for artists not to take their
creations too seriously. As Schlegel liked to say, the point of creation was
not the art produced, but the act of creation itself. To be truly free, an artist
could not concern him or herself with the results of yesterday’s creation, for
that would interfere with one’s ability to be open to new creative
inspirations today. It’s hard not to see, in Schlegel’s lack of concern for the
consequences of his creative powers, a parallel in his attitude toward his
affair with Dorothea.
For Hölderlin, however, the act of creation came after his manic periods,
when he had gained a sense of Oneness with the divine expressed as a
wrathful power. Only when the spell of the wrath broke was he in a fit state
to reflect and put his thoughts on paper, but the period of reflection was
also accompanied by a deep sense of separation and unworthiness. Thus, in
his experience, even though a sense of Oneness could be ecstatic, it was also
a curse. “If only one weren’t so periodic!” he once exclaimed. Unlike
Schlegel, he was dead earnest about his poetry. This was one of the reasons
why The Death of Empedocles was never finished, and why his hymns and
odes went through repeated revisions, often drastic. Each new experience
of Oneness left him dissatisfied with what he had learned from earlier ones.
When we compare the way these writers approach the religious
experience with the Buddha’s approach, three points stand out.
• The first is that none of them approached the issue of religious
experience with anything near the rigor and discipline of the Buddha’s
search for the deathless. Instead, they approached religion through
symphilosophy—discussions that were pursued less with the purpose of
coming to firm conclusions and more with the purpose of entertaining and
exploring original ideas.
57