Buddhist Romanticism

naturally deepen over time. With each new experience of that unity, one
feels a natural desire to express it: This desire is the origin of religious
traditions and texts. But because unity is infinite, and expressions of
feelings are finite, no religious tradition has the final word on how infinite
unity feels. And because any expression of a feeling has to be shaped by
time and place, each person is duty bound to express the feeling of infinite
unity in ever-new ways. Only this can keep religion alive as cultures
change.
For the Dhamma, however, full, final awakening is possible in this life,
and the texts cite people by the thousands who, in the Buddha’s time,
confirmed this fact for themselves. Once gained, full awakening is fully
understood. The Buddha, in teaching, was not interested in expressing his
feelings about the infinite. Instead, his interest lay in explaining the path of
action by which other people could reach nibbāna and in inducing them to
follow it. Because the path is timeless—and because it has stood up to
repeated testing for more than 2,600 years—there is no need to formulate it
in new ways. In fact, the greatest gift one can give to other people now and
into the future is to pass along knowledge of the Buddha’s path in as
faithful a way as possible, so that they can test it for themselves.
When we examine the way Buddhism is currently being taught in the
West—and, in some cases, in Asia to people with a Western education—we
find that it often sides with the Romantic position and against the Dhamma
on all five of these questions. And because questions shape the structures
that give concepts their meaning and purpose, the result is that modern
Buddhism is Romantic in its body, and Buddhist only in its outer garb. Or
to use another analogy, modern Buddhism is like a building whose
structure is fully Romantic, with Buddhist elements used as decorations,
reshaped to fit into the confines of that structure. This is why this trend in
modern Buddhism is best referred to as Buddhist Romanticism, rather than
Romantic Buddhism.
From a Romantic point of view, even a structural change in the Dhamma
is no serious problem, for such a change would simply fall in line with the
Romantic notion that all paths of open receptivity lead to the goal, so that
replacing one path with another would make no practical difference. But
from the point of view of the Dhamma, the Romantic goal offers only a
limited possibility of freedom. If the Romantic goal is regarded as the one
and only aim of spiritual life, it stands in the way of the further goal of total
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