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+ | ====== The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism ====== | ||
+ | <span hide>The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism</ | ||
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+ | Summary: | ||
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+ | Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, | ||
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+ | The German Romantics may be dead and almost forgotten, but their ideas are still very much alive. Their thought has survived because they were the first to tackle the problem of how it //feels// to grow up in a modern society. Their analysis of the problem, together with their proposed solution, still rings true. | ||
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+ | Modern society, they saw, is dehumanizing in that it denies human beings their wholeness. The specialization of labor leads to feelings of fragmentation and isolation; the bureaucratic state, to feelings of regimentation and constriction. The only cure for these feelings, the Romantics proposed, is the creative artistic act. This act integrates the divided self and dissolves its boundaries in an enlarged sense of identity and interconnectedness with other human beings and nature at large. Human beings are most fully human when free to create spontaneously from the heart. The heart' | ||
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+ | When psychology and psychotherapy developed as disciplines in the West, they absorbed many of the Romantics' | ||
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+ | In addition to influencing psychology, these conceptions inspired liberal Christianity and reform Judaism, which proposed that traditional doctrines had to be creatively recast to speak to each new generation in order to keep religious experience vital and alive. So it was only natural that when the Dharma came west, people interpreted it in line with these conceptions as well. Asian teachers — many of whom had absorbed Romantic ideas through Westernized education before coming here — found they could connect with Western audiences by stressing themes of spontaneity and fluidity in opposition to the " | ||
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+ | In fact, the Romantic view of religious life has shaped more than just isolated Dharma teachings. It colors the Western view of the purpose of Dharma practice as a whole. Western teachers from all traditions maintain that the aim of Buddhist practice is to gain the creative fluidity that overcomes dualities. As one author has put it, the Buddha taught that " | ||
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+ | Just as the Chinese had Taoism as their Dharma gate — the home-grown tradition providing concepts that helped them understand the Dharma — we in the West have Romanticism as ours. The Chinese experience with Dharma gates, though, contains an important lesson that is often overlooked. After three centuries of interest in Buddhist teachings, they began to realize that Buddhism and Taoism were asking different questions. As they rooted out these differences, | ||
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+ | Taken broadly, Romanticism and the Dharma view spiritual life in a similar light. Both regard religion as a product of human activity, rather than divine intervention. Both regard the essence of religion as experiential and pragmatic; and its role as therapeutic, | ||
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+ | These differences aren't just historical curiosities. They shape the presuppositions that meditators bring to the practice. Even when fully present, the mind carries along its past presuppositions, | ||
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+ | The Romantics took their original inspiration from an unexpected source: Kant, the wizened old professor whose daily walks were so punctual that his neighbors could set their clocks by him. In his //Critique of Judgment// he taught that aesthetic creation and feeling were the highest activities of the human mind, in that they alone could heal the dichotomies of human experience. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), | ||
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+ | In Schiller' | ||
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+ | Schiller saw the process of integration as unending: perfect unity could never be achieved. A meaningful life was one continually engaged in the //process// of integration. The path was the goal. | ||
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+ | It was also totally unpatterned and unconstrained. Given the free nature of the play drive, each person' | ||
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+ | Schiller' | ||
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+ | A few quotations from his essays, //On Religion,// will give a sense of Schleiermacher' | ||
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+ | Schiller and Schleiermacher both had a strong influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, which can easily be seen in the latter' | ||
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+ | At present, the Romantics and Transcendentalists are rarely read outside of literature or theology classes. Their ideas have lived on in the general culture largely because they were adopted by the discipline of psychology and translated into a vocabulary that was both more scientific and more accessible to the public at large. One of the most crucial translators was William James, who gave the psychological study of religion its modern form a century ago, in 1902, with the publication of //The Varieties of Religious Experience.// | ||
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+ | Still, James was influenced by the intellectual currents alive in his time, which shaped the way he converted his large mass of data into a psychology of religion. Although he spoke as a scientist, the current with the deepest influence on his thought was Romanticism. | ||
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+ | He followed the Romantics in saying that the function of religious experience was to heal the sense of " | ||
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+ | Drawing on Methodism to provide two categories for classifying all religious experiences — conversion and sanctification — James gave a Romantic interpretation to both. For the Methodists, these categories applied specifically to the soul's relationship to God. Conversion was the turning of the soul to God's will; sanctification, | ||
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+ | Also, James followed the Romantics in judging the effects of both types of experiences in this-worldly terms. Conversion experiences are healthy when they foster healthy sanctification: | ||
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+ | Other writers who took up the psychology of religion after James devised a more scientific vocabulary to analyze their data. Still, they maintained many of the Romantic notions that James had introduced into the field. | ||
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+ | For example, in //Modern Man in Search of a Soul// (1933), Carl Jung agreed that religion' | ||
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+ | Unlike James, Jung saw the integrated personality as lying above the rigid confines of morality. And, although he didn't use the term, he extolled what Keats called " | ||
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+ | In // | ||
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+ | Maslow had little use for traditional interpretations of peak experiences, | ||
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+ | These three writers on the psychology of religion, despite their differences, | ||
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+ | However, when we compare these expectations with the original principles of the Dharma, we find radical differences. The contrast between them is especially strong around the three most central issues of spiritual life: What is the essence of religious experience? What is the basic illness that religious experience can cure? And what does it mean to be cured? | ||
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+ | //The nature of religious experience.// | ||
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+ | However, the Dharma as expounded in its earliest records places training in oneness and a healthy sense of self prior to the most dramatic religious experiences. A healthy sense of self is fostered through training in generosity and virtue. A sense of oneness — peak or plateau — is attained in mundane levels of concentration (jhana) that constitute the path, rather than the goal of practice. The ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling, but of knowledge: skillful mastery of the principles of causality underlying actions and their results, followed by direct knowledge of the dimension beyond causality where all suffering stops. | ||
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+ | //The basic spiritual illness.// Romantic/ | ||
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+ | //The successful spiritual cure.// Romantic/ | ||
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+ | The Dharma, however, teaches that full Awakening achieves a total cure, opening to the unconditioned beyond time and space, at which point the task is done. The awakened person then follows a path "that can't be traced," | ||
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+ | When these two traditions are compared point-by-point, | ||
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+ | Now, for many people, these limitations don't matter, because they come to Buddhist Romanticism for reasons rooted more in the present than in the past. Modern society is now even more schizoid than anything the Romantics ever knew. It has made us more and more dependent on wider and wider circles of other people, yet keeps most of those dependencies hidden. Our food and clothing come from the store, but how they got there, or who is responsible for ensuring a continual supply, we don't know. When investigative reporters track down the web of connections from field to final product in our hands, the bare facts read like an expos& | ||
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+ | However, Buddhist Romanticism also helps close the gate to areas of the Dharma that would challenge people in their hope for an ultimate happiness based on interconnectedness. Traditional Dharma calls for renunciation and sacrifice, on the grounds that all interconnectedness is essentially unstable, and any happiness based on this instability is an invitation to suffering. True happiness has to go beyond interdependence and interconnectedness to the unconditioned. In response, the Romantic argument brands these teachings as dualistic: either inessential to the religious experience or inadequate expressions of it. Thus, it concludes, they can safely be ignored. In this way, the gate closes off radical areas of the Dharma designed to address levels of suffering remaining even when a sense of wholeness has been mastered. | ||
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+ | It also closes off two groups of people who would otherwise benefit greatly from Dharma practice: | ||
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+ | -- Those who see that interconnectedness won't end the problem of suffering and are looking for a more radical cure. | ||
+ | -- Those from disillusioned and disadvantaged sectors of society, who have less invested in the continuation of modern interconnectedness and have abandoned hope for meaningful reform or happiness within the system. | ||
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+ | For both of these groups, the concepts of Buddhist Romanticism seem Pollyannaish; | ||
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+ | Like so many other products of modern life, the root sources of Buddhist Romanticism have for too long remained hidden. This is why we haven' | ||
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