The Roots Of Buddhist Romanticism

[camerata]

The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. But what they may not realize is that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha's teachings but from the Dharma gate of Western psychology, through which the Buddha's words have been filtered. They draw less from the root sources of the Dharma than from their own hidden roots in Western culture: the thought of the German Romantics.

[...]

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?

The nature of religious experience. For humanistic psychology, as for the Romantics, religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer divisions. These experiences come in two sorts: peak experiences, in which the sense of oneness breaks through divisions and dualities; and plateau experiences, where — through training — the sense of oneness creates a healthy sense of self, informing all of one's activities in everyday life.

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.

The basic spiritual illness. Romantic/humanistic psychology states that the root of suffering is a sense of divided self, which creates not only inner boundaries — between reason and emotion, body and mind, ego and shadow — but also outer ones, separating us from other people and from nature and the cosmos as a whole. The Dharma, however, teaches that the essence of suffering is clinging, and that the most basic form of clinging is self-identification, regardless of whether one's sense of self is finite or infinite, fluid or static, unitary or not.

The successful spiritual cure. Romantic/humanistic psychology maintains that a total, final cure is unattainable. Instead, the cure is an ongoing process of personal integration. The enlightened person is marked by an enlarged, fluid sense of self, unencumbered by moral rigidity. Guided primarily by what feels right in the context of interconnectedness, one negotiates with ease — like a dancer — the roles and rhythms of life. Having learned the creative answer to the question, "What is my true identity?", one is freed from the need for certainties about any of life's other mysteries.

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," but is incapable of transgressing the basic principles of morality. Such a person realizes that the question, "What is my true identity?" was ill-conceived, and knows from direct experience the total release from time and space that will happen at death.

When these two traditions are compared point-by-point, it's obvious that — from the perspective of early Buddhism — Romantic/humanistic psychology gives only a partial and limited view of the potentials of spiritual practice. This means that Buddhist Romanticism, in translating the Dharma into Romantic principles, gives only a partial and limited view of what Buddhism has to offer.

Full essay.

[Xangsamhua]

Thanks, Camerata, for posting this.

I read through it rather quickly and don't know how much of it "stuck", but I must say I don't like the term "Buddhist Romanticism".

While not denying the importance of feeling, of aesthetics, and the need for interconnectedness and belonging, I'm not sure that the Romantics, especially the German ones, have been a beneficial legacy for post-Enlightenment Europeans.

Filling the vacuum left by the withdrawal and eventual death of God among the intelligentsia by sentimentality and aesthetics led to the utopianism of Marx (heroicization of the proletariat and "the withering away of the state"), the romanticization of revolution (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin), the idolization of the state (Prussia) and of the German people (volk), the combination of nationalism, volk-romanticism and anti-semitism (Wagner), the corruption of German Protestantism (the Pro-Nazi "New National Church") and the apotheosis of German Romanticism in National Socialism and all its derivatives. Somewhere in there sits the despair of Nietzsche and the extreme self-centredness of Rousseau, though he was uninfluenced by the Germans, as far as I know.

The "[inter]connectedness" that the Romantics sought and praised was not a connectedness with Dharma or a gate for it into Europe. The Romantics for the most part did not seek connectedness with the realities of life, death, suffering and karma as applied to themselves except in sentimental and destructive ways. Hence the support of people like Marx, Shelley and Byron for revolutionary movements of oppressed people, the first two at a theoretical and physical distance, the latter directly involved. None of them, in fact, contributed anything to the awareness of the real causes of suffering and how to overcome it. Nor did the pacifist romantic, Tolstoy, or the revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, etc. Romanticism-inspired revolution was essentially and effectively destructive.

Romanticism lives on in the West in the demand for gratification, preferably instant, the belief that what we want we deserve, that whatever we feel deserves respect, especially when dressed up as opinion, and the apparent need to lionize and idealize people we cast in romantic molds, regardless of the their deserts, and preferably exotic and/or dead, whether Che, Fidel, Ho, Mao, Gandhi or JFK, for example, or the heroes and heroines of one's national past (Joan of Arc - a poor, decent, though deluded girl made into a monster by elevation to heroine and saintly status).

The Western romantic narrative applied to the events of March to May 2010 in Bangkok, was evident in the reporting of the foreign news media, who at the time saw these events as nothing more than a peasant rebellion against a callous urban ruling elite. (Later academic analysis is more subtle, fortunately. See Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand, Silkworm 2011).

I'm not challenging Thanissaro Bhikkhu's impressive overview. I just think that Buddhism and Romanticism are terms that do not sit well together.

[huli]

I found the author's comparison and contrast of Buddhist and humanistic psychology riveting. The term "Romanticism" and the discussions therein didn't really add that much. I would have just left it at humanistic psychology.

[sabaijai]

To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha's teachings but from the Dharma gate of Western psychology, through which the Buddha's words have been filtered.

Agreed. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.