Introduction
Questioning Buddhist Romanticism
Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, spontaneity, ego-transcendence, non-judgmentalism, and integration of the personality. They tend not to realize that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha’s teachings but from their hidden roots in Western culture: the thought of the early German Romantics.
The names of the early Romantics—Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Novalis—are largely forgotten, but their ideas are still very much alive in Western culture. They were among the first to analyze the problem of what it feels like to grow up in modern culture, where science teaches a dizzying perspective of deep space and deep time, and where rationalized economic and political systems foster a sense of fragmentation within and without. The Romantic analysis of how spiritual life, approached as an art of the emotions, can enhance inner psychological health and outer harmony in modern culture has continued to shape popular ideas on these issues up to the present day.
If the influence of early Romanticism on modern Buddhism went no further than a few isolated concepts, it would not be much of a problem—simply a matter of mapping familiar Western terms onto unfamiliar Buddhist terms so that Buddhist concepts would make intuitive sense to people with a Western background. The only issue would be determining whether the terms were properly applied, and tweaking any that were off the mark. And it might be argued that fitting Romantic concepts into a Buddhist framework automatically changes those concepts in a Buddhist direction. But the situation is the other way around. The influence of Romanticism on modern Buddhism has penetrated through the surface and into the bone, shaping not only isolated concepts but also the underlying structures of thought from which those concepts take their meaning. In other words, Romanticism has provided the framework into which Buddhist concepts have been placed, reshaping those concepts toward Romantic ends.
When we compare the Dhamma—the teachings of the Buddha—to the religious thought of the early Romantics, we see that they differ radically on a structural level in how they define all the important questions concerning the purpose of religion, the nature of the basic spiritual problem, the cure to that problem, how the cure can be effected, and the effect of that cure on the person cured.
• For the Romantics, religion is concerned with establishing a right relationship between human beings and the universe. For the Dhamma, religion is concerned with gaining total freedom from suffering and stress, beyond “human being,” “universe,” or any relationship at all.
• For the Romantics, the basic spiritual problem is ignorance of human identity—that each person is an integral part of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos. This ignorance, in turn, leads to an alienating sense of separation: within oneself, between oneself and other human beings, and between oneself and nature at large. For the Dhamma, the basic spiritual problem is ignorance of what suffering is, how it’s caused, and how it can be ended. In fact, the Dhamma lists among the causes of suffering the attempt even to define what a human being is or a human being’s place within the universe.
• For the Romantics, the basic spiritual cure lies in gaining an immediate felt sense of unity within oneself and between oneself and the universe. For the Dhamma, a felt sense of unified awareness is part of the path to a cure, but the ultimate cure involves going beyond feelings—and everything else with which one builds a sense of identity—to a direct realization of nibbāna (nirvāṇa): a dimension beyond Oneness and multiplicity, beyond the universe, beyond causal relationships, and beyond the dimensions of time and space.
• For the Romantics, there are many ways to induce a spiritual cure, but they all involve inducing a sense of receptivity to all things as they are. For the Dhamma, there is only one way to nibbāna—the path of skills called the noble eightfold path—against which all mental states are judged as skillful and unskillful, with skillful states to be fostered and unskillful ones to be abandoned in whatever way is effective.
• For the Romantics, the cure is never final, but must be continually pursued throughout life. One’s understanding of inner and outer unity can 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 freedom.
In fact, as we will see when we examine the logical implications of the Romantic worldview, the idea of the universe as an infinite organic unity offers no possibility of genuine freedom of choice for any part of that unity. If your kidneys, for example, were free to do what they chose, they could go on strike to demand more dignified work, and your body would die. Similarly, in a universe where all are part of a larger Oneness, no one has freedom of choice even in common, everyday matters. People simply have to follow their nature, with no choice as to what that nature might be. But as the Buddha pointed out, if there were no freedom of choice, the idea of a path of practice would make no sense, because no one would be free to choose whether or not to practice it.
So, for anyone sincerely interested in the path to the freedom promised by the Dhamma, Buddhist Romanticism is very much a problem. It closes the path to two groups of people who mistake it for genuine Dhamma: those attracted to Romantic ideas, and those repelled by them. It teaches the first group a very limited idea of how much freedom a human being can possibly experience. It teaches the second group not to take the Dhamma seriously at all.
For both groups, the problem is a lack of awareness: not knowing that Buddhist Romanticism is one thing, and the Dhamma another. So, for the sake of both groups, it’s important to raise awareness of how Buddhist Romanticism and the Dhamma are two different things—overlapping in some areas, but nevertheless coming from radically different assumptions and leading to radically different goals. In this way, members of the first group will be in a position to make an informed choice: Do they want to stay in the comfort zone of Romantic ideas, or do they want to strive for something more promising even though it’s more challenging?
As for members of the second group, they will be in a better position to open their minds, gain access to the actual Dhamma, and judge it on its own terms. In both cases, the advantage will be that, when choosing how much to take from the Dhamma, their choices will be informed.
Unfortunately, the ignorance that allows people to confuse Buddhist Romanticism with the Dhamma is very complex, and exists on many levels. First, there is simple ignorance about what the Buddha actually taught. This is partly the fault of past Buddhists, some of whom continued to create texts that they attributed to the Buddha many centuries after his passing. On top of this, there has been a tendency in the West to misquote traditional Buddhist texts, attributing the misquotes to the Buddha himself, often on the Romantic principle that to force an ancient text to speak to the needs of modern people is to do it a favor, even if that means radically changing what the text has to say.
Ironically, an even greater reason for ignorance about Buddhist Romanticism is a general ignorance in Western culture about its own history, and the history of Romantic ideas in particular. In some cases, this can be traced to a widespread belief that society and culture have changed so much in the 21st century that we are no longer influenced by the past; thus, there is no reason to know anything about what people in the past thought. This attitude blinds us to the fact that many of those ancient thoughts still actually influence the way we think today.
Another reason for our ignorance about the past is the belief that ideas alive at present have survived where other ideas have died because the survivors are more objectively true. Therefore there’s no point in learning about ideas that perished along the side of the road, or about how the survivors came to survive. This belief, though, ignores the extent to which ideas can be forgotten even when they are true. It also ignores the extent to which ideas can survive not because they are true but because they are useful, and that there’s a need to look into what uses and whose uses those ideas are being pressed to serve. Otherwise, when adopting the ideas around us, we risk serving purposes—both within us and without—that cannot be trusted.
But even among people who have some knowledge and interest in history there is a general ignorance about the Romantics and their influence on present thought. Even in scholarly literature, there has been no comprehensive study of Romantic ideas on religion and their impact on later generations. This leaves us with nothing but popular perceptions of the Romantics, which often turn out to be misinformed.
For example, a common misperception of the Romantics is that they opposed science and exalted the emotions of the Self over the hard facts of the world. Actually, though, the Romantics responded positively to the sciences of their time, which—in the case of astronomy, biology, paleontology, and geology—saw the universe as an infinite, evolving, organic Oneness, and each human being as a part of that Oneness in an interactive relationship with its environment. From this view, the Romantics developed the theory of the microcosm: that because each human being was shaped internally by the same forces that operated externally, a study of one’s inner emotions was neither self-indulgent nor egotistical. It actually gave objective knowledge about the forces acting on a larger scale in the cosmos. At the same time, knowing the latest scientific findings about external processes at work in the cosmos would give objective knowledge of the processes working internally, in one’s own body and mind.
So, instead of gazing only inside and exalting the Self over the world, the Romantics looked both within and without for better ways to know both self and world so that they could better foster the forward evolution of both.
Because this fact is so poorly understood, we have the ironic situation in which some modern Buddhist teachers, while denouncing the Romantics for being unscientific and egotistical, propose that Buddhism should be altered to fit in with the paradigms of modern science or to place greater importance on our collective interconnectedness—unaware of the fact that both of these proposals are exactly what the Romantics themselves would have espoused. This is one of the reasons why modern Buddhist teachers, though sometimes open about the fact that they are altering and updating the Dhamma as they interpret it for the West, are nevertheless unaware of where their interpretations come from.
Given these many levels of unawareness, it should come as no surprise that Buddhist Romanticism has rarely been questioned. It is simply accepted as a valid version of the Dhamma for our place in time. Even the scholarly literature on Western Buddhism—to the extent that it has taken note of Buddhist Romanticism—tends to view the rise of Buddhist Romanticism as both necessary and good in terms of the laws of cultural change. The scholars themselves rarely stop to ask where those supposed laws came from. And it turns out that they originated with the early Romantics. In fact, as we will see, the academic study of religion is one of the main vehicles by which Romantic views on religion have been transmitted to the modern world.
But there is a further irony. One of the principles of the Dhamma that has been adopted by Buddhist Romanticism is that the Dhamma should not simply be accepted on faith. Instead, it should be put to the test, in practice, to see if it really works. But if the Dhamma is filtered through Buddhist Romanticism, it won’t get a fair hearing, for its message will be garbled. And if it doesn’t get a fair hearing, there’s no way to subject it to a fair test. At the same time, if Buddhist Romanticism is not recognized as something different from the Dhamma, there is no way that it can be tested in a way that allows for a fair comparison as to which body of teachings gives better results.
Thus this book.
Its purpose is to raise awareness about the fact of Buddhist Romanticism, so that people who are interested in putting an end to suffering will be able to ask informed questions, both about the Dhamma and about Buddhist Romanticism, and to gain a sense of the practical implications of choosing one over the other.
Part of the inspiration for this book came from studying the process by which Buddhism entered China many years ago. In their first three centuries of contact with Buddhism, the Chinese had Taoism as their Dhamma gate. In other words, when Chinese intellectuals first learned about the Dhamma, they interpreted it in line with Taoism, placing Buddhist concepts in the context of a Taoist worldview. In fact, early translators used the word tao to translate a wide range of Buddhist concepts, such as dhamma, yoga, awakening (bodhi), and path (magga). These and other Dhamma concepts were then applied to answering questions that arose from within the Taoist context. At the same time, the myth developed that the Buddha had actually been taught by the Taoist sage, Lao-tze, and that unfamiliar elements in the Buddha’s teaching could be attributed to the fact that Indians, being barbarians, had garbled Lao-tze’s message. This was how isolated Buddhist ideas began entering Chinese culture.
However, in the fourth century, monks such as Tao-an (312–385) and his disciple, Hui-yüan (334–circa 416) began to realize that Buddhism and Taoism were asking different questions. As these monks rooted out and exposed these differences, they started using Buddhist ideas to question their Taoist presuppositions. This was the origin of a larger movement to try to understand Buddhism on its own terms, and to get the most out of the Dhamma by adopting the questions it asked. In this way, Buddhism, instead of turning into a drop in the Taoist sea, was able to inject something genuinely new into Chinese culture.
The question here in the West is whether we will learn from the Chinese example and start using Buddhist ideas to question our own Dhamma gate—Romanticism—to see exactly where the gate and the Dhamma are in alignment and where they are not. If we don’t raise these questions, we run the risk of mistaking the gate for the Dhamma itself, and of never going through it to the other side.
So, to follow the example of Tao-an and Hui-yüan, we will adopt an approach in this book that reverses a common tendency in modern Buddhism. Instead of questioning the Dhamma from the Romantic point of view, we will question Buddhist Romanticism from the point of view of the Dhamma.
For the purposes of this book, I will treat Buddhism not as a single religion, but as a family of many religions, the primary three being Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna. Although Buddhist Romanticism has shaped all of these religions as they have come to the West, my focus here will be on the Dhamma as taught in the suttas, or discourses, of the Pāli Canon, which forms the basis for the Theravāda. I do this for three reasons:
1) Of all the various sources of the Buddha’s teachings, the Pāli suttas—together with the Pāli Vinaya, or monastic rules—seem by far to be the closest record we have of the Buddha’s teachings.
2) This is the Buddhist religion with which I am most familiar and in which I was trained.
3) Of all the Buddhist religions, the Theravāda contains teachings that differ most sharply from Romantic ideas. Yet modern discussions even of the Pāli suttas are strongly influenced by Romantic principles, which means that modern Theravāda provides a clear test case for how pervasive Buddhist Romanticism can be, even in a tradition that offers the fewest possible points of overlap.
To maintain this focus, when I quote from the writings of Buddhist Romantics, I will limit my sources to those Buddhist teachers who—whether they identify themselves as Theravādin or not—engage with the Pāli suttas when commenting on what the Buddha taught.
The book is arranged in seven chapters, followed by an appendix.
Chapter One begins with some biographical sketches to give a sense of the people responsible for the ideas that are the focus of the book. It starts with a sketch of the Buddha’s life—for, although it can’t be said that his life story is unknown in the West, the version of the story that most people know dates from sources much later than the Pāli Canon. The Pāli version of the Buddha’s life story, while somewhat less dramatic than the more widely known version, contains many details that make it psychologically more interesting.
As for the early Romantics, their lives—even their names—are largely unknown. They never called themselves “Romantics,” their friendships were volatile, and some of them embraced the Romantic worldview more thoroughly than others. So it’s often hard to say who counts as an early Romantic and who doesn’t. Still, five thinkers were by far the most influential in constructing early Romantic religious ideas, so we will focus on them: Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Friedrich Schelling.
Chapter Two provides a brief sketch of the Dhamma taught in the Pāli suttas. This is meant to act as a baseline against which Romantic ideas about religion in general, and about Buddhism in particular, can be assessed. The Pāli is the oldest extant canon of teachings attributed to the Buddha. Although there have been many efforts in the scholarly world to question its reliability, those efforts tend to reveal more about the people making the effort than about the Pāli itself. Three points in particular recommend it as an authority for understanding the Dhamma:
1) No evidence contemporary with the Buddha contradicts anything found in the Pāli Canon.
2) Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna texts presuppose the teachings found in the Pāli Canon, but the Pāli Canon doesn’t presuppose the teachings found in them.
3) Where the Pāli Canon can be compared with fragments of other early canons, we find that many elements included in those other canons were often kept out of the Pāli Canon and placed instead in the commentaries that grew up around it. This suggests that the people who maintained the Pāli Canon, beginning at least at some point in time, tried to be scrupulous in drawing a clear line between what they had received from tradition and what was novel in their day and age.
So it seems reasonable to take the Pāli Canon as the best available primary source for learning what the Buddha taught.
The next three chapters provide a history of Romantic religion and its survival into the 21st century. Because, as I noted above, there has been no adequate scholarly overview of this topic, I have had to give it a fairly extensive treatment. My general approach to this history is similar to what Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche, has called genealogy: focusing on history not as a grand narrative showing a clear and definite purpose, but as a series of accidents and reversals, following a random and somewhat arbitrary course. Only if we appreciate how arbitrary the past has been can we sense our freedom to shape the present into something better than it is. Only if we appreciate the irony of history can we begin to distance ourselves from the ideas in which we have been raised.
Unlike Foucault, however, I take a somewhat Buddhist approach to genealogy. What this means is that I am interested in ferreting out the way in which individuals freely shape their environment, in addition to being shaped by it. This approach follows a principle common both to the Dhamma and to the Romantics: that people exist in a reciprocal relationship with their environment, and that influences between the two can go in both ways. But whereas the Romantics saw this sort of reciprocal relationship as a sign that individuals were part of a larger organic whole whose purpose was to work toward the wellbeing of all its parts—and that history thus has a goal—the Dhamma regards reciprocity as inherently unstable and without an overarching purpose. This is why genealogy is closer to the Buddhist view of history than to the Romantic.
Chapter Three provides some background on the scientific, political, philosophical, and literary situation to which the Romantics were responding.
Chapter Four gives an outline of their thought and the type of Bildung—or training in art, culture, and character—that they hoped would foster freedom in Germany and among humanity at large. As the chapter points out, their notion of freedom is paradoxical, in that their view of the universe as an infinite organic unity provides no room for freedom. Nevertheless, each of the Romantics struggled in his own way to resolve this paradox, and as a result each bequeathed a distinctive and influential understanding of freedom to the modern and postmodern world.
Chapter Five shows how Friedrich Schleiermacher in particular took the Romantic views on artistic creation and applied them to the felt experience of the infinite that, in his eyes, constituted religion. It also shows how the other Romantics responded to his thoughts on religion to create a distinct body of thought that can be called Romantic religion. The chapter ends with two lists of twenty points: the first, enumerating the points that identify Romantic religion; the second, showing how the Dhamma differs from Romantic religion on all twenty.
Chapter Six traces the development of Romantic religion into the 21st century in four areas: literature, psychology, history of religions, and perennial philosophy. Here, too, the emphasis is on genealogy, showing how the survival of Romantic religion was contingent on many factors that could have easily gone otherwise, and yet how Romantic ideas—once they had become enshrined in scholarly fields—gained an aura of scientific objectivity.
Chapter Seven documents the existence of Buddhist Romanticism by quoting passages from the writings and talks of modern Buddhist teachers that conform to the defining points of Romantic religion. Because Buddhist Romanticism is a cultural syndrome—a widespread pattern of behavior that is socially reinforced—I have not identified the teachers quoted. One reason for this is that their audiences carry as much responsibility for the syndrome as they. Teachers tend to sense when their audiences respond positively to a teaching, and can easily—often unconsciously—fall under the sway of what their audience wants and expects. At the same time, I am following a point of Buddhist etiquette: when teaching the Dhamma in public, not to criticize other teachers by name. It is less important to know who some of the main exponents of Buddhist Romanticism are, and more important to learn what it is, and how to recognize its tenets no matter who is expounding them.
Because one of the tenets of Buddhist Romanticism is that there is ultimately no practical difference between adhering to the Dhamma of the Pāli Canon or to Buddhist Romantic ideas—that both lead to the same goal, although Buddhist Romanticism may get there more effectively—this chapter concludes with a discussion of how choosing Buddhist Romanticism over the Dhamma actually leads to a lower goal that gets in the way of the higher goal that the Dhamma offers.
The Appendix contains many of the Pāli sutta passages on which the discussion in Chapter Two and the critiques at the ends of Chapters Five and Seven are based.
Some of the ideas presented in this book have already appeared in two published articles: “The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism” (also published under the title, “Romancing the Buddha”) and “The Buddha via the Bible.” In my original conception for this book, I planned simply to patch those two articles together. But after doing further research, I realized the need for a much larger work. This was partly to correct some of the mistakes in those articles (for instance, I originally identified Schiller as a Romantic, but now I understand why it’s more accurate to treat him as pre-Romantic), and partly to fill in a large gap in the existing literature on Romantic religion.
The earlier articles prompted some criticisms and objections, three of which I would like to respond to here.
• Many features of Romantic religion resemble Mahāyāna doctrines, so the question is: To what extent can Buddhist Romanticism really be traced to Romanticism, and to what extent is it simply the importing of Mahāyāna ideas into Theravāda? This question, however, begs two other questions: (1) Central Mahāyāna ideas, such as emptiness, interconnectedness, and the innate goodness of Buddha nature, are interpreted in Asia in a wide variety of ways. Here in the West, though, the interpretations closest to Romantic religion are predominant. What is that, if not a sign of the influence of Romantic religion in Western Mahāyāna? (2) Why would a Western teacher trained in Theravāda want to import Mahāyāna ideas into the Dhamma if it were not for the fact that those ideas correspond to ideas already popular in Western culture?
• The approach adopted in the above articles and in this book is sometimes dismissed as fundamentalist. But this begs another question: What does “fundamentalist” mean in a Theravāda Buddhist context? Given that the term has been applied both to Buddhist monks in Asia who advocate genocide, and to Buddhist monks in America who argue against condoning any form of violence, even a “just war,” is “fundamentalist” anything more than a pejorative meant to put a stop to the conversation? The usual image of fundamentalism equates it with unquestioning faith in harmful and irrational beliefs. Although it’s true that we are here measuring Buddhist Romanticism against fundamental Dhamma teachings, I hope to show that those fundamentals are far from being harmful or irrational. And the whole thrust of the book, instead of advocating an unquestioning attitude, is to raise questions that haven’t previously been asked.
• The growth of Buddhist Romanticism is sometimes portrayed as a dialogue between ancient Buddhist and modern Western ideas, a dialogue that needs to happen if Buddhism is going to make sense in the West. But as I have already suggested, the term “dialogue” hardly applies to the current situation. Buddhist Romanticism has been more of a monologue, in which modern teachers and their audiences determine the topic, set the questions, and choose what the ancient texts are and aren’t allowed to say. In many cases, there is hardly any awareness that there might be another cogent side to the discussion: The claim is that the Buddha’s true message was about interconnectedness, wholeness, spontaneity, ego-transcendence, non-judgmentalism, and integration of the personality, while anything else in the texts is simply a flaw in transmission.
Only if we recognize that Buddhist Romanticism differs radically from the Dhamma, and allow the Dhamma to speak on its own terms, can a genuine dialogue begin.
The need for this dialogue was shown by a question I was asked recently when I led a daylong discussion on the theme of Buddhist Romanticism. The morning had been devoted to listing the twenty points that define Romantic religion. The afternoon was to be spent showing the actual position of the Dhamma on all twenty. When we had arrived at Point 3 or 4 in the afternoon, one of the attendees—who had participated in many Buddhist retreats—raised his hand and asked, “So what you taught us this morning wasn’t the Dhamma?” The twenty Romantic points copied so accurately what he was accustomed to hearing as Dhamma that he had blocked out all my earlier comments to the contrary. This sort of confusion can happen only when the Dhamma is denied a voice in the discussion of modern Buddhism, and Buddhist Romanticism has the forum to itself.
The type of dialogue needed is shown by a comment made at two other daylong discussions on the theme of Buddhist Romanticism that I led during the past year. Toward the end of each day, after I had outlined the main tenets of Romantic religion, an attendee would say plaintively, “These are all the reasons I came to Buddhism in the first place.” I responded in both cases to the effect that “It’s like psychotherapy. There comes a time when you sense that some deeply buried ideas that may have worked for you when you were a child are now getting in the way of your growing up. If you can dig up those ideas and question them in the light of an adult intelligence, you’re in a better position to outgrow them and move on.”
The purpose of this book is to start a dialogue of cultural psychotherapy, so that people attracted to Buddhist Romanticism can decide if they want to outgrow their attraction to it in order to benefit more from what the Dhamma has to offer. And when more people can see the difference between Buddhist Romanticism and the Dhamma, people who are not attracted to Romantic religion will be in a better position to benefit from the Dhamma as well.
How to Read this Book
The heart of the argument can be found in Chapter Two, in two sections of Chapter Five—“The Religious Experience” and “Recognizing Romantic Religion”—and in Chapter Seven. If you tend to get bogged down while reading history, you can read these passages first. However, I’m inclined to agree with the early Romantics that every idea has a history, and that to really understand an idea you need to know where it came from. So even if you don’t like history in general, I would recommend giving the historical chapters a try. Otherwise, you’ll miss not only many of the subtleties of the issues surrounding Buddhist Romanticism and the Dhamma, but also the opportunity to meet some of the most fascinating individuals in the history of Western and Buddhist thought.
