Chapter Six

The Transmission of Romantic Religion

People at present rarely read Schleiermacher. Most have never even heard of his name, and the same holds true of the other early German Romantics. Nevertheless, their ideas on art and religion have influenced many thinkers in the intervening centuries, thinkers whose names are more familiar and who have had a widely recognized influence on current culture—in the areas of literature, humanistic psychology, comparative religion, comparative mythology, and perennial philosophy. A short roster of these more recognized thinkers would include Sir Edwin Arnold, Helena Blavatsky, Joseph Campbell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, G. W. F. Hegel, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, William James, Carl Jung, J. Krishnamurti, Abraham Maslow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolph Otto, Huston Smith, Henry David Thoreau, Swami Vivekananda, and Walt Whitman. And there are many, many others. These are the people who have transmitted Romantic religion to the present, and who—through their influence—have made Buddhist Romanticism possible.

Part of the Romantics’ continuing influence can be explained by the fact that, even though some of them could be quite obscure in expressing their more abstract thoughts—William Hazlitt started his review of A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur with the quip, “The book is German,” to give an idea of how impenetrable it was—they found champions in a number of English and French writers who, in the early 19th century, developed an enthusiasm for German thought and were able to popularize it with greater clarity in their own languages. Among the English, Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) were the foremost advocates of German Romantic thought; even Hazlitt (1778–1830), when writing about Shakespeare, borrowed heavily from the very book he had savaged for being German. Among the French, Madame de Staël (1766–1817), whom we have already met, was an early admirer of the German Romantics, and Victor Cousin (1792–1867) was another.

These interpreters presented early Romantic thought as a natural extension of Kant’s philosophy, in that both Kant and the Romantics focused on understanding all aspects of human inquiry in terms of the psychology of the human mind making the inquiry. In other words, the emphasis was not on the world outside, but on the mind as an active principle, shaping its experience of the world both within and without. This conflation of Kant with the Romantics gave added authority to the thought of the early Romantics in Western culture at large, even though the early Romantics themselves had largely abandoned the theories of their younger days.

Another explanation for the Romantics’ continued influence in 20th and 21st century thought is that, in some cases, the early Romantics themselves and the first generation of their followers actually initiated the fields of inquiry in which their influence has survived. One of the founding texts of comparative mythology, for instance—The Symbolic and Mythology of Ancient Peoples (1810–12)—was written by a scholar, Friedrich Creuzer, who was inspired by Schelling’s Method of Academic Study. Similarly, the basic premise underlying perennial philosophy—the principle that monism is the central doctrine of all great religions—was first suggested by Herder after reading some English translations of the Bhagavad Gīta, which he then rendered into German in a way that emphasized the monism that he had read between their lines. Herder’s premise was then expanded and popularized by Schlegel in his writings on India before he fully abandoned the Romanticism of his youth.

Perennial philosophy is still essentially a Romantic enterprise. As for the history of religion and comparative mythology, these fields of inquiry have since come to question many of the Romantic assumptions that engendered them, but traces of these assumptions still underlie the way they conduct their inquiries.

One of the ironies of these continued influences is that the basic scientific assumption of Romantic religion—the infinite organic unity of the universe—did not survive long into the nineteenth century. However, largely through the work of the American psychologist William James, the principles of Romantic religion were divorced from the worldview that formed their original context and were given independent life and respectability in a new context: as scientific psychological principles with pragmatic value for the healthy functioning of the human mind. Thus, even as the paradigms for the physical and social sciences continued to change, the principles of Romantic religion were able to survive regardless of what shapes those paradigms took.

At present, there is no universally accepted scientific theory for understanding the universe, and yet this fact, too, has helped Romantic ideas to survive. Assuming that the purpose of the universe is unknowable, then the Romantic program of focusing on the mind—not as an embodiment of reason, but as a collection of organic processes, feelings, and emotions, in search of health and wellbeing—makes sense. If we can’t understand the purpose of the universe over time, the thinking goes, we can at least try to find a sense of inner health in the present. And although the modern/postmodern study of the mind contains many currents of thought, the current that grants religion a positive role in the pursuit of inner health tends to think in terms of Romantic concepts, such as integration of the personality, non-dualism, receptivity, non-judgmentalism, and the spiritual benefits of erotic love.

Even though many of these concepts rest on very shaky assumptions, their absorption into academic fields has given them academic respectability. Because of this aura of respectability, they carry a great deal of authority when brought into the popular culture. This authority has made their underlying assumptions invisible—a fact that has given them power in shaping attitudes in many areas of Western culture. Those attitudes, in turn, have served to shape and justify the development of Buddhist Romanticism.

A thorough study of all the channels through which Romantic ideas have entered into modern Dhamma would be beyond the scope of this book. So in this chapter I will simply sketch the ideas of a few of the prominent thinkers who have transmitted Romantic religion to the present. My purpose is to show which parts of Romantic religion were altered in the transmission, which parts remained the same, and how contingent the whole process was: Much of it was shaped by the personal concerns of the individual authors; things could have easily come out in a very different way. I also want to show how various thinkers picked up on some points of Romantic religion while rejecting others, and yet the cumulative effect—as we will see in the next chapter—has been that all twenty of the main points of Romantic religion have reconverged in Buddhist Romanticism. The process has been like a river that has split from one lake into many channels, only for the channels to reunite in another lake downstream.

I will deal with four main areas: literature, humanistic psychology, the history of religion, and perennial philosophy. Although I have organized the discussion to treat these areas separately, we will see that writers focusing on one area were often informed by the theories and discoveries of writers in the other areas as well. The psychologist Maslow, for instance, was heavily influenced by the perennial philosopher, Huxley; James and Jung were influenced by advances in the study of the history of religion. The channels of the river intermingled even before they reunited in the lake of Buddhist Romanticism.

In the area of literature, I will focus on one writer, Emerson, partly because he is one of the few major writers in English who directly read Schleiermacher—James was another—and partly because his influence spread into all four of the above areas of thought. His writings were the English-language lake from which many channels of Romantic thought diverged.

Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was the leading figure in a group of New England thinkers and writers who became known as the Transcendentalists. Others in the group included Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and Theodore Parker. The term Transcendentalist was first applied to the group to ridicule them, but the Transcendentalists quickly decided to embrace the insult, adopting the name for themselves to deprive it of its sting.

The original implied insult points to one of the ironies of their position in American literature. Although later generations came to regard the Transcendentalists as among the first genuinely American thinkers writing in English, their unenamored contemporaries saw them as blatantly aping the Germans in their thought. The term transcendental in this case came from Kant’s transcendental categories as filtered through Coleridge’s Romantic interpretation of them. The critics of the Transcendentalists were accusing them of trying to be little Kants. As we will see, however, Emerson was much closer to the Romantics than to Kant both in the style and in the substance of his thought.

Emerson wrote many essays, but never a systematic treatise on his religious views. In fact, the idea of “system” was anathema to his sense of how religion worked. He took seriously Schleiermacher’s dictum that because religion was purely a matter of internal experience, it could not properly be taught. At most, one person might try to provoke other people to look inward to find religion within themselves, but that was all. As a result, Emerson took on the role of provocateur, stringing together epigrams that would now take one extreme position and then another one, often in contradiction to the first, in hopes that this would induce his listeners to question their everyday assumptions and so become more receptive to the infinite within.

This aspect of Emerson’s style has Romantic roots, specifically in Schlegel’s “ideas” and sense of irony. Like Schlegel, he regarded the ability to contradict oneself as a sign, not of muddled thinking, but of an ability to rise above finite concerns and limitations and adopt an infinite point of view:

Emerson’s adoption of Romantic religion, however, was not simply a matter of style. It was also a matter of substance. In almost all areas of religious thought—and Emerson was first and foremost a religious thinker—he followed the Romantic paradigm.

Like the Romantics, he defined the object of religion as “man’s connection with nature.” Nature, for him, was an infinite organic unity, animated by the Over-Soul—an immanent, impersonal principle that, like Schelling’s World Soul, was always evolving:

Each human being was an organic part of this ongoing, evolving unity, and yet suffered when feeling divided from it. This sense of division was endemic because each person also felt divided within him or herself. The basic cure—which, Emerson agreed with the Romantics, is available to all—was to regain a sense of the pre-existing unity through a direct intuition of its presence.

In describing this unity both as a pre-existing characteristic of the infinite universe and as a direct experience, Emerson placed more emphasis on its mental aspect, and less on the physical aspect, than the Romantics had. Individual minds were part of a unified universal mind. This shift in emphasis meant that he gave little importance to physical drives, and total importance to the messages the mind received as a result of the experience.

Emerson called these messages “laws,” which signals another shift of emphasis on his part. In fact, this particular shift was his most distinctive contribution to Romantic religion. For him, intuitions of the infinite were a matter not of aesthetic taste, but of moral and social imperatives. When the infinite impressed itself on the human mind, it yielded not just a general feeling, but also a direct intuition of one’s duty. Inner oneness expressed itself as the willingness not to resist those intuitions, wherever they might lead. However, unlike Kant’s sense of duty as a universal, immutable law, Emerson’s “duty” was constantly open to change. In fact, its changes were signs that it was in tune with the living universe. Because the universe was constantly in a state of Becoming, evolving with every day, no external laws should override a person’s evolving inner intuition of his or her duty, which would necessarily change on a daily basis.

Emerson distinguished the mind’s own inner laws from mere voluntary “notions,” and he felt that everyone had the innate ability to discern which thoughts were of divine origin and which were not.

Having intuited these inner laws, one then expressed the authenticity of one’s intuition, not by romanticizing the world, but by following one’s inner voice of duty, even when—especially when—the duties and customs of society pointed in a contrary direction. One romanticized one’s actions first, and the romanticization of the world would follow.

In this way, Emerson gave a moral and social dimension not only to the intuitions of the infinite, but also to the idea of authenticity. Both of these shifts in meaning have had important consequences in shaping Romantic religion up to the present.

Emerson agreed with the Romantics that the experience by which people attain inward unity is essentially the same for all. He noted, though, that some individuals—and here he gave an ecumenical list of divinely inspired people, both Christian and not, such as Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, the Apostle Paul, George Fox, and Swedenborg—feel a stronger sense of transformation than others.

These intuitions of infinite unity, or “revelations” in Emerson’s terms, cannot last. Coming from an immanent source, they are immanent in nature. Emerson, like Schleiermacher, did not posit a transcendent dimension outside of time, and rejected the desire for personal immortality as an act of wandering “from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.” Thus even though he viewed revelations as transcending ordinary input of the senses in importance—this is the sense in which he is a Transcendentalist—he did not view them as giving access to a realm transcending space and time.

Because revelations can offer only finite, momentary glimpses of the infinite, religious life is an affair of continually pursuing repeated glimpses, in hopes that one’s comprehension of those glimpses will gradually deepen. Never will there come a point, though, where one can attain total comprehension. The religious quest is thus a continual process with no final attainment. And as we noted above, the sense of freedom gained from these experiences is limited to that of being true to one’s nature and having warrant to defy social norms.

Even though Emerson measured the authenticity of these experiences by one’s ability to speak and act in line with the duties they impose, he also had room in his thought for Novalis’ sense of authenticity: the ability to transform the commonplace events of life into the microcosmic sublime.

As for the means to develop this sense of unity, Emerson agreed fully with the Romantics that the aptitude for a religious experience could be cultivated by adopting an attitude of open receptivity. He also agreed that this receptive attitude could be developed in a wide variety of ways, in line with one’s temperament and culture.

Unlike the Romantics, though, he saw little role for erotic love in developing this attitude. His take on love was more Platonic: The early stages of love may bring the lover into a higher spiritual state, but one must outgrow one’s fascination with the beauty of the beloved if one wanted to grow spiritually and appreciate the higher beauty of consciousness. And this, he taught, required that one go, in solitude, into nature. Only there can one abandon the sense of self that interferes with an open receptivity to the infinite.

Emerson shared the Romantics’ ambivalent attitude toward religious traditions as sources for spiritual inspiration. His essay, “History,” illustrates this point well. An extended “idea,” in Schlegel’s special sense of the word, the essay first advocates the benefits of studying history when approached in the correct way. Because each mind is part of the universal mind, the correct way to understand history is to regard it as the story of one’s own development. When reading history, one is reading about oneself, and one should develop an ironic tolerance for all actions, good and bad, that have come from the universal mind over time.

Then, however, the essay shifts gears:

In other words, records of the past may have their uses, but they pale next to nature as a guide to true religious inspiration. This shift in gears makes the essay an “idea” in Schlegel’s sense of the term.

Even when sacred texts do offer sustenance during one’s dark hours, Emerson felt that they should be read, not as statements of fact, but as myths and poetry: symbols and allegories whose meanings the reader is free to interpret creatively as he or she sees fit.

If granted too much authority, religious texts can get in the way of true intuitions.

Emerson also shared the idea, advocated by the Romantics, that the natural response to an experience of the infinite was to express it, and that this response would be dictated by one’s temperament and culture. As we have noted, however, he saw this response more in moral than in aesthetic terms—although, again, Emerson’s sense of “moral” was very much like Schlegel’s and Schleiermacher’s in that it allowed for no rules or codes of behavior. In ultimate terms, people could do nothing but follow their nature. Even if that involved doing harm, Emerson, like Hölderlin, held that the universe was large enough not to be wounded.

Finally, Emerson shared with the Romantics the idea that the modification of a religious tradition was not only a historical fact. It was also a duty in light of the ongoing progress of the Over-Soul. This may sound paradoxical: If the universe is ultimately indifferent, what sense of duty could there be? Emerson’s answer was that in the living fact of change, the soul could best express its true nature. In other words, the duty here was a duty to one’s nature, and not to the rest of the world.

The theme of one’s duty to make religion evolve was one to which Emerson often returned, with even more feeling than the Romantics.

There were several discrepancies between Emerson’s thought and his life, which came largely from his desire, as a finite being, to express an infinite point of view. One is that, even though he preached tolerance for each person’s intuition of the infinite, he balked when other people actually took him at his word. One case was Walt Whitman, who—following Emerson’s dictum—was true to his inner nature when he expressed his sexuality frankly in Leaves of Grass. On receiving a copy from the poet, Emerson was shocked and advised Whitman to delete the offending poems.

Another case was Emerson’s break with many of his fellow Transcendentalists over issues of social action. Although he insisted that religious inspiration was best expressed in words and actions, he chided Fuller, Brownson, and Parker when they argued that religious inspiration should first be expressed in social change, on the grounds that only when society was fair could all individuals be free to commune with their inner nature. From Emerson’s perspective, social change would be genuine only after inner change had taken place. The issue of which should come first—social change or inner change—was to become a recurring bone of contention in Romantic religion, and has resurfaced in Buddhist Romanticism as well.

In both of these cases, the disparity between Emerson’s words and actions stemmed partly from a dominant feature of his writing style. He wrote in epigrammatic sentences, each sentence polished so that it could stand on its own, and many of his essays read like a series of Schlegel’s fragments strung together in a flowing but fairly arbitrary order. Thus it was easy for his readers to extract individual epigrams from their larger context, taking part of the message for the whole. Although Emerson might have objected to their doing this, saying that that wasn’t what he meant, his readers could counter that that was what he had said.

Emerson, in his later years, derived congenial spiritual nourishment from Indian religious texts, primarily the Upaniṣads, but he never contemplated adopting an Indian religion, and his interest was more of an eclectic sort: looking less for new ideas than for confirmation of ideas that he already held. Ironically, the influence was reciprocal. During his lifetime many of his essays—in particular, “The Over-Soul”—were printed in India, where they inspired educated Indians who were in the process of developing a new universal Indian religion, now called Neo-Hinduism, based on the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gīta. We will return to this point below.

As a transmitter of Romantic religion, Emerson deviated from his German mentors on only two major issues: the moral rather than aesthetic import of religious experiences, and the role of Eros in inducing such experiences. Otherwise, his thought differed from theirs primarily in terms of five points of emphasis.

• He tended to dwell more than the Romantics had on the point that there can be no categorical standards for judging the reliability of religious experiences or of the sense of duty that one gained from them.

• Related to this point was his recasting of authenticity as a moral rather than an aesthetic quality: the ability to remain true to one’s own sense of right and wrong, regardless of how inconsistent it might be from day to day, and regardless of what society might say.

• This further related to his implied definition of freedom as license to flaunt social norms in the name of one’s inner nature, whatever that nature might be.

• He also placed more emphasis than the majority of Romantics on the idea that actions, in ultimate terms, have no real consequences in the overall economy of the universe.

• And he wrote more fervently than they in celebrating the constant evolution of the world and the soul as the highest aspiration of human life.

From the Buddhist perspective, all these points of emphasis are problematic.

• To say that there can be no standards for judging right or wrong is, in the Buddha’s words, to leave people unprotected (§8). They will have no way to judge one intention as superior to another, and no way to protect themselves from engaging in unskillful actions. Emerson assumed that people can clearly distinguish between their individual notions and their trustworthy perceptions, but experience shows that this is not the case.

• Similarly, to deny that there are constant standards for judging one’s daily intuitions of right and wrong, and to deny that there is anything of worth to learn from others, makes it impossible to learn any sense of skill in the conduct of one’s actions.

• Freedom defined as the ability to defy social norms in remaining true to one’s inner nature is no real freedom at all, and leaves one at the mercy of deluded states of mind.

• To say that actions have no real consequences in the long term is irresponsible, and again makes it impossible to give rise to heedfulness and the desire to develop skill in one’s conduct.

• To celebrate the process of becoming—the repeated assumption of new roles and identities in the story of the universe—as the best use of human life is to stay mired in suffering and stress, with no possibility of gaining release.

Even though Emerson’s emphasis on these points runs directly counter to some of the most basic tenets of the Dhamma, we will see below that their influence has spread through many channels to shape the basic tenets of Buddhist Romanticism.

Psychology of Religion

Romantic religion was transmitted to Buddhist Romanticism through several channels in the field of the psychology of religion, particularly through the branch that came to be known as humanistic psychology. One of the two main channels came, via Emerson, through the writings of William James; the other, drawing both on James and directly on the early Romantics, came through the writings of Carl Jung. Both of these psychologists in turn had a major influence on Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology and a direct influence on many Western teachers of Buddhism.

The way these psychologists adopted Romantic ideas about religion was determined by the dominant paradigms in the sciences of their times. As we will see when we examine James’ thought, the organic view of science on which the Romantics drew, and which Schelling in particular had promoted, had quickly fallen into disfavor in the 19th century, as more materialistic hypotheses concerning physical events led to more useful experimental results. Based on these results, deterministic materialism became the dominant scientific paradigm, thus calling into question the possibility of any meaning to life: If the universe was driven by deterministic laws, how can there be freedom of choice? And how could the physical processes that make up the body—and perhaps drove mental processes as well—exist to serve a purpose?

In an attempt to answer these questions, James—and later, Jung—found Romantic ideas about religion helpful in fostering psychological health both for themselves and for their patients. To carve out room for these ideas in the face of a toxic scientific worldview, both James and Jung started with the phenomenology of consciousness, i.e., consciousness as it is immediately experienced from within. Because, for every human being, consciousness is a more immediate reality than physical processes, which are known only at second remove, both thinkers argued that the reality of consciousness must take priority over the supposed reality of physical laws. And because consciousness is purposeful, any interpretation of the universe that denies purpose cannot be taken as ultimately true, and certainly not true for consciousness. “True” for any conscious being had to be defined as what was conducive to the healthy functioning of consciousness.

As for Maslow, he was writing at a time when, as he said, sophisticated theologians and sophisticated scientists “seem to be coming closer and closer together in their conception of the universe as ‘organismic,’ as having some kind of unity and integration, as growing and evolving and having direction and, therefore, having some kind of ‘meaning.’”1 In other words, he saw himself as back in the organic, unified universe of the Romantics, in which biological facts could carry inherent meaning and purpose. Thus, given that human beings are born with certain potentials, he argued that we must assume that those potentials are meant to be actualized. In other words, the fact of any potential implied an ought: People ought to be trained, and society ought to be ordered, so that all human beings have the opportunity to fully actualize their innate potentials. The training he proposed thus came close to the Romantic concept of Bildung: a rounded education for a fully functioning human being hoping to find and fulfill his or her purpose in a purposeful universe.

It should not be surprising that Maslow found the organic Romantic view of spiritual life congenial to his approach, as it, too, was derived from the principles of biology. However, even though the phenomenological approach was not necessarily tied to biology, both James and Jung ended up adopting many of the organic principles of Romantic religion when fleshing out their approach as well. In fact, it was James who inspired both Jung and Maslow in this direction. Apparently, James adopted these principles because he saw them as the best example of a non-materialistic but scientific approach available in the West. At the same time, the Romantic concept of the divided self also spoke to James’ understanding of his own personal psychological issues.

But whatever the reason, even though Romantic ideas gave these psychologists tools to advance their cause against deterministic materialism, those ideas also ended up placing what were, from the point of view of the Dhamma, severe limitations on their thought. These limitations—which were then passed on to Buddhist Romanticism—will become clear as we examine which principles of Romantic religion these psychologists transmitted, whether intact or with modifications, to the 20th and 21st centuries.

James

William James (1842–1910) played a paradoxical role in the transmission of Romantic religion to the present: rejecting the monistic, organic Romantic view of the universe, and yet arguing that many of the principles of Romantic religion could thrive even when divorced from their original metaphysical context. In fact this was James’ main contribution to the survival of Romantic religion: giving its principles scientific respectability—at least within the science of psychology—even as the fashions of the physical sciences moved away from organic metaphors for understanding the universe and back to more mechanical ones.

Part of the paradox in James’ accomplishment can be explained by his training both in philosophy and in psychology. As a philosopher, he rejected the monism that underlay Romantic thought. In fact, the battle against monistic idealism—the basic metaphysical assumption both of the Romantics and of Emerson—was one of the defining crusades of James’ philosophical career. As a psychologist, however, he found useful inspiration in the Romantic/Transcendentalist teaching on the religious experience as a means of healing divisions within the psyche.

As a result, James divorced the psychological aspect of the religious experience—a feeling of unification—from its original metaphysical context in a unified universe. He further argued that even if the experience told us nothing about the actual nature of the universe, it could—and often did—function as an important step in promoting the psychological health of the human organism. As such, it was a fitting subject for scientific inquiry.

To separate psychology from metaphysics—and, in so doing, to give psychology priority over metaphysics—was, for James, a deliberate and momentous act. In part, he was simply following a general trend in the study of psychology during his time. Instead of being the province of novelists, psychology had become a scientific field in its own right—even though, as we will see, it continued to frame some of its issues in terms that had originated in the Romantic novel. In fact, what we have termed the novelist’s view of reality—in which truth is a matter not of metaphysical statements, but of the psychological processes leading a person to make such statements—continued to provide the dominant paradigm within the field. In addition, psychology as a field of study was also beginning to divorce itself from the field of philosophy, particularly as it developed its own methodology for experimentation. Here again, though, there was still some overlap between the two fields, a fact that James himself was able to use to great advantage in his professional career.

However, the act of giving psychology priority over metaphysics also had great personal meaning for James. As a young man, he had suffered a prolonged and sometimes severe depression, which his biographers have diagnosed as both personal and philosophical in origin. The personal origin lay in his relationship to his family. Thwarted by a domineering father in his early career choices, James came to be troubled by the idea he might not have free will. The philosophical origin for James’ depression lay in his growing conviction that the question of free will was not merely his own problem; it was a problem for all beings in a materialist universe. His doubts about free will were further exacerbated by the scientific education he had received in medicine and biology.

Here it’s useful to take stock of what had happened in the physical sciences between the early- and the mid-19th century. Remember that, for the Romantics, biology, geology, and astronomy taught mutually reinforcing messages in which all aspects of the universe had an organic purpose. Schelling, in particular, had recommended a course of research for the sciences that would further explore the unity of all sciences in pursuit of knowledge about how the World Soul was bringing about its purpose in the universe, both as a whole and in its minutest operations.

By James’ time, though, Schelling’s program had become discredited. It had inspired some useful research in the field of electricity, but more often than not it had directed its followers down lines of inquiry that had proven fruitless. The most productive research in the early 19th century had either ignored Schelling’s program or had been devoted to debunking it. As a result, science had progressed by ignoring larger theories of universal purpose and focusing instead on discovering mechanical laws of physical and chemical behavior.

In this way, the mechanistic model of the universe had again become ascendant, the biological model had been discarded, and the various sciences had gone their separate ways. In astronomy, Herschel’s biological analogy for the development of stars and galaxies was pushed aside. The dominant view came to be that complex systems could grow and decay without our having to assume that they formed organic unities or that they were driven by a teleological purpose. This view came to govern not only astronomy, but also geology.

In biology, research had taken a different tack. Charles Darwin’s work had convinced many if not all biologists that the theory of the evolution of life had a sound empirical basis. And although the philosophical implications of Darwin’s work could be interpreted in many different directions, the young James focused on the means by which living beings evolved, noting that natural selection through accidents of environment and genetic mutation was a blind process. This seemed to imply no overriding direction or design to life at all. Life evolved, but not with a purpose. Evolution was nothing more than an accident of mechanical laws—an idea that exacerbated James’ sense of fatalism.

In other words, he was back in the mechanistic universe inhabited by Kant, Schiller, and Fichte. His solution to this dilemma—the solution that got him out of his depression and into a productive career—bears comparison with theirs. In fact, it was through reading the essays of a French Neo-Kantian, Charles Renouvier (1815–1903), that James came to the insight that started him on his road to recovery. Renouvier had argued for the possibility of free will based on an internal psychological observation, which James noted with excitement in his diary: “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts.”2 In other words, one’s choice to think one thought rather than another showed freedom of will in action, something that no outside fact could deny. In his later language, James would call this a “lived fact.” It led to his Fichtean motto, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”3

It also led to his choice of career, at the intersection of psychology and philosophy, focused on the issue of felt experience. As a psychologist, James had been trained primarily in physiological psychology, an outgrowth of the philosophical medicine in which Schiller had trained. But James’ research interests came to focus less on the physiology of psychological states and more on their phenomenology: how those states felt from within and could be cured from within. Similarly, as a philosopher, he focused on the issue of what it feels like to be an acting, willing being. Philosophical issues should start within, with the fact of felt experience, and not from without, with metaphysical assumptions about the world, even if those assumptions were based on the sciences of the day.

In an important passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he argued, “So long as we deal only with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.”4 For James, the realm of the private and personal was where life was actually lived. The knowledge provided by physical sciences was peripheral to the conduct of life; the knowledge provided by his style of psychology and philosophy was where the conduct of life began. Thus his embrace of pragmatism—the doctrine that philosophical issues should be addressed only if they made a difference in the conduct of life, and should be answered in ways that were most helpful to that conduct.

Thus also his assertion, in The Will to Believe (1897), that there were two types of truth: what might be called truths of the observer—the facts that can be discovered only by suspending one’s desire that the truth come out one way or the other (this applied to physical scientific truths); and truths of the will—events and accomplishments that can be made true only through a unified act of desire and will. Truths of the will were the truths that mattered most in life. In fact, only through acts of will could human beings can make sense of what James famously called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory input. The experience of life even on the most basic sensory level thus requires an interactive process—which the Romantics would have recognized—of both passive receptivity and active engagement. James, however, viewed the achievement of meaning in life in much more heroic terms than had the Romantics, perhaps because he had needed to exert a heroic mental effort to cure his depression. Health, for him, was a truth of the will.

James saw that truths of this sort could be developed effectively only if there was a basic inner unity to the psyche, what we now call the integration of the personality. And this is where his interest in religious experience came in. Even though he had overcome his depression to the extent of developing a highly functioning will, he still felt a nagging division in his psyche. Unlike the Romantics, he cast this division—what he called the divided self—as a split not between reason and feeling, but as a split within the will itself. To be fully healthy, he decided, he had to heal this split.

In fact, James came to see—much like Emerson and the Romantics—that the sense of divided self was the primary spiritual illness. Emerson’s discussions of the malaise of a self divided against itself struck a personal chord in James; Emerson’s discussions of the healing power of a directly felt sense of inner and outer unity had him intrigued. So, both as a personal and as a professional pursuit, James began to research the topic—studying unusual religious movements, reading autobiographical and other accounts of religious experiences, even exploring spiritualism and drug-induced ecstasies (his own and others’)—to see if Emerson was right. Toward the end of his life, he summarized his findings in a series of lectures that he then put into book form as The Varieties of Religious Experience. This book was not only one of the founding works in the field of the psychology of religion. It is also still widely read for pleasure and education today.

Where the Romantics and Emerson had formulated their views about religious experiences by extrapolating from their own experiences, James in the Varieties quoted from many religious traditions—and from many untraditional sources. What is striking, however, is how he used a large number of terms reflecting Romantic assumptions about the nature and function of religious experience to analyze those sources. He actually reduced the variety of experiences he reported by squeezing them into a small set of Romantic categories. This was one of the main ironies of the book, and at the same time the main aspect of Romantic religion that James transmitted to later generations and to Buddhist Romanticism.

Like the Romantics, James defined religion as an issue of relationship, although in his case the definition runs: “Feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”5 James was not very precise in explaining what he meant by “divine” in this definition, although he did state that he intended the term to be broad enough to cover the Buddhist nirvāṇa (nibbāna) as well as the Judeo-Christian God, along with other conceptions of “divine” in other religions that do not posit a personal God—or any God at all.

The fact that James put the word feelings first in his definition was no accident. As he also stated, in introducing the working hypothesis of his research, “If the inquiry be psychological, [then] not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject.”6 With this statement, the Romantic assertion—borrowed from the Pietists—that religion is primarily a matter of feeling became enshrined as a fundamental tenet for professional psychological inquiry. This in turn brought the Romantic approach to religion—viewing it as a novelist would, focused less on the truth value of statements than on the truth of the psychological processes leading to and resulting from those statements—into the basic structure of psychology of religion as a developing field.

Another Romantic assertion underlying the Varieties is the assumption that the apparent variety found in religious experiences actually masks an underlying identity: There is a single basic religious experience, one of inner unification. James offers no proof for this assertion. It is, for him, simply a fact. Borrowing a term from Methodism, he calls this experience of unification conversion, although his explanation of conversion is more Romantic than Methodist in that he denies that there is anything mystical or transcendent about the experience.

He gives two reasons for issuing this denial. The first is that a religious sense of unification is simply a more intense version of a process that every personality has to undergo at some point in adolescence: the integration of the psyche, bringing it from a “divided self,” with warring impulses and drives, to a unified self in which the inner drives have reached a measure of order and hierarchy. What sets religious experiences apart as special is that they often convey a strong sense that one has learned important truths about one’s relationship to the divine and/or the universe as a whole. This process can be either gradual or sudden and dramatic. The drama James attributes to a personality trait: People who have dramatic experiences tend to have a more active subconscious than people who don’t.

James’ second reason for denying a transcendent dimension to the religious experience is his sense of what a human being is and therefore can know: In his eyes, human beings, as finite organisms, cannot directly experience a transcendent, unconditioned realm. From a psychological viewpoint, religious experiences, like all integrative experiences, come from the subconscious. Although James leaves open the possibility that a divine force might be acting through the subconscious, such a divine input would, from the perspective of the knowing subject, lie on the “other side” of what can be directly experienced. Because it cannot be measured or experimented on, it cannot, in a scientific psychological study of religion, play an explanatory role.

As for the information conveyed by the experience, James concedes that it has strong meaning for the person undergoing the experience, but cannot be taken as authoritative for others. This, too, follows the Romantic paradigm—although James differs from the Romantics in questioning whether, despite the strong sense of authority conveyed by the religious experience, the person having the experience really should take the information it conveys as authoritative even for him or herself. In particular, speaking as an outside observer, James expresses doubt that the experience actually does give knowledge about the divine. This doubt comes partly from his philosophical assumptions about what a human being can and cannot know, and partly from the historical fact that people undergoing religious experiences have come away from them with so many contradictory messages.

James also notes that people who have undergone religious experiences often describe, as one of their striking features, a heightened sense of the miraculous in commonplace events: what we have termed the microcosmic sublime. Here again, though, James does not see this sense of sublime as confirming authenticity of the experience. It is simply a psychological side effect of inner unification.

The many accounts of religious experiences that James quotes show that they can be induced in a wide variety of voluntary and involuntary ways—although, unlike the Romantics, he never mentions erotic love as a possible trigger for a religious sense of union. He does note, however, that a surrender of the will is often a crucial element in the religious experience, but for this point, too, he offers a psychological explanation. Because the experience is often brewing in the subconscious long before it breaks through to the conscious mind, the sense of surrender is actually the act of the conscious mind allowing the subconscious to surface. In other words, there is again no reason to assume a divine source for the sense of infusing power that comes with the act of surrender.

As for the results of the religious experience, James notes—and here again he follows the Romantics—that all religious interpretations of religious experiences should be tolerated, except for those that are intolerant of others. He also argues that the plurality of religious explanations for religious experiences is a Good Thing, for two reasons. The first is that people have different temperaments—which he attributes largely to heredity—some tending to see the world always in a positive light; others, in a darker light. A religious explanation satisfying a person with one of these temperaments would not satisfy a person with the other. Thus the human race needs many interpretations from which people of different temperaments may choose.

The second reason is that societies and cultures change over time, and an explanation of divine power that would make sense, say, in a period of absolute monarchies, would seem crude in a more democratic culture. So, to keep up with changes in culture, religious traditions need to change. Here again, James is enshrining a Romantic assumption as a sociological truth, although he is subtle enough to question whether the changes that religions necessarily undergo are always objective improvements.

James’ main interest in the expression of religious experiences, however, lies less in religious interpretations than in psychological interpretations of the effects that such experiences have over time. In particular, he focuses on what is required to integrate the experience into the conduct of one’s life, making it the “center of one’s personal energy”—in other words, how to develop the feeling of unity so that it actually yields a unity of the will in action.

To describe this latter phase of ongoing integration, James borrows another Methodist term—sanctification—while giving it his own meaning. This is an area where James breaks new ground, for his treatment of sanctification explores an issue that neither the Romantics nor Emerson had considered: What changes does the religious experience make in the personality? Reviewing a wide range of accounts, James notices four character traits that mark a person for whom spiritual emotions are the habitual center of the personal energy. If sanctification is genuine, he says, these traits should become consistent features of the personality:

1) a feeling of being in a wider life than that of the world’s selfish interests, along with a sensible conviction of the existence of an ideal power;

2) a sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with one’s own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control;

3) an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down; and

4) a shifting of the emotional center toward loving and harmonious affections.

These character traits, in turn, have four practical consequences in how they are expressed through the actions of one’s daily life: as (a) asceticism, (b) strength of soul, (c) purity, and (d) charity. This is one of the first attempts to list the personality features of a spiritually mature person and—as we will see—these lists tended to grow as they became a feature both of the psychology of religion and of Buddhist Romanticism.

In treating the four moral traits in his list, James observes that they can be expressed in either healthy or pathological ways. For instance, asceticism can be healthy as an expression of hardihood, temperance, and a happy sacrifice for higher aims. This side of asceticism appealed to James’ sense of life as a heroic struggle, and his own dismay over what he saw as the weakened moral fiber engendered by the comforts of 19th century bourgeois life. As for the pathological side of asceticism, James attributed it either to a childish sense of expiating punishments for imagined sins, an irrational obsession with purity, or with a perversion of bodily sensibility in which pain actually registers as pleasure.

It’s in his discussion of healthy and pathological results of the religious experience that James betrays his philosophical assumptions—and, in fact, his own personal views about what religion should and should not be.

Life, in his eyes, finds meaning in action for the sake of the world. As he stated in his book, Pragmatism (1907), the genuine pragmatist must see action as the true end of thought, and must believe that human actions will make a difference as to whether the world will reach salvation or not. Here he differs radically from Hölderlin’s Romantic view that action, in the large picture, does not matter. For him, life has meaning only when action has meaning; and action has meaning only when it leads to a fuller and more accomplished life.

One of James’ biographers quotes this passage from James’ writings as the epigraph to the biography and as a summation of James’ attitude to life:

Toward the end of the Varieties, James supplements his original formal definition of religion with a functional definition formulated by one of his followers in the nascent field of the psychology of religion, James H. Leuba:

Leuba here is making an empirical observation about how people choose their religion: How useful is it in leading to a satisfying life—as they themselves define satisfaction? For James, however, the reference to a more satisfying life suggests more than an empirical fact. It becomes a moral imperative. Religion should serve one’s impulses to conduct one’s life in a higher, more unified way. This is why, when discussing Buddhism in the Varieties, he expresses his approval of the doctrine of karma; but when touching on Buddhism in Pragmatism, he denounces nirvāṇa as a pathological goal that comes from abandoning one’s responsibilities to life with an attitude that is “simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life.”9 James’ views on karma did not transmit into Buddhist Romanticism, but his attitude toward nirvāṇa did.

James, like Kant and Fichte, believed fiercely in the moral life, and agreed with them that for such a life to make sense one had to assume a creator who took an interest in human action. Like Schiller, he believed that the divisions in the psyche came from conflicting drives, both for and against the moral law, and that a healthy, integrated personality was a means to living a satisfying life in line with that law. On these two points, James differed sharply from Emerson and Schlegel, who recognized no set moral law at all. Thus, for him, the doctrine of life for life’s sake—and religion for life’s sake—was not a hedonistic one.

However, when James was writing not as a moral philosopher but as a psychologist, he dropped the moral dimension of his beliefs. For instance, even though as a philosopher he felt that the best integration of the personality was around the moral law, as a psychologist he recognized that the personal integration of the will did not have to take that law into account. Any clear sense of hierarchy among a person’s desires and aims could count as a successful integration of the self. Thus it was easy for his readers to take his psychological observations out of the context of his moral beliefs, giving them a more hedonistic interpretation—which is precisely what many of them did.

Similarly, even though James left open the possibility that there might be a divine source for religious experiences, he explained such experiences in such a way that they made sense totally in terms of the powers and needs of a living human organism. In fact, he even described religion as a biological function:

Likewise, even though James personally assumed that there might be a transcendent dimension that took an interest in human actions, throughout the Varieties he judged those actions entirely in this-worldly terms. The upshot was that the transcendent dimension, both as a source and as a result of religious experience, could be completely ignored as unknowable and extraneous.

This, despite his intentions, was what he bequeathed to the field of the psychology of religion: religion as a this-worldly phenomenon serving this-worldly needs and values. The Romantics, of course, would have recognized their own view in this part of James’ legacy, even though he himself had not intended to leave this particular legacy behind.

Thus, when gauging James as a transmitter of Romantic religion, we have to look at the ways in which he voluntarily and involuntarily acted in that role.

We have already noted some of the voluntary assumptions that he shared with the Romantics:

• the mind is not only passive, but also active in shaping its awareness of its environment,

• there is a single religious experience, marked by a strong feeling of inner and outer unity,

• this feeling of unity comes after a mental state of surrender or open receptivity,

• this feeling of unity helps to heal the basic spiritual illness, which is a sense of division within the psyche,

• this experience is immanent because the human organism can know only conditioned realities,

• the fact that this experience is immanent further means that it does not heal the psyche once and for all, so that religious life is one of pursuing but never fully achieving full psychological health,

• no single religious interpretation of this experience is authoritative,

• all religions should thus be tolerated to the extent that they foster a healthy religious experience, and are tolerant of other religions,

• all religions should change to keep up with other changes in culture and society, and

• there is much to learn from studying religions from the point of view of the experience from which they grew.

By divorcing these values from their original worldview and transmitting them as part of the field of psychology, James did a great deal to keep Romantic religion alive and respectable into the 20th and 21st centuries.

James’ involuntary contribution to the survival of Romantic religion related to the issue of morality. On the one hand, he rejected the Romantic worldview of a monistic universe in which human action, ultimately, carried no consequences. On the other hand, by discussing religion as a purely this-worldly, biological phenomenon—an organic activity to be judged by its ability to foster the health of the organism—James made it possible for later generations to ignore his personal beliefs about the larger moral consequences of one’s actions, and to focus attention—as Hölderlin and other Romantics had—totally on one’s inner sense of unity and health. In this way, James transmitted a signal feature of the organic Romantic religious worldview to later generations in spite of himself.

Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was one of the pioneers in the use of dream analysis as a method of psychotherapy. Early in his career he took as his mentor Sigmund Freud, the father of dream analysis, but later split with Freud because he felt the latter’s understanding of the mind and of mental health was too narrow. This much is very well known. What is less well known is that Jung credited William James, and in particular, James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, with providing him guidance on how to go beyond Freud and to understand “the nature of psychic disturbances within the setting of the human psyche as a whole.”11

From Jung’s later work, it’s easy to see that he derived several important assumptions from the Varieties: that psychic reality—the lived fact of consciousness—comes prior to one’s consciousness of physical reality, and so need not be regarded as a product of physical processes; that “psychic disturbances” could be regarded as spiritual illnesses, and not just problems of sexual repression; that the primary spiritual illness was a sense of a self divided within itself and from the rest of humanity; that the unconscious, instead of being simply a storehouse of repressed neuroses, also contained potentials and tendencies that, if allowed to develop properly, could work to heal the sense of the divided self; and that some of these potentials might be divine in origin.

James’ influence on Jung was augmented by a book that appeared in 1917: Rudolph Otto’s Das Heilige (translated into English as The Idea of the Holy). Otto (1869–1937), even though he meant to correct some defects he saw in Schleiermacher, ended up transmitting four important features of Romantic religion in The Idea of the Holy, features that Jung picked up from reading the book.

The Idea of the Holy was focused on what Otto saw as the primal direct experience underlying all the religions of the world: that of a supra-rational, numinous power, wholly other, that was mysterious, overwhelming, and utterly worthy of one’s full attention and worship. Otto meant his description of the religious experience to be a corrective both to Schleiermacher and to James. Schleiermacher, he felt, had failed to distinguish properly between the actual experience of infinite power and the individual’s reaction of submission and desire for union with that power. In actuality, Otto felt, a sense of union is only one of the many possible ways of reacting to the experience. As for James, Otto felt that he had underestimated the objectivity of the experience. James, because of the constraints of his psychology, was limited to describing the subjective side of the experience. In Otto’s eyes, an integral part of the experience was that the numinous was more objectively true than anything else.

But in offering a corrective to the work of these two thinkers, Otto was actually adopting and transmitting four of their underlying assumptions. From both he adopted the assumptions that (1) the religious experience is essentially the same for everyone, (2) this experience, variously interpreted, accounts for all the religions that have ever existed, and (3) religions evolve to express the implications of this experience in ever more advanced and adequate ways. From Schleiermacher, he also adopted the assumption that (4) this experience is not in itself moral: Moral interpretations, if they come, come later. These four assumptions played an important role in shaping Jung’s thought.

One of Jung’s most creative additions to the history of Romantic religion was that he applied these assumptions to dream analysis, treating dreams that carried a numinous power for the dreamer as if they were—in James’ terminology, which Jung himself occasionally used—conversion experiences. In place of James’ category of sanctification—a term that Jung never used—Jung proposed that dream analysis be applied to these extraordinary dreams so as to help the patient integrate the conscious and unconscious factors of his or her psyche in a way that fostered the ongoing pursuit of inner unification and finding meaning in life: what Jung termed the “becoming of the self” or the “becoming of the soul.”

Jung insisted that he had adopted this strategy in dream analysis because it worked. This was all that his professional duties required. However, he also confessed to indulging in what he called his “scientific hobby”: “my desire to know why it is that the dream works.”12 In other words, he wanted to develop hypotheses about the nature of the mind and of mental healing that would explain both why his methods of analysis worked and why dreams seemed to have a purpose and efficacy in curing the illnesses of the mind.

In doing so, he not only borrowed ideas from James and Otto but also adopted many other Romantic ideas—and in particular, Romantic ideas about religion—that both of them had put aside. In this way, Jung came to play an even larger role than either James or Otto in transmitting Romantic religion to the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jung’s embrace of Romantic assumptions led his detractors to accuse him of being mystical and unscientific, but, like the Romantics themselves, he insisted that the scientific method had forced him to adopt these assumptions as hypotheses. His two main reasons for splitting with Freud, he said, were empirical: (1) In the course of analyzing his patients’ dreams, he encountered many dream images that Freud’s theories could not account for. In particular, he was struck by images that were obviously religious in import, containing symbols that could not be explained by the individual’s neuroses or by anything at all in the individual’s personal history. The fact that these images had an import—that they seemed to be delivering a message, and that the message was concerned with far more than healing the individual’s neuroses—led to Jung’s second reason for splitting with Freud. (2) He saw that, although Freud’s methods were helpful in treating specific neuroses, they did not provide a complete cure for the patient’s deeper spiritual malaise, and if they were applied to the dreams that Jung and his patients found most meaningful, they would actually do more harm than good.

In Jung’s own terms, the most fundamental difference between his approach and Freud’s was that Freud contented himself with asking “why” a particular dream occurred—i.e., what pre-existing factor in the patient’s psyche had given rise to the dream—whereas Jung also asked of the dream the more teleological question, “what for”: i.e., what purpose the dream might have in bringing the patient to psychological health. By asking this question, Jung was going beyond the mainstream science of his day, which saw all causality in the universe as mechanical, deterministic, and purposeless. To carve out room for teleology in such a universe, Jung followed James in arguing that psychic reality, instead of being experienced as a product of physical reality, actually comes prior to it. As he stated in Psychology and Religion,

Because psychic processes can only be understood in terms of what they mean, Jung reasoned, we have to assume that they have a purpose. Thus the question, “What for?” is the question most deserving of an answer. However, simply adding this second question to the psychological inquiry required that Jung give his own distinctive answer to Freud’s first question of “why.” Freud had satisfied himself that the “why” could be ferreted out by tracking down a repressed memory in the patient’s unconscious. Jung decided that there was more to the unconscious than just that.

His eventual hypothesis was that there were three levels to the psyche. The first was the conscious level, which he also termed the ego. This was composed of all the emotions and memories that fit with one’s persona: the face that one wanted to present to oneself and to the world. Any emotions and memories at odds with the persona were repressed and buried as neuroses in the second level of the psyche, the personal unconscious. This part Jung called the “shadow,” the dark side of the person’s unconscious that had to be faced before the patient could access the third and deepest level of the psyche, the collective unconscious. This third level contained not neuroses but archetypes: innate mental structures or patterns that were not personal in origin, but that acted as factors independent of the patient’s conscious will, often on the principle of compensation: communicating through symbols the message that the patient’s ego was out of balance and suggesting ways in which balance could be recovered.

In analyzing his patients’ dreams, Jung found that there were countless varieties of archetypes, but that three types were particularly important for re-establishing mental health. The first were the archetypes of life, which Jung also called the anima in his male patients, the animus in his female patients. These represented the principle of the opposite gender contained in each person and, in Jung’s words, craved life, both good and bad. In describing the message of this type of archetype, Jung stated that “Bodily life as well as psychic life have the impudence to get along much better without conventional morality, and they often remain the healthier for it.”14 However, one cannot simply surrender to the amoral demands of this sort of archetype. Balanced health requires going deeper, to archetypes of meaning—wise ways of negotiating the demands of the ego and anima/animus—and ultimately to archetypes of transformation: indications that communication among the various levels of the psyche had been established, and that the ongoing process of integration had been engaged.

Jung presented a variety of hypotheses as to the nature of the collective unconscious and the origin of the archetypes and the symbols through which they communicated. In some of his writings, he suggested that the collective unconscious was a biological inheritance from the past; in others, that the collective unconscious had porous boundaries connecting it with the collective unconscious of all other psyches existing at the same moment in time. As for the compensatory action of the archetypes, in some cases he suggested that this was simply an inherited biological self-regulating faculty; in others, that it had its roots in the totality of all contemporaneous consciousness; in others, that its origin was divine. In true Romantic fashion, he did not see these various possibilities as mutually exclusive.

When discussing the possibility of a divine origin for the archetypes and their messages, Jung stressed the need for symbols to mediate the communication from the divine to the human. The divine, he said, borrowing Otto’s characterization of the holy, was an overwhelming and sometimes frightening power, something “totally other”—although in his view, the “other” was not something outside of one’s self; it was, instead, a psychic factor from the unconscious that the conscious mind didn’t recognize as coming from within the psyche. Without the mediation of symbols through the archetypes, the ego would be overcome by the power of this factor and potentially harmed.

Because these symbols were often ambiguous, Jung maintained that they required careful interpretation so that they could give wise guidance in the patient’s individuation: the on-going process by which one integrates one’s conscious and unconscious needs, providing both an inner sense of unity and an outer sense of purpose and meaning in life that is purely one’s own. In other words, although one should learn how to listen to the unconscious, one should not identify with the impersonal forces it contains, for that would result in the psychic illness Jung termed inflation: the assumption that one was actually identical with the divine forces welling up from the unconscious. Instead, one should synthesize or actualize the wholeness of one’s identity as an individual leading a purposeful life on the human plane. Psychological health should aim, not at a transcendent dimension, but at a sense of meaning that is wholly immanent: i.e., concerned with finding happiness in this world and not worrying about transcendent dimensions.

Jung saw the role of psychotherapy in this process as picking up and moving forward with the work that religions had done in the past. All religions, he said, were essentially “systems of healing for psychic illness.” Like James and Otto before him, Jung saw that human religions had to evolve over time in order to better serve this function as humanity evolved. Unlike James and Otto, however—and here he was harking back to the early Romantics—he did not see Protestant Christianity as the ultimate endpoint of how far this evolution could go.

There were two main reasons for this. The first had to do specifically with Protestantism. In shedding the rich body of symbolism that had developed within the Catholic Church, the Protestant movement had deprived its followers of a clear symbolic vocabulary for understanding the messages of the unconscious. This lack of symbolic vocabulary had both benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, it allowed Protestants to have more direct confrontations with immediate religious experience. On the other, it left them defenseless and clueless as to how to read and integrate the messages contained within those confrontations.

To understand the spontaneous images and symbols that such people experienced in their dreams and fantasies, Jung recommended that psychotherapists become knowledgeable in the vocabulary of symbols developed in the religions of the past. In Jung’s own case, this meant studying not only Catholic symbolism, but also the symbolism of a wide range of heterodox and non-Western traditions, including alchemy, astrology, Egyptian religion, Gnosticism, the I-Ching, and Tibetan tantrism.

Jung’s second reason for seeing psychotherapy as an advance over Protestant Christianity had to do with the totality of Christianity itself. In his words, every religion is a spontaneous expression of a certain predominant psychological condition at a certain place and time. Christianity spoke to a psychic condition that required a dynamic of repentance, sacrifice, and redemption. But now, Jung asserted, that condition no longer prevails. As he wrote in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933),

Jung derived this observation from two recurrent patterns in the archetypes of transformation that many of his patients experienced spontaneously in their dreams. The first pattern was the predominance of a fourfold symbolism—sometimes in the shape of maṇḍalas, with their boxed circles and squares; sometimes in other forms. Jung interpreted the number four as more inclusive than the Christian symbolism of the Trinity. Four indicated the element missing in the Trinity—an element that Jung variously interpreted as the body, physical creation, the feminine: in other words, everything in the universe that had been excluded from the Christian idea of the holy. For Jung, these symbols expressed union and reconciliation between creator and created, the earthly and the divine sides of experience. This is one of the reasons why he saw psychological health as an immanent rather than a transcendent affair: His patients, to be healthy, needed to see the divine as something in no way separate from their individual lives on Earth.

The second pattern of dream symbolism to which Jung gave great importance was the fact that, in his patients who had dreams of maṇḍalas, the center of the maṇḍalas—in which a deity was traditionally found—contained no deities at all. Instead, there were symbols—such as globes or stars—that the patients immediately identified as standing for a center within themselves. In Psychology and Religion (1938) he reports:

This means that the psychological condition of modern life has shifted away from a sense of sin that looks for help from a transcendent dimension outside, and toward a sense of separation—from one’s self and one’s surroundings—that looks inward for a healing sense of acceptance and inner reconciliation.

To treat this more modern sense of the psychic illness, Jung did not totally reject the religions of the past. After all, as we have seen, he relied heavily on them for their symbolism, although in many cases he converted that symbolism from its original context to serve what he saw as a change in the human condition. He also stated that traditional and primitive religions contained much of positive, psychological therapeutic value in their ceremonies, rituals, initiation rites, and ascetic practices.

Strikingly, he did not include the worldviews of traditional religions in his list of approved religious therapies, and he included moral teachings only with a proviso: that they are therapeutic solely when in accord with a patient’s own insight and inspiration in the search for the right way to deal with forces of inner life. In other words, notions of right and wrong communicated through dreams had to trump any traditional standards of morality. One obvious reason for Jung’s proviso here is that he had seen many of his patients develop neuroses by trying to live up to the moral standards of European society. Another is that he himself had chafed under society’s standards of monogamy. His own mental health, he felt he had been taught by his dreams, required that he be polygamous.

As might be expected, Jung met with criticism from his religious peers just as he had from his scientific ones. Among the criticisms from the religious side were (1) that he had trivialized Otto’s concept of the holy, and (2) that he was encouraging his patients to develop idiosyncratic theologies that left them defenseless against their very-much-less-than-divine impulses. With no solid standards of right and wrong against which to measure one’s dreams, one’s emotions could use the dreams to invent their own morality at will.

In response to the first criticism, Jung stated that his patients’ dreams had great meaning for them: “To an empiricist all religious experience boils down to a peculiar condition of the mind.… And if it means anything, it means everything to those who have it.… One could even define religious experience as that kind of experience which is characterized by the highest appreciation, no matter what its contents are.”16

In response to the second criticism, he asked, “What is the difference between a real illusion and a healing religious experience? … Nobody can know what the ultimate things are. We must, therefore, take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make your life healthier, more beautiful, more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: ‘This was the grace of God.’”18

In other words, Jung adopted the Romantic position that, because the ultimate ends of the universe are unknowable, people must focus on finding meaning and wholeness in the immediate work of their lives: the ongoing “becoming of the self.” That, for him, was the highest truth and happiness that a human being can expect.

As a transmitter of Romantic religion, Jung received influences not only through James and Otto, but also directly from the Romantics themselves. For instance, living at a time when Hölderlin’s poetry had finally become widely available, he liked to quote these lines from Hölderlin’s “Patmos” in connection with the practice of using neurotic dreams to cure neuroses: “Danger itself / Fosters the rescuing power.”19

Even though Jung gave his own twist to the various elements of Romantic religion he received from his sources, he nevertheless managed to transmit many Romantic ideas about religion to the 20th century and beyond. In fact, Jung’s modifications continued James’ work in keeping these ideas alive and respectable in a society where science viewed the universe in mechanistic terms.

We can summarize Jung’s relationship to the basic features of Romantic religion as follows:

On the universe: Although Jung never stated that the universe is infinite, he did state that all existence is psychic, and that the total range of psychic reality is an organic whole, aimed at an unknowable goal, and regulating itself toward that goal through the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The fact that the goal is unknowable makes Jung’s universe functionally equivalent to the infinitude of the Romantic universe, in which the goal of the infinite universal organism is unknowable as well. Jung also agreed with the Romantic principle of the microcosm: that the living organism contains within it the organic history of all consciousness:

On the spiritual problem: Jung agreed with the Romantics on all the major features of the basic religious illness and the way in which a religious experience could work toward alleviating it:

• Human beings suffer when their sense of inner and outer unity is lost—when they feel divided within themselves and separated from the universe.

• Despite its many expressions, the religious experience is the same for all: an intuition of the wholeness of reality that creates a feeling of unity with the universe and a feeling of unity within.

• Although Jung did not give Eros a role in provoking a religious experience, he, like the Romantics, felt that its needs had to be accommodated in any true psychic unity:

• This sense of internal and external wholeness is healing but totally immanent. In other words, (a) it is temporary and (b) it does not give direct experience of any transcendent, unconditioned dimension outside of space and time.

• Therefore the freedom offered by the religious experience—the highest freedom possible in an organic universe—does not transcend the laws of organic causation. Jung shared with the Romantics the inability to conceive of human nature in a way that could transcend the limitations of becoming. In fact, for him, the healthy becoming of the soul was what religion was all about.

• Because the religious experience can give only a temporary feeling of unity, the religious life is one of pursuing repeated religious experiences—in Jung’s case, this meant staying in touch with the messages from the collective unconscious—in hopes of gaining an improved feeling for that unity, but never fully achieving it.

• Unlike the Romantics, Jung did not insist that a numinous dream would carry with it an ability to see the commonplace events of the immanent world as sublime and miraculous. Still, he did regard the dream as something to be given the highest respect, and that the meaning it gave to life should be respected in the same light.

On the cultivation of religious experiences through numinous dreams: Jung agreed with the Romantics that an attitude of open acceptance was necessary for this sort of transformative experience. Here he cited Schiller:

Jung believed that dreams and consciously induced fantasies were the primary modes in which such a state of receptivity, free from the constraints of the ego, could be accessed. In fact, The Red Book, a diary of his consciously induced fantasies, shows the extreme extent to which Jung tried to access the contents of his own unconscious in this way.

He also agreed with the Romantics that religious texts of all sorts should be respected as possible sources of inspiration, but that none of them should be granted full authority, for that would prevent the patient from having an immediate experience of the psychic forces trying to do their compensatory work from within.

On the results of religious experiences: Like the Romantics, Jung believed that the creative nature of the mind wants to express these experiences—he often encouraged his patients to paint their responses to their dreams—and to derive meaning from them. He also agreed that these expressions were authoritative only for the person who made them. This point applied in particular to any desire to express one’s experience in terms of rules of behavior. No one had the authority to force his or her morality on anyone else. In this sense, Jung’s sense of the moral expression of the undivided self came closer to Hölderlin’s than to James’. In other words, the purpose of religious experiences was not to lead to conformity with any moral law. Instead, it was to provide an ongoing integration of all the contents of the psyche, with no need for consistency over time.

On religious change: Again agreeing with the Romantics, Jung felt that although all religions were valid, some were more evolved than others and had to be evaluated under the framework of historicism to see where that particular religion fell in the organic development of the human psyche. In this way, one could gauge how appropriate its lessons were for curing spiritual illness as that illness takes new forms in modern times. And because the human psyche is constantly evolving, religious change is not only a fact, it is also a duty. This, for Jung, meant that the development of dream-analysis in psychotherapy as a replacement for traditional religion was not only a fact of modern life, but also a necessary and healthy development in human evolution.

To justify this view, he closed Modern Man in Search of a Soul with these words, Romantic both in their message and in their organic symbolism:

Jung obviously believed that the living spirit had chosen him to proclaim his message as a compensatory action against the rampant materialism of the modern world. For him, the fact that dream analysis—the search for the meaning of dreams—cured the psychic illnesses of his patients was proof that psychic reality could not be reduced to material laws. After all, “meaning” has no meaning in a strictly materialistic system. “Meaning” makes sense only in a system that allows for the teleology of purposes and aims. Thus the focus on symbolism was, for him, the central means for re-enchanting the world so that life itself could regain meaning and authenticity.

In proclaiming this modernized version of the Romantic view of spiritual illness and the spiritual cure, Jung saw himself as advancing beyond both Christianity and Buddhism. Buddhism, in his eyes, ranked with Christianity as one of the two greatest traditional “systems of healing for psychic illness.” And he expressed high regard for the symbolic world of the Buddhists, especially in the Tibetan tradition, and for Buddhist systems of mental training as possible means for inducing mind states receptive to the unconscious. In this way he accorded much more respect to Buddhism than had Freud, who regarded all quests for religious experience as reversions to an infantile state. Thus, wherever Jung’s influence spread—both among trained Jungian analysts and among therapists of a more eclectic humanistic bent—he opened the door for Buddhism to enter into the world of Western psychotherapy.

Nevertheless, the door was open only on certain conditions. Jung criticized Westerners who wanted to adopt Buddhism as their religion, comparing them to Western paupers trying to dress up in Oriental robes. In his eyes, Buddhist symbolism and practices were to be adopted strictly in line with his view of how to best foster the becoming of the soul. The result was that his Romantic organic view of the universe prevented him from imagining the possibility that the Dhamma might be right in seeing even the healthiest form of becoming as a disease, and that it might offer a spiritual cure—suitable for all times and places—that transcended becoming entirely.

Maslow

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was one of the pioneers of humanistic psychology in America. Writing at a time when Freud and the behaviorists dominated the psychotherapeutic field, Maslow championed what he called a Third Force in psychotherapy, devoted to the principle that a therapist should not be content simply with curing his or her patients’ blatant neuroses and psychoses, but should also work toward their full psychological health. Among his fellows in this movement he counted Jung, Horney, Rogers, and a host of others.

One of Maslow’s primary contributions to this approach to psychotherapy was the concept of self-actualization: the principle that human beings are born with certain potentials that they need to actualize to the full in order to achieve genuine happiness. For Maslow, this observation carried an imperative: “What man can be, he must be.” In other words, the fact that biology has endowed people with certain potentials carried a value: Society should be ordered so that those potentials can be actualized.

In the course of articulating what those potentials are and how they can best be actualized, Maslow drew heavily from James, Jung, and Otto. In doing so, he adopted many of the Romantic assumptions about religion that their writings contain. He also adopted a number of Romantic assumptions from Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, a book we will discuss in the last section of this chapter. In addition, he was familiar with the writings of the New England Transcendentalists. And as we noted above, he was living at a time where he felt that serious scientists had come to regard the universe as an organic, unified whole, evolving with meaning and purpose. In other words, he felt that science had returned, in principle at least, to the universe inhabited by the Romantics.

As a result, just as Jung had incorporated more Romanticism into his writings than he had acquired from either James or Otto, Maslow incorporated more Romanticism than he had acquired from any of the three. The fact that Maslow’s Third Force has now come to dominate American psychotherapy has meant that these Romantic assumptions continue to thrive in American culture, where they have played a direct role in shaping Buddhist Romanticism.

Maslow’s most accessible book on the topic of religion is Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences, which he published in 1964 and then revised in 1970, shortly before his death. The book centers on the issue of how to derive an objective set of spiritual values that can underlie an educational system in a modern democratic, pluralistic society. He did not define the term spiritual value, but he did provide a list of questions that spiritual values should answer: “What is the good life? What is the good man? The good woman? What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness? How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? What is my responsibility to my brothers? Who are my brothers? What shall I be loyal to? What must I be ready to die for?”24

Maslow noted that modern society had reached an impasse on these questions, an impasse he traced to the fact that religion and science, narrowly defined, had carved out mutually exclusive areas of concern. Science, in a quest for objectivity, had declared itself value-free, and in fact had dismissed questions of value as not worth answering. Religion had retreated from science and so offered no intellectually respectable, objective source for its answers to these questions. All it could offer were unverifiable supernatural claims.

Maslow’s proposed solution to this problem was to offer an expanded vision of science based on his assumption—taken from his organic view of the universe—that human potentials carry an inherent, objective imperative to be actualized. But just as science would have to be reconfigured to adopt this assumption, so would religion. Following Jung, Maslow felt that the progress of society required religion to relinquish its authority in the field of values and hand it over to psychotherapy, just as in earlier centuries it had relinquished its authority in cosmology to the physical sciences.

To convince the religions of the world to relinquish their authority in the area of values, Maslow followed a two-pronged approach. First, he stated as a scientifically proven fact the basic premise of historicism: that all truths were subject to time and place, and that the social sciences had disproven all religious claims to eternal truth.

The second prong of Maslow’s approach was to argue that psychotherapy had a more objective understanding of the common essence of all religions, along with their common values, and so was better qualified than they to take charge in the area of determining and teaching values. Following James, Maslow stated as a fact the bald assumption that all religions are derived from a single religious experience, common to all great religious figures, which was then integrated into the life of the individual who had undergone the experience. To divorce James’ categories of conversion and sanctification from any particular tradition, Maslow renamed them after the shape they would assume if graphed over time: peak-experiences and plateau-experiences. Peak-experiences are short-lived feelings of oneness, rapture, ecstasy, and integration. Plateau-experiences exhibit a more stable sense of integration, knowledge, and heightened being, and last much longer. Peak-experiences could not be lived in, but plateau-experiences could.

We have already noted the paradoxical role of this essentially Romantic claim that all religions come from the same experience, variously described: On the one hand, it can be used as license for each person to interpret the religious experience in any way he or she saw fit; on the other, it can be imposed as a means for judging invalid any religious view that doesn’t agree with the Romantic explanation of where that view came from. Maslow, at least for the purpose of deriving an objective set of values, adopted the second tack.

Maslow then argued that peak-experiences should be regarded not as supernatural in any sense, but as totally natural and biological in origin. Previous generations of mystics had missed this fact because of the limitations of their culture:

In contrast, Maslow argued that the naturalistic, biological explanation of these experiences available in his time and place was not limited in this way. As proof, he cited interviews in which—defining peak-experiences as any feeling of heightened rapture, ecstasy, or illumination—he had asked a variety of educated people whether they had ever had such experiences. At first he seemed to find two sorts of people—peakers and non-peakers—but then he realized that the non-peakers actually had had such experiences but, for various psychological, philosophical, or other undetermined reasons, had dismissed them as unimportant. Thus he concluded that non-peakers were really weak peakers: Everyone has had such experiences, and in many cases those experiences carried no supernatural meaning for those who had them. Thus supernatural interpretations of such experiences were expendable.

Furthermore, he maintained that because peak-experiences carried a heightened sense of being and consciousness, they could function as a source of objective values offering guidance in how to foster heightened self-actualization throughout society. Based on his interviews and on his readings about peak-experiences in the past—mainly in James, Otto, and Huxley—he came to the following conclusions about the core values that could be derived from such experiences.

To begin with, people can be taught how to have them. Like the Romantics, Maslow noted that this meant, basically, developing an attitude of open receptivity toward them, which could be triggered in a number of ways: through hearing or reading about examples of peak-experiences, through the controlled use of psychedelic drugs, or through healthy sexual love. Maslow focused special attention on this last trigger, devoting an entire appendix of his book to ways in which one should view one’s sexual partner—both as an actual human being and as an idealized archetype of Man or Woman—so that the sexual act could be a union of the sacred and profane. In this way, he revived an element of Romantic religion that James and Jung had ignored: the role of Eros in bringing about heightened consciousness. This element would play a large role in Buddhist Romanticism.

As for the lessons learned during a peak-experience, Maslow drew up a long list of perception shifts that the experience induces, which included these Romantic perceptions about human beings and their place in the universe: The universe is an integrated, organic, unified whole. Dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts are resolved, both within and without. One’s life has meaning and purpose as an integral part of the whole. In fact, every object is seen in its own Being as sacred. The universe is good in its purpose, and one becomes reconciled even to the place of evil in the larger scope of things. One’s emotional response is one of wonder, acceptance, and humility, and yet one also feels pride in having a creative role to play in contributing to the whole. Consciousness becomes unitive—a term that Maslow apparently picked up from Huxley. In Maslow’s definition, the special mark of unitive consciousness is what Novalis would have termed authenticity: It glimpses a sense of the sacred in and through the profane particulars of the world.

Maslow, like James, noted that these perceptual shifts were extremely convincing for the person experiencing them, but that the experience offered no objective proof of their truth. Nevertheless, Maslow did venture to say that these experiences proved that the view of the universe as an organic, unified whole is conducive for self-actualization, and so should be regarded as a “species-relative absolute,” i.e., a truth with pragmatic value that has to be assumed for the healthy functioning of every member of the human species.

As for the personal values and traits resulting from peak-experiences—and that, through effort and training, can be developed into plateau-experiences—Maslow formulated a list that omitted a few items, such as asceticism, from James’ similar list, but otherwise considerably expanded on it: truth, goodness, an appreciation of the beauty, perfection, and richness of the world; wholeness, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, a sense of the necessity of the way things are, justice, order, simplicity, effortlessness, playfulness, and self-sufficiency.

Maslow argued that the objectivity of these values is proven by the fact that they are conducive to survival—in a good society. In a bad society, some of them can lead to a premature death. Thus, he argued, social sciences should study further what a good society is and how it can be brought about so that human beings can be free to develop these values and traits to their full potential without infringing on the full development of those same traits in others. In this way, Maslow’s religious program, like the religious Bildung recommended by the Romantics, had a political/social dimension, aimed at freedom as the Romantics defined it: the freedom to express one’s inherent nature. This was another aspect of Romantic religion that he revived and added to what he had learned from James and Jung.

It’s easy to understand why the religions of the world did not all accept Maslow’s argument that psychology had now superseded them as an authority on human values. Three reasons in particular stand out:

• One, not all religions would have agreed to limit questions of values to the ones on his list.

• Two, they would have recognized that his equation between flux and relativism is a false one: The fact that cultures and societies undergo flux does not mean that all truths are culturally relative. The fact that change happens does not mean that it always happens in a healthy, appropriate way.

• Three, it is hard to see that the religions of the world would have agreed that all peak-experiences are essentially the same, and in particular that the ecstasy of good sex was no different from the religious experiences that had inspired their founders. From the Buddhist point of view, this last assumption is a fatal weakness in Maslow’s theory.

Then there are the two major methodological weaknesses in his analysis of the core peak-experience.

• First, it’s easy to see that Maslow’s method for conducting interviews about peak experiences skewed the results of those interviews in the direction he wanted them to go. By defining such experiences as any sense of rapture, ecstasy, or illumination, he ensured that the interviews would lead to the conclusion that not all peak experiences were supernatural in meaning, and that supernatural interpretations were for that reason irrelevant. Because this conclusion was implicit in the way he framed his questions, the answers he got were no proof that his conclusion was true.

• Second, even though Maslow used James as a source, he chose to ignore many of the accounts in The Varieties of Religious Experience that did not fit into his paradigm of the core peak-experience. For example, there was the account of Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842), the French philosopher whose conversion experience had told him that the world, far from being sacred, was meaningless, and that he was thus free to create his own meaning for his life. There were also the many Catholic saints—such as Margaret Mary Alacoque, Saint Theresa, and Saint Louis of Gonzaga—whose peak-experiences, according to James, had turned them into lower-functioning rather than higher-functioning individuals. Maslow dismissed these experiences as pathological, which indicates that he was not actually deriving his system of values from the universal phenomenon of peak-experiences. Instead, he was judging peak-experiences from another set of values about health and pathology, which seem to be Romantic/Transcendentalist in origin, and then cherry-picking the evidence to give those values the appearance of objectivity.

This tendency is most blatant in Maslow’s treatment of one of the perception-shifts that he attributed to the core peak-experience—an acceptance of the necessary role played by evil in the world—and the corresponding value, dichotomy-transcendence, that he derived from it. It’s hard to see how either of these features could provide a motivation for doing good—after all, if evil is necessary, how is it bad?—or any answer to the questions of what a good life or a good person should be.

And of course, from the perspective of the Dhamma, it’s obvious that Maslow’s imperatives of self-actualization are at best nothing more than imperatives for improved levels of becoming: how to become a more fully developed human being within the world, but leaving no possibility for going beyond a human identity in a human world. By dismissing any religious experiences that deviate from what he defines as a core peak-experience, he closed off the possibility that an awakening like the Buddha’s could have anything of unique and higher value to offer the world.

Nevertheless, in spite of these weaknesses in his theory, Maslow’s attitudes about religions, values, and peak-experiences were not only adopted by many therapists in the field of humanistic psychology, but also—through those therapists—made their way into the thought of modern Dhamma teachers, providing the underlying structure for a large portion of Buddhist Romanticism.

History of Religions

As we noted in Chapter Four, the early Romantics were among the first European thinkers to call for a new way of studying religion in the university: what Schelling called a “supra-confessional” approach. Instead of simply teaching Christian theology, they argued, professors should approach the study of the world’s religions with an eye to the way in which all religions played a role in the unfolding drama of the evolution of the cosmos.

The three early Romantics who wrote most extensively about this proposed line of study—Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel—agreed that religion had to evolve in line with the progressive evolution of the cosmos, but they approached this idea from different angles. Each of these angles ended up influencing the ways the study of the history of religions developed in Europe and America in the succeeding decades.

Schelling was convinced that religious ideas, over time, had to evolve in objectively better ways as part of the general evolution of divine consciousness—from unity, through diversity, to unity containing diversity. For him, this conviction was an objective truth. He was also convinced that human beings, in helping religion to evolve, had no choice in the matter. They were simply acting in line with the laws of organic change that drove the entire cosmos. Thus any effort to understand the evolution of religion had to find its place in a larger philosophy of history—like Schelling’s—that tried to explain the laws of the evolution of the universe as a whole.

In contrast, Schlegel—in line with his high regard for a sense of irony—thought that the idea of progressive change in religion was simply a useful myth to foster the progress of freedom in society. His concern was less with the general shape of religious change and more with the aesthetics of religion as a human art form, expressed in individual myths that pointed to the reality of infinity but could not describe it objectively. He also believed that the creativity expressed in these myths was an expression of divine freedom in action. Like Herder, his interest lay more in developing an “infinite sphere of taste” than in judging particular myths as to their “objective” value. And, like Herder, he called for a greater interest in philology—the study of languages and other critical tools to determine the meaning and authenticity of ancient texts—so that these myths and their evolution could be better understood. In particular, he called for a greater interest in Sanskrit, so that the myths of India—in his eyes, the source of all religious mythology—could be appreciated in a way that would advance the evolution of European civilization across the board.

As for Schleiermacher, his interest centered in the primary experience of the infinite within each individual, and so he believed that religious texts should be studied with regard to how they tried to express that experience, given the talents of the author and his or her situation in time and place. Like Schlegel, Schleiermacher promoted the study of texts so as to understand the author’s original meaning—but less for the sake of aesthetic appreciation than as a way to intuit the experience that inspired the text. In fact, as we have noted, Schleiermacher’s writings on this topic are considered the founding documents of modern hermeneutics, or the science of interpretation. And as we saw in the discussion of Jung, Schleiermacher’s ideas eventually influenced Rudolph Otto and, through Otto, shaped the discipline called the phenomenology of religion: the attempt to understand the religious experience from the inside.

Thus the early Romantics bequeathed three approaches to the academic study of what came to be called history of religions, comparative religion, and comparative mythology: grand history, philology, and phenomenology.

It’s easy to see why these approaches eventually split apart, for they assign meaning to religious beliefs in different ways. In grand history, religious texts and experiences have meaning only with an eye to where the cosmos as a whole is going; in philology, meaning is centered in the texts themselves; whereas in phenomenology, meaning is centered in what the reader intuits about the experience that must have inspired the text. For the Romantics, though, these various approaches were tied together by their common assumption that the cosmos was animated by a single divine force, so that wherever one looked for meaning—in the original experience of infinity, its expression as myth, or its role in the larger evolution of consciousness in the universe—that meaning must always be the same.

For a while, these approaches continued to work together, as can be seen in one of the first studies of comparative mythology inspired by the early Romantics. In 1810–1812, Friedrich Creuzer published Symbolic and Mythology of Ancient Peoples, citing Schelling as his prime intellectual influence. In this work, Creuzer advanced a dual thesis: that the Eleusinian mysteries contained the true religious doctrine of the ancient Greeks, and that the origins of this “symbolic”—i.e., both the body of symbols and the beliefs organized around them—lay in India. “When dealing with almost all major myths,” he wrote, “… we must, so to speak, first orient ourselves toward the Orient.”29 Although Creuzer explicitly expressed his intellectual debt to Schelling in writing this book, Schlegel’s influence can also be seen in Creuzer’s choice of subject matter, his philological emphasis, and his understanding of the role of India in the history of world religions.

However, the peaceful co-existence of grand history, philology, and religious phenomenology quickly came to an end, even before the belief in an ever-present and ever-active divine force in the universe was rejected. Ironically, the first battle was fought in the 1820’s in German university circles among scholars who had played a role in the early Romantic movement. At the center of the battle was the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had been a bit-player in the early Romantic movement but then went on to become the most influential German philosopher of the 19th century.

Hegel

Hegel (1770–1831) had roomed with Hölderlin and Schelling while at seminary, and had danced with them around their “tree of liberty” on first hearing the news that the German efforts to stifle the French Revolution had failed. Later he gained minor jobs with Hölderlin’s and Schelling’s help. He repaid his debt to Schelling in 1801 by publishing a book on the differences between Schelling’s philosophy and Fichte’s, arguing that Schelling’s was by far the better of the two.

In 1807, however—after the early Romantics had gone their separate ways—he published his first major independent work on philosophy, The Phenomenology of Mind, in which he tried to distance himself from Schelling and the other early Romantics. The general outline of his philosophy—the universe as an infinite, organic unity, developing by dialectical means from unity, through diversity, and on to an ultimate unity that contains diversity—came from Schelling. So did Hegel’s understanding of philosophy in the context of that worldview: that philosophy could not deal only in static, abstract principles, but had to show how the cosmos—both in material reality and the evolution of human consciousness—had actually developed by dialectic means. Schelling was not happy to see his ideas appropriated by his former roommate, because Hegel, in his preface to the Phenomenology, had grossly misrepresented Schelling’s positions, perhaps to disguise his debt to Schelling. Nevertheless, Hegel made many additions to what he had taken from Schelling, enough to make his philosophy his own.

Hegel’s most basic contributions to Schelling’s outline lay in his treatment of the dialectic means by which consciousness and the cosmos evolve. In Schelling’s dialectic, the assertion of a thesis contains an implicit contradiction, which is its antithesis. In other words, the antithesis does not arise in opposition to the thesis. It actually arises from within the thesis itself. The conflict between the two is then resolved only by reaching a higher synthesis, which embraces both. This synthesis, however, then becomes a new thesis, which contains a new antithesis, and so on. For our purposes, we can highlight two major additions that Hegel made to Schelling’s explanation of this process.

• The first was his explanation of what was actually happening in the move from thesis to antithesis to synthesis: In resolving the conflict between thesis and antithesis, Hegel said, the act of arriving at a synthesis had to discover and articulate a larger truth that was implicit in the social process of asking for and providing reasons for the thesis—an underlying truth that the thesis had ignored. This explanation carried three main implications.

One: All knowledge, to count as knowledge, had to be articulate. Thus what we have been calling “phenomenology” throughout this book—one’s sense of one’s consciousness as something singular, composed of sense data that are directly experienced from within, prior to being put into words—doesn’t really count as knowledge.

Two: Just as the synthesis moves knowledge forward by expanding the range of articulate understanding of the activities of the mind, it also moves backward in the sense that it reveals what was already implicitly there prior to the assertion of the thesis. (As we will see in the next section, this aspect of Hegel’s dialectic came to inform the growth of perennial philosophy in a way that Hegel would neither have anticipated nor welcomed.) This is how the diversity of articulate knowledge moves back to unity but without the ignorance of primal unity. This is what “unity in diversity” means.

Three: Because human philosophizing lies at the forefront of all conscious activity, it is not an idle pastime. Nor does it simply attempt to grasp what is going on in the world. Instead, it actually directs the evolution of the world through its efforts to articulate a full and coherent synthesis embracing all of the assumptions underlying the activity of Mind: the larger, universal consciousness of which all individual consciousnesses are a part. Evolution then reaches completion as this synthesis becomes manifest in physical reality. This is why, for Hegel, every statement of a philosophical position had to show how that position had actually played a role in world history. This in turn is why his philosophical works devote so much space to Grand History: showing how the philosophical, political, and social history of the world could be explained in terms of the dialectic of human thought. In Buddhist terms, this History was a celebration of Becoming writ large.

• Hegel’s second main addition to Schelling’s dialectic lay in his understanding of where the dialectic was headed. As we noted in Chapter Four, Schelling had argued that all events and organisms in the universe had to be understood in terms of where they fit within the dynamic evolution of the universe toward a goal, but then he denied that a final goal would ever be reached. This meant that his philosophy, judged on its own terms, couldn’t explain anything: If things can be understood only in relation to the goal to which they lead, but that goal itself can’t be understood, then nothing can be understood.

Hegel proposed to remedy this defect by defining the goal of the universe. He gave it two different definitions in two different works, but the definitions are connected. In the Phenomenology, he defined the goal of the universe as “absolute knowledge,” i.e., the realization on the part of Mind—both in its personal sense as individual human minds and its cosmic sense as God—that all of the universe is nothing but its own constructs, and that beyond itself and its constructs there is nothing to know. This knowledge is absolute in that it is not an object of a knowing subject. Instead—within this knowledge—the subject, the object, and the knowing are all One. This unity would contain no inner conflict, and so there was nowhere further for the cosmos to develop. This point was to resurface in perennial philosophy as well.

In The Philosophy of Right, however, Hegel defined the goal of history as “full consciousness of the idea of freedom.” Here he attempted to combine Kant and Spinoza by defining freedom both as adherence to the universal laws of reason, and as the freedom to follow one’s own nature. To make this combination work, though, Hegel had to deviate from Kant in arguing that when a mind sees itself as separate from other minds and from universal Mind, its feelings are bound to conflict with universal laws of reason, which means that it becomes divided within itself, feeling constrained by those laws. But when it realizes that it is in no way separate from Mind, its feelings and reason can harmonize. It can act morally with no inner conflict or sense of alienation.

This is why absolute knowing and full consciousness of the idea of freedom are simply two different ways of stating a single goal: the fully articulated Oneness of everything. In this way Hegel supplied further arguments for the Romantic ideas—which would eventually become Buddhist Romantic ideas—that the universe was One, and that morality could be achieved effortlessly by learning to see oneself as part of that universal Oneness.

Not only did Hegel define the goal of the universe, he also announced that it had already been reached. On the one hand, Mind arrived at absolute knowledge when Hegel finished The Phenomenology of Mind—which means that he viewed his book both as a description of the purpose of the universe and as a performance piece: an example of how Mind drives evolution to a purpose, and the actual means by which that purpose was finally attained. On the other hand, Hegel argued in The Philosophy of Right that the idea of freedom had been fully realized in the modern Prussian state. On this latter count, though, his students later fell into two major camps over the question of whether he was speaking of the political realities of the 1820’s or of his idea of where Prussia would have to develop given that he had realized the true idea of freedom.

As might be expected, these principles in Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic thrust of history shaped his understanding of the role of religion in history. But events in his academic career shaped it as well. After the completion of his second major opus, the Science of Logic (1812–1816), Hegel in 1818 was offered a position on the philosophy faculty of the recently founded University of Berlin. Schleiermacher was already on the faculty there—as we noted in Chapter One, he had been involved with the university since its founding in 1810—and although he was a member of the theology faculty, he lectured on philosophy as well.

Because, in Hegel’s view, the evolution of the cosmos depended on the ability to articulate the relationship of Mind and its creations, he felt that Schleiermacher’s view of religion as an inarticulate feeling for the infinite was a giant step backward. Thus, in 1821, he began to lecture on the history of religion with the express purpose of refuting Schleiermacher’s views, and he continued to lecture on the topic three more times, in 1824, 1827, and 1831. Not only did he offer rational arguments against Schleiermacher’s ideas on religion, he heaped ridicule on them as well. For instance, he remarked that Schleiermacher’s description of faith as a feeling of dependence on and submission to the infinite could not tell the difference between faith and a dog’s happiness at getting a bone from its master.30

The overall effect of this attack was to emphasize the vast difference between their approaches, and to push Schleiermacher and his theories out of the realm of philosophical discourse for many decades afterward. Only in academic theology was Schleiermacher considered an authority; and only in the last decades of the 19th century, when professors such as William James began to question Hegel’s theories, did Schleiermacher’s theories on the nature of religious experience receive serious attention in the disciplines of philosophy and psychology.

However, in addition to exposing the divide between phenomenology and Grand History, Hegel’s lectures also exposed a similar divide between Grand History and philology as approaches in the study of world religion. Exposing the first divide was intentional on his part; exposing the second divide was more inadvertent.

He had already established the major outlines of his theory of the evolution of religion in world history in the Phenomenology; in his lectures on the history of religion, he simply worked out the details of this outline. He presented the evolution of religion as a story of growing understanding of the relationship between the finite and the infinite. This much of the theory is Romantic in origin, as was Hegel’s assertion that this understanding was evolving not only in human minds but, at the same time, in the mind of God: The history of religion showed not only the evolution of human understanding in the area of religion; it also showed the evolution of God’s.

In line with Hegel’s theories about the goal of the universe, this understanding grew dialectically toward a full and articulate consciousness of freedom together with the Oneness of all reality. The initial thesis in the dialectic from which this consciousness grew was represented by what Hegel called “nature religion.” In nature religion there is a vague sense of a universal force behind the finite events of nature, but with no logical understanding of the relationship between the two, and thus no possibility of freedom for the individual. In this category, Hegel gathered primitive religions together with Chinese, Indian, and Persian religions, culminating in Egyptian religion. As an aside, he also threw Kant’s religious beliefs into this category as a way of dismissing them.

The antithesis growing out of nature religion was “the elevation of spirit over nature,” which covered Greek, Jewish, and Roman religion. Greek religion elevated spirit over nature in an aesthetic way, showing humanity—through stories of the gods—how to imagine what it must be like to be free. Jewish religion showed this in a sublime way, by depicting God as a single, transcendent power. In Roman religion, however, the conflict between external compulsion and the subjective desire for freedom created an “unhappy consciousness,” which, having posited a God apart from itself, felt alienated both from God and within itself. This conflict was resolved with Christianity, in which, according to Hegel, God becomes a human being and then dies in order to show all human beings that they no longer have to look for divinity outside themselves, but should learn to see it within themselves. At the same time, Hegel felt, Christ’s message was that all human beings should realize that, being an integral part of the divine, they are free to act in line with that divinity, and that they were under no compulsion to obey any outside authority.

This, of course, was a very imaginative interpretation of world religions, and of Christianity in particular. Hegel himself realized that his interpretation of Christ’s message was novel, but he defended it on grounds that also took Schleiermacher as their target: Philosophy, instead of being a degenerate, second-hand result of the religious experience, he said, actually took the content of religious revelation and gave it logical form, making it both understandable and real by showing its dialectical necessity and reconciling the conflicts that the first thought of religion engendered—thus completing the work that religion left unfinished. In Hegel’s words:

Here again, Hegel felt that his own philosophy of religion was not only descriptive. It was also performative, a momentous event in world history in that it made the Oneness of all reality explicit in the real world.

At the same time, by presenting the history of religion as a history of the evolving relationship of the divine with its creation, Hegel was the first to realize Schelling’s Romantic dream of a universal history showing the drama of what Schelling had called the World Soul at work in the world: Grand History in the grandest sense. One can only wonder what Schelling thought, though, on seeing Hegel assume a starring role in the dream. But from our perspective, even if we don’t take sides in the feud between Schelling and Hegel, we can easily see that Hegel’s history told more about Hegel than it did about the religions of the world.

This is evident from many idiosyncratic features in his version of history, but two in particular stand out. First, Islam is allowed no role in world history, and Hegel mentions it briefly only in passing. Given his general theory that religions evolve over time through dialectic necessity, the fact that Islam developed after Christianity would lead one to assume that it would have to be an advance on Christianity, but Hegel dismissed it as pure irrationality. His unwillingness to discuss Islam in detail can perhaps be explained by a passage toward the end of the Science of Logic. There he stated that although the dynamic of the dialectic was necessary, it exerted no compulsion on nature. In other words, the progress of the world had to follow the dialectic pattern, but individuals were free to move the world forward in line with that pattern or not. If they chose not to, they could either stagnate or regress. This would explain not only Islam, but also, in Hegel’s opinion, such retrograde theories about religion as Schleiermacher’s and Kant’s.

However, given that the ultimate outcome of religious progress is full consciousness that God and the universe have been One all along, it would be strange for God’s left brain not to know what his right brain had been doing. How could part of God regress when another part had already made progress?

A second idiosyncratic feature of Hegel’s history is the role it gives to Indian religion. Even his sympathetic commentators have noted that his treatment of Buddhism and Hinduism is blatantly one-sided and negative, a severe distortion of what these religions actually practiced and taught. These commentators have excused this aspect of Hegel’s history by claiming that Hegel had no good sources to work with, but that was not actually the case.

It is true that Hegel’s initial views about Indian religion were based on limited sources. For instance, Herder, in 1792, had rendered into German some passages in the Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gīta from earlier English translations. In these renderings, he had emphasized, with considerable poetic license, the monistic and vitalistic elements that he intuited in the texts and that corresponded with his own views about the cosmos. But even Herder had objected to some of the doctrines he found in those texts—in particular, the teachings on karma and rebirth—seeing them as undermining morality. In the Phenomenology, Hegel had followed Herder in dismissing Indian religion as “a realm of pantheism, passivity, selflessness, and amorality.”

Similarly with Buddhism: 18th century scholars had depicted Buddhism as a form of nihilism, and so Hegel in his religion lectures summarized its teaching as, “It is from nothing that all comes, and to nothing that all returns.” Further, “Man must make himself into nothingness”; and “holiness consists only to the extent to which man in this annihilation, in this silence, unites with God, with nothingness, with the absolute.”32 This interpretation fit neatly with Hegel’s assertion in the Science of Logic that the initial conception of Being is undifferentiated, and thus is actually a concept of nothingness. Interpreting Buddhism as nihilism allowed him to cite it as an example of this primitive stage in his story of the dialectic of human thought.

As more Buddhist and Hindu texts were translated into German in the succeeding years, Hegel moderated some of his views on Indian religions, but he continued to assert that even though Indian religions had formed a concept of the infinite and proposed an identity of the finite with the infinite, they had no clear, concrete conception of how the infinite could be fully realized on the level of the finite. As for Buddhism, he continued to present it as a form of nihilism even though newer research showed clearly that it wasn’t.

We might excuse Hegel’s intransigence on these points by assuming that he simply wasn’t keeping up with the scholarly literature in these areas, but in at least one case we know that this wasn’t so. The case involves August Schlegel, Friedrich’s brother, one of Hegel’s acquaintances from his earlier days at Jena.

August had been appointed professor of literature at the University of Bonn in 1818. In 1823, he published—together with Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of the University of Berlin—a full, annotated translation of the Bhagavad Gīta. In it, he noted that when the Gīta was read in full, it did not support Herder’s facile interpretations of Indian religion and instead presented a more complex view of the relation between God—Viṣṇu—and the cosmos.

In 1827, Hegel himself wrote a review of the book. Then, four years later, he neglected to mention in his 1831 lectures the fact that this text, predating the Christian Bible, mentions a divine being who had become fully human in the person of Krishna, who taught that his incarnation had a universal plan with implications for all of humanity. Instead, Hegel continued to insist that Indian religion had created no necessary connection between beings and their underlying Being. Thus Indian religion was nothing but the “Religion of Abstract Unity,” a pantheism in which “substance [is] not grasped as wisdom but solely as power. It is something devoid of concept; the determinate element, purpose, is not contained in it.… It is merely the reeling, inwardly purposeless, empty power.”33 Hegel should have known that this was a gross mischaracterization of what the Gīta taught, but he held to it in order to continue maintaining that only Christianity provided a meaningful incarnation of the divine. In other words, he fudged the facts to fit his theories.

From his review of Schlegel’s book, it’s clear that Hegel would have justified his treatment of Indian religion by claiming that his understanding of the dialectic had enabled him to get below the surface of the text to see its underlying message. Thus, in his eyes, just because the facts did not fit with his theory, that did not prove his theory wrong. It simply showed that the facts were insignificant or provided a false cover for a deeper reality.

This was how Hegel’s theories were able to survive and exert influence on later generations. But this incident did show that two of the Romantic bequests to the study of world religions—philology and Grand History—were beginning to work at cross-purposes. Philology tried to get at what a text was saying on its own terms in its immediate historical environment; Grand History tried to assign meaning to the texts in terms that the author of the text would not have recognized. Add to this Hegel’s treatment of Schleiermacher’s phenomenological approach, and we can see that even by the 1820’s, the threefold Romantic bequest to religious studies was already beginning to fall apart. As philologists continued their work in the 19th and 20th centuries, the split among these three approaches continued to widen.

Romanticism in Modern Scholarship

Fast-forward to the present. The two world wars have put an end to any serious academic effort to present the history of world religions as a grand narrative of progress. The rise of the social sciences has brought the techniques of anthropology and sociology to bear on the history of religious change. And the assumption that a divine will is at work in personal religious experiences, in the composing of religious texts, or in the direction of religious change has, at least in the academy, fallen by the wayside. Nevertheless, the modern academic study of religion has created a climate that has fostered and justified the growth of Buddhist Romanticism.

To begin with, all three aspects of the Romantic approach to the study of religion are still being practiced: Philologists still study texts. Phenomenologists still follow Schleiermacher in trying to get at the structure of religious consciousness. As for Grand Theorists, Hegel’s descendents in the field no longer look for grand narratives, but they do look for underlying power dynamics in religious texts (counting all kinds of behavior as “texts”), dynamics that subvert the surface meaning of the texts and that the authors they are studying would deny are there. And although each of these approaches has provided interesting insights, when they are applied to the study of Buddhism, none of them are capable of answering the most important question that the Dhamma provokes: Does the practice of the Dhamma really lead to the end of suffering and stress?

For this reason, historians of religion have directed their focus away from the Dhamma and turned it toward Buddhism as a social movement in history. In other words, they focus on issues that skirt the basic question. They analyze what texts say about the ending of suffering or related issues. They observe what people who claim to be inspired by these texts have done or are doing. They trace the changes in texts and behavior over the centuries.

Furthermore—given the message from the psychology of religion, that no religious experience carries any truth-value for those who haven’t had the experience—texts are studied not for their truth-value but as myths. In the case of Buddhism, this means stories or myths about the end of suffering or anything that can claim relation to that topic. Behavior is judged, not by its success in putting an end to suffering, but by how it relates to developments in society and culture. The question of whether a development in the tradition was made by someone who actually put an end to suffering or by someone who hadn’t, is never allowed into the discussion. With the discussion limited to what makes sense in light of historical circumstances, the conclusion is that this sense and these circumstances explain everything worthy of interest.

Inevitably, the field itself becomes a major topic of discussion, as historians argue over what “Buddhism” means and how far the term extends. To define the field, historians of religion have to ask and answer questions like these: (1) What kind of text or behavior deserves to fall under the term, “Buddhism,” and at what point is the relationship so tenuous to other Buddhist texts and behavior that it falls out of range? (2) Within that range, what kinds of text or behavior deserve to be studied?

Because the historical method cannot judge whether there really is a path to the end of suffering, historians cannot use that as an anchor point against which to judge these things. In fact, some scholars have made their reputation by saying that the Buddha didn’t teach the four noble truths at all. Thus the default answer to question (1) becomes: Anything done by anyone claiming to be Buddhist—or inspired, positively or negatively, by Buddhist teachings—counts as Buddhism, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the end of suffering. Given that changes are more interesting to discuss than efforts to maintain teachings and practices unchanged, the default answer to question (2) is: Any trends or changes in those teachings that are adopted by enough people or survive long enough deserve to be studied. The emphasis on change reinforces the Romantic assumption that changes are actually the life of religion. The question then becomes, how many people and how long a survival count as “enough” to deserve study? In this way, Buddhism is no longer about the Dhamma, or the end of suffering. It’s about patterns of religious change: the way in which people adapt the tradition—successfully or unsuccessfully—to meet their perceived needs at their particular point in space and time, with emphasis placed on the most popular adaptations.

To cite a typical example: Richard Seager, in Buddhism in America, writes,

Notice that the discussion here is not about the Dhamma as something to be discovered, as the Buddha claimed. It’s about Buddhism as something to be built. And the question is not one of whether these developments in Buddhism will keep alive the path to the end of suffering. It’s simply whether they are viable—“viable” meaning, not keeping the Dhamma alive, but simply being able to survive as forms of behavior, with the implicit assumption that whatever survives must be better than what doesn’t.

The result is that people learning about Buddhism from the academy—and that’s where many Westerners are first exposed to Buddhism—learn it from a distinctly Romantic point of view. Just as the Romantics studied religious texts as myths, to be appreciated as responses to the particulars of their historical context but with no necessary truth outside of that context, that is how students are exposed to Buddhist texts. Just as Romantics such as Schlegel and Schleiermacher argued that no one was in a position to pass judgment on the religious experience or beliefs of another person, that is the perspective from which students are exposed to the behavior of Buddhists over the centuries.

So it should come as no surprise that students who learn about Buddhism in this way and then become attracted to practicing it bring a Romantic view of the tradition into their practice. And it’s no surprise that they would use Romantic principles for doing so. This is true not only of Buddhist teachers, but also of Buddhist scholars studying these teachers. Here are two examples from the recent literature:

David McMahan, writing in The Making of Modern Buddhism, legitimates the creation of modern Buddhism in a very Romantic way. First he frames the issue in terms of Buddhism, rather than Dhamma, dismissing the early texts teaching the end of suffering as “myths.” Then he paints a picture of the Buddhist tradition as a search for viability: the ability to survive. There is no question of the motives animating the people who change the tradition, or the standards by which a viable change is to be judged. The people in each generation are to be trusted to know what their needs are and how they can use the tradition to meet those needs. The fact that they use the tradition to answer questions that the tradition explicitly refrained from asking is, again, assumed to be a good thing:

Ann Gleig, in an article describing the celebration of Eros in American Buddhism—“From Theravāda to Tantra: The Making of an American Tantric Buddhism?”—echoes many of McMahan’s assertions and concludes:

As these quotations indicate, the Buddha’s comment that the True Dhamma disappears when counterfeit Dhamma is created has been borne out in the modern academy. There is no True Dhamma in the academy at all. There is just Buddhism, and as far as the academy is concerned, Buddhism is a tradition whose story is all about being adaptable over time and finding enough followers to accept the adaptations. Small wonder, as we will see in the next chapter, that exponents of Buddhist Romanticism use these Romantic arguments from the academy to lend academic authority to the changes they are making in the Dhamma.

Perennial Philosophy

While thinkers in the fields of the psychology of religion and the history of religion have—at least professionally—abandoned the idea that religions teach metaphysical truths, that idea has survived in the field named after a book that Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) published in 1944–45: The Perennial Philosophy. The basic premise of the perennial philosophy is that there is a core of truths recognized by the greatest spiritual masters in all the great world religions. As Huxley expressed it, that core has three dimensions, all based on the principle of monism: Metaphysically, there is a divine Ground that forms the single substance underlying and identical with phenomena; psychologically, one’s individual soul is not really individual, in that it is identical with that divine Ground; and ethically, the purpose of life is to arrive at a unitive experience of this already-existing unity, in which the knower and the known are one.

The truth claim of this premise is based on the principle of corroboration: that because all great spiritual teachers agree on this premise, it must be true. We will examine the validity of this truth claim below, but first we need to examine its history, to see how Romantic religion came to shape Huxley’s thinking, both on the issue of what constitutes a great religion, and on the issue of what all great religions teach. To the extent that Huxley’s writing influenced Western Buddhist teachers—and the influence is extensive—this history will help us see how the Romanticism implicit in the perennial philosophy has played a role in shaping Buddhist Romanticism today.

As it turns out, two currents of Romantic thought converged in Huxley’s religious philosophy. As a Westerner, he picked up some Romantic influences directly from his education and culture. As a pupil of Indian religious teachers, he received corroborating influences indirectly via the Western education received in India by the teachers in his lineage. Because the second current is unusual and somewhat unexpected—much like the introduction of American pizza to Italy—we will focus our primary attention on it. As we do so, we will see how Asian religions in general were changed by Western ideas before they were exported to the West, and how some of the changes went deeper than mere repackaging. They also altered the content.

One of the main influences in the Westernization of Asian religions in Asia came from Hegel. As we saw in the last section, he taught that every culture and race has contributed its own peculiar strengths to the religious progress of the world. And in his eyes, of course, the pinnacle of progress had been achieved in Protestant Christianity. When this theory was brought by European colonial powers to the countries in Asia where they established schools, some of their students adopted Hegel’s basic script of the march of religious progress but rewrote the parts, so that their own religions, rather than Christianity, played the starring role. Reformed Zen in Japan was one example; Neo-Hinduism in India was another.

Neo-Hinduism is the name currently given to a religious movement in 19th century India—centered in Calcutta and, with the passage of time, conducted primarily by Indians trained in British schools—to reform the Indian religious tradition from one of multiple separate religions into a single religion that would be in a better position to ward off the influx of foreign religions on Indian soil.

The basic premise of the movement was that the varieties of religious experiences and practices in India hid an underlying unity: All gods and goddesses were expressions of a single God, Brahmā, who was also the one substance permeating the individual soul and all of creation; the Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gīta were the primary texts underlying all Indian religious beliefs; and the differences among the various sects were simply adaptations of the one true message, adaptations designed to appeal to the needs of people at different stages of development on the common path leading to union with Brahmā.

This was a radical recasting of the Indian religious tradition. To begin with, the Upaniṣads had long been treated as secret texts, revealed only to brahman initiates. Thus they could not be the common source of all Indian religious beliefs. Similarly, union with Brahmā was a goal traditionally reserved only for brahmans and denied to other castes, so it could not be the universal Indian religious goal. Nevertheless, by dint of education and propaganda, the leaders of the Neo-Hindu movement were able to convince both their British colonizers and many of their fellow Indians that this was the actual religious tradition that India had inherited from its past.

The figure most commonly recognized as the founder of the movement was Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj, a society devoted to the dissemination of Upaniṣadic and Vedantic teachings, in 1828. As far as can be ascertained, he was the person who had earlier coined the term, “Hinduism,” in 1814. In other words, “Hinduism” was a Neo-Hindu construct. Some scholars, however, debate whether Neo-Hinduism had roots going back further than the arrival of the English in India, and there is good evidence that Neo-Hinduism had its roots at least in the 18th century, as a reaction not to the Europeans, but to the challenge presented by Islam.

To begin with, there is the fact that some of the earliest Europeans to learn Sanskrit from brahmanical teachers in Calcutta—Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke—were led, prior to Roy’s work, straight to the Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gīta as most representative of Indian religious beliefs. Traditionally, as foreigners outside the caste system, they would have been denied access to the Upaniṣads. However, the willingness of their teachers to show them these texts would not be unusual if we assume that Sanskrit pundits, in their earlier confrontation with Islam, had focused on the same texts. In dealing with a monotheism of the Book, such as Islam, it would be strategic to claim that Indian religions, too, had a Book, and the Bhagavad Gīta would be a likely candidate for that Book, inasmuch as it taught monotheism, too.

As for the Upaniṣads—especially as interpreted by Advaita Vedanta, which focused on their monism—they would have been useful in opening dialogue with the monistic branch of Islam, Sufism. In fact, the first translation of the Upaniṣads into a non-Indian language—Persian—was completed in 1657 at the request of a crown prince in the Moghul dynasty who had Sufi leanings. These facts help to explain why Roy’s first book on the Upaniṣads, Gift to the Monotheists (1803–04), was written in Persian and aimed at a Sufi audience.

So when the Sanskrit pundits encountered Christianity—another monotheism with a Book—they adopted the same strategy. Wilkins was introduced to the monotheism in the Bhagavad Gīta, and Colebrooke to the monism of the Aitareya Upaniṣad. This means that when Roy completed a translation of the Kena Upaniṣad into English in 1816, he was simply following an earlier precedent.

However, as the 19th century progressed and the British took control of India, Indian students trained in British schools realized that there was more to European spirituality than just Christianity. There was European philosophy as well. Although many of the philosophers taught in British schools—such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer—were agnostic, others, such as Spinoza, Emerson, and Hegel, were not only monotheists, but monists to boot. The simple fact that their views were in harmony with Advaita Vedanta held out the possibility of a meaningful dialogue between cultures. And the vitalism taught by Emerson and Hegel offered a new twist on monism that was eventually absorbed into Neo-Hinduism.

The example of Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta, 1863–1902) offers a case in point. Trained in British schools, he was exposed at an early age to a wide range of European philosophers, among them Spencer, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. He was especially drawn to those whose philosophies focused on progress and change, apparently because they explained the progress of the British and how India might start making progress of its own. Spencer and Hegel were the two philosophers with the most lasting influence in shaping Vivekananda’s vitalism, although they taught him different lessons on how the principle of vitalism could be used to move India forward.

From Spencer—the famous proponent of the ideology now known as social Darwinism (even though he formulated it before Darwin published his findings on evolution)—the young Narendranath learned the social principle of the survival of the fittest: Social organizations are like organisms that must compete with other organizations in order to survive, with the victory going to those whose strengths enable them best to thrive in the competitive environment. Later in his career—under his ordained name, Vivekananda—he used this theory to explain why Buddhism had failed to survive in India and, in its downfall, after sapping the strength of the Indian race by getting too many people to join its celibate order, had brought India to ruin as well. At the same time, he also used Spencerian principles to advance a program for the strengthening of the Indian race so that it could throw off its European oppressors.

From Hegel, Narendranath had learned that social progress is led by the evolution of Mind, and that this evolution follows the dialectical pattern of moving forward by digging back into the most ancient assumptions underlying earlier thought. Thus the way to lead India forward—so that it would develop, in his words, “muscles of steel and nerves of iron”—was to return to the deepest principles underlying Indian religion, which he came to believe lay in Advaita Vedanta. Narendranath also learned from Hegel the idea that the history of the religions of the world is a vast drama in which all cultures and religions play a distinctive part, culminating in a unitive knowledge of the One Mind or One Soul at work both within and without. Given that the Upaniṣads were older than Christianity, and that Vedanta taught monism in much more definitive terms, it is easy to see how, as Vivekananda, he could put Hegel’s principles together in such a way that Vedanta, rather than Christianity, was to be the religion of the future. This explains why he went on lecture tours not only throughout India, but also twice into the West before his early death at age 39.

In the West, he encountered resistance from conservative Christians but he also found a select, receptive audience whose attitudes had been shaped by the Romantics. By extolling India as the source of spiritual inspiration, by claiming that vitalistic monism was the most advanced spiritual teaching, and by portraying the religions of the world as part of a common quest to realize the monistic vision, the Romantics and their transmitters had paved the way for Vivekananda’s teachings to take root in the West.

In teaching Vedanta both in India and the West, Vivekananda formulated the principle that was to provide the underpinning for Huxley’s perennial philosophy: that when comparing different religious traditions, the differences are of no account; only the similarities matter. Thus he was able to brush over the many differences not only among Indian religions, but also the religions of the world. In this, he followed the Romantic program that attributed differences among religions to the accidents of personality and culture, whereas the core religious experience for all was the same: union with the infinite. The main point of difference was that, for the Romantics, the infinite was totally immanent; whereas for Vivekananda, it was both immanent and transcendent. This point was to resurface in Huxley’s perennial philosophy, too.

One of Vivekananda’s disciples, Swami Prabhavananda, was placed in charge of the Vedanta Society of Los Angeles. He, in turn, was Huxley’s teacher. When Huxley later came to compose The Perennial Philosophy, he adopted from his teachers the principle that the one force permeating and underlying the cosmos was both immanent and transcendent. On this point, he was more Vedantic than Romantic. And he differed both from Vivekananda and Romantics like Schelling in abandoning the idea of the inevitable spiritual progress of the human race—after all, he was writing during World War II, which severely challenged the idea that humanity was moving ever upward. Otherwise, though, The Perennial Philosophy expresses a wider range of Romantic principles than Huxley had learned from his Vedantic teachers.

To begin with, there is the underlying assumption about what religion is and the questions it is meant to address. Like both the Vedantics and the Romantics, Huxley presents religion as a question of relationship between the individual and the divine, in which the main questions addressed are, “What is my True Self? What is its relationship to the cosmos? And what is its relationship to the divine Ground underlying both?” These questions, according to Huxley, belong to the field of “autology,” or the “science of the eternal Self.” And the answer—“the most emphatically insisted upon by all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy”—is that this Self is “in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground.”38

Huxley then quotes approvingly a passage from William Law, an 18th century mystic, to the effect that this Ground, both within and without, is infinite.

Although Huxley presents this Ground—God in his various names—as both transcendent and immanent, he gives something of a Romantic twist to the idea of God’s immanence. In a peculiar passage, explaining the existence of evil in a universe that is the expression of a single divine power, Huxley falls back on an organic model to explain the relationship of all creation to God: We are all individual organs within a much larger organism permeated with God. From this analogy, Huxley argues a position similar to Hölderlin’s: that the universe, being infinite, ultimately lies beyond good and evil, and that peace can be found only by adopting this universal view. After pointing out that many individuals—i.e., other organs in the universal organism—behave selfishly, Huxley states:

In making this point, however, Huxley doesn’t seem to realize that he has portrayed God as a glutton and a lush. Thus the passage has the double effect of adding confusion to the problem it attempts to solve, at the same time undermining much of the rest of his book.

This unfortunate passage aside, there are other features of Romantic religion that Huxley transmits in a fairly unaltered manner.

For example, his definition of the basic spiritual problem is that people suffer from their sense of having a separate self. This sense of separation causes suffering both because it produces feelings of isolation and also because it leads to the notion of a separate free will. Like Schelling and Hegel, Huxley regards the idea of individual will and its freedom to choose as the “root of all sin,” for such a will can have only one purpose: “to get and hold for oneself.” And, like them, he derives this low evaluation of individual freedom from his vision of a monistic, organic universe. In such a universe, the idea that one part of the organism would have a will of its own would be detrimental to the survival of the whole organism, and then, of course, to the survival of the individual part.

The solution to the problem of the “separative self” is a direct, unitive consciousness of the divine substance, in which the knower, the knowledge, and the known are one. This experience is the same for all who have it, meaning that differences among religious teachings are merely a matter of personality and culture. Thus the differing names by which it is known—God, Suchness, Allah, the Tao, the World Soul—are to be taken as synonyms for the one Ground. And he assumes that this Ground has a will, just as the Romantic World Soul operates with a purpose. It functions not only as that which is known in the religious experience but also as the inspiration within the knower to open up to its preexisting unity with the Ground.

Huxley notes that many people can have this unitive experience spontaneously—he cites Wordsworth and Byron as examples—but he makes a distinction between what James would have called experiences of conversion and sanctification. If the conversion does not lead to sanctification, or further cultivation of this consciousness, it is little more than an invitation declined—and, as in the cases of Wordsworth and Byron, has little lasting effect.

To be truly fruitful, the unitive experience has to be cultivated by a process that Huxley calls mortification. By this he means not so much mortification of the flesh as mortification of the individual will: adopting an attitude that he variously describes as docility, obedience, submission, receptivity, and acceptance. The only positive exercise of individual freedom is to willingly abandon it:

Like the Romantics, Huxley compares the cultivation of this receptive attitude to the state of mind that a true artist must cultivate before creating art of genuine value, although he recognizes that spiritual cultivation is a much more rigorous process. He also warns that heroic efforts to purify oneself in the course of this cultivation are counter-productive. Only through the negation of self-will and the ego can one open to the grace offered by the Ground:

Also Romantic is Huxley’s comment that one of the results of the unitive experience is that nature is seen as sacred. Strangely, given that he was a novelist, he devotes no space in The Perennial Philosophy to the idea that unitive experience automatically issues in a desire to express it aesthetically. In this, he departs from the Romantics and is more in line with the Vedantic tradition. But he is thoroughly Romantic in his insistence that, because the Ground lies beyond common notions of good and evil, the experience of the Ground finds its moral expression not through rules, but through an attitude of love that makes rules unnecessary. To bolster this point, he quotes, out of context, a passage from Augustine (who had counseled not simply to love, but to love God):

Huxley does add, however, that this sense of love is not incompatible with the idea of divine commandments. In fact—in a passage that may have been Maslow’s inspiration for Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences—Huxley states that unitive consciousness is the source of all moral values.

Huxley does not directly address the question of whether mortification is a process that arrives at its goal, or is one that must be constantly pursued throughout life, but he does seem to endorse the latter position by quoting Augustine, this time more accurately:

Unlike the Romantics, Huxley does not recommend erotic love as a means of mortification, nor does he assume that religions have progressed or are destined to progress over time. As for one’s duty to make one’s religion evolve, Huxley has little to say on the topic except that world peace will be impossible unless all religions evolve to the point where they accept the perennial philosophy as their common core.

As we noted above, the truth claim of the perennial philosophy is based on the principle of corroboration: the claim that these teachings are common to all the world’s great spiritual traditions, stretching back to prehistoric times. There are two good reasons, though, for rejecting this claim.

The first is that, even if it were true that all religious traditions, in their highest expression, hold to these teachings, it would not be a sound basis for a truth claim. The traditions, for all we know, could all be wrong. Human beings, throughout history, have agreed on many things that have since been proven false.

The second reason for questioning Huxley’s claim is the sheer fact that these teachings are not common to all religions. Theravāda—what Vivekananda called the Southern School of Buddhism, and Huxley called Hīnayāna—is a major case in point. Whereas the perennial philosophy teaches religion as an answer to questions about the relationship between self and cosmos, Theravāda puts those questions aside. The perennial philosophers teach a true Self; Theravāda, not-self. The perennial philosophy teaches union with God as the highest goal; Theravāda calls union with Brahmā a goal inferior to unbinding (MN 83; MN 97). And whereas the perennial philosophy teaches that the Ground of Being has a will, and that its grace is necessary to attain the highest goal, Theravāda teaches that unbinding is totally without a will—being unfabricated, it does not fabricate any intentions at all—and that it is reached, not through grace, but through one’s own efforts.

These differences presented problems both for Vivekananda and for Huxley, and they tried to overcome them by using a variety of tactics.

Vivekananda visited Sri Lanka to gain the support of the Buddhist monks there in creating a unified Hinduism that would contain Buddhism in its fold, but he was understandably rebuffed. For the remainder of his life, he had very little good to say about the Buddhist Saṅgha.

When it came to the topic of the Buddha, though, Vivekananda adopted three strategies in his addresses to American audiences to dispense with the areas where Buddhist teachings contradicted those of Advaita Vedanta:

1) In “Buddha’s Message to the World” (1900), he portrayed the Buddha as a well-meaning reformer who had taught not-self and no-God as a way of undoing the selfish exploitation that characterized the caste system of his time. However, in spite of the Buddha’s good intentions, his teachings were so out of step with the reality of God and Soul that they disappeared in India—and deservedly so. In this presentation of the Buddha, Vivekananda took pains to express admiration for the Buddha as a man, but not as a philosopher.

2) In “Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism” (1893), Vivekananda insisted that the Buddha was misunderstood by his followers, and that his teachings were really meant to be in line with the Vedanta—which Vivekananda, like many Indians of his time, believed to have predated the Buddha. For example, when the Buddha taught not-self, Vivekananda claimed, he was denying the existence not of the True Self, but of the false separate self. The implication of this claim, of course, is the Buddha’s discourses are not to be taken at face value when they say that the idea of a universal self is completely foolish (§21). Like Hegel, Vivekananda was convinced that his beliefs gave him insight into intentions that lay below the surface and subverted the meaning of the surface.

3) In “The Vedanta Philosophy” (1896), Vivekananda claimed that the true essence of the Buddha’s teachings was to be found in the Mahāyāna—what he called the Northern School—and that the Southern School could simply be dismissed.

Huxley, in dealing with the problem of the Buddha, fleshed out all three strategies and used them to support one another. This is clearest in his treatment of the teaching on not-self.

In one instance, Huxley adopts the first strategy, treating the not-self teaching—in its interpretation as a no-self teaching—as simply inadequate to answer the questions that would animate a metaphysician, in particular, those around the question of an intelligent design to the cosmos:

Here Huxley is adopting the Romantic view of causality, in which complex interacting systems can be explained only in terms of an organic, purposeful will.

In another passage, Huxley starts with strategy number 2, following Vivekananda’s example: The not-self teaching was intended to deny, not the universal Self, but only the personal self. Therefore it is actually in line with the perennial philosophy.

As we have noted, this misrepresents the Buddha. Not only did he say that the idea of a universal Self is a foolish doctrine (§21); he also explicitly applied the teaching on not-self to all possible ideas of self, including a self that is infinite (§18).

Huxley then goes on to combine strategy number 3 with strategy number 1, asserting—without supporting his assertion—that the sort of metaphysical questions the Buddha deliberately put aside actually need to be asked and answered, and that the Mahāyāna, in answering those questions, made Buddhism truly great. In other words, Huxley is defining “great religion” as any religion that articulates the perennial philosophy—which turns the truth claim of perennial philosophy into a tautology: I.e., the perennial philosophy is true because all great religions teach it, but a religion can be called great only when it teaches the perennial philosophy.

At the same time, Huxley—like Māluṅkyaputta (§5)—is criticizing the Buddha for not answering the sort questions that Māluṅkyaputta wanted answered, but that the Buddha saw as obstacles in the path to the end of suffering.

Huxley also uses strategies number 2 and 3 to explain that the Buddha really believed in God as the ultimate Ground, but that his rhetorical style obscured this point until the Mahayanists realized that this assumption was a necessary part of his teaching:

This, of course, ignores the Buddha’s repeated emphasis that unbinding was not identical with the brahmanical goal of union with Brahmā, that the latter goal was inferior because it was still stuck in becoming, and so did not lead to the end of suffering. Although Huxley treats union with Brahmā as an eternal state lying beyond the flux of becoming, the Buddha saw that any sense of identity—even with an infinite being—actually lies within the flux of becoming because it is based on subtle craving.

The fact that Huxley is rewriting the Dhamma in a way that offers no release from becoming is reflected in his use of strategy number 2 to rewrite the noble eightfold path. In his account, the first seven factors are meant to impose a regimen of mortification—which, by his definition, is not a matter of self-cleansing or self-mastery through the mature cultivation of one’s freedom of choice. Instead, it is a matter of opening oneself up to divine grace. As for why the Buddha neglected to mention the need for grace, he wrote:

In other words, in Huxley’s eyes, the Buddha gave an incomplete picture of the path because his rhetorical style got in the way.

To make the noble eightfold path lead not to the end of becoming, but to a refined level of becoming in which one attained union with the Ground of the universe, Huxley redefined the factors of the path. A look at his version of two of the factors will show how he managed this. First, right view—or in his terms, right belief:

In terms of the Dhamma, Huxley has redefined “complete deliverance” to mean release only from a separative self-identity, and not from all forms of self-identity, separative or unitive. In practical terms, this is shown by his definition of the last factor of the path:

Here Huxley presents, as the goal of the practice, a revived version of a step that the Buddha included as part of the path to the goal. From the point of view of the Dhamma, only when one drops any perception of “Ground” and any identification with unitive knowledge—which, by nature, is fabricated—can one attain final release.

From this discussion of Huxley’s treatment of Buddhism, two points are clear:

1) To make Buddhism fit in with the perennial philosophy, he had to extensively rewrite it, at the same time criticizing the Buddha: The Buddha was unwise not to address metaphysical questions about the nature of the world and the self; his doctrines on not-self and nirvāṇa were incomplete, leading to a confusion that was cleared up only in the Mahāyāna. Whether Huxley was correct in making these criticisms, the fact that he had to revise the Buddha’s teaching so radically to make it fit into the perennial philosophy shows that the truth claim of that philosophy—that it is true because all great traditions agree with it—is bogus.

2) From the point of view of the Dhamma, Huxley’s revised Buddhism is inferior to the original Dhamma in that it can lead not to the total cessation of becoming, but only to a refined level of becoming. Thus it cannot lead to total freedom from suffering and stress. And by asserting that differences among religious traditions don’t really matter, Huxley has obscured an important principle: that differences in belief do matter when they lead to differences in behavior. From this principle follows the Buddha’s teaching on how truth claims made by different teachings can be tested: not by agreement among views, but by the results that come when teachings are put into practice. In this way, too, Huxley has promoted an inferior version of the Dhamma, denying any possible way for religious truth claims to be tested through action.

Despite Huxley’s rough treatment of Buddhism, The Perennial Philosophy has had an enormous influence on the development of Buddhist Romanticism: both directly, on those who read the book, and indirectly, through the book’s influence on Maslow.

Part of this influence can be explained by the fact that the book opened the minds of many Westerners to the idea that religions of the East, such as Buddhism, have something valuable to offer, and that the preference of one religion over another could be simply a matter of personal taste—as long as that religion was interpreted in a monistic way. People already favorably disposed to monism—through Emerson and other transmitters of Romantic religion—found this condition easy to accept. Those with a positive relationship to the Judeo-Christian tradition felt that they could adopt Buddhist teachings and practices without conflict; those with a negative relationship to that tradition felt that they could find spiritual nurture in Buddhism, free from the faith demands of the synagogue or the church. In this way, the idea of a perennial philosophy eased the way of many Westerners into Buddhist thought and practice.

But even though The Perennial Philosophy helped open the way for Buddhism to be accepted in the West, it did so at a price. Because it misrepresented the Buddha’s teachings, it brought many people to Buddhism on false pretenses. To the extent that Huxley’s rewriting of the Dhamma contained many elements of Romantic religion, it led them to believe that the Dhamma and Romantic religion were the same thing. This is one of the reasons why the development of Buddhist Romanticism has been so invisible, even to those responsible for it.

At the same time, because The Perennial Philosophy claimed that the choice of a tradition was merely a matter of taste and personal attraction, it downplayed the extent to which the choice of a practice really does make a difference in action. In this way, it has led many Westerners to believe that the act of mixing and matching the Dhamma with other teachings carries no practical consequences, and is instead simply a matter of aesthetics and taste. This in turn has led many Western Buddhist teachers to believe that their primary duty as teachers is not to remain faithful to the tradition, but to make themselves and their teachings attractive through an appeal to ecumenism. This is why teacher biographies often list non-Buddhist teachings from which the teachers take inspiration, and why Rumi, for example, is so often quoted in Buddhist writings and talks.

Finally, the truth claims of the perennial philosophy—even though they don’t stand up to scrutiny—have justified many Western Buddhist teachers in their belief that if a tenet of the perennial philosophy doesn’t exist in the Dhamma, they are doing the Dhamma a favor by adding it to the mix. Because many such tenets are actually derived from Romantic religion, this is one more way in which The Perennial Philosophy has promoted the obscuration of the Dhamma and the rise of Buddhist Romanticism in its place.

The Cumulative Transmission

As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, very few people still read the early Romantics. However, the transmitters of Romantic religion surveyed in this chapter—especially Emerson, James, Jung, Maslow, and Huxley—are still widely read for inspiration. At the same time, they have exerted an influence on the fields of literature, the psychology of religion, the history of religion, and the discourse of perennial philosophy—fields that to a greater or lesser extent are accorded respect in our culture. This is why the ideas of Romantic religion have not only survived into the present day, but have done so with a measure of authority.

And when we look at the premises of Romantic religion that these authorities have transmitted, we find that almost all the defining features of Romantic religion have survived intact, beginning with the Romantic view on the prime question raised by religion—the relationship between the individual and the cosmos—and the answer to that question: that the individual is an organic part of the larger organism of the cosmos. Also intact are the Romantic ideas about there being one religious experience, along with the nature of that experience; the psychological illness that that experience heals; the way that experience is to be cultivated; the results of that experience; the status of religious texts as expressions of feelings; and the duty of individuals to help their religions evolve.

The various Romantic positions on the relationship among inner oneness, freedom, and duty in an organic universe have also been transmitted intact. Emerson followed Schlegel in asserting the duty to be free to express one’s intuitions without being confined by society’s rules, and to follow those intuitions as they change over time; Jung, like Hölderlin, asserted the duty to allow one’s aesthetic intuitions to govern one’s search for the peace of inner integration; Hegel and Huxley followed Schelling in asserting one’s duty to abandon one’s individual will in favor of the universal will.

Transmitters of Romantic religion have also transmitted the paradox at the heart of Romantic religion: On the one hand, it asserts the individual’s complete freedom to create his or her own religion, a religion that no one else is in a position to judge. Emerson is the prime exponent of this side of the paradox. On the other hand, Romantic religion proposes an objective standard for judging religious views, stating that individuals are free to create their own religions only because they are an organic part of a monistic, vitalistic cosmos. This view of the cosmos, in their eyes, is the most advanced—and thus objectively the best—worldview that a religion can teach. Maslow and Huxley are the prime exponents of this second side of the paradox.

In fact, among the 20th century thinkers we have considered, only one principle of Romantic religion cannot be explicitly found: the idea that the immanent organic unity of the universe is infinite. Huxley comes close, but his infinity is ultimately transcendent, in that part of it lies beyond time and space. This gap in the transmission of Romantic religion, however, is not a major one. The infinitude of the universe, for the Romantics, meant ultimately that its purpose could not be fathomed, an idea that remains common in our culture for other reasons. So for all practical purposes, the tradition of Romantic religion is still intact. And although Buddhist Romanticism follows the 20th century transmitters of Romantic religion in dropping “infinite” from its description of universal organic unity, it follows the Romantics in seeing the ultimate purpose of that unity as lying beyond the powers of the human mind to fathom.

Some of the transmitters of Romantic religion have introduced a few innovations in the tradition. Emerson and James, for instance, have redefined authenticity in moral, rather than aesthetic terms, although Emerson’s approach to morality meant that this concept retained its sense of being authentic to oneself—in all one’s inconsistencies—and not to any consistent principles of reason.

Also, different transmitters have added their own variations to the already varied Romantic ideas of what inner integration means. As we noted in Chapter Four, the early Romantics regarded inner integration as a matter of reestablishing unity to heal two inner splits: between the body and mind on the one hand, and between reason and feeling on the other. As the transmitters of Romantic religion brought these ideas into the present, some of them—such as Jung and Maslow—were more explicit than others in discussing the unity of body and mind. All, however, offered their own ideas of what unity within the mind might be and how it might be found. For Emerson, it meant staying true to one’s intuitions, wherever they might lead; for James, it meant developing a coherent will, giving order to one’s overall aims in life. For Jung, inner unity meant opening a dialogue among the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. For Maslow, inner unity was an affair of unitive consciousness, which he defined in terms reminiscent of Novalis: the ability to see the ordinary affairs of the world as sacred. Huxley also defined inner unity as unitive consciousness, but for him this concept meant a mode of knowing in which knower and known are one. In other words, inner unity meant seeing one’s unity with the world outside.

What this means is that the Romantic idea of inner oneness has come to carry a wide variety of meanings—so wide that it’s possible to say inner oneness to, say, ten people and for them to hear ten different positive things. This fuzziness in the concept has lived on in Buddhist Romanticism.

Yet the process of transmission has brought about still another change in Romantic religion that has had an even more important effect on Buddhist Romanticism. That is the change effected by James and Jung. Both of these thinkers showed that even though Romantic thought originally depended on a particular view of the physical universe, many Romantic principles about the psychological value of religion could survive even when the dominant paradigm in the physical sciences changed. To allow for this survival, both men had to reinterpret them, not as principles built into the fabric of the cosmos, but as principles useful from a phenomenological point of view: solving the problems of consciousness as felt from within.

However, neither James nor Jung, despite their broadmindedness, tested alternative principles for achieving psychological health, such as those offered by the Dhamma, most likely because they were not aware that these alternatives might exist. They simply picked up the principles that—both from the limited perspective of their personal religious experience and in the limited range of the Western philosophical and religious tradition—seemed most useful for their purposes. The limits of their personal experience can be seen in that, although they extolled a sense of Oneness as a religious goal, neither of them attained that Oneness to the point where they could assess its worthiness as a goal. The limits of the material they were working with can be seen most clearly in their understanding of what religious experiences might be possible, and what kind of freedom or health could be derived from those experiences. The idea of an absolute freedom, attained once and for all, lay beyond their conception of what a human mind could do. They didn’t realize that the varieties of actual religious experience were actually more various than the Varieties would suggest.

The overall effect of their work was that Romantic psychological principles took on a life of their own. Cut loose from their original metaphysical moorings, they became embedded as axioms in the field of psychology, but without having their assumptions carefully scrutinized or adequately tested against the wider range of religious experiences in non-Western cultures. This has allowed many people to adopt the principles of Romantic religion without being aware of their deeper implications, of the assumptions that underlie them, or of their history in the Romantic movement. And because Romantic religion regards religion not as a body of truths and skills to be tested, but as an evolving expressive art, the extent to which people are aware that they are changing the Dhamma as they fit it into a Western mold, they justify what they are doing as Good.

These are some of the reasons why Buddhist Romanticism has been developed by people who are largely ignorant of the Romantics and of the assumptions on which Romantic views are based. To free the Dhamma from Romantic distortions, this ignorance has to be addressed. The first, threefold step—identifying the principles of Romantic religion, their sources in our cultural history, and their transmission to the present—has now been completed. The remaining step, which we will take in the next chapter, is also threefold:

1) to identify the ways in which Romantic religion has found expression in Buddhist Romanticism;

2) to understand some of the factors in modern culture that incline people to find those expressions attractive; and

3) to compare those expressions with the actual Dhamma so as to assess the practical consequences of choosing Buddhist Romanticism over the Dhamma.

Only when these three topics have been covered will people in search of a path to the end of suffering be able to make an informed choice, clear on the fact that the choice does matter, and that much can be lost by choosing the less effective alternative.

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
•