Quotes
“Both formerly and now, it’s only stress that I teach, and the cessation of stress.” — The Buddha
“Religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite.” — Friedrich Schleiermacher
“God hates the unbound.” — Friedrich Hölderlin
Abbreviations
AN
Aṅguttara Nikāya
Dhp
Dhammapada
DN
Dīgha Nikāya
Iti
Itivuttaka
Khp
Khuddakapāṭha
MN
Majjhima Nikāya
SN
Saṁyutta Nikāya
Sn
Sutta Nipāta
Thag
Theragāthā
Thig
Therīgāthā
Ud
Udāna
References to DN, Iti, and MN are to discourse (sutta). Those to Dhp are to verse. References to other texts are to section (saṁyutta, nipāta, or vagga) and discourse. Numbering for AN and SN follows the …
Copyright
Copyright 2015 ṭhānissaro bhikkhu
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. To see a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. “Commercial” shall mean any sale, whether for commercial or non-profit purposes or entities.
Questions about this book may be addressed to
Metta Forest Monastery
Valley Center, CA 92082-1409 …
Contents
Titlepage
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Quotes
Acknowledgements
Questioning Buddhist Romanticism
How to Read this Book
Dramatis Personae
The Buddha
Five Early Romantics
Novalis (1772–1801)
Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)
Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854)
Shaping the Romantic Experience
An Ancient Path
Suffering, Its Cause, Its Cessation
The Path
How the Buddha Taught
Keeping the Path …
Acknowledgements
In the course of preparing this book, I have discussed my findings with a number of Dhamma groups, and have benefited greatly from their feedback. These groups include the Laguna Beach Parisa, the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies, and Against the Stream. I am also indebted to a long list of individuals who provided me with materials that helped make my research possible …
Glossary
Arahant: A “worthy one” or “pure one;” a person whose mind is free of defilement and thus is not destined for further rebirth. A title for the Buddha and the highest level of his noble disciples.
Āsava: Effluent; fermentation. Four qualities—sensuality, views, becoming, and ignorance—that “flow out” of the mind and create the flood (ogha) of the round of death & rebirth …
Endnotes
Chapter One
1. Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism, p. 419–420.
2. Frank, Manfred. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, p. 161.
3. Novalis. Philosophical Writings, p. 4.
4. Frank, Manfred. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, p. 163.
5. Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy 1760–1860, p. 159.
6. Droit, Roger-Pol. Le culte du néant, p. 171.
7. Frank, Manfred …
Bibliography
Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Beiser, Frederick C. Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
————. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
————. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
————. The Romantic Imperative: The …
Introduction
Questioning Buddhist Romanticism
Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, spontaneity, ego-transcendence, non-judgmentalism, and integration of the personality. They tend not to realize that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha’s teachings but from …
The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism
Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. But what they may not realize is that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha’s teachings but from the Dharma gate of Western …
Chapter Two
An Ancient Path
The Buddha did not invent the Dhamma. As he said, he discovered an ancient path that Buddhas of the past had discovered, but that had since become overgrown. His job was simply to clear the path again and teach others to follow it (§1).
In describing the Dhamma as a path, he was pointing to the fact that he …
Chapter Five
Romantic Religion
Friedrich Schleiermacher, in the conversations that issued in his book, Talks on Religion for Its Cultured Despisers (1799), was the agent primarily responsible for convincing his fellow early Romantics that their view of artistic creation was actually an ideal model for religious experience as well. Just as artists should open themselves and respond creatively to the organic influences of the …
Chapter Seven
Buddhist Romanticism
Buddhist Romanticism is a result of a very natural human tendency: When presented with something foreign and new, people tend to see it in terms with which they already are familiar. Often they are totally unaware that they are doing this. If emotionally attached to their familiar way of viewing things, they will persist in holding to it even when …
Appendix
Unromantic Dhamma
The Discovery of the Dhamma
§ 1. “It’s just as if a man, traveling along a wilderness track, were to see an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by people of former times. He would follow it. Following it, he would see an ancient city, an ancient capital inhabited by people of former times, complete with parks, groves, & ponds, walled, delightful …
Chapter Four
The Romantic Universe
In Germany of the late 1790’s, there was nothing unusual in the fact that the early Romantics met frequently to discuss issues of philosophy, literature, and Bildung. The taste for this pastime was something they shared with many of the other book-reading clubs of their time. What set them apart, though, were five factors:
• The speed with …
Chapter One
Dramatis Personae
On a very broad level, the Buddha and the German Romantics share two points of resemblance. Like the Buddha, the Romantics were born into a period of great social ferment: political, cultural, and religious. Like him, they were dissatisfied by the religious traditions in which they were raised, and they searched for a new way to understand and to cure …
Chapter Three
An Age of Tendencies
In contrast to the Buddha, the early Romantics intentionally focused on creating a body of thought that, instead of being timeless, was in step with—and a few steps ahead of—their times. So, to understand them, it’s necessary to gain a sense of the times to which they were speaking.
Friedrich Schlegel once listed the three …
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 …
Cover | Buddhist Romanticism
