I'm still reading The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David McMahan, and I've gotten to a part about the influence of the� Romanticist and Transcendentalist movements. And this touches on something that has long been a pet peeve of mine.
Romanticism was a cultural movement that began in 18th century Europe and spread to America, and which was very influential in the development of literature, music, and visual arts. Romantic theologians promoted the idea that religion is more about individual intuition and feeling than about institutions and dogma -- probably a radical idea at the time.
If you're a bit hazy about who the Transcendentalists were, see "What Is Transcendentalism" and "Definition of Transcendentalist." Very briefly, Transcendentalism was an American philosophical movement of the 19th century. Among other things, the Transcendentalists idealized a kind of mystical, cosmic spirituality over the dogmas and strictures of organized religion.
So, yes, the Romantics and Transcendentalists probably were the original "I'm spiritual but not religious" crew.
If you grew up in the Americas or Europe in the 20th century and received the standard western education, you got big doses of the Romantics and Transcendentalists -- William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, etc. etc. No matter how bad a slacker student you were, you had to have bumped into some of these people, sometime.
And these writers and thinkers in turn influenced writers and thinkers who came after them, so just about all of the respectable English language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries bear some Romantic and Transcendentalist fingerprints. If you are a child of the cultural West, you've got Romantic and Transcendentalist ideas virtually stamped into your DNA, whether you are aware of it or not.
McMahon tells us that a lot of the westerners who first took an interest in and wrote about Buddhism were five-alarm Romantic-Transcendentalists. One of these is Dwight Goddard (1861-1939), who wrote a bunch of books that are still in print and which introduced Zen to Jack Korouac.
McMahon says Goddard's interpretation of Buddhism was more influenced by "German idealist metaphysics ... probably refracted through transcendentalism and late nineteenth-century metaphysical movements such as Theosophy" than by, you know, Buddhism. Romantic-Transcendentalist themes were "crucial in the first western interpretations of Buddhism" and were carried through the 195os "Beat" era, the 1960s counterculture, and still strongly influence Buddhism in the West today. McMahon provides many examples of this.
Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing; just because something isn't "Asian" doesn't necessarily mean it is incompatible with the dharma. However, the Romantic-Transcendentalist influence at this point is so seamlessly woven into western Buddhism that most of us westerners don't notice it and don't realize it isn't Asian. For example --
"The many recommendations in contemporary popular western Buddhist literature to trust your deepest experiences, you inner nature, you internal vision have more to do with this legacy of Romanticism than with traditional Buddhism. One seldom hears such counsel from traditional Buddhist texts and teachers; for them, until one is an advanced practitioner, one's inner experiences are likely to be considered just another form of delusion."
I'm not sure what to do with this information, but I find it fascinating.
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