Enlightenment East and West: An Introduction to Buddhism and Romanticism

Abstract

The first half of this chapter’s title offers a binary (“East” and “West”) at the core of concerns explored below yet also echoes the famous assessment of shared affinities between Eastern and Western approaches to the healing of psychological suffering offered by Alan W. Watts, one of the leading figures in the translation of Eastern mental approaches into Western terms and strategies in Psychotherapy East and West. The first term, “enlightenment,” and the short epigrams by Buddha and Kant also point to the convergence of philosophical forms of mental liberation pursued within the two large terms in the second half of the title (“Buddhism” and “Romanticism”). The confluence of historical and philosophical concerns binding those terms is worth intensified attention by scholars working in Romantic studies for several reasons. This examination of the broad contours of interaction between “Buddhism” and “Romanticism” during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moves from historical encounters through linguistic engagements to intellectual and spiritual resonances. The temporal range for European Romanticism adopted here from Raymond Williams, roughly extending from the birth of William Blake to the death of William Wordsworth (Williams 30-2), coincides rather well with the historical emergence of Buddhism into Western consciousness, when Europe’s knowledge of the religion originating with Śākyamuni’s enlightenment evolved beyond early views as a religion of “Idolaters [with] many minsters [sic] and abbeys after their fashion” (Polo I.219) and toward the later view as a “philosophy … under the imputation of atheism” (Fields 47).¹

Your own self is your master; who else could be?

(Buddha, The Dhammapada)

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage

(Kant, What is Enlightenment?)