Chapter 1 Enlightenment East and West: An Introduction to Buddhism and Romanticism 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?) Critical Coincidence 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 men- tal 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 con- fluence of historical and philosophical concerns binding those terms is worth intensified attention by scholars working in Romantic stud- ies for several reasons. This examination of the broad contours of interaction between “Buddhism” and “Romanticism” during the late M. S. Lussier, Romantic Dharma © Mark S. Lussier 2011 2 Romantic Dharma eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moves from historical encoun- ters 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 “phi- losophy . under the imputation of atheism” (Fields 47).1 Before this intensive phase of encounter, Buddhism, for even the most educated, well-read, and well-traveled Europeans, remained a somewhat dis- sonant presence within the sacred literature of Hinduism (e.g., Sir William Jones) and presented severe difficulties to separate its ana- lytic structures, meditative practices, and ethical presumptions from its site of origin in India (Batchelor, Awakening 231–3). As Philip Almond, Stephen Batchelor, Rick Fields, Richard King, Donald Lopez, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Raymond Schwab exhaustively demonstrate in a group of exploratory works spanning two generations of research, the completion of Buddhism’s long passage into Western consciousness was achieved via increasingly intensified phases of punctuated encounter, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century and coming to final fruition “in the 1840s after the arrival of the Sanskrit and Pāli canons” (Schwab 24), after Eugene Burnouf published his definitive L’Introduction à l’historire du buddhisme indien in 1844 (Batchelor, Awakening 240), and after H. H. Wilson’s summative lecture on “Buddha and Buddhism” before the Royal Asiatic Society in 1854. The gradual emergence of the dharma flowed from a coincidence of energies as colonial functionaries in the trans- Himalayas and Indian subcontinent applied enlightenment epistemic techniques to an unruly body of practices and texts. Comparative enlightenment epistemologies fueled both the East India Company and the British governmental structure that supplanted it, and these two operations meet in the drive to establish economic monopoly and territorial dominion. These economic and colonial authorities acquired a massive amount of textual materials in little-known languages and that were gathered in the East and transmitted to the West, and these works required the dedicated efforts of Oriental scholars across Europe to cross those linguistic barriers, in the process bringing Buddhism into focus during the last stages of historical Romanticism. Enlightenment East and West 3 The culmination of these efforts ignited an “Oriental Renaissance,” to quote the phrase Raymond Schwab adopted from Edgar Quinet (11), and phrased in this way, the complexities of this topic come quickly into view, involving colonial encounters, enlightenment prac- tices, Orientalist scholarship, and Romantic reception. The outward movement of colonialism took the form of both “transcontinental European empires [and] multinational trading companies [like the East India Company]” (Outram 8–9). In all spheres of colonialism, the outward movement, especially into India, returned people as well as commodities to the homelands in Europe, and “with the coming of Britain colonial rule over increasing parts of India, the number of Indians who made the journey to Britain would [continue to] expand” (Fisher 49). These “counterflows” (Fisher 1) formed a prominent by- product of colonial operations and established pathways for the sub- sequent flow of knowledge about cultural and religious practices. In the 150 years prior to the Romantic era, Oriental manuscripts and texts entered Europe at an ever-escalating rate through economic and colonial contacts, and “the emergence of the academic study of Buddhism in Europe and America [must be placed] within the con- text of the ideologies of empire” (Lopez, Curators 2). The returning flow of information that was established during the period immediately prior to Romanticism became “a canal . [con- necting] thought and history” and through which passed “a torrent of narratives and accounts that nearly defied imagining” (Schwab 2, 25, 28). As Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi suggest, this type of concep- tual counterflow began almost immediately to exert considerable force within colonial homelands, thereby not only highlighting the necessity of exploring “the different role the ‘Orient’ played [in Europe]” (41) but also tracing the broader reception accorded to Buddhism within its art and philosophy across the second half of the nineteenth century. This reception reached its zenith with the 1879 publication of Light of Asia, Sir Edwin Arnold’s epic-scale poetic depiction of “the life and character [and] philosophy of that noble hero and reformer, Prince Gautama of India, the founder of Buddhism” (xix). Through the application of categorical and comparative imperatives energizing its own form of enlightenment philosophy, European colo- nial movements outward assured a corresponding inward counterflow of textual materials collected, catalogued, and transmitted to Europe and thereafter translated and codified within centers of Oriental studies in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, igniting a process that arguably extends to our own day, as the pan-global recognition of 4 Romantic Dharma His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama confirms.2 On the linguistic tide briefly mapped above, Buddhism flowed into Western consciousness, like a lotus floating westward on a stream toward the sunset. Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan manuscripts and texts then just emerging into European knowledge and languages allowed Western scholars to differentiate Buddhism from Hinduism, and by the end of this same periodic range (ca. 1850), Buddhism had assumed the status of a world religion within the Western enlighten- ment’s evolving sociology of knowledge, although only first appear- ing in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, in 1801 (Lopez “Ambivalent Exegete” 53). The pan-European Romantic movement—at least defined by a somewhat arbitrary temporal span of 100 years—could hardly be described as uniformly monologically, but for this work, the “Romantic” writers referred to reacted against those stifling ele- ments within the West’s materially driven enlightenment episte- mology, “the rationalistic theory of knowledge” (Cassirer 114) that entraps intellection through reliance on “reason as the system of clear and distinct ideas” (Cassirer 95) and that established reason as the primary hermeneutic faculty mediating inner and outer experience. Stephen Batchelor, Richard King, and Tomoko Masuzawa identify the drive of enlightenment forms of scientism as crucial both to the development of religious studies generally and to the establishment of Buddhism as a world religion specifically. The solidification of world religions within the West was concretized by the end of the nineteenth century and, as King argues, “was constructed upon a foundation of readily identifiable Enlightenment convictions” (47), a view embedded rather deeply in all forms of Orientalism. Through such “Orientalist scholarship, [which] had been discovering, edit- ing, and translating literary treasures of some of the most power- ful nations known in history,” European colonial powers asserted “control” over these countries and their literatures, which “no longer seemed to possess the power and the prerogative to repre- sent their own legacy apart from this scholarship” (Masuzawa 17). Batchelor offers a similar assessment, suggesting that the slow emer- gence of understanding giving rise to “Buddhism” depended on three elements; “throughout the course of the eighteenth century three interconnected factors were gestating that would give birth to what we know as ‘Buddhism’ . the emergence of the rationalist Enlightenment, the decline of religious authority and the consoli- dation of colonialism” (Awakening 231). The development of this ideology during the eighteenth century came after China and Japan Enlightenment East and West 5 foreclosed on European entry