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Mark
Lussier, "Enlightenment West and East, or An
Introduction to Romanticism and Buddhism"
Buddhism emerged into European
consciousness during the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, a temporal period long associated with
Romanticism. The historical conditions leading to this
emergence were rather complex, being bound up with both
colonialism and orientalism, and the process was quite
gradual, actually unfolding across almost two hundred years
of encounters and engagements. This emergence was futher
complicated by the inability of those at the vanguard of
early contact to fully distinguish "Buddhism" from
"Hinduism," since the body of thought and practice now
termed "Buddhism" had been virtually eradicated from its
homeland in northern India and since the textual body of
the dharma was dispersed across several languages,
primarily Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, but also embedded in
several Chinese dialects as well. However, once British
colonial authority began to move further north into the
transhimalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet, and once the
development of linguistic oprientalism was sufficiently
well-developed to recognize the importance of the religion
of the Buddha, the necessary elements of intellectual
information were in place to assure the full flowering of
the dharma into western consciousness during the last half
of the nineteenth century.
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Louise Economides, "Blake,
Heidegger, Buddhism and Deep Ecology"
This article engages with debates regarding
Deep Ecology, especially the charge that this branch of
environmental philosophy constitutes a dangerously Romantic
form of eco-fascism. This study makes a case for the
necessity of Deep Ecology's challenge to anthropocentric
humanism, while acknowledging the risks of this enterprise
from an historical vantage point. Parallels between Deep
Ecology and Buddhism are examined in order to illuminate
non-occidental sources of thought which influence the DEA
(Deep Ecological Approach). Finally, Deep Ecology's
endebtedness to Romanticism—specifically to William
Blake and Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of
poiesis—is also acknowledged, but in a manner that
resists a reductive interpretation of what is at stake in
these discourses.
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Timothy
Morton, "Hegel on Buddhism"
Hegel derived his understanding of Buddhism
from a particular sect of Tibetan Buddhism which emphasizes
the notion of emptiness. This sect had recently gained
political power in Tibet to the exclusion of other
legitimate views of the Dharma. This essay demonstrates the
signficance of Hegel's misprision of Buddhism for his
thought and for Western philosophy in general. In
particular, Hegel radically misreads Buddhist meditation as
an immersion in "self" ("Insichsein"), and construes
Buddhism as a dangerous feminine principle, either too
sexual or strangely asexual or autoerotic (as the current
Pope has also stated). Using a combination of Buddhist
scholarship and philosophy and deconstruction (ways of
analyzing that go together quite well), I discover a fatal
and phobic fascination with Buddhism in Hegel's thought, a
fascination which leads him to develop the idea of
"nothingness." "Nothingness" becomes an evocative term
which Western philosphy after Hegel will try to include,
exclude and police in numerous ways. Most recently, the
systematic and shocking (deliberate?) misunderstandings of
Buddhism by Slavoj Zizek have been based on this idea of
nothingness. "Hegel on Buddhism" shows how this idea is
nothing more than a paper tiger, a construct which tells us
more about Western philosophy than it does about
Buddhism.
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John Rudy,
"Shelley's Golden Wind: Zen Harmonics in A Defence of
Poetry and "Ode to the West Wind"
Early in his Defence of Poetry,
Shelley undertakes to define art in relation to a
"principle" of "harmony" that "acts otherwise than in the
lyre," the Aeolian image he deploys to explicate his thesis
that poetry is "the expression of the Imagination" and that
it is "connate with the origin of man." This principle of
harmony undermines all notions of perspective in art, all
presumptions of there being anything like a separate poetic
self or a separate cosmic force creative in itself and
inaugural of human productivity. The aesthetic base of this
harmony, if it can be said to have a base at all, is
meditative unfolding rather than hermeneutic perception.
Art for Shelley is a journey from selfhood (a relational
mode of subject-object dissociation) to full personhood (an
opening process aligned with interdependent origination).
The method of this journey is not self-affirmation or
self-projection, as the term "expression of the
Imagination" may imply, but self-emptying exposure to a
prior Buddhistic oneness with all beings, an "origin"
dislocated in time and space yet forever emergent in the
moment and accessible through poetry as a mode of spiritual
practice. This article explores the theoretical features,
the practical functions, and the critical implications of
this "origin" through a Zen Buddhist reading of A
Defence of Poetry and "Ode to the West Wind."
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Dennis
McCort, "Kafka and the Coincidence of Opposites"
This study traces the age-old mystical idea
of the coincidence of opposites through Kafka's short
fiction as well as through his letters and diaries. Its aim
is to demonstrate convincingly that Kafka was first and
foremost a spiritual writer who composed innumerable
variations on the paradox of the One and/in the many in
order to spark in his reader insight into the mystery of
Being. Along the way, I allude occasionally to the kindred
paradoxical wisdom and dark humor of Zen to illuminate
Kafka's parables. All in all, the essay constitutes a kind
of cautionary argument against current
cultural-constructivist interpretations that mean to
undermine the view of Kafka's literary sensibility as
essentially spiritual.
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Norman
Dubie, "Tantric Master, Lord Marpa, Twice Dreamt of
the Prophet,
William Blake"
This poem, bringing together the two
streams of Romanticism and Buddhism, was written at the
request of the editor to be included with this volume. It
reflects the poet's long-term engagement with Buddhist
philosophy, and his practice in the Tibetan Buddhist
tradition.
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