Afterword

Abstract

One of the primary lessons I have taken away from both my study of Romanticism and my practice of Buddhism is the commitment in both paths of knowing to engagement, a commitment to transfer the insights gained from reading and intellection, and from empowerments and meditation into the world. My closing focus on Byron in chapter 6 gestures to this sense of engagement, since he was willing to aid the cause of liberty in Greece in spite of the daunting conditions such an endeavor represented and in the face of his potential death in the process of embodying his commitment to liberation (as “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” acknowledges). Byron addressed his motive for intervention in a September 1823 letter to Augusta Leigh: “You ask why I came up amongst the Greeks? It was stated to me that my doing so might tend to their advantage in some measure in their present struggle for independence, both as an individual and as a member for the Committee now in England. How far this may be realized I cannot pretend to anticipate, but I am willing to do what I can” (McConnell 336).¹ Of course, other examples are numerous in the Romantic period, as when William Wordsworth intervened in an attempt to preserve the Lake District from a proposed Kendal and Windermere Railway, which generated his famous 1844 sonnet and prompted the composition of two letters published in the Morning Post (Bate Romantic 50).²

There is a Tibetan saying that just as every valley has its own language so every teacher has his own doctrine. This is an exaggeration on both counts, but it does indicate the diversity to be found within Buddhism and the important role of a teacher in mediating a received tradition and adapting it to the needs, the personal transformation, of a pupil.

(Paul Williams)