Tintern Abbey ruins - temple of nature

King Henry the Eighth closed down all the monasteries of England and banished or killed the monks. Tintern Abbey, a Cisterican monastery, stood abandoned for three hundered years, overgrown with creepers and forest, a haunt of wild animals, when the young boy William Wordsworth came upon the ruins in the early 18^th century. As the contemplated the ruins, Wordsworth was overcome with a feeling of enchantment and longing, that gave rise to the so-called “Romantic Movement.”

I regard the Romantic Movement as the first faint, pre-dawn glow of Buddhism in the West, in reaction to the scientific-rationalism of the 17^th century.

Wordsworth saw the ruins of Tintern and was fascinated, mesmerized by the atmosphere and the effect it had on him. This feeling became the “romantic” feeling of longing for something that had been lost or forgotten, longing for another kind of world, a better and more humane world than the modern world he saw emerging around him.

Wordsworth intended to write a long philosophical poem called The Recluse, as a meditation on nature. The poem was never completed.

The poem “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” outline his ideas on nature, as he contemplated the ruins of the Abbey overgrown in vines.

How do I trace Romanticism to the influence of Buddha?

As a young man, Wordsworth had come under the influence of the eccentric ideas of a wandering yogi, John “Walking” Stewart (Feb 19, 1747-Feb 20, 1822). Walking Stewart was an English eccentric, traveler, philosopher who had walked on foot form Madras, India (where he worked for the East India Company) back to Europe between 1765 and mid-1790’s. In his wandering life, he walked across Persia, Abyssinia, Arabia and Africa, before finally wandering through Europe and into Russia.

When he settled down in England, Walking Stewart wrote The Apocalypse of Nature (The Revelation of Nature) in 1794 and Opum Maximum in 1803, outlining his ideas that he had discovered of eastern spirituality. Walking Stewart had a philosophy which combined elements of Spinoza pantheism with yogic notions of the single unified consciousness, i.e. universal mind or Buddha nature. He began to publish his ideas in 179s with his book Travels over the most interesting parts of the globe.

Walking Stewart saw a conscious universe in which all parts interpenetrated and corresponded through vitalist energies, sympathies, and antipathies – which Buddhist call Interbeing. His books and speeches stimulated radical interest in Pythagorean and Brahminical ideas in Europe. We would think of him as  a “man ahead of his time.”  He was a feminist, animal rights activist, and also promoted ideas of vegetarianism.

Walking Stewart was appalled by violence, and insisted that “men must do no violence to any part of the animal nature.” He was opposed to slavery, and killing of animals, and capital punishment.

Walking Stewart said that men “have glutted on the Tree of Knowledge, on arts and sciences, and abandoned the Tree of Life, that is, the knowledge of the Self in the law of sensation, and the relations of men with all their surrounding nature.”

In his teaching in England, he aimed to “harmonize” men with the “great organism of their universe,” and he defined nature as the state “when appropriation of things and persons shall cease.”

When Wordsworth saw the ruins of Tintern Abbey, the vision seemed to trigger a recognition of something for which there were no words. He sensed "something", a message from another world, outside the modern world. He saw the Interbeing with nature that Walking Stewart had spoken of.

Tintern Abbey, suppressed by King Henry VII in 1536, had been deserted for nearly 250 years, when Wordsworth came across the runs overgrown with vines and abandoned in the remote forest wilderness.

The Anglican minister Reverenced William Gilpin was the first to discover the abandoned ruins, in modern times. He had published Observations on the River Wye in 1786, in which he had described the ruins; and he began a tourism industry, when English folks began visit the ruins in droves. Gilpin found the ruins “picturesque” – a word he coined and developed, meaning an “appreciation of nature that rolls through all things.”

The abbey ruins gave Wordsworth a pantheistic vision of the divine, nature. He is overcome with a “sense of the sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”

He is met with the divine as “a notion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things.”

The Romantic movement laid the foundation for Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the American Transcendentalists, the “first Buddhists” in America.