A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

This well-known story is from one of the first widely read works on Zen published in English, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled and published by Paul Reps in 1957. It incorporates stories from several sources, including a book published in 1919 called 101 Zen Stories, which in turn drew mostly from a 13th-century Japanese collection, the Shasekishū, and a koan collection, The Gateless Gate (Jpn: Mumonkan).

Ask anyone today the meaning of the story and they will likely give the same answer: carpe diem; Seize the day! Enjoy life while it lasts; live life to the fullest; savor the simple pleasures of life while you can; or, in the words of the title of a book by Maezumi Roshi, Appreciate Your Life. Many philosophers and religious thinkers have emphasized that profound awareness of one’s mortality changes the way one lives and feels life. Anyone who has had a serious illness or accident knows something about this. So this story presents an illustration of being able to appreciate the sweetness of whatever the moment brings in the face of the situation we are all inevitably in—hanging on for life while the white and black mice of passing days and nights nibble away at our remaining time. The Zen attitude, the story suggests, is to fully appreciate and savor each moment in unblinking awareness of our precarious circumstances. Meditation, we might further infer, fosters this appreciation.

There exist, however, other iterations of the story that imply an altogether different message, including versions in ancient Buddhist and Hindu texts. The Buddhist one is in the Lalitavistara, a fourth-century account of the life of the Buddha. In this text, the man is chased by an elephant instead of a tiger, he falls into a well instead of off a cliff, and rats, rather than mice, nibble the vine. Below him is a great serpent, and four snakes come from the sides of the well attempting to bite him. Instead of the strawberry, there is a beehive from which drops of honey fall into his mouth while bees swarm and sting him. And brush fires burn the tree branch to which he clings. The Buddha, who is relating this story, details what the various elements represent (the elephant is impermanence, the fire is old age, the serpent below, death). The five drops of honey represent desires for food and drink, sleep, sex, wealth, and fame. He leaves no ambiguity about the moral of the story: “That is why, great king, you should know that birth, old age, illness, and death are quite terrible. You should always remember them, and not become a slave to your desires.” In a version found in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, the story is put into the mouth of a Jain monk, who explains that the drops of honey are trivial pleasures that people become attached to and consume insatiably, distracting them from the spiritual life. He mocks the doomed man for craving the superficial pleasure of the honey in the face of his precarious situation.

The story of how this tale migrates from the world-weary ethos of ancient ascetic communities in India to the back pockets of world-affirming, strawberry-eating seekers in the 1960s is long, complicated, and fascinating. The story of the Buddha’s life told in the Lalitavistara, containing within it our story of the unfortunate falling man, was picked up by the Manicheans and transformed into the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat (the latter’s name is likely derived from the term “bodhisattva”). An Arabic version circulated in eighth-century Persia, and from there it was adapted to Christianity and attributed to St. John Chrysorrhoas of Damascus (675–749). In this version the man is transfixed with tasting the honey and, failing to notice a ladder his friend extends to him, falls and is devoured by the dragon below, now representing Satan.  

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat circulated throughout Europe and the Middle East for centuries and was translated into many languages. In the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy used the story of the man in the well as the centerpiece of his autobiographical work, A Confession, where he saw it as an expression of the futility of his life up to the point of his radical personal transformation and embracing of a liberal, pacifist understanding of the teachings of Jesus. Tolstoy’s autobiography, in turn, had a profound influence on a young Indian lawyer in the nineteenth century—Mohandas Gandhi—who would incorporate it into his own revolutionary teachings. So the story made its way back to India after becoming a part of most of the major religious traditions of the world and attaining new meanings and significance in each one. Meanwhile, around the same time Gandhi encountered it, a Zen monk named Nyogen Senzaki (1876–1958), one of the first Zen monks to teach in the United States, compiled and helped translate a version of the story of the man in the well—which had all the while been circulating in Asia, both independently and as a part of the Lalitavistara and other texts—into the version we have now in English in the book 101 Zen Stories, which became a part of Reps’ slim, pocket-sized volume, which is still in print and part of essential Zen reading in America.  

The journey of this story illustrates how texts, works of art, poems, rituals are never fixed in their meaning. They yield up new interpretations in new contexts, as novel meanings are coaxed out of them by new cultural contexts, and people tweak them to resonate with prevailing ideals and assumptions. All of this is a rather roundabout way of illustrating that the ethic of renunciation so pervasive in early Buddhist literature often fades into invisibility in modernized Buddhisms and is largely displaced by what I would call the ethic of appreciation. This ethic entails an affirmation of the implicit value of the physical world, the senses, and the ordinary experience of ordinary people. The ethic of appreciation contrasts strikingly with the ethic of world-renunciation that dominates the early Buddhist literature. It is part of a broader Indian ascetic literature that attempts to train the mind to see things in particular ways, develop particular virtues, sensibilities, aesthetic responses, and affective habits. According to the suttas and the Vinaya, monastics must train themselves in detachment from the world. They are to cultivate indifference, for example, to the eight worldly concerns: hope for gain and fear of loss; hope for fame and fear of disgrace; hope for praise and fear of blame; hope for pleasure and fear of pain (AN 8.5). They are to see the world as something that cannot possibly bring about satisfaction, as something fleeting and unreliable, deceptive and beguiling. They should become disenchanted with it and withdraw emotional investment in seeking satisfaction from it. They are to imagine the interior of bodies to counter attraction to physical beauty, cultivate revulsion at physiological processes like digestion and sex, and take opportunities to view corpses to ameliorate illusions of permanence and vivify the inevitability of death. They are to shun attachment to family and avoid seeking solace in the inevitably fragile and unstable human relationships. The world is often called a “mass of suffering.”  

There is another side to this, however. These attitudes exist in counterpoint to advice in the suttas on good family relations and the need to cultivate particular social emotions like love, compassion, and taking joy in others’ happiness. In some literature, readers are advised to cultivate the kind of love toward all living beings that a mother has for her only son. The Buddha gives advice to kings on worldly affairs and is clearly invested in the wellbeing of people, animals, and society. So throughout the Buddhist traditions a tension exists between an ethic of detachment and renunciation and a more this-worldly ethic of compassion and engagement. Also, we should remember the wide array of this-worldly practices Buddhists have developed that were oriented toward physical health, worldly prosperity, and a fortunate rebirth this side of nirvana. We have to be careful, therefore, not to overstate the anti-worldliness of early Buddhism or suggest that it has an unrelentingly negative view on embodied life. Rather, a great deal of Buddhist literature attempts to navigate this tension between ascetic detachment and compassionate engagement.  

The message of the early version of the story of the man in the well—as well as the meditations on corpses and contemplations of the repugnance of the body—is not that one should appreciate one’s life, with its delicious honey drops, beautiful scenery, exquisite scents and tastes, and other physical delights. It is, rather, that such sensual engagement merely entraps one further in the cycle of samsara. Granted, Buddhist traditions are not univocal in this. Tantric literature sometimes starkly reverses the devaluation of the physical, valorizing the body and physiological processes, seeing them as essential to liberation. A passage from the Candamaharosana Tantra, for example, declares:

One should not torment oneself with austerities,

Abandoning the five sense-objects.

One should notice beauty as it comes along,

And listen to the sound.

One should smell the odor

And savor the supreme taste.

One should experience the sensation of touch,

Pursuing the five types of sense-objects.

One will quickly become awakened….

East Asian Buddhist literature, drawing from the broader strains of the Daoist reverence of mountains, rivers, and trees, expresses a similar admiration of the physical and natural world, some seeing even rocks and grasses as infused with buddha-nature.  

The ethic of appreciation that has more recently become intertwined with Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices, however, may be something new. It is part of the modern valorization of worldly life, what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life.” The idea is that the value and dignity of human life does not reside beyond it but in the manner of living it. The ordinary person, rather than the noble warrior or king, becomes the center of artistic attention in modern art and literature, where ordinary experience is valorized and, in some cases, even sacralized. Much of the world of global, cosmopolitan late-modernity flows from the European Enlightenment, and one of its distinctive characteristics was this broad sense of world-affirmation. Most inheritors of this tradition have a general sense that the world and worldly activity are good in and of themselves. Marriage, reproduction, and work attain an esteem absent in medieval times, when the world was often considered a place of brief, temporary residence prior to occupying one’s true home in the afterlife. Pleasure was positively reevaluated, as was material well being. A positive view of the prospects of worldly satisfaction is not, of course, exclusive to the modern West, but it has been a prominent and enduring feature of the modern and late-modern eras.

Contemporary meditation and mindfulness practices have embedded themselves in this world-affirming ethos, absorbing it so thoroughly as to transform the significance of the practice itself. Consider a standard exercise in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction courses. One of the first things students do is eat a raisin. They first look at the raisin, notice its folds and contours, then eat it excruciatingly slowly, with complete focus on the flavors, sensations, textures—all the nuances of the experience of this simple, everyday activity. The exercise is designed to bring increased attention to something familiar in order to uncover hidden dimensions of ordinary experience. The clear implication is that all experiences are like this. They all contain hidden aspects, secret delights, normally occluded subtleties to which we, in our mindless routines, have become blind. To increase attention to the fine-grained qualities of our ordinary experiences is to truly live our life rather than miss it in a haze of daydreams, distractions, and mental chatter. The underlying message is: the raisin is good; your sense-experience is good; your life as an embodied being who eats and digests and has sex and enjoys the sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and smells of the natural world is good.    

The purpose of close attention to the ordinary phenomena of embodied experience in the early Buddhist meditation texts is quite different. These practices are designed to bring about disenchantment (nibbida—sometimes translated “revulsion”) with all phenomena and to develop dispassion (viraga) and detachment from them. There is still a hint of detachment in contemporary versions: one detaches from one’s ordinary habitual attitudes and mindless sleepwalking through life in order to discover the hidden treasures just below the surface. And it is not just treasures: sometimes one finds ugly emotions, hidden internal conflicts, repressed desires. But underlying it all is the idea that in order to deal with such difficulties, as well as appreciate the wonders of life, one must be mindful and increase one’s scope of awareness—and that, ultimately, even in the face of old age, sickness, and death, embodied human life is good in and of itself, whether or not there is an afterlife or nirvana.  

The point here is not to disparage recent reconfigurations of meditation as not sufficiently “traditional,” nor to laud them as having shaken off the shackles of tradition. Buddhist traditions have been adapted and transformed in different cultures long before coming to the West. In each case, the ideas and practices incorporated elements of the new culture and, in turn, contributed to changes in those cultures. In each case at least part of the value that meditative practices have offered derived not from the fact that they are being practiced exactly as a preceding historical version of the tradition practiced it but in how they became relevant in a novel cultural context.

If the ethic of appreciation is baked into contemporary culture, and meditation and mindfulness in our era are inevitably tilted toward the “this-worldly” side of the equation, the question then becomes: to what this-worldly uses are these practices best put today? Is meditation a tool for creating more productive workers to feed the system of global capital? Or does it focus the critical faculties of the mind for resistance against systems of routinization, commodification, and oppression? For critical inquiry into the social hierarchies and oppressive structures? Does it create an inner citadel that insulates one from being adversely affected by external events? Or does it create greater attunement, intimacy, and sensitivity to the world and others in the world? Is it for creating mental and physical health as understood today? Or for fostering an awareness of a transcendent dimension of experience? These are questions that, whether they are formulated explicitly or not, are being worked out among practitioners and their communities every day. They are not so much about the abstract question how does meditation work? but, rather, what work does meditation do in a novel cultural ecosystem?

♦

This piece is adapted from the forthcoming book Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds, Oxford University Press.

The post Strawberries and the Ethic of Appreciation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Exploring history, as Jacqueline Stone stated in a recent interview with Tricycle, exposes what has been lost and forgotten, and, often, what has been added. Awakening to how deeply personal experience is shaped by our embeddedness in a particular time and place can inform and enrich Buddhist practice. Over the last 150 years, changes of what is broadly called “modernity” have molded our world and structured our experiences in profound ways. Tracing back the influence of these changes on Buddhism reveals that what we usually take for granted as “Buddhist” may be more a consequence of history and social trends.

Although the social, political, economic, religious, and technological changes that characterize modernity originated in the cultural West, their impact on Asian Buddhism was not a one-way current—Asian monastics, teachers, and lay practitioners arose to the challenges of modernity and seized the openness of the moment to reinvent and revitalize their traditions. Monks and nuns brought practice out of the forests, mountains, and monasteries and into the lives of everyday people, envisioning Buddhism as a much-needed “spiritual” practice to counter increasing materialism. They manifested their vision of a new Buddhism for a still-suffering world, and the Buddhism we know today is firmly rooted in their struggles and efforts.

Professor David L. McMahan, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, is a leading expert on the complex constellation of social influences impacting Buddhism during the 19th and 20th centuries. His book The Making of Buddhist Modernism is the indispensable text on the subject. In this latest interview with Tricycle, he elucidates the Asian roots of the modern transformation that has shaped Buddhism around the world.

–Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins

Since you published The Making of Buddhist Modernism in 2008, scholars, including you, have continued to explore the subject. How do scholars currently understand Buddhist modernism?  Part of the project of scholars in identifying a specifically modern Buddhism was to show that what Americans and Europeans often encountered in recent decades are historically unique forms of Buddhism. Like other historical forms of Buddhism, this version had been adapted in response to the intellectual trends, the default intuitions, the background assumptions, and the ethical values of the time and place. To point out that these new articulations of Buddhism exist need not be a judgment on their authenticity—Buddhisms have been changing and adapting for twenty-six centuries.

Buddhist modernism specifically refers to distinctive forms of Buddhism that have emerged in the last 150 years and have been significantly shaped by modernity’s ideas, practices, and institutions. These include, for example, an engagement with some of the intellectual forces of modernity, such as science, Enlightenment rationalism, romanticism, transcendentalism, Protestantism, and psychology, as well as social forces like democracy, feminism, liberalism, and egalitarianism. Buddhist modernism is sometimes described as a fusion of these discourses with aspects of Buddhist thought and practices, creating unique hybrid forms.

Sometimes these forms are critical of, or simply ignore, widespread aspects of Buddhism, like relic veneration, appeasement of troublesome spirits, or prayers to buddhas and bodhisattvas for good fortune. They often abandon or reinterpret traditional cosmology in favor of a broadly scientific worldview and recast concepts of karma as “natural law” and meditation as an internal science that discerns empirical realities or laws of nature. There is a tendency toward the psychologization of teachings as well, for example, interpreting the various realms of rebirth primarily as states of mind. The spread of meditation among laypeople, the attenuation of hierarchy, and increasing gender equality are also identified with Buddhist modernism.

Having said all of this, though, no one monolithic “Buddhist modernism” or a definitive break between “modern” and “traditional” Buddhism exists. Multiple Buddhist modernisms contain unique combinations of traditional and modern elements with a variegated spectrum of continuities and discontinuities. For example, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama makes ample use of science and is exceptionally well-versed in it; at the same time, he believes in rebirth, the nonmaterial basis of consciousness, and gods that can have good or bad effects on humans.

What do we mean by “tradition” and “modernity”? “Modernity” is usually defined as a time period, a set of ideas, as social, political, and economic institutions, technologies, and so forth. This term’s unique cultural and historical realities have had significant, unprecedented transformative effects on the world. However, like all dualisms, the binary of “tradition” and “modernity” starts to deconstruct at a certain level of analysis. And this can be useful.

These concepts often come with polemics and value judgments. The modern is associated with progress, rationality, and science, and some practitioners may see certain “traditional” elements of Buddhism as outdated, moribund, and a matter of “cultural baggage.” Naturally, people of any religion will ask how their tradition can exist in harmony with, for example, contemporary science, democratic institutions, egalitarianism, and other elements of the modern world. But there is a history to keep in mind. Westerners have often ascribed “modernity” to themselves and “tradition” to non-Western peoples, usually ones that Western powers have colonized. So there is an unfortunate echo of colonialism and racial prejudice that can be a part of the mix. Appeals to the modern also tend to flatten everything “traditional” into a uniform, ahistorical past rather than recognizing that Buddhist traditions have been dynamically changing, adapting, and innovating for centuries.

Some may conversely see Buddhist modernism in a negative light and strive to shun anything “modern,” insisting that theirs is the pure, “traditional” dharma, unencumbered by the supposedly corrupting influence of modernity. But what is “traditional” is always imagined from a present perspective, and some aspects of tradition are reinterpreted and deployed in response to—or reaction against—the modern. Like the various Theravada forest traditions, what may seem like a very “traditional” form of Buddhism is often a recent reformulation.

When did the modernization of Buddhism begin, and what were some contemporaneous sociopolitical currents stimulating the drive to modernize? It’s essential to recognize that whatever Buddhist modernism is, it is not simply “Western” or “Westernized” Buddhism, nor Buddhism that’s been salvaged by the people of North America and Europe. It’s often assumed that the most innovative reformers of Buddhism were from Europe and America. But the first modern Buddhist reformers were in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), China, Japan, Burma, etc. They were motivated to reexamine and reform their traditions, partly due to internal social forces but also in light of the tumultuous effects of colonialism and the attendant disempowering of Buddhism in their countries. So these reform movements associated with Buddhist modernism mostly came from the 19th and early 20th centuries and began in Asia.

For example, bringing meditation out from the monastic community to the masses was part of Ledi Sayadaw’s response to British rule’s threat to Buddhism in Burma. He was concerned that colonialism could destroy Buddhism; part of his plan to preserve it was to bring philosophical teachings and meditation to laypeople. Anagarika Dharmapala, in Sri Lanka, presented Buddhism as essentially compatible with, even a precursor to, modern science, insisting on its compatibility with evolutionary theory, psychology, and scientific ideas of causation. This was very important in establishing a link between Buddhism and science that is still prominent in different ways.

Were Asian Buddhists simply reacting to colonialism and hegemony and not necessarily creatively responding to the challenges of modernity? These are not exclusive of each other. Creativity often emerges in stress, conflict, and pressure, and we can see a mixture of defensive moves and creativity in modern rearticulations of Buddhism.

The project of reimagining Buddhism led reformers not just to critique their own traditions and reform them in ways that would be acceptable to the West; they often used Western concepts, fused with Buddhist ones, to critique the West, especially its drive for economic and military power.

Part of the creativity has involved looking at resonances in global currents of thought and practice. For example, the concept of dependent arising underwent a considerable transformation in Asia before it reached a global audience. It began as bad news: karmic bonds enmesh us in bondage, suffering, and continual rebirth. But the interdependence of all things begins to take on more positive meanings in East Asia, especially when combined with the idea that buddhanature permeates everything, including the natural world. Today, the more generalized notion of interdependence has been forged from a mixture of classical articulations and more recent conceptions of ecology, biology, and causality, as well as the empirical reality of the increased systemic interconnectedness of everything and everyone in the contemporary world. In this sense, Buddhist thinkers have been able to think deeply about classical ideas that resonate with current concepts and realities.

Engaged Buddhism is also sometimes characterized as a Westernization of Buddhism. Yet many of the most influential figures in this movement, like Thich Nhat Hanh, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhadasa, are Asian and have infused particular concerns rooted in their cultural context into the movement.

What role did literacy and education play in early efforts to modernize Asian Buddhism? The explosion of Buddhist publishing, the wide availability of classical Buddhist texts in translation, and the increase in literacy over the last 150 years has radically changed how it’s possible to access Buddhist thought and practice.

Many Asian reformers were educated in their local forms of Buddhism and Western curricula set up by colonial governments. This enabled them to embrace certain Western ideals while using them in unique ways. For example, Dharmapala critiques colonialism by employing Western ideals of freedom and democracy, pointing out the apparent contradiction between these ideals and the subjugation of colonized and enslaved people.

The development of a transnational educated population accessing the same scientific theories, literature, and philosophical ideas also contributed significantly to the development of transnational Buddhism. People worldwide began working from a shared repertoire of ideas, which allowed new resonances and connections.

You’ve argued that Asian Buddhists used the term “spiritual” to position Buddhism as secular but also to critique and expand the borders of the secular. What influence has this had on Western Buddhist modernism? The way we use “spiritual” and “spirituality” today is a relatively recent phenomenon. People in the late 19th century began to use it to refer to something at once deeply personal and at the same time universal, almost something free-floating above established religious traditions. Spirituality began to be conceived as something that all religious traditions have but to which no tradition could lay exclusive claim. It was the idea that there is more to religion than just institutions, dogmas, and hierarchies—spirituality pointed toward an internal experience with its own authority.

Buddhism appealed to certain Western seekers partly because it was articulated as compatible with secular forms of knowledge. But it also promised to infuse spirituality into these forms of knowledge or extend secular knowledge into the spiritual realm without contradicting it. One powerful narrative throughout the 20th century was the narrative of science and modernity being forces that were “disenchanting” the world, robbing it of the meaning, depth, and life that it had in premodern times. Buddhist reformers tapped into this disenchantment among specific educated populations by promising to “reenchant” the world, while not contradicting the basic principles of science and secular discourses.

Were Asian Buddhist reformers concerned with finding an imagined “original” Buddhism, similar to some Western Buddhists?  Yes, many framed it that way. Many Theravada Buddhists claim the Pali canon as the “original” Buddhism. There is a lot of debate among scholars about how confident we can be that the current versions of the Pali suttas reflect the earliest forms of Buddhism, since these texts were not written down until several centuries after the life of the Buddha, and they were redacted in subsequent centuries. Scholars can be confident that specific layers of these texts are likely earlier than others, but we can’t be confident that these give us an unambiguous “original” Buddhism. I think of the Pali Nikayas and Chinese Agamas as reflecting the earliest iterations of Buddhism to which we have access. But we have no access to whatever “original Buddhism” was.

Did Asian reformers receive pushback from other monastics who didn’t want to modernize?  Modernizing efforts successfully established new possible ways of practicing Buddhism, but they in no way displaced things not associated with modernist revivals like rituals, belief in spirits, prayer, etc. One of the crucial fissures was between an approach ultimately committed to a universalist or theosophical version of Buddhism—like that of Henry Steel Olcott, one of the first Americans to become a Buddhist—and a reformed Buddhism that is not interested in subsuming Buddhist truths within a more general all-religions-lead-to-the-same-ultimate-truth approach. Dharmapala broke with Olcott because he didn’t want Buddhism to be seen as one part of a larger truth to which all religions had access. He believed in Buddhism.

Regarding people within the monastic community, many were interested in modernizing and reforming Buddhism. And, yes, some resisted and still do. These are matters of vigorous debate. Many were not interested in scrapping all features of Buddhism that couldn’t be made to fit with scientific, psychological, or transcendentalist ideas. So, again, one could see it as a complex, plural, and variegated continuum of beliefs and practices. One modernist articulation of Buddhism might draw heavily from psychology but also believe in spirits that populate the human world. Another might insist on no “supernatural” elements at all. This is why the notion of a singular Buddhist modernism is problematic.

In an interview with Tricycle, Robert Bellah criticized religious expressions of the “radical ‘disencumbered’ individualism that idolizes the choice-making individual as the prime reality in the world,” and then stated that “to emphasize primarily the individualistic side of Buddhism (especially Zen) in America is only to contribute to our pathology, not ameliorate it.” How might Buddhist modernism reinforce our own cultural and individual pathologies? There is, of course, a dimension of Buddhism that emphasizes internal or extraordinary experiences that can break through delusion. The idea has usually been that practitioners must awaken to the same realization as the Buddha. The Buddha’s awakening to a wider and truer sense of reality is the paradigm.

In the West, this emphasis on internal experience can get assimilated with modern Western individualism, notions of the atomistic, autonomous self, and the absolute authority of individual experience. This latter may seem quite Buddhist: many texts insist that it is not enough to “believe” in the Buddha; one must verify the truths he realized. But in practice, this has almost always been a collective project carried out in close consultation with a teacher, the sangha, and one’s particular tradition. Zen, for example, may seem like the ultimate individualist, trust-your-experience, find-the-buddha-within path. Yet, in practice, one’s insights and realizations are cultivated in close consultation with the roshi, who can ultimately confirm them as genuine or dismiss them as illusory.

This traditional importance of a sangha and teacher in Buddhist practice seems at odds with contemporary mindfulness practices used for individual health and wellness.  Yes! There is tension between conflicting possibilities in contemporary mindfulness and meditation practice. On the one hand, it can reinforce an individualism that seeks to enhance the self. You meditate to make yourself a better worker, parent, hedge fund manager, or golfer. On the other hand, it can shake up the boundaries of the self, show its fluidity, disrupt its narratives, and foster a sense of interrelatedness with others. It can make one more comfortable in challenging conditions and more accepting of social norms, or it can be a powerful tool of critical self-inquiry that can entail questioning the default intuitions and tacit ideologies of one’s society as they exist in one’s mind.

In some cases, Buddhist modernism may become wedded to the more pathological forms of Western individualism. One feature often ascribed to the milieu that Bellah is referring to is an implicit opposition between the individual and society. There is a strong tradition in the West, beginning with Rousseau and others, of conceiving society in opposition to the individual. Society corrupts the individual’s purity and constrains individual freedom. And in Buddhist circles today, we often hear that the Buddhist path is a matter of overcoming social conditioning, implying that only the pure, authentic insight of the individual who transcends all social and cultural influence matters. However, this interpretation neglects how Buddhist insight has always been fostered in a complex interaction between individuals, teachers, communities, and cultures.

But more community-oriented forms of Buddhism are emerging—maybe forms of Buddhist postmodernism, as Ann Gleig suggests—that cast a critical eye on seeing the spiritual quest as one solely of the internal experience of the isolated, lone individual. They might encourage people to see themselves more relationally, which has implications for personal relationships, community, and social-political engagement.

You’ve written that a new understanding of spirituality emerged in which personal spiritual experience transcends doctrine and authority. What challenges might this personal, subjective spirituality create? This is another creative tension in Buddhism today. In some iterations of contemporary spirituality, individual insight is sacrosanct and transcends institutions and religious authority. For example, Buddhist meditation aims to cultivate insight into things as they really are. When hearing this, we tend to think of insight in psychological terms—I have an insight into what’s been making me anxious or obsessing about something.

But meditation, as laid out in classical texts, suggests that the insights to be cultivated are Buddhist insights, for example, into the impermanence of everything, the unsatisfactory nature of the body, or the fact that we have no permanent, independent self. What if I have an insight that fundamentally challenges Buddhist doctrine? After 2,500 years of Buddhists insisting that there are five skandhas, what if I have an insight that there are seven? Buddhist communities have to negotiate this emphasis on the authority of individual insight and the authority of the dharma and Buddhist institutions.

This is not unique to the modern or contemporary context, but the current emphasis on the authority of individual experience undoubtedly enhances it. Different traditions will likely navigate this terrain in different ways, some insisting on adherence to doctrine over personal experience and others giving more credence to innovation. This negotiation may be especially challenging to Buddhism since it has been understood recently as a path that elevates personal experience above all else.

People often characterize Buddhism as a “way of life” or a philosophy—in other words, it’s not a religion. Is Buddhism a religion? Scholars have endless debates about what “religion” is or is not. Without getting into that, it’s clear that if you see Buddhism on the ground in Asia, you’ll most likely think it’s a religion. It involves prayer, ritual, belief in supernatural beings, etc. The same is true of a lot of Buddhism in the West too! In the last 150 years, some Buddhists and Buddhist enthusiasts have cast the tradition as a way of life or philosophy. They often mean that one can, for example, follow the eightfold path without resorting to the things one usually associates with religion. There is a certain truth to that—but it’s a truth that has come about recently. Before the last 150 years, no one conceived of a Buddhist way of life that resembles contemporary secularized versions.

The Search for “True” Dharma

A distinctive mark of Buddhist modernism is the search for an “original” form of Buddhism. In this quote from his 2017 article “Buddhism, Meditation, and Global Secularisms,” in the Journal of Global Buddhism, David McMahan writes about the search for a true Buddhism and the academic skepticism toward any such possibility.

In the 19th and 20th century, authors from around the globe began to create a narrative of Buddhism, celebrating the rediscovery of “true” Buddhism, in part by Western scholars: a Buddhism of texts, philosophy, psychology, meditation, and ethics that contrasted starkly with the “degenerate” Buddhism that colonists found on the ground in places they occupied. The latter Buddhism was a matter of “cultural baggage” that had accumulated around the core of the dharma and was inessential—even corrupting—to its original liberative message. Most scholars today are quite skeptical of this narrative and recognize the picture of a pure rational core of Buddhism enveloped by various cultural impurities to be inadequate to account for the complexities of Buddhism in all its varieties now and throughout history. Yet the picture persists in many different contexts of the rescue of Buddhism from moribund tradition and its (re)emergence into its true ancient form, which turns out to be the most compatible with the modern.

The post The Roots of Buddhist Modernism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When Western Buddhists sit down to meditate, many of us may imagine that we are doing the same thing Buddhists across the globe have done for centuries. We may think we are using the same practices Buddhists have always used to overcome suffering (and probably we hope to attain the same result).

But this is a problematic assumption, not least because it is based on the view that the meaning of Buddhist practice is independent of culture and time.

David McMahan studies the role of social and cultural context in meditation. A professor of religion at Franklin and Marshall College, he is the editor of the recently published volume Buddhism in the Modern World and the author of two books, including The Making of Buddhist Modernism (which Tricycle reviewed in Spring 2012). He is a frequent contributor to scholarly journals, reference works, and anthologies, and participates widely in conferences, seminars, and lectures across the United States and overseas. An expert on Buddhism’s encounter with modernity, McMahan suggests that we approach the subject by considering a monk in ancient India. “He has left his family behind; he is celibate; he doesn’t eat after noon; he studies texts that give him a skeptical view of the phenomenal world and its value. Is his practice really exactly the same,” McMahan asks, “as that of a contemporary secular mindfulness practitioner who is meditating to excel at work or to be more compassionate to her children?”

If this question makes us a little uncomfortable, there is good reason, because it triggers an underlying tension. On the one hand, we want to counter McMahan’s challenge: Don’t we believe the Buddha’s teachings are timeless? Suffering, after all, doesn’t belong to a particular culture or historical age. Beings suffered in the past and they are pretty clearly suffering now. There was a solution to suffering taught by the Buddha and it is still available today. On the other hand, an ever-growing body of evidence tells us that over time and across cultures (and even within traditions) there exist multiple versions of Buddhism that all define the human problem and its solution differently. We might be left wondering: if Buddhism is changed by culture or history, how can it be authentic? How could it be true?

This tension isn’t just a Buddhist problem, McMahan points out. It is a deep paradox in modern life.

The double-whammy of rationalist thinking is that when we imagine truth is singular, cross-cultural, and ahistorical, we slam into the reality of historical change and cultural pluralism; when we accept that plural truth claims can be equally valid, we slam into relativism.

McMahan says, “The understanding that social science and contemporary philosophy and anthropology have brought to the importance of cultural context is a uniquely modern Western phenomenon.” But he assures us that Buddhism’s teachings on emptiness and dependent origination can shed important light on this seeming paradox. In June, I sat down with him during a break at a Mind and Life conference in Garrison, New York, to ask him to place Buddhism beside the contemporary Western intellectual tradition to explore why and how context matters.

–Linda Heuman, Contributing Editor

Is there some popular misconception you are pushing against in your work on Buddhism and modernity? There is a prevalent misperception, especially among Western practitioners, that what they are practicing is basically the same thing Buddhists have practiced since the time of the Buddha. They seldom recognize how contemporary forms of Buddhism have been re-contextualized by Western tacit assumptions and understandings.

Can you tell me about your current research on the role of context in meditation? I’m trying to see how meditation works in a systemic way within a culture. I’m trying to get away from meditative “states,” or thinking of meditation in a static sense: “you do practice A and it leads you to state X.” The meaning, the significance, the understanding, and the rationale for meditation in one culture might be different than in another. For example, if somebody from a Tibetan tradition who has had very little contact with the West does a particular practice, is it really going to be the exact same thing as a modern Western professional who is doing on paper “the same practice” but nested in very different contexts?

What exactly do you mean by “context?” First of all, there’s the explicit context of the dharma. Right now, for the first time ever, we have contemplative practices derived from the Buddhist tradition that are being practiced completely independently of any Buddhist context. Secularization has filtered out what we would call “religious elements.” It is those religious elements, those ethical elements, and those intentions that have always formed the context of meditation and that have made meditation make sense. Otherwise, what sense does it make to sit down for half an hour and watch your breath? Somebody has to explain to you why that matters, why it is a good idea, and what it is actually doing in the larger scheme of things. When meditation comes to the West completely independently of that, it is like a dry sponge; it just soaks up the cultural values that are immediately available. So it becomes about self-esteem. Or it might be about body acceptance or lowering your stress. It might be about performing lots of different tasks efficiently at work. It might be about developing compassion for your family. A whole variety of new elements now are beginning to form a novel context for this practice, which has not only jumped the monastery walls but has broken free from Buddhism altogether.

I know people who are not interested in being Buddhists or studying Buddhist philosophy who have really benefited from stripped-down mindfulness practice. So I’m not in a position to say, “Oh no, you shouldn’t be doing this unless you can read Nagarjuna!” [Laughs.] Every culture has its elite religion and its more popular folk religion; it’s almost like mindfulness is becoming a folk religion of the secular elite in Western culture. We’ll see whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

To expand the idea of context further, there is also cultural context, which obviously can be very different. And again, there are a lot of tacit understandings there: I feel myself in a world of atoms and molecules and bacteria and viruses and galaxies that are unimaginably far away. I think I’m literally incapable of feeling myself in a world in which there are cold hells and hot hells beneath my feet. So in that sense, just our ordinary being-in-the-world—our “life world,” to use a phenomenological term—is deeply conditioned by these cultural elements. And this cultural context provides novel goals and intentions to which meditation is put in service.

Does acknowledging the importance of context mean we have to be cultural relativists? I’m not a complete cultural relativist. I’m not saying everything is cultural. There are things that obviously go across cultures. We’re all working with the same basic neurophysiology. But epistemologies and ways of seeing the world are deeply embedded in cultures. The basic categories we use to make sense of the world are culturally constructed. I think it’s interesting that the Buddhist tradition has seen something of this—not so much in terms of culture, but in terms of language and concepts. For instance, Nagarjuna, in my reading, says that there’s no set of categories that finally, simply, mirrors the world. All categories, ultimately, are empty of that self-authenticating representation of reality as it is. I think that insight is really an interesting one to take into the contemporary world, because now we can expand on that with this idea of culture.

You can see how that rubs up against the whole scientific enterprise. Even though good scientists are much more nuanced about it today than they would have been a hundred years ago, the ideal of the sciences is still “a view from nowhere.” The purpose is to get us out of those contexts, to get us out of those very particularistic ways of seeing things. And that’s going to be a tension between the humanities and social sciences on the one hand and the hard sciences on the other.

We want to have a kind of final understanding of the world. That’s natural. We don’t want to be told that the way we’re seeing the world is just a product of our upbringing and our language and our culture. And yet there are certain things that can only be seen through the lenses of particular traditions or particular categories. So I think rather than seeing the existence of various systems of knowledge or taxonomies and so on as devaluing, you can see them as different lenses. That doesn’t mean they’re all the same and they’re all equally valuable. Some may be much more valuable for certain purposes, and some may be valuable for other purposes.

What sorts of misunderstandings about meditation might practitioners fall into if they assume the context of meditation is unimportant? It can lead to dogmatism about progress in meditation along the path: here is this stage, here is the next stage. And we find these schemas in the Buddhist texts, so there is every reason for a good Buddhist to think those schemas of meditative progress are simply built into the nature of things—built into the mind itself. Why shouldn’t we think that if we are going to be Buddhists and practice Buddhism? I’m not saying we shouldn’t necessarily, but first of all, we are confronted with the plurality of maps of the path. This is the same general problem of pluralism that we are confronted with in the modern world. I don’t even think it is unique to the modern world. One view would be to say that my map is simply the right one and everybody else is off. The other would be to say that there are lots of different maps, and that they do different things. If you look at actual maps of the earth, you realize that you can never really make a completely accurate map of the earth. Mapmakers struggle with this. Do you make it look curved? Do you represent roads? You just can’t represent the earth on a flat piece of paper in an absolutely straightforward way. You have to make all kinds of choices. So where you are going and what you are doing really matters when you are trying to make a map. In the Theravada, the ultimate goal of meditation is to transcend the world completely. In the Mahayana, you want to come back as a bodhisattva over and over again. So these maps get configured differently.

Isn’t the view that “no map is absolutely true” also a view? It is. In his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, Nagarjuna lays out his understanding of emptiness, and then he makes a surprising, even an astonishing, move. He says, “Ultimately, everything that I’ve said is also empty.” This is the idea of the emptiness of emptiness. He is admitting that everything he is laying out is also a pragmatic map, not an absolute system that corresponds to reality in an absolute way. There is some discussion and debate about whether when Nagarjuna critiques views he is talking about any view or just wrong views. I kind of like the “any view” view [laughs]—that any kind of map or system that you hang onto and make into something that you believe corresponds to reality in and of itself becomes a kind of bondage.

Isn’t part of the problem here the assumption that “corresponding to reality in and of itself” is what it means for a map, concept, or idea to be true? After all, we Buddhists don’t buy that there is reality “in and of itself.” Very true. That is why we have such a hard time as modern Westerners trying to see a way around this problem. It is so firmly built into the Western Enlightenment system of thinking, and into modernity, that we have sentences and representations in our minds that correspond (or don’t correspond) to external reality. Descartes and Bacon set up this whole way of thinking. There have been a number of moves in more contemporary Western thought—phenomenology, for instance—to develop a language that gets away from this. But it is deeply rooted in our culture to think that way. And science encourages us to think that way.

Maybe this tension is running through other cultures too—the tension between a very detailed systematic view of how things are versus a suspicion of our ability to construct a completely accurate model. In a lot of Abhidharma literature, there seems to be an attempt to account for everything, to get a category for everything, to really make a comprehensive accounting of the phenomenological reality of being human. I think it was in reaction to that systematizing that Nagarjuna and the Perfection of Wisdom came along and said that language doesn’t work that way—it doesn’t simply correspond to self-existing, independent entities that match our categories. So this tension is there even in the Buddhist tradition historically.

I think there is an assumption among many Western Buddhists that decontextualization of the dharma is okay because if non-Buddhists just do these meditation practices—for whatever reason—then they will have Buddhist insights. So it becomes almost a covert way of converting people.

Yes. From what you’re saying, it sounds like maybe it’s not so cut and dried. It is a little more complicated than that, because to have those insights you need to have a bit of that context in place. Explicit teachings are a context that reprograms the mind deeply, at both a conscious and a tacit level. It is no accident that Buddhists memorize and recite scriptures, repeating them over and over and over. This makes the dharma sink very deeply into the mind, so that it forms the tacit background of understanding. And that is part of what bubbles up in insight. It’s not just that insight clears away everything and then—just boom!—there’s bare insight into something. Reconditioning is a necessary precondition for at least some forms of insight.

Can you give me an example? Look at one of the earliest comprehensive meditation texts, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. I’m always fascinated by the fact that people work with this fundamental text today, because generally people just take one tiny slice of it—bare attention to breath and physical movements—and that becomes “mindfulness” in the modern world. But if you keep reading to the end of the sutra, you realize that there are all kinds of very conceptual aspects. And far from being simply “nonjudgmental,” it suggests making wise and discerning ethical judgments and judgments on the value of various things. The sutra is training the mind to see the world and oneself in certain ways. Rather than have you see yourself as solid, singular, and permanent, it offers an alternative way to train to see yourself: five skandhas. It goes through the relationship between the senses and the external world. And then the sutra ends up with a meditation on the eightfold path and the four noble truths. You are meditating on a thumbnail sketch of the whole dharma! So there is a lot of conceptual stuff going on there. The text attempts to train the mind to see the world in a particular way that is conducive to following the Buddhist path and to making progress toward enlightenment. So the text supplies a whole raft of attitudes, orientations, ethics, and values that form the context—and sometimes the actual content—of the meditation practices. Bare awareness may be a starting place, a way of focusing and concentrating the mind. But this broader context supplies the rationales and aims of practice. Even in the most secularized contemporary mindfulness movements, there are lots of these values and attitudes that enter in because it doesn’t really work without some kind of conceptual and ethical orientation.

Why do you think the importance of context is so hard to see here? I think that’s fostered by a certain idea that meditation actually gets us beyond all context, that that’s really what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to get us beyond this cultural stuff and make us transcend our culture. And I would say that this itself is an idea that’s coming very much out of a modern context. Modern Western notions of freedom are often about freedom of the autonomous individual from social, institutional, cultural influences and conditioning. The idea that many modern practitioners have that meditation is somehow beyond cultural or other forms of context stems largely from D. T. Suzuki’s articulation of Zen, which really emphasizes the non-conceptual. It also comes out of the modern pluralistic context whereby, for the past couple of hundred years, we’ve been bumping into other cultures at an unprecedented rate, trying to figure out what to do with each other, recognizing each other’s differences, and having wars about those differences. If we can get beyond concepts, then we are not bogged down in who is right and who is wrong and who has the right model of things. D. T. Suzuki says we can just cut through all that and get to a direct pure experience of reality in and of itself, beyond cultural context.

There is a place at a certain point for overcoming concepts and conditioning, but there is also a lot of reconceiving and reconditioning. The idea is to transform the mind, not just to extract it from all cultural influences. Buddhism itself is a culture—one that attempts to train and condition minds in specific ways conducive to awakening. In some traditions there is the idea that you do transcend all causes and conditions completely, but there is a way to go before that.

Is there something to be said about the Buddhist notion of dependent arising in relation to context? If phenomena are dependently originated as the teachings tell us they are, in a sense it is all context. Yes, exactly. The very notion of things arising from causes and conditions is an affirmation of the importance of contextuality. It’s no accident that the concept of dependent arising or interdependence has become so prominent in understandings of Buddhism today. The world is so interconnected today that everybody is talking about this.

In the earliest forms of Buddhism, the notion of dependent arising or interdependence was not really good news. It was a device to explain how suffering arises (as in the twelve links). It wasn’t a celebration of our interconnectedness in a living web of creation. It was something you wanted to extract yourself from; it was bondage. With the arising of the Mahayana, especially in China, there was a shift in understanding the phenomenal world and its significance. Chinese Buddhists were able to look at nature as an expression of buddhanature—and there were debates about whether trees and grasses could be enlightened and whether they really were sentient. Also, there were a lot of nature metaphors for enlightenment. And so the Chinese appreciation of nature infuses itself into this idea of interdependence and provides a more world-affirming version of it, which then centuries later runs into the Transcendentalists and the Romantic view of nature and deep ecology. Now we have a whole new flourishing of the notion of interdependence that has been informed not only by these streams of Buddhism but also by various Western ideas of interdependence.

So there is a shift that happens over many centuries. There emerges the possibility of seeing the world both as a place of suffering and bondage and also as a place of liberation—a projection of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, like a training ground or a pure land, a place in which there is a sacred and wondrous hidden aspect in the ordinary things of the world. The Avatamsaka Sutra symbolizes this by wild visions of tiny universes in grains of sand or the pores of the Buddha’s skin. The attitudes toward the world itself become more varied and complex. And then, when you get to the modern world, certain realities and concepts in the modern world serve like magnets that pull out particular ideas from the Buddhist tradition, leaving others behind. Interdependence is one of these ideas that has really been pulled out. Not the old idea of the twelve-link chain of dependent origination. That idea resonates with people who really immerse themselves in the Buddhist worldview, but when I try to explain it to my students, they don’t get it right away. But when they read a paragraph by Thich Nhat Hanh about interdependence—how the paper is dependent on the sunshine, and the cloud, and the lumber worker, and all that—they immediately understand it.

Conditions right now in the world are such that interdependence is a prominent and obvious fact. Everything is connected through communications technology and through ease of travel. We know that if we screw up the environment over here, it can affect things on the other side of the world. So suddenly the image of Indra’s net attains new significance; in fact, it has become one of the most prominent images and concepts in modern articulations of Buddhism, while it had nowhere near that prominence in the past, except in a particular Chinese Buddhist school.

I do think this pointing out of historical change and the relativity of cultural contexts can be very disturbing and destabilizing. It is not necessarily a comforting thought. But it is interesting that it is destabilizing in a way that Buddhism has been pointing out all along.

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