The growing secular dharma movement is a contemporary perspective that aims to reinterpret the Buddha’s teachings in the context of the global, modern world. Rather than focusing on the goal of enlightenment and transcending the cycle of rebirth (samsara), secular Buddhists are more concerned with ethical conduct, freedom from suffering and achieving human flourishing and collective well-being in the present. Teachings such as the four noble truths, for example, are taken as a wise recommendation for how to release reactivity and act skillfully in the world, rather than inviolable truth. 

Learn more about the secular dharma movement—and its practices, ethics and perspectives on traditional Buddhist teachings—in the cards below. 

Discover Level 2, Deck 7: 

What is secular dharma? This contemporary tradition looks at the teachings of the historical Buddha in the context of modern life in today’s world. 

Why “secular”? Isn’t Buddhism a religion? Those who engage with secular dharma are not required to adopt metaphysical beliefs or become involved in traditionally religious activities such as chanting or praying. 

What do secular dharma practitioners believe? The two main secular dharma groups have beliefs that align with scientific atheism and Western philosophies of phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. 

What’s the role of meditation in secular dharma? Secular meditation is primarily about stillness and self-observation.

What are secular dharma’s ethics? Secular Buddhists do not take the Buddha’s word as absolute and have found several ways of meeting the challenge of establishing guidelines for ethical conduct. 

Is secular dharma the same as mindfulness? While mindfulness is a secularized form of Buddhist practice, secular dharma is a movement that goes beyond meditation practice. 

What does secular dharma teach about enlightenment? Secular dharma tends to promote the goal of human flourishing rather than the traditional aim of reaching enlightenment or nirvana. 

Do secular dharma communities have spiritual leaders? Secular dharma places value on the teachings over the teacher, emphasizing self-reliance and community engagement rather than following a guru. 

Recommended Reading: 

• A Secular Buddhist, by Stephen Batchelor 
• Has Secularism Become A Religion?, by Sarah Shaw 
• Reimagining the Eightfold Path – Online course with Bodhi College 
• Coming of Age in a Secular Era, by Katherine Ozment 
• Reincarnation: A Debate – Stephen Batchelor and Robert Thurman

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Secular dharma is not (yet) a Buddhist school, or “vehicle.” It has no orthodoxy, no separate canon, no institutional presence, and is remarkably heterodox. Its sympathizers participate mostly in practice communities with friends of other Buddhist persuasions, or of none in particular. It is a movement that is typically Buddhist in its open-minded skepticism and its desire to let the dharma speak most effectively, in culturally available terms.

By far the majority of dharma practitioners living outside majority-Buddhist nations belong to Asian diasporas and preserve the practices of their countries of origin, though this is changing. Rapidly growing in number are ethnic Westerners who have adopted, and sometimes adapted, one or more of the Asian forms of practice, with those forms’ associated beliefs and organizational culture (including their understanding of authority, hierarchy, and gender relations). 

A third, emerging category of practitioners in the West encompasses people of all ethnicities who are developing forms of practice, community, and thought that harmonize with progressive values, starting with egalitarianism, inclusiveness, and democratic self-rule. They hold care as their core value and promote both individual flourishing and social justice. It is this third group that consider themselves practitioners of secular dharma

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• Contrasted with or seen as being in opposition to “religious”;
• From the Latin word saeculum, originally meaning a human lifespan but later understood as a century, it refers to worldly concerns about the quality of our personal, social, and environmental experience on Earth;
• In Western countries, it describes the profound cultural transformation in which metaphysical beliefs and religious truth claims are no longer of central importance, and in which even some traditional religious bodies emphasize belonging and ethical practices instead.

Secular dharma, or Secular Buddhism, is “secular” in the sense of the second and third definitions of the word. The emergence of secular dharma is just one instance of the secularization that has been developing in the West since before the European Enlightenment. Seen historically, secularity consists of a centuries-long religious development rather than a victory of science over religion. Today’s secularity is marked by a cultural decline of truth claims, particularly those that involve supernatural beings or phenomena.

The Christian theologian Paul Tillich suggested that religion as such has little to do with beliefs, rather religion is “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.” The secular Buddhist writer and thinker Stephen Batchelor has written, “Secular dharma has a religious quality because it is rooted in four ‘ultimate concerns’: the principle of conditionality; the practice of a fourfold task; the perspective of mindful awareness; and the power of self-reliance.”

While secular dharma practitioners have been connected with a range of Buddhist lineages, and none, secular dharma is a development out of certain modernizing trends within different schools of Buddhism. A secular space is open-minded and tolerant and does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, gender, ability, beliefs, or faith. Those who engage with a secular dharma community are not required to adopt metaphysical beliefs or become involved in activities generally associated with religion, Buddhist or otherwise, such as chanting or praying.

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Two separate groups refer to themselves as “secular dharma practitioners” or “secular Buddhists.” One group focuses on recent claims of the life sciences, seeing Buddhism as fundamentally compatible with Western natural science. This group often aligns itself with scientistic atheism. The other group favors an interpretive first-person discourse that inspects human experience, believing the Buddha’s teachings are more in line with the 20th-century Western philosophies of phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. 

Regardless of their philosophical affinity, when secular dharma practitioners come together in a community, they usually tend to avoid incense, candles, and religious images. They may meditate in chairs rather than on cushions on the floor. 

Secular Buddhists typically recognize the principles of conditionality, contingency, or dependent origination—cause and effect. They also heed the Buddha’s insistence on cultivating mindful awareness around the specific nature of experience, aiming to be fully present for what is taking place right now, right here. Likewise, they value their autonomy and self-reliance, reflecting the refrains in an early Buddhist text that describe people who have entered the path as having become “independent of others in the Buddha’s teachings.”

Secular Buddhists also tend to focus on the earliest Buddhist teachings, including but not entirely limited to the Pali canon. Of particular interest are the Buddha’s teachings on the four noble truths—which some secular dharma practitioners have reinterpreted as the four noble tasks—and the eightfold path.

These four great tasks are as follows:

1. Embrace life, including one’s own suffering, that of all others, and that of the world;
2. Let go of the instinctive reactivity that causes us to grasp, crave, and reduce experience to our personal fears, desires, and delusions;
3. See the ceasing of reactivity, if only for a moment, so we can open to experiences in which we are no longer prompted by fear, attachment, pride, jealousy, or hatred; and
4. Act from a place of clarity, embarking on an ethical way of life in which our humanity can flourish in the way we perceive life, speak, act, work, apply ourselves, pay attention, and focus our minds.

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Sitting regularly, practitioners become increasingly proficient at seeing what is happening in the mind. With this awareness, they can then direct their attention toward their mind states, emotions, and thoughts, and as they work through what comes to the surface, they become aware of the habitual processes of the mind. Not seeking “peak experiences,” secular practitioners may start posing a question during meditation, such as the Seon (Korean Zen) question, “What is this?” 

At the end of a meditation session, some take time to reflect, notebook and pencil at hand to jot down what they can recollect of the experience. Over time, secular meditation practitioners tend to relax into a nonformulaic, open awareness, followed by journaling and discussion with others. Meditation works well as a communal practice, and practitioners might practice alone or in a group. 

Mindful awareness can be practiced throughout the day, not just when sitting in meditation. When people become aware that they are practicing meditation for its own sake with the Buddha’s four tasks structuring it, they may then develop their understanding of a secular approach to the eightfold path or the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s five mindfulness trainings; and they can see how to use these practices to thrive, find happiness, and lead an ethical life. 

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Traditional Buddhist schools tend to follow strict rules such as the Vinaya code of conduct for monastics and the five precepts for laypeople. While most secular Buddhists understand why such rules are needed, they reject strict interpretations and prefer to apply ethical principles to each individual situation, which is unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable. One might approach a moral dilemma by asking What is the loving thing to do? or What is the compassionate response to this situation? 

One common approach to secular Buddhist ethics is based on empathy as the foundation of care—an expression of the golden rule, “Treat others as you would like others to treat you.”

Care—in the sense of caring for ourselves and others, as well as caring about what is happening here and now—is a key aspect of ethics that must be cultivated and developed.

The last words the Buddha spoke, according to the Pali canon, were: “All conditioned phenomena are impermanent, strive on diligently,” or “stride on with care.” The original Pali word for care here is appamada. Appamada encompasses a practice of not just mindfulness but also nonreactivity, or freedom from craving, aversion, and delusion.

Siddhartha Gautama (Pali: Siddhatta Gotama) described care as the one virtue that encompasses others, using the metaphor of the elephant’s footprint that is so large it is able to hold all other animals’ footprints within it. More than just being watchful, or alert, care has a clear ethical quality to it, an energetic cherishing of what we regard to be good.

When we practice taking care, we are continually aware of when the mind goes into autopilot, and our lives become ever more present, attentive, alive, and mindful. 

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Mindfulness is now taught widely in secular contexts, removed from its Buddhists roots. Some secular dharma practitioners approve of these mindfulness courses because they teach students a practice that relieves their suffering. Whether students are initially aware that this practice draws on Buddhism or not, they may become more open to dharma communities where mindfulness and related practices are cultivated within a richer cultural context.

Other secular dharma practitioners hold that when mindfulness is taught commercially it can blunt the appreciation people might otherwise feel for the Buddha’s teaching, because Siddhartha Gautama (Pali: Siddhattha Gotama) taught a lot more than just mindfulness. Further, students who learn a particular practice and find that it doesn’t work for them may conclude that Buddhism as a whole has nothing to offer them.

Seen in the framework of the four tasks of secular dharma, mindfulness classes often consist of just the first three tasks: embracing life, letting go of reactivity, and seeing the ceasing of reactivity. The fourth element—the task of acting, setting a direction in our lives in which we cultivate an ethical way of being in the world—is often missing from mainstream mindfulness programs. This last task is based on a secular reading of the Buddha’s noble eightfold path:

1. Authentic worldview;
2. Appropriate thinking and intention;
3. Authentic speech;
4. Appropriate occupation, the work we do and how we approach it;
5. True survival, in other words what we do in life so as to survive;
6. Appropriate effort in our spiritual endeavor;
7. Appropriate mindfulness;
8. Appropriate inner integration.

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Secular dharma practice works with the self and the world. Practitioners’ work is to understand and transform these according to the values and vision of the dharma itself. This is not accomplished by transcending the self and the world, but by creating the self and the world in which we live. This task requires commitment, technical accomplishment, and imagination.

The third task of secular dharma—to see the ceasing of reactivity and savor each moment—is the movement’s interpretation of the Pali word nibbana, more commonly known in its Sanskrit form, nirvana. This is what Buddhist traditions refer to as “enlightenment.” In English, the word “enlightenment” can suggest the flicking on of a switch: either one is enlightened or not. For secular dharma practitioners, however, the Pali word bodhi, “awakening,” is a better fit. “Enlightenment” implies a permanent change of status that takes someone beyond the realm of suffering. In contrast, “awakening” is an experience, transient like any other, but one which—if entered into often enough—has a formative impact on who we are and how we live our everyday lives. For examples of this kind of awakening, we can look to the metaphors of the carpenter, the farmer, and the arrowsmith in the Dhammapada (a collection of the Buddha’s sayings). These verses describe artisans whose awakened lives are embedded in a creative relationship with the ordinary, everyday sublime.

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The Buddha envisioned a community that would collaboratively develop his teachings without an authority figure. In the Kalama Sutta, he explicitly warns against believing something “because my guru said it,” and he told his followers before he died, “After I am gone, do not think you will have no teacher; the dharma will be your teacher.”

Proponents of secular dharma believe that large organizations and charismatic leaders are not necessary, and see those with more experience and wisdom as spiritual friends rather than as people to be venerated for their achievements. By placing value in the teachings rather than the teacher, secular practitioners also hope to avoid the abuses that can result from hierarchical spiritual environments. 

Secular Buddhists typically prefer to come together in small, supportive communities, either face-to-face or online. Driven by a shared purpose and ethic, these predominantly lay communities associate on democratic terms, informed by an ethos of inclusivity and equality. Communities share authority and responsibility among peers, because they are all considered to be capable of understanding and practicing the four tasks, taking responsibility for their own practice, and being a spiritual friend for others. 

The San Francisco-based Insight Meditation teacher Eugene Cash suggested that the three jewels, which are traditionally listed as the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, are more useful for Westerners in reverse order. Secular dharma communities might agree, observing that people first come to see what the community is like, then look into the practices and teachings, and only if they like what they see do they finally inquire about the role of the Buddha and the innate human capacity for awakening.

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