Notes on Buddhist Modernism

A couple months ago I was carpooling with my friend Kati Devaney on the way back from a gathering of California Buddhists. The occasion was the visit of a Bhutanese monk, Khedrup Rinpoche, who had come to the US on a fundraising visit for his monastery projects. In the car Kati and I reviewed the event’s discussion, which largely centered on questions of how Buddhism can reach the West further. As I was getting out of the car, she asked a provocative question: “will all this stuff have to be Christianized to be really taken up in America?”

One reason I moved to California is to find out what kind of religious hybrids are getting cooked up in the melting pot that is America’s most advanced spiritual marketplace. California Buddhism in particular makes for a great case study of religious hybridization and adoption. If Buddhism is so popular in the US, isn’t it likely that it has gone through a Christianization already? When Kati posed her question, I decided it was finally time to queue up a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a while: David McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism. I thought I’d write up my reflections as a little book report. For a more full overview of the book, I recommend reading David Chapman’s response to the book, which is intertwined with his own account of “Consensus” Buddhism’s rise. There is also a post by Ethan Edwards at Palladium Magazine that largely paraphrases McMahan and Chapman’s work.

How was Buddhism adopted in the Anglosphere? To unpack the answer, McMahan draws heavily on Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, a book I also reference often. I do so for the same reasons as McMahan: when thinking about cultural change and religious adoption, understanding the moral underpinnings of culture is crucial. Taylor’s book is a moral genealogy of the West. He outlines three moral sources as the DNA that make up our culture: Christianity, scientific rational humanism, and Romantic expressivism. These are broad frameworks by which people understand the good life, and interpret and evaluate their own behavior. These are the linguistic and evaluative worlds that Asian “Buddhist modernizers” and Western “Buddhist sympathizers” (McMahan’s terms) drew on to make Buddhism legible to Westerners.

Each of of the three domains has profoundly shaped our culture in its own way. One simple way of understanding them is to look at how they construct the basic spiritual problems of human existence, and how they offer resolution to those problems. I don’t believe Taylor would particularly endorse this framing, but I like it because it demonstrates the basic patterns of Western spiritual and moral thought.

The first moral source is the Christian conception of God and the ethical obligations laid out in Christian theology. The basic spiritual problem of Christianity is sin, moral failure, and our estrangement from god. We’ve tasted the fruit of knowledge, and know the difference between good and evil. As a result we’ve been banished from our prior state of paradise in Eden. The basic spiritual solution is through our redemption through divine grace, salvation through Christ, and our choice to live a life of repentence, love, and humility.

The second moral source is the domain of rationality, science, and utilitarian ethics, with its root in the European Enlightenment. Here the basic problem is our irrationality. We are naturally prone to superstition and dogma, to moral blindness, and to undisciplined and unruly passions. To correct this, we have to discover and use our Reason. (You can see how this is a naturalized variant of original sin!) We are rational beings when we use our knowledge and reflection to increase our efficacy and improve our moral behavior. We ought to be industrious and rational in meeting our own needs, and through the improvements that result, help meed the needs of others. That’s how we achieve a “harmony of interests” and a just and ordered society. This is the moral domain that gives rise to utilitarian thought.

Finally, the third influential moral vision is the ethos of Romantic expressivism, which arises as a response to the Enlightenment project. Here, the basic spiritual problem is our alienation from society, from nature, and from ourselves. This is a result of the rationalization and mechanization of the Western world, and of the Enlightenment’s instrumental and disenchanted view of nature. The inner depths of human emotion, creativity, and individuality are suppressed. The spiritual solution for the Romantic culture involves accessing the creative “depths” of our own individuality. Artistic creativity, strong sentiments and emotions of awe, and connectedness with nature are pointers to the good life. We look to them to find a source of inspiration for an authentic life, lived not according to a template.

This is the briefest of introductions, but you can already begin to see how each of these moral sources inform contemporary life. They are the background that any new idea must engage with in order to be morally legible to the West. McMahan shows how Buddhism entered Western culture by engaging with these discourses of modernity. Buddhism has not only been Christianized, it has also been Romanticized and Rationalized. Let’s look at how each of these plays out.

McMahan argues that Buddhist modernization began partly as a program of resistance to Christian missionary efforts and colonization in places like moern-day Sri Lanka. Early Buddhist modernizers familiarized themselves with Christian theology and made intentional comparisons between the two, adopting Protestant concepts in order to legibilize Buddhism in influential Western venues. When presenting about Buddhism at religious gathering in the West, they emphasized personal salvation, blurred the lines between monk and laity, and talked up the social benefits of the religion. At the same time they underplayed Buddhism’s rituals, spirits and deities, spiritual idols, dogmas, doctrine of rebirth. This was part of a general effort to distance Buddhism from pagan folk beliefs and Catholic formalism, positioning Buddhism as a distinctively modern religion. David has a useful list of other Protestant-shaped modern Buddhist assumptions in his post “Protestant Buddhism.”

But Buddhist modernizers and sympathizers also positioned Buddhism against Christianity, seeking to establish it as rational and scientific, as well as more universal. Buddhism was introduced widely to elite audiences during an era of moral crisis, as a weakened Christianity jostled for power with a scientific establishment growing in strength. Buddhism was ushered into this discourse a religion that could ally with modern science. Apologists typically presented Buddhism as “free from theology, priestcraft, rituals, ceremonies, dogmas, heavens, hells, and other theological shibboleths,” while its doctrines were claimed to be compatible with then-controversial views such as evolution and “cause and effect.” Through selective readings of certain sutras, the Buddha was claimed to espouse an ethos of Cartesian doubt. In one particular passage, the Buddha tells followers to “come and see”—to test the precepts of the religion by experience—as opposed to blindly believing it. This passage was repeated ad nauseum by Buddhist promotors with the end effect of portraying the Buddha as a rational and scientific modern Victorian gentleman. Later on Buddhism was presented as a psychological science in itself—a series of discoveries of natural law in the mental domain. Today’s hybrids of psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation are the fruit of this particular graft; more on that later.

The scientific and evolutionary framing of Buddhism worked in tandem with attempts to turn Buddhism into a universal religion. These attempts came in the form of a Buddhist-flavored perennialism—the idea that all religions are different interpretations of the same ultimate reality. Some of the first Westerners to introduce Buddhism into the discourse were Transcendentalists, Theosophists, and members of other Romantic-ish perennialist philosophies circulating at the end of the 19th century. But Buddhist modernizers did it too. The influential Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki is one example. He claimed that the mystical experience achieved through meditation, the “unmediated” experience of reality, is at the heart of every religious tradition, construing Buddhism as the essence of all religions. Such framings have allowed Buddhism to claim compatibility with Christianity, while also superseding it. In some places in the West, Buddhism is framed as less than an institutional religion and more of a “contemplative technique” that can augment one’s engagement with any religion, be that Christianity, Daoism, or anything New Age. The outcome of Buddhist perennialism has been not just the Protestant-style redaction of ritual practices and worship of local deities, but also the rise of weird and interesting Christian-Buddhist hybrid lineages in the 20th century.

This brings us to Buddhism’s integration with Romanticism, the third major moral source. Perennialism is a critical factor here, because its widespread adoption has made place for a spiritual marketplace in the West. I thought McMahan summarized this well:

Entwined with this view was the emergence of a new crosscultural conception of “spirituality” as the individual’s search for, or experience of, this reality. Spirituality was thus dislodged from its traditional Christian home, where it was used as a term to contrast with material, and came to be considered distinct from “religion,” especially “institutionalized religion.”

The individual’s search for meaning through personal sentiments, intuitions, and ultimately a private spirituality is a constitutive element of Romanticism and its downstream subcultures. Buddhism’s alliance with Romanticism is perhaps the deepest of all three moral sources. Two aspects are important here: the relationship to science, and the relationship to art.

The first claim is about Buddhism’s ability to rehumanize or spiritualize science. Recall that Buddhism was promoted as a “scientific religion.” But as McMahan points out, whenever Buddhism is presented as a science, the rationalistic element of that science, be it cosmology or ethics or psychology, is always softened or superseded by an intuitive experience which is more vital. For instance, how does this “scientific religion” escape the overly mechanistic view of nature? Well, Buddhist modernizers claim that we are not separate from nature, but in fact the highest spiritual goal is realizing our one-ness from nature. (This is exactly the Romantic critique of Enlightenment rationalism.)

Meditation is of course key to this: it is a way of recovering nature and the unconscious mind. Nature is a kind of “master mind,” where the personal unconscious becomes the cosmic unconcious, which is the principle of creativity. This is the second Romantic theme, that inner experience and sentiments are the source of creative inspiration. Meditation, especially Zen meditation, is a way of accessing these infinite creative depths. You can see the success of this rhetorical strategy in the loads of books (usually titled something like “The Zen of Painting”) and college courses that position Buddhism as aligned with artistic and creative endeavors. Artists and writers have been a big part of the story of Buddhist adoption, with many influential 20th century creatives playing key roles. These include neoromanticist author Herman Hesse, the author of Siddhartha (a very popular bildungsroman modeling a fictional account of Buddhist enlightenment), and influential artists John Cage and Alan Ginsburg.

From this cursory overview it should be clear how Buddhism leveraged the three moral sources to adapt to the West. The result is not one Buddhist modernism, but many new Buddhisms which exist a spectrum of tradition to modernity, with Goenka vipassana retreats and New York’s Zen Mountain Monastery on one side and Monastic Academy and Jhourney on the other.

The rise of these different Buddhisms has provoked critique from those who favor traditional Buddhisms. American teacher Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu has written a remarkably erudite book called Buddhist Romanticism in which he argues that much of Buddhist modernism is not Buddhism at all, but Romanticism with Buddhist window dressing.

For the Romantics, the basic spiritual problem is ignorance of human identity—that each person is an integral part of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos. This ignorance, in turn, leads to an alienating sense of separation: within oneself, between oneself and other human beings, and between oneself and nature at large. For the Dhamma, the basic spiritual problem is ignorance of what suffering is, how it’s caused, and how it can be ended. In fact, the Dhamma lists among the causes of suffering the attempt even to define what a human being is or a human being’s place within the universe.

For the Romantics, the basic spiritual cure lies in gaining an immediate felt sense of unity within oneself and between oneself and the universe. For the Dhamma, a felt sense of unified awareness is part of the path to a cure, but the ultimate cure involves going beyond feelings—and everything else with which one builds a sense of identity—to a direct realization of nibbāna (nirvāṇa): a dimension beyond Oneness and multiplicity, beyond the universe, beyond causal relationships, and beyond the dimensions of time and space.

. . . When we examine the way Buddhism is currently being taught in the West—and, in some cases, in Asia to people with a Western education—we find that it often sides with the Romantic position and against the Dhamma.

Beyond this, some modern Buddhism converges on what David Chapman calls “consensus Buddhism:” a Buddhism that “consists of simple meditation techniques, modern liberal morality, minimal doctrine, and clouds of vague niceness. It has more in common with Unitarian Universalism than with any traditional Buddhism.” This is also what McMahan has in mind in the last chapter where he discusses “global folk buddhism.” Does consesnsus Buddhism count as a “real” Buddhism? McMahan resonates with complaints about commercialized Western Buddhism, but also points out that

the vast majority of Buddhists in Asia are not monks like Ṭhānissaro but laity whose practice of Buddhism is similarly soothing, offering comfort and accommodation to cultural norms rather than radical transformative challenge. Such laypeople blend Buddhism liberally with local spirit and amulet cults just as Americans and Europeans blend it with their cults of consumerism and commodity fetishism.

Ha! Of course, a Buddhism which is compatible with globalized consumer culture can no longer critique that culture with potency. It cannot offer an alternative solution to the spiritual problems of the West. This is another tradeoff made by this weaker Buddhist modernisms. But other new forms of Buddhism, grounded in rigorous practice but still partially understood in the language of **Western spiritual problems, are more robust.

This brings us back to the three moral sources and how they exist today. All the moral sources (and their many-headed variations) operate at all times in tension with one another. Christianity is still a major force in the West; although its position has weakened dramatically, secularized Protestant morality is still a bedrock of our culture. The spiritual crisis of rationalist modernity and disenchantment to which Romanticism offered an answer are still one that is very much alive today. These moral frameworks are not selectively adopted; you can’t live one of them in a “full-stack” way today, even if you’re a Christian fundamentalist or orthodox, because your friendly neighbors are atheists and you talk about yourself in the language of psychology, a discipline is basically encoded in Romantic tropes. Thus these sources, and the tensions between them, give the basic terms of Western spiritual-moral debate. Tensions between the sources play out in specific personal ways, such the classic tension between adhering to one’s family faith and some sort of self-created moral path.

I get the sense that the game board is also changing. The notion of the spiritual problems of the west no longer take on a Christian point of view as they did in the 19th century. The basic form of the problem is no longer a decline of Christian belief. The framing of the problem has now become a self-reflexive one. The discourse of the “meaning crisis,” which laments the loss of moral coherence and “grand narrative” as a whole, is one version of this problematic. But there are many more, from Alasdair Macintyre to Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition to Putnam’s Bowling Alone to John Vervaeke’s thought. This meta-level framing is exactly what gives rise to the interest in “cults” today and why everyone is talking about reinventing religion. It’s not clear to me whether this new level of abstraction in the framing of the spiritual problem changes the terms of the problem at all—they are still given in rationalist and Romanticist language. But it does pose the question as to whether Buddhism can be that so-called “religion of the future.”

This is the problematic scene into which Buddhism enters. Its claims of humanizing science, solving psychology, and being the source of all religions under the hood seem to have been very successful in the 20th century. As McMahan points out in one early chapter, you can be into Buddhism in a way that it is impossible to be into Christianity. Of course, there are a vast range of possible Buddhist modernities for Westerners to be into. Being into Buddhism could mean reading books about Buddhism and meditating for 15 minute a few times a week, but it could also mean much greater involvement, such as visiting a local monastery regularly for liturgical service. You can do all this without saying you adhere to a religion, which is a privilege not afforded to any other major faith system. Buddhism has effectively become naturalized. At the cost of some of its key tenets, it has become a religion Westerners can participate in without moral controversy.

In a short but provocative paragraph on page 410 of Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor writes that a philosophy which can plausibly claim to unite two of the three moral sources can accrue great power. He offers up Marxism (and reading between the lines of his work, psychoanalytic psychotherapy) as examples of philosophies which combine scientific materialism with a Romantic expressive drive toward wholeness. It seems that Buddhist modernism as a whole has managed to do this as well. This is especially visible in the adoption of Buddhist meditation practice. Following McMahan, we could call this “folk psychological Buddhism:” Buddhism as a psychological science which can help individuals achieve their true self (my crude paraphrasing of this particular strand). And with his argument about Buddhism shedding elements like a priest class and celibacy to look more Protestant, McMahan seems to be saying that Buddhism is actually managing to hit all three targets. But again, Buddhist modernism is not a single philosophy but a semi-incoherent collection of different faith-ish practices and communities.

Let me close out with a couple remaining thoughts and questions. I framed this as a case study in religious adoption. Any cult, faith, practice, or set of beliefs gaining traction in the West will also make use of the moral sources Taylor identified; I might have to unpack them in greater depth in future posts. But moral systems are not the only dimensions needed for a practice to find cultural fit.

What is the future of Buddhism in the West? Currently would bet on real advancements coming from scientific engagement with Buddhist theory of mind. A lot of things seem to be happening on this front. Whether they take the form of Buddhist systems of belief, or whether they are fully converted into a scientific idiom, remains to be seen.