Buddhism in Australia

Traditions in Change

Cristina Rocha, Michelle Barker, Cristina Rocha, Michelle Barker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136890789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhismus

The number of Buddhists in Australia has grown dramatically in recent years. In 2006, Buddhists accounted for 2.1 per cent of Australia's population, almost doubling the 1996 figures, and making it the fastest growing religion in the country. This book analyses the arrival and localisation of Buddhism in Australia in the context of the globalisation of Buddhism.

Australia's close geographical proximity to Asia has encouraged an intense flow of people, ideas, practices and commodities from its neighbouring countries, while at the same time allowing the development of the religion to be somewhat different to its growth in other Western countries. The book seeks to explore the Buddhist experience in Australia, looking at the similarities and particularities of this experience in relation to other Western countries.

The inception of Buddhism in Australia is investigated, and a voice is provided to people on the ground who have been fundamental in making this process possible. For the first time, academic analysis and practitioners' experience are juxtaposed to show the adaptations and challenges of Buddhism in Australia from above and below. This book is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of Buddhism in the West, globalization of religion, and studies in Asian Religion.

Part I
Academics

1 Localizing Buddhism in Australia

1
The emergence of secular insight practice in Australia

David Bubna-Litic and Winton Higgins

In Australia over the last three decades, secular insight (vipassana) meditation practice has increasingly drawn away from its Theravadin origins, thus exemplifying a wider trend in western Buddhist circles over the second half of the last century, to loosen ties with their Asian traditions of origin. In 1998 Batchelor articulated the divergence by drawing a contrast between ‘religious Buddhism’ and ‘dharma practice’ in his Buddhism without Beliefs (Batchelor 1998a), a contrast with resonances in the changes now unfolding in Australia. He elaborated his key concepts, not least the ‘deep agnosticism’ he discerned in the Buddha’s own teaching, in other writings published in the same year (Batchelor 1998b; 1998c). The contrast acknowledges a strong tendency towards secularization in the re-rendering of Buddhism in culturally appropriate terms for westerners who, from the 1970s, began to practise meditation seriously in this tradition in significant numbers.

As Gombrich and Obeyesekere remind us, however, this trend now visible in western countries such as Australia has Asian (not least Sri Lankan) precedents going back to the last three decades of the nineteenth century (1998: chapter 6). The elements of that earlier Asian Buddhist confrontation with modernity included a fresh re-reading of canonical texts, promotion of serious lay dharma practice, scepticism towards claims to orthodoxy, monastic authority and the efficacy of ritual, and dismissal of the folkloric accretions to popular observance. All resurfaced in the late twentieth century developments in western countries.

In Australia, however, their expression has been mediated and complicated, both through being melded with central western moral concepts and through the growth of serious dharma practice from the 1970s, at a time when the certitudes of modernity were to some extent giving way to an embrace of uncertainty, ambivalence and fragmentation. This embrace has often attracted the catchall (but contested and unstable) term, ‘postmodernity’. We thus need to hold lightly any classificatory schema – be it ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ Buddhism or Martin Baumann’s (2001) suggested heuristic periodization of Buddhism into canonical, traditional, modern and today’s ‘global’ stages (1998: chapter 6).¹ Nevertheless, as long as we honour its heuristic intent, appreciation of Buddhism’s current global character helpfully sensitizes us to the dangers of accounting for current developments in parochial (western or national) terms, while avoiding the ironically totalizing assumptions of postmodern theory. In what follows, then, we present Australian developments in insight (vipassana) meditation practice as specific illustrations of global trends rather than as components of a national exceptionalism. More than ever today, little sense can be made of Buddhism in any one country without reference to this global context.

The authors are both veteran dharma practitioners and have gleaned the local historical content presented in this article from their own active engagement in (often intermingling) Zen, Theravadin and insight groups on the Australian eastern seaboard over the last two decades. The first named author recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the relation between experiential outcomes of long-term Zen and insight meditation practice among senior teachers of the discipline in various western countries, on the one hand, and, on the other, the foundational assumptions about the self in economic theory. The second author fulfilled teaching and administrative roles in (among others) Wat Buddha Dhamma and the Buddhist Library and Meditation Centre in Sydney (which feature as prominent examples in the following) and is a member of the Insight Teachers’ Circle of Australia. The events described in this chapter are drawn from discussions with key actors, firsthand and participant observations of significant meetings and a continual flow of internal written and verbal communications within the organizations concerned.

Background: modern and global Buddhist developments in the west

In one sense, there is nothing special about adapting Buddhism to a new cultural environment – in this case, the west. It is a process that has occurred many times before, for instance, in China from the first century CE; Faure even argues that this example is still unfolding (1993). A notable (albeit not unprecedented) feature of the western adaptation, however, is the relative eclipse of monasticism and the emphasis on lay practice in lay settings. Monasticism has historically underpinned and dominated Buddhist survival and development in most other times and places and lay dharma practice has typically functioned as a mere adjunct of monastic practice.

Many of the generation of teachers who brought serious dharma practice to the west from the 1970s onwards (including Robert Aitken, Christina Feldman, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and Christopher Titmuss) had received intensive monastic training in Asia. Despite the acknowledged legacy of monastic institutions in Asia, these teachers returned to the west and insight (or vipassana) teachers in particular taught dharma practice in ways that made no necessary references to the monastic world at all. Instead, they established pioneering (and these days, internationally pivotal) lay institutions for intensive meditation practice, above all Gaia House in the United Kingdom and the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock in the United States. This development diffused throughout other western countries, not least the English-speaking ones – a matter we will return to when considering the Australian example.

At first the abandonment of monastic integuments excited little comment. With some exceptions in Burma, monasteries in Asia neither taught laity the finer points of meditation nor offered them intensive residential meditation retreats. If laypeople in the west sought these boons, then a degree of institutional creativity was self-evidently required to provide them. That creativity was successful, but it often took time for the all-important ethical implications inherent in institutional choice to crystallize. When they did so, the ensuing tensions highlighted the way in which western forms of association, above all the model of the voluntary association, rested on the core western moral values of equality, inclusiveness and collective self-rule.

In this embryonic decade of the 1970s, the west was coming under the influence of second-wave feminism, the peace movement, various other democratic protest movements and the broader counterculture, all of which sought to cultivate the values in question. Buddhism as such enjoyed a ‘radical’ reputation in the west, thanks to such influences as the Beat Poets and popular writings about Buddhism, such as those of Alan Watts. Thus many western Buddhists took for granted an elective affinity – the institutional hallmarks of traditional Buddhism notwith-standing – between the dharma, on the one hand, and the egalitarian, universalist zeitgeist of the 1970s, on the other. In several western countries, Buddhist intentional communities sprang up and melded dharmic principles with countercultural ideals.

In hindsight, the irony of imputing radicalism to religious or traditional Buddhism is clear. As with any other large-scale institutionalized religion, Buddhist monasticism in its homelands was strongly aligned with sociopolitical elites and adapted to their hegemonic values. Buddhist monastic institutions were socially and politically embedded: they performed social-integrative and regimelegitimizing functions. Many western dharma practitioners only gradually came to realize that these institutions presented a tableau of resilient hierarchy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, dogmatism, ritualism, social conservatism and superstition. But by bracketing these features of inherited institutional forms as mere culturally biased interpretations of the dharma, western practitioners tended to trivialize the moral significance of such forms of association.

A couple of factors fed this naiveté. First, the Asian de-emphasis of intensive lay practice encouraged an assumption in the west that other values would ‘of course’ assert themselves once laypeople accounted for a majority of serious practitioners. Second, a significant group of westerners were aware of Buddhism’s historical reliance on monastic institutions and at first saw that reliance as inevitable in the west as well. Third, monastic institutions that had developed in relationship with lay communities had, necessarily, learned that survival depends on deflecting conflict with them. The result was institutional practices that honed the art of sending conciliatory signals while resisting substantive change.

Fourth, monastic Buddhism itself at first appeared adaptable when quasi-monastic dharmic movements emerged and established themselves internationally. The most notable of these hybrids was the (interdenominational) Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, founded in Britain in 1968. This movement sought to partially replicate full-blown monasticism, maintaining a range of monastic organizational vestiges such as lineage-based dharma transmission, quasi-ordination procedures, ritual and hierarchical authority. (The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order from its inception included a semi-autonomous nucleus, the Western Buddhist Order, which resurrected monastic hierarchy, nomenclature and usage to a considerable degree.) Similar hybrid forms appeared, for instance, with the (Zen) Diamond Sangha, which continued lineage-based dharma transmission and, in the sphere of insight meditation, the monastic-blessed lay associations connected to the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw.

Inevitably, however, a clash of fundamental moral principles,² above all over the inclusion of women on equal terms, was bound to emerge in institution building. If the new vehicles of dharma practice in the west were not monastic, then what were they? In practice, they readily fell into that familiar category of western civil society – the voluntary association. At least in the wake of second-wave feminism and comparable demands for civic diversity, the ethos of western associational life has tended to be rationalist, egalitarian, inclusive and democratic. In particular, decision makers typically have to face regular elections and discussion of the group’s affairs must proceed without undue influence, let or hindrance. Westerners who commit their time, energy and money to a voluntary activity of any kind might reasonably expect to enjoy full rights of membership and thus to exercise an influence over it equal to that of any other activists.

So long as an aura of religiosity surrounded dharma practice, the demands of normal western principles of association could to some extent be deflected by appeals to spiritual authority. But that aura inexorably faded the further dharma practice removed itself from monastic tutelage and the more the bounds of that authority began to be questioned.

The Australian ‘dharma scene’

International influences and networks have moulded endeavours to establish dharma practice in the various western countries. Prominent western dharma teachers have tended to globalize their activities and lead meditation retreats in a number of different countries. Especially since the introduction of the world wide web in the mid-1990s, Australian dharma practitioners in particular have taken the opportunity to overcome their geographical isolation by not only going on retreat with overseas teachers, but also by following developments in (and debates around) dharma practice and doctrine occurring in locales a long way from their native shores. The search for an ‘Australian Buddhism’, then, will yield only an oxymoron.

Many individuals who would later become influential teachers of insight meditation in Australia originally spent time in Asia, sometimes in robes, in Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand. On their return, they typically also returned to lay life and practised either in the quasi-monastic centres of the Mahasi tradition or in entirely lay forms.

Practitioners with Asian experience were prominent among those who, in the 1970s, established two still extant Buddhist intent...

Table of contents

• Routledge critical studies in Buddhism
• Contents
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Academics
• Part II The Buddhist community
• Index