Revamp

Writings on secular Buddhism

Winton Higgins

• Publisher: The Tuwhiri Project Ltd
• eBook ISBN: 9780473571405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

A living tradition, Buddhism began as a way of working with the difficulties we all face as mortal, vulnerable, conscious beings. Its founder imbued this practice with an ethic of care, and teachings we can use today to interpret our experience and as a guide to full human flourishing.

Since the Buddha's death, the dharma has been expressed in many ways in different cultural settings, and often these border crossings enriched it. But when the dharma appeared in religious guise, it became burdened with cosmic beliefs, its practice regimented, and was used as an instrument of social control, stifling the freedom at its heart.

Secularity encourages a search for the good life in today's circumstances, not as prescribed by timeless myths. As part of the process of the dharma putting down roots in the west, secular Buddhism offers the vitality of the early dharma, free of religious distortions.

Winton Higgins tracks the emergence of secular Buddhism with a focus on today's climate emergency and intensifying social injustice that cry out for radical socioeconomic and political change. The ethic of care that underpins a creative dharma practice, he suggests, calls on us to bring our training to bear on these urgent tasks.

Part I
Emergence

Chapter 1

The coming of secular Buddhism: a synoptic view

Naïveté is now unavailable to anyone, believer or unbeliever alike.

Charles Taylor1

Twenty-five years ago I started teaching Buddhist meditation (mainly what was then called vipassanā) in a large lay-based dharma centre cum monastic hermitage outside Sydney, one with links to the Theravādin monastic network. What I taught was formulaic, reasonably orthodox, and raised no Theravādin eyebrows. Everyone concerned belonged to the broad church of Buddhist modernism, even if tensions were already high around those aspects of the Theravāda untouched by modernity – the marginalisation of women, male monastic privilege, and an organisational culture which concentrated power at the top of a hierarchical organisation. We the disenfranchised non-hierarchs saw these failings as relics we could soon scrap, so that the Buddhism we practised would shine forth as what we naïvely assumed it to be in essence – proto-modern, rational, democratic, inclusive, and amenable to gender equality.

Ten years later the dharma centre in question imploded in the hierarchs’ manful attempt to simulate an orthodox Thai Theravādin monastery in the Australian wilderness, with male monastic privilege and exclusivity once more in full bloom. The Buddhist-modernist compromise collapsed in acrimony; goannas and wombats reclaimed the splendid acres where lay retreatants once mindfully walked.2 Together with other teachers of similar background, I found myself teaching non-formulaic insight meditation retreats in various venues typically rented from Catholic nuns, and at weekly practice evenings in suburban insight meditation groups called sanghas.

These sanghas are all self-generating and have no organisational links to each other apart from membership of a lay-Buddhist peak organisation, but they march to the same drum. They’re self-evidently inclusive, egalitarian and democratic – voluntary associations like any other, the stuff of civil society – free of ritual (including formulaic meditation). Their members study the original teachings of the Buddha in their historical context, in order to deepen into their dharma practice in their own intellectually free-ranging way. They trade tips on books, blogs, podcasts and websites. Ethically, their conception of dharma practice extends beyond the five precepts to tackling the big issues of today’s globalised world – such as climate change and the treatment of refugees – and many are active in progressive social movements or community work. None of these sanghas identifies with the Theravāda or any other ancestral school of Buddhism.

Not long after that transition I queried an overseas visitor’s use of the expression ‘secular Buddhism’ – what could that possibly refer to? But on reflection no alternative presents itself to capture the changes that had already occurred and were intensifying in the meditation practice and sangha life around me. Willy-nilly, secular Buddhism was upon us, ruffling fideist feathers, prompting panics and alarums, and drawing rancorous anathemas.3

The changes in the Sydney ‘dharma scene’ seem to merely exemplify shifts occurring elsewhere and in some other Buddhist schools, mostly in the English-speaking world. Though globalisation tends to diffuse cultural trends in short order, I see little evidence so far of secular Buddhist practice outside Anglophone countries, with some exceptions in the German-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking ones. In any event, I won’t speculate here about secular Buddhism’s possible diffusion elsewhere.

In this chapter, then, I embrace the expression ‘secular Buddhism’, together with the movement emerging in its name. I will seek to place it historically and conceptually, rather than try to pre-empt its doctrinal development. My opening mise en scène suffices as a preliminary marker of the secular-Buddhist condition, which answers to the need to resolve incoherences in Buddhist modernism (the ‘push’ factor), while responding to secularising impulses in contemporary western society (the ‘pull’ factor).

More generally, as my opening narrative indicates, secular Buddhism betokens a new stage in the acculturation of the dharma in the west. My account draws on Charles Taylor’s œuvre, though he himself exercises an option (Christian belief) different to the one I’m presenting here. I draw on him indirectly through the influence of his Sources of the self on insightful accounts of Buddhist modernism, and more directly on his A secular age – his historical analysis of the drawn-out secular turn in the west.4 The latter establishes a model for tracing the sources of transformations in religious-spiritual-ethical life to manifold shifts in cultural, socio-economic, political, and institutional affairs. In the background, the classical sociologist Max Weber’s analysis of modernity informs Taylor’s work.

My story thus starts with Buddhist modernism, out of which secular Buddhism is gradually crystallising. The former, an increasingly fraught mix of ancestral Buddhism and modern discursive practices, initially deflected European colonialism’s Christianising mission in Asia and provided a bridge for missionary Buddhism’s entry into the west. But internally Buddhist modernism has harboured incongruities at the levels of practice, doctrine and institutions, ones which have obstructed the dharma’s deeper acculturation in the new host societies, not least as the latter have themselves been undergoing a marked cultural shift during the last half-century. Secular Buddhism constitutes one response to the impasse. In the second part of this chapter I’ll go into the modalities of contemporary secularity that mould this response.

Secular Buddhism leans towards what Charles Taylor calls an ‘exclusive humanism’, that is, a discourse and set of practices in aid of full human flourishing – one that disavows superhuman agencies and supernatural processes, and thus redemptive (‘soteriological’) exits from the human condition.5 It seeks a renewal of the Buddha’s tradition, firstly by retrieving the early teachings free of later monastic commentarial spin; and secondly by developing affinities between it and fertile social practices and intellectual developments in western societies. I will focus mainly on the post-Theravādin experience, which provides something close to a paradigmatic case in the shifts involved in this story. For the most part I leave it to the reader to qualify my remarks for the legatees of other branches of ancestral Buddhism.

The modernist historical compromise

Heinz Bechert appears to have coined the term ‘Buddhist modernism’.6 But its origins go back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially in Sri Lanka.7 In brutal summary, its course has run like this. Under the umbrella of British colonial rule, Christian (mainly Protestant) missionaries sought conversions among Sinhalese Buddhists, some of whose leaders resisted by adopting modern Buddhist practices along ‘Protestant’ lines without disturbing existing institutions or folk observance. They thus gave more weight to lay practice and study, including laicising meditation practice and making some canonical texts available to a much wider readership, not least in the rising (and increasingly educated) middle class. Soon this form of resistance to Christianised western cultural hegemony spread to Japan, Burma and Thailand, and then further afield in Buddhist Asia. As it did so, it challenged Christianity on a point on which the latter was taking a hit in its homelands: the perceived clash between Christian doctrine and ascendant scientific rationalism. Buddhism, by contrast, gained a reputation for meshing with the scientific worldview, and indeed, for being a ‘scientific religion’.8 The ‘new Buddhism’, as it was sometimes also called, pro...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Part IEmergence