In its broadest sense, this book is about the tension between Buddhist and Western conceptions of what it means to live the best possible kind of life one can aspire to. It’s a book about what aspects of traditional Buddhist teachings are possible for us, as modern Westerners, to truly accept and make good use of, and what aspects conflict so deeply with our cultural heritage that genuine belief becomes impossible. By genuine belief, I mean the kind of belief we feel deeply in our bones in the same way we believe gravity will keep us rooted to the ground and that we will not, someday, wake up to find ourselves floating mysteriously in midair. Lastly, this is a book about how Buddhism is changing in the course of its transmission to the West, and how it will continue to evolve if it’s to remain relevant to how we—as modern people—understand and construct our lives.

As such, this is a deeply personal book based on my experience as a long-term Buddhist practitioner, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, a clinical psychologist interested in Asian and Western philosophy, and a person living within a specific cultural, historical, and socio-economic context. Over the years, I have found Buddhist practice to be extraordinarily beneficial. It has helped strengthen and enrich my capacities to be intimately present, to be at home in my body, to accept life’s circumstances with equanimity, and to focus on the well-being of others. At the same time, I am aware of Buddhist teachings I’ve had to modify, alter, or simply disregard in order for Buddhism to make sense for me. I am also aware of the ways that many contemporary Western Buddhist teachers often alter, ignore, selectively emphasize, or unwittingly misunderstand traditional Buddhist teachings, and how their modifications and elisions echo my own difficulties with making modern sense of the tradition. The things I find a need to alter—and which these teachers seem to have made parallel conscious or unconscious compromises on—are not random but conform to a pattern. That pattern—why it occurs and why it ought to occur—is the subject of this book.

All of us inescapably dwell in and are confined to a specific culture and time—the one we were reared in and the one we presently inhabit—the way fish dwell in and are confined to the sea. Even the most ardent iconoclast struggles against a comparatively small component of his or her cultural inheritance, the vast majority of which operates at the level of tacit assumption and common sense. The way we think about selfhood, identity, gender, family, community, morality, justice, progress, truth, beauty, time, space, cosmology, and divinity is bound together and deeply intertwined with other shared basic assumptions of our culture forming our zeitgeist, or common ecosystem of meanings.

When one finds oneself dissatisfied with aspects of one’s own time and culture and seeks answers for it in the practices and beliefs of another time and culture, some of the borrowed practices and beliefs fit easily into the meaning ecosystem of one’s root culture, some are misunderstood through the prism of available memes in one’s root culture, and some irreconcilably clash. The product of one time and culture cannot be completely assimilated as is by the dweller in another time and culture. It must be—to some extent—reshaped and reconfigured to make sense if one is to believe it genuinely and completely. In the act of assimilating borrowed practices and beliefs and making them one’s own, something is gained and something lost. What emerges from that process has one foot in its culture of origin and one foot in its adopted one. It is both a continuation of the culture borrowed from and a betrayal of it.¹ It also—if it takes hold—colonizes its adopted culture like a virus invades a host, subtly shifting older meanings and understandings as its adopting culture accommodates to and reorganizes around it.

Many Buddhist accommodations to Western culture have already taken place, but the fact that they are accommodations often goes unacknowledged. They’re often clothed in the fiction that they’re, in fact, the Buddha’s “original” teachings, and their inconsistencies with other older-strata Buddhist teachings may go uncommented on as if they didn’t exist.

There’s nothing new about the pretense that novel teachings are original teachings. As we shall see, this pretense has been employed and re-employed throughout history whenever Buddhism has journeyed to a new shore or made contact with competing religions and philosophies. Many of the suggestions I will make in this book about how to best modify traditional Buddhist teachings have already been made by others. Some are already commonly held tenets in many contemporary Western Zen, Vajrayāna, and Vipassanā communities. My intention is to integrate these modified teachings within a single meaningful framework that I hope will prove helpful to practitioners—beginners and old hands alike.

As an aside, my critique is specifically directed at Buddhist concepts as found in classic Pāli, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts, as regularly encountered in Western English-language Dharma talks, and as generally understood within Western “convert” Buddhist communities. It is not directed at the ways traditional Buddhist practice—lay and clerical—is instantiated by non-convert Buddhists in diverse Asian cultures.

Western Buddhist practitioners who value the “authenticity” of their practice above all else—that is, the degree to which their practice conforms to the Buddha’s “original” teachings—are often disconcerted to discover how little we know about the historical Buddha, how much our understanding of the earliest strands of Buddhist teachings is a matter of conjecture and guesswork, and how much of what often passes for the historical Buddha’s authentic teachings is the result of a lengthy historical process of revision and reinvention. It’s sometimes best not to think of Buddhism as being a single coherent tradition, but to think of it as two-and-a-half millennia-long conversation about what it means to live the best kind of existence, one that has many different tributaries, branches, and side-streams.

Buddhism is not alone in having undergone this kind of historical transformation. Religions thrive, wither, or die according to their ability to address the existential concerns of particular times and places, and to harmoniously coexist within the wider ecosystem of a culture’s deeply held beliefs. As they evolve, traditionalists strive to maintain ideas and practices that have lost their resonance, while innovators strive to reconfigure them to meet the needs of the moment. Religions that survive over millennia manage to skillfully thread the needle between these extremes.

History provides us with many examples of once vibrant religions that are now, for all practical purposes, extinct. Very few people, if any, continue to worship the Greek, Roman, Norse, or Egyptian gods. The tales of these gods, demigods, fates, and furies retain an enduring cultural value in their roles as metaphors, but not as objects of worship and belief. The idea that human-like deities control nature from atop Mount Olympus, or that a horse-drawn chariot draws the sun across the sky, or that three Norns weave our fates is too inconsistent with our other beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality for us to take them seriously as literal truth.

The religions that survive have undergone continuous revision over long periods of time. Judaism, for example, evolved from henotheism² to monotheism, and from a priestly religion of animal sacrifice to a rabbinical religion of prayer, repentance, charity, and adherence to a set of commandments. Today, competing visions of what it means to be Jewish are transmitted by a multiplicity of Hassidic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular voices.

The evolving, pleomorphic, multi-vocal nature of both historical and contemporary Judaism is typical of all religions. The histories of Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism demonstrate a similar course of evolution and multiple forms of contemporary expression. In just the last two centuries, for example, American Christianity has, in an extraordinary burst of creativity, witnessed the birth of new forms of worship and belief, including Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholic Workers, Pentecostalism, fundamentalism, revivalism, and liberation theology. These new movements are the collective results of many individuals responding to the spirit of their times.

The history of Chán in China and Zen in Japan reveals a similar course of endless revision, reinvention, and reinterpretation. Alan Cole³ has documented the Chinese Song dynasty (960–1157 CE) reinvention and mythologization of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) Chán masters; Jiang Wu⁴ has documented the reinvention of the Huángbò lineage within the Línjì school of Chinese Chán in the mid-seventeenth century; Peter Haskell⁵ and David Riggs⁶ have documented the Japanese resurrection and reinvention of Dōgen-style Zen during the Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868 CE), and Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler⁷ has documented the radical transformation of Japanese Zen in the Meiji era (1868–1912 CE). The Zen we practice now is not the timeless practice of our ancestors, but something continuously modified over the centuries.

It’s also of historical interest to note that the Buddhism that came to America in the twentieth century was a Buddhism already transformed through contact with the West. As David McMahan notes:

[O]ne of the major ways in which Buddhism around the world has modernized is through its re-articulation in the languages of science and secular thought. This began during the colonial period in Asia, in the nineteenth century, when Buddhists who were either colonized, as in Ceylon and Burma, or concerned about the economic and military hegemony of the West, as in China and Japan, began reinterpreting and representing Buddhism as a system of thought and ethics more attuned to the emerging scientific worldview than the religion of the colonizers.⁸

In other words, nineteenth-century Asian Buddhist modernists constructed “rational” versions of Buddhism that were in better accord with Western secular and scientific trends as a response to Western colonialism, imperialism, and proselytizing. These modernized forms of Buddhism were then transmitted to the West in the twentieth century, where Westerners continued the process of reform and reinterpretation. This applies not only to the radical Japanese revision of Zen in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, but also to the rise of the modern Vipassanā movement in Sout...