Introduction
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. Itâs 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 itâs to remain relevant to how weâas modern peopleâunderstand 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 lifeâs circumstances with equanimity, and to focus on the well-being of others. At the same time, I am aware of Buddhist teachings Iâve 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 alterâand which these teachers seem to have made parallel conscious or unconscious compromises onâare not random but conform to a pattern. That patternâwhy it occurs and why it ought to occurâis the subject of this book.
All of us inescapably dwell in and are confined to a specific culture and timeâthe one we were reared in and the one we presently inhabitâthe 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 oneâs 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 oneâs root culture, some are misunderstood through the prism of available memes in oneâs 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 beâto some extentâreshaped 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 oneâs 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 alsoâif it takes holdâcolonizes 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. Theyâre often clothed in the fiction that theyâre, in fact, the Buddhaâs âoriginalâ teachings, and their inconsistencies with other older-strata Buddhist teachings may go uncommented on as if they didnât exist.
Thereâs 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, VajrayÄna, and VipassanÄ communities. My intention is to integrate these modified teachings within a single meaningful framework that I hope will prove helpful to practitionersâbeginners and old hands alike.
As an aside, my critique is specifically directed at Buddhist concepts as found in classic PÄli, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts, as regularly encountered in Western English-language Dharma talks, and as generally understood within Western âconvertâ Buddhist communities. It is not directed at the ways traditional Buddhist practiceâlay and clericalâis instantiated by non-convert Buddhists in diverse Asian cultures.
Western Buddhist practitioners who value the âauthenticityâ of their practice above all elseâthat is, the degree to which their practice conforms to the Buddhaâs âoriginalâ teachingsâare 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 Buddhaâs authentic teachings is the result of a lengthy historical process of revision and reinvention. Itâs 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 cultureâs 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 Jehovahâs 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 ChĂĄn in China and Zen in Japan reveals a similar course of endless revision, reinvention, and reinterpretation. Alan Cole3 has documented the Chinese Song dynasty (960â1157 CE) reinvention and mythologization of the Tang dynasty (618â907 CE) ChĂĄn masters; Jiang Wu4 has documented the reinvention of the HuĂĄngbĂČ lineage within the LĂnjĂŹ school of Chinese ChĂĄn in the mid-seventeenth century; Peter Haskell5 and David Riggs6 have documented the Japanese resurrection and reinvention of DĆgen-style Zen during the Tokugawa shogunate (1600â1868 CE), and Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler7 has documented the radical transformation of Japanese Zen in the Meiji era (1868â1912 CE). The Zen we practice now is not the timeless practice of our ancestors, but something continuously modified over the centuries.
Itâs 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:
In other words, nineteenth-century Asian Buddhist modernists constructed ârationalâ 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 VipassanÄ movement in Sout...[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