1 Introduction: Buddhism and Modernity

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David L. McMahan
A New Buddhism
On a chilly Friday evening in my first year of teaching at Franklin and Marshall College, I was led at the behest of an earnest student down a dark street to the hippest nightclub in town.
Inside, ghoulish sculptures protruded from flat black walls, flashing lights and ear-splitting music emanated from gyrating musicians on stage, and the darkened dance floor writhed with
pink mohawks, lip and eyebrow rings, black leather, and torn jeans. And off to the side, sitting placidly in a dim corner by the bar, were five Tibetan Buddhist monks in their gold and
saffron robes preparing to take the stage. When the band took a break, the monks emerged in the spotlight and, after a brief introduction by the student, performed some guttural chanting

and a short p j ceremony. Some in the young audience appeared puzzled but maintained a respectful silence. Others looked satisfied, not understanding the Tibetan syllables or the
mechanics of the ritual but knowing that something exotic, spiritual, profound, and very cool was happening. Afterward, a spokesperson for the local chapter of Students for a Free Tibet
briefly discussed the Chinese occupation of Tibet and handed out some pamphlets, and the thrashing and gyrating resumed. The monks quickly moved on to their next stop, a show at
Carnegie Hall the following evening.
It was one of the countless encounters between Buddhists and interested westerners—characterized by overlapping interests and
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agendas and mutual goodwill, as well as mutual incomprehension—that for more than a century have made up new contexts in which Buddhism can be found and which, indeed, have
constituted a new Buddhism. For the monks and the clubgoers, life no doubt went on much as usual after this encounter. But the event undoubtedly generated dozens of conversations
among the young partiers about the situation in Tibet, the demeanor of the monks, the otherworldly chanting, a Free Tibet concert someone had attended, and a book read or class taken on
Buddhism. The monks surely had their conversations, too: attempts to ascertain the significance of the youths’ clothing and hairstyles, expressions of hope that even this small event would
help raise awareness and support for their cause of greater autonomy for Tibet under Chinese rule, assessments of American punk music, and perhaps comparisons of the nightclub scene to
an anteroom of a Buddhist hell realm. The conversations entered the stream of discourse that makes up the growing and shifting patterns of overlap between Buddhism and western culture.
Another of these conversations took place in my classroom the next Monday, when I asked my students in an introductory class on Asian religions—our first day dealing with Buddhism—
to relate some of their ideas and images of the tradition. After the various impressions from popular films and magazine articles, someone faithfully conveyed that semester’s version of
what has become a standard view: that Buddhism is a religion in which you don’t really have to believe anything in particular or follow any strict rules; you simply exercise compassion and
maintain a peaceful state of mind through meditation. Buddhism values creativity and intuition and is basically compatible with a modern, scientific worldview. It is democratic, encourages
freedom of thought, and is more of a “spirituality” than a religion. While scholars steeped in the rich diversity of Buddhism in a wide variety of cultures over its twenty-five hundred years
of history—not to mention serious practitioners immersed in the complexities of Buddhist practice and doctrine—may roll their eyes at such vagaries, these notions are not simply a result
of ignorance. They have specific roots in representations of Buddhism in recent history—representations created, in fact, by scholars and practitioners themselves. Indeed, they are accurate
representations not of Buddhism in its diverse Asian historical contexts but of a new Buddhism that has emerged more recently.
One of the prominent shifts in the religious landscape of North America in recent years is the explosion of Buddhism into various facets of American culture. Buddhist monks appear in
television ads and sitcoms, chant onstage at rock concerts, and build stupas in California and upstate New York. Books on Buddhism fill the bookstores, while middle-class Americans
gather for informal
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Buddhist meditation on college campuses and in Unitarian churches. What many Americans and Europeans often understand by the term “Buddhism,” however, is actually a modern hybrid
tradition with roots in the European Enlightenment no less than the Buddha’s enlightenment, in Romanticism and transcendentalism as much as the Pali canon, and in the clash of Asian
cultures and colonial powers as much as in mindfulness and meditation. Most non-Asian Americans tend to see Buddhism as a religion whose most important elements are meditation,
rigorous philosophical analysis, and an ethic of compassion combined with a highly empirical psychological science that encourages reliance on individual experience. It discourages
blindly following authority and dogma, has little place for superstition, magic, image worship, and gods, and is largely compatible with the findings of modern science and liberal
democratic values. While this picture draws on elements of traditional forms of Buddhism that have existed in Asia for centuries, it is in many respects quite distinct from what Buddhism
has meant to Asian Buddhists throughout its long and varied history. The popular western picture of Buddhism is neither unambiguously “there” in ancient Buddhist texts and lived
traditions nor merely a fantasy of an educated elite population in the West, an image with no corresponding object. It is, rather, an actual new form of Buddhism that is the result of a
process of modernization, westernization, reinterpretation, image-making, revitalization, and reform that has been taking place not only in the West but also in Asian countries for over a
century. This new form of Buddhism has been fashioned by modernizing Asian Buddhists and western enthusiasts deeply engaged in creating Buddhist responses to the dominant problems
and questions of modernity, such as epistemic uncertainty, religious pluralism, the threat of nihilism, conflicts between science and religion, war, and environmental destruction.
The emergence of Buddhist thought on these problems is the product of a unique confluence of cultures, individuals, and institutions in a time of rapid and unprecedented transformation of
societies. Many modernizing interpreters of Buddhism, both Asian and western, have proffered the theme of the rescue of the modern West—which they have claimed has lost its spiritual
bearings through modernization—by the humanizing wisdom of the East. In order for the rescue to succeed, however, Buddhism itself had to be transformed, reformed, and modernized—
purged of mythological elements and “superstitious” cultural accretions. Thus the Buddhism that has become visible in the West and among urban, educated populations in Asia involves
fewer rituals, de-emphasizes the miracles and supernatural events depicted in Buddhist literature, disposes of or reinterprets image worship, and stresses compatibility with
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scientific, humanistic, and democratic ideals. At the same time, these recent forms of Buddhism have not simply dispensed with all traditional elements in an effort to accommodate to a
changing world but have re-invented them.
Buddhist Modernism and the West
It is tempting to think of the various modernizing forms of Buddhism as “Western Buddhism,” given the influence of western science, philosophy, and psychology on modern variations of
the dharma, as well as the visibility of American and European authors on the subject.1 Indeed, westerners have contributed significantly to transforming Buddhism in highly selective and
idiosyncratic ways in terms of the categories, ideologies, and narratives of their own cultures. The modernization of Buddhism, however, has in no way been an exclusively western project
or simply a representation of the eastern Other; many figures essential to this process have been Asian reformers educated in both western and Buddhist thought. Nor can the motivations of
major Asian figures in this process, such as Anagarika Dharmapala, Daisetz T. Suzuki, and of late, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, be reduced to the simple accommodation of Buddhism to
western forms of modernity. Some have infused Buddhist categories into modernist discourse only to turn around and critique modernity’s perceived weaknesses, to resist the colonialism
of the West, or to assert their own forms of religious or national particularity. This new form of Buddhism that I want to discuss—what some scholars have called Buddhist modernism—
has been, therefore, a cocreation of Asians, Europeans, and Americans. Although I intend to look primarily at its manifestations in the West, such interconnections between them belie any
attempt to categorize my subject as “western Buddhism,” for it is a global phenomenon with a wide diversity of participants. What scholars have often meant by “western Buddhism,”
“American Buddhism,” or “new Buddhism” is a facet of a more global network of movements that are not the exclusive product of one geographic or cultural setting.
By “Buddhist modernism” I do not mean all Buddhism that happens to exist in the modern era but, rather, forms of Buddhism that have emerged out of an engagement with the dominant
cultural and intellectual forces of modernity. Buddhist modernism is a dynamic, complex, and plural set of historical processes with loose bonds and fuzzy boundaries. Yet there is
something distinct enough to outline its broad contours, clarify some of its detailed features, and trace aspects of its emergence. Heinz Bechert established the term as a scholarly category
in his Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft (1966; see also 1984). He described it as a revival movement spanning a number of
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geographical areas and schools, a movement that reinterpreted Buddhism as a “rational way of thought” that stressed reason, meditation, and the rediscovery of canonical texts. It also
deemphasized ritual, image worship, and “folk” beliefs and practices and was linked to social reform and nationalist movements, especially in Burma and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In some
places it attempted to reassert Buddhism as a national religion in the face of European colonialism and to counter its negative colonial portrayals in western literature (1984: 276). In a later
article, Bechert identified a number of key components of the early forms of Buddhist modernism. They include demythologization—the modernization of cosmology along with a
“symbolic interpretation of traditional myths”—something that has allowed Buddhism to be interpreted as a “scientific religion” over against others that stressed belief and dogma. They
also include the idea of Buddhism as a philosophy rather than a creed or religion, the insistence on the optimism of Buddhism (to counter early western representations of it as pessimistic)
and an activist element that stresses social work, democracy, and a “philosophy of equality.” Also crucial is the newly central emphasis on meditation, a development that not only has
revived canonical meditation methods but also popularized and democratized them, making them available to all at uniquely modern “meditation centers” (1994: 255–56).
Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere have mapped similar trends specifically in Sinhalese Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Emphasizing the Christian influence on modernizing forms of
Sinhalese Buddhism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as those of Victorian English culture, they use the term “Protestant Buddhism” to suggest that modernizing
Buddhism both protested against European colonization and Christian missionization and adopted elements of Protestantism. These included rejection of the clerical links between
individuals and the religious goal, emphasis on the “individual’s seeking his or her ultimate goal without intermediaries,” “spiritual egalitarianism,” individual responsibility, and self-
scrutiny. The importance placed on the sangha (the community of monastics) was diminished as the laity became more important.2 Under the influence of Protestantism, Gombrich and
Obeyesekere assert, “religion is privatized and internalized: the truly significant is not what takes place at a public celebration or in ritual, but what happens inside one’s own mind or soul”
(1988: 216). The rise of Protestant Buddhism was also connected with urbanization and the rise of the bourgeoisie in Ceylon, as well as other Asian nations, and mingled traditional
Buddhist ethics with Victorian social mores (Gombrich 1988: 172–97). It also replicated orientalist scholars’ location of “true Buddhism” in canonical texts, while often dismissing local or
village iterations as degenerate and superstitious.