A complete grasp of non-duality is beyond limited beings such as ourselves. This is why Dōgen wrote “when one side is illumined, the other is dark.” Even in satori, we only have hints at and intimations of the undivided wholeness that we call “reality.” There is always a greater understanding of that undivided reality to be be had, but never a complete understanding.

Words too, when skillfully used, can also point towards an understanding of nonduality, however incomplete. They can never take us all the way there, but sometimes part of the way is all we can do. The Flower Garland Sutra’s metaphor of Indra’s Net is one such skillful use of words, and Dogen’s endlessly playful permutations and inversions of phrases and sentences are another.

I am thinking today about two stories that can act as metaphors for nonduality. The first is about the role of causation in the assassination of President Lincoln, and the second is a spatial metaphor about points in a circle.

The Lincoln Assassination

If we ask what caused Abraham Lincoln to die on April 14, 1965, one short-hand answer is that he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. It seems reasonable to say that John Wilkes Booth caused his death. But how many other factors also contributed to that moment in history? For example, if Lincoln had never been elected president, or if the Civil War had never occurred, or if Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes had never given birth to John Wilkes, the assassination  never would have occurred. If the United States had not become a nation in 1776, or if the South had not depended on slave labor, it never would have occurred.  If the Greeks hadn’t invented theater and then if John Ford hadn’t renovated the First Baptist Church of Washington, D.C. to turn it into a theater, it never would have occurred. If firearms hadn’t been invented, it never would have occurred. If Lincoln’s guard had been at his post that night, or if General and Mrs. Grant had accompanied Lincoln as originally planned, things might have gone differently.  If Lincoln had caught a cold the day before and cancelled his trip to the theater, it wouldn’t have occurred—so even viruses get implicated in this event. All of the events we describe presuppose the evolution of homo sapiens, and the formation of a star and planet on which homo sapiens could evolve, bringing the laws of physics and the Big Bang into play. We can go on in this manner endlessly. In the end, there is no preceding event that is not, in some way, implicated in Lincoln’s assassination. The whole universe cooperated to make it happen.

But it is not this way only for major events; it is equally true for trivial events. All the world is also implicated in your next inbreath. Think of everything that had to happen for you to be alive, to be where you are right now at this point in your life and in this location, and to be breathing in the particular air molecules you are breathing in. So we can look at this present moment and anything occurring within this moment as a cooperative co-production of everything else in the world. And it is this way, moment after moment. The next step you take, the next thing you say. is the cooperative co-production of everything. The next time you sit zazen, imagine the whole world with all of its past leading up to the present completely involved with each inbreath and outbreath.

Points in a Circle

We can spatially schematize this idea to devise a variant of Indra’s web.  Imagine the area of a circle divided into an infinite number of points, each point representing a thing, process, or event.  Let’s pick out one of these points at random and imagine that there are arrows pointing to that point originating from every other point in the circle.  We can say that these arrows represent causation, or contribution, but we could also say they represent attention or caring, so that the whole universe of points causes, contributes to, attends to, or cares about that one infinitesimal point. We can then shift our attention to any other point within the circle and see that it too has an infinite number of arrows pointing to it that originate in every other point within the circle. In this image, every point is influenced by, attended to, and cared for by every other point. Even if you are infinitesimally small, you are always the focal point of the universe, but so is every other point.

The Lincoln story was a story about time and how things lead to or co-create each other. The points in the circle story is a story about space and how things are interrelated outside of time. They both point to the same thing, however, which is the infinitely intricate inter-relatedness of all things with each other.

Both images have the significant limitation, however, that here are no such things as disconnected zero-dimensional “points” or separate entities called “Lincoln,” “John Wilkes Booth” and “Ford’s Theater.” We create stories to illustrate how separate things are related, but ultimately, these things are not “interrelated,” but “inter-are” from the start.

Why is this important? Biology is stuck with the problem of how the 30,000,000 cells of the human body cooperate to make one “you.” How do embryonic cells “know” to differentiate and migrate where they need to go in a developing embryo? What are the feedback loops between the brain and autoimmune system? How do kinesins transport vesicles, organelles, and mitochondria along microtubules to exactly where they are needed within cells? We understand bits and pieces of how these processes work, but not the whole picture of how they all cooperate together—a picture that is too intricate and complex and always reorganizing itself as it adapts to changing conditions. The question of “how do these all cooperate” is already the wrong question because the body, from its time as a fertilized egg on, is always a unity, always one process we mentally break down into allegedly separate processes. And even that is wrong, because the body, from the start, is already one process together with the whole evolution of the species and with its interaction with its environment. Embryonic cells are processes that turn the environment into themselves as they grow from pinpoint specks to beings weighing over a hundred pounds, and that simultaneously spew out parts of themselves and return them to the environment.

Neither of these metaphors is perfect—no metaphor could be— but I think each points us in the direction of a greater apprehension of nonduality, a pair of fingers pointing to the moon.

]]> https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2025/07/two-fingers-pointing-to-the-moon/feed/ 6 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2025/03/buddhists-organize-to-defend-democracy/ https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2025/03/buddhists-organize-to-defend-democracy/#comments Sun, 30 Mar 2025 20:14:05 +0000 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/?p=1290 Continue reading "Buddhists Organize to Defend Democracy"

Mike Slott’s Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue (Tuwhiri, 2024) lays out the arguments in favor of Secular Buddhism, why social engagement is necessarily a part of it, and how a Marxist analysis can complement the Buddhist analysis of suffering’s causes and amelioration. Mike is a long-time political and labor movement activist who manages the Secular Buddhist Network and edits its monthly newsletter, Rethinking the Dharma/Reimagining Community. He is a proponent of non-dogmatic and democratic forms of socialism. He believes Buddhism and radical political activism can benefit from dialogue with each other.  Buddhists need to realize that not all causes of suffering are due to individual greed, hatred, and delusion; some result from structural causes rooted in class-based oppression and exploitation. On the other hand, radical political groups often splinter or flounder because members fail to recognize and minimize their egoistic involvement, or to employ mindfulness and compassion in managing intragroup conflict.

The book, like Mike, is earnest, thoughtful, humble, and humane. Mike lays out the reasons why he practices a secular rather than traditional form of Buddhism—a form that is naturalistic, pragmatic, and directed towards individual and collective flourishing rather than Nirvana. He thoughtfully discusses the work of other major Secular Buddhist writers like Stephen Batchelor and Winton Higgins, recognizing their contributions and sorting through areas of agreement and disagreement. He explores Jay Garfield’s ideas on “no-self,” and recommends not ontologizing it. He explains why the bodhisattva ideal might not be the best model for social engagement. He discusses convert Buddhist’s over-emphasis on meditation to the exclusion of other aspects of the path. He helpfully defines human flourishing through Buddhist and Marxist lenses, and also through the lens of Nussbaum’s and Sen’s capabilities approach. As you can see, this is a very rich book that covers a lot of ground.

So where do we agree, and where do we disagree?  Like Mike, I practice a naturalistic, pragmatic Buddhism aimed at greater human flourishing.  I agree that Buddhists should be socially engaged—that we have ethical responsibilities to do what we can to reduce suffering in our communities and on our planet. Finally, I agree that Buddhism lacks a sophisticated social theory—an analysis of how societies function, how they support exploitation and oppression, and how they can be improved—and that Buddhist theory needs to be supplemented by complementary approaches.

On the other hand, I believe that Mike is (at times, not always) more optimistic about human nature and how much we can improve society than I am. Mike believes that radical social change can greatly reduce the inequality and cruelty inherent in “neoliberal capitalism.”  I, however, am a chastened liberal in the Niebuhrian sense. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) is a profound exploration of social life that everyone ought to read. Niebuhr started out as a Marxist but gradually became disillusioned. He thought that individuals could aspire to be more moral, but societies were and always would be governed by power relations between competing groups. Elite groups never surrendered their privileges voluntarily, and subordinated minorities never gave up their demands without the threat or use of elite force. Social change came about through competition between elites, or from revolution from below; when revolution occurred, it established a new order in which the formerly ascendent and the formerly subordinated merely exchanged roles.

I‘m somewhat more sanguine than Niebuhr. Positive moral social change can sometimes occur—think of the successes of the abolitionist, suffragette, and gay rights movements over the past two centuries. But there is no guaranteed moral arc of justice, and what’s gained can easily be lost. It’s easy to imagine future dystopias in which nuclear war, climate change, biological plague, or waves of populist discontent erase all the positive gains of modern civilization.

Economic systems don’t stand apart from the societies they are an integral part of.  The many institutions that make up our “economic system”—paper currency, the federal reserve, banks, stock exchanges, systems of credit, corporations, regulatory agencies, management theories, business law, unions—are institutions that took centuries to evolve, and they evolved in the context of other ongoing changes—the Protestant reformation, the scientific revolution, globalization, automation, the shift from a manufacturing to an information economy, the growth of secondary and post-secondary education, changes in family structure and the average life span, changes in communication and transportation, changes in medicine, changes in energy sources, changes in international relations,  and so on.

All of these changes are interlocking, interconnected, and inter-affecting. While you can make changes in these systems—they are in fact changing all the time—every change one makes impacts how every other part of the system functions. It seems to be a rule that any solution to a problem is only a solution for a while until it too becomes a problem. Another rule is that every solution to a problem introduces new, unintended and unanticipated problems over time. So antibiotics, which solve the problem of infection, result in increased chronic diseases of old age. Automobiles which solve problems related to depending on horses for mobility (they go faster, don’t leave the streets covered in feces, and don’t tire out after twenty miles) create suburbs, smog, traffic jams, motor vehicle injuries and deaths, costly infrastructure needs, and climate change.

This means that when you are imagining “dismantling” and “replacing” capitalism, and think this will result in a better life, you are dwelling in fantasy land.  Attempts to totally change societies (the French, Russian, and Cambodian revolutions are cases in point) are more likely to result in disasters rather than improvements. You are better off making small changes here and there—strengthening unions, changing taxation rates, subsidizing college tuition, regulating mergers and acquisitions, limiting predatory bank practices, amending corporate law, overturning Citizens United—than thinking in terms of “ending capitalism.”

In the long run capitalism will evolve into some new economic form of activity, just as feudalism and mercantilism evolved into new forms—but that will not be the result of planned change, just as no one planned to abolish feudalism, mercantilism, or hunter-gathering. What capitalism evolves into may be better or worse, but it will evolve.

In the meantime, let’s take a brief moment to appreciate capitalism. Under capitalism, the number of people living at the edge of dire poverty and starvation around the world has dramatically decreased, while the average human life expectancy around the world has dramatically increased. While poverty, racism, sexism, inequality, climate change, warfare, ecocide, nuclear proliferation, and the development of bioweapons continue as major unsolved problems, we might also note that poverty, inequality, social stratification, patriarchy, warfare, and many other ills have been true not just of modern neoliberal capitalist Western societies, but were also true of Babylon, Persia, the Athenian city states, the Roman, Russian, and Chinese empires, the Aztec, Incan, and Mayan empires, and any other large scale civilizations you can mention.  Perfection is nowhere to be found.

I agree with those who suggest that the Scandinavian social democracies are preferable to the neoliberal society we have in Post-Reagan (and now post-Biden) America—that they are fairer, and the people there seem happier.  I would love to nudge America in that direction.  But as philosopher Richard Rorty noted—it’s easy to imagine better economic or social arrangements than the ones we have now. Almost anyone can do it. What seems impossible, however, is how to tell a believable story of how we can collectively get from here to there.

And remember that a lot of contemporary Leftist culture  (antiracism, identity-based politics, calling out culture, pronoun policing, defunding the police, sanctuary cities, Occupy Wall Street, pro-Hamas campus demonstrations) has not resulted in intended improvements but has only served to help Donald Trump return to the presidency and threaten American democracy. The working class doesn’t seem to be on board with left-wing politics in America. Blame that on what you will— capitalist divide-and-conquer tactics, right-wing disinformation, infantile leftism—but the dream of a radicalized, united American working class seems further away than ever.

So, while I think we modern Buddhists need to be socially engaged, and that we ought to do what we can to increase the likelihood that more and more people can lead flourishing lives, I think we need to be careful. We needs to pursue practical improvements that have, given the current political climate, a reasonable chance of reaching fruition over an extended horizon of time. And then we need to empirically assess whether our “improvements” have actually ended up improving things or unintentionally making them worse.  This is a liberal pragmatic program rather than a radical one.

Despite our disagreements, I’m glad I read Mike’s book. We agree on many points, and even where we disagree, Mike challenges me to think more clearly about where we disagree. Like Mike, I think  Secular Buddhism has a lot to offer political activists. I hope this thoughtful and well-written book finds and serves its intended audience.

]]> https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2025/01/review-of-mike-slotts-mindful-solidarity/feed/ 2 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/12/toward-a-naturalistic-pragmatic-eudaimonic-and-cosmopolitan-buddhism/ https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/12/toward-a-naturalistic-pragmatic-eudaimonic-and-cosmopolitan-buddhism/#comments Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:01:00 +0000 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/?p=1273 Continue reading "Toward a Naturalistic, Pragmatic, Eudaimonic, and Cosmopolitan Buddhism"

 

The Buddha lived prior to the discoveries of modern physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. There are lots of things we know now—cell biology, genetics, evolutionary theory, relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics—that the Buddha had no way of knowing.

On the other hand, during the Buddha’s lifetime there was active speculation and debate about the nature of reality. We moderns usually underestimate how much the ancients knew about their world—they knew a surprising amount for their time and place.  There were advocates for various versions of atomic theory, physicalism, determinism, and skepticism that the Buddha came into direct contact with during his lifetime, and he developed the Dharma against the backdrop of these lively debates.

Ethics, unlike modern science, has not evolved much beyond the Axial Age—the period when the Buddha, Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, and Hillel lived.  While our ideas about matter, energy, time, space, the cosmos, and evolution have changed considerably over the centuries, our ideas about what it means to be a good person have not changed all that much.

All this is a way of saying that while there are certain conclusions the Buddha drew that might still be valid for us today, there are others that unavoidably reflect the limitations of the time and place in which he lived. In fact, we might assert as a more general proposition that all the great philosophers throughout history got some things right and others wrong. All great philosophers initiate and participate in traditions in which subsequent philosophers continue to investigate and elaborate on the questions they raised. There is a way in which all the great Western philosophers continued to work out the implications of questions initially posed by Plato and Aristotle. Similarly, the Chinese Confucian tradition continued to work out the implications of issues initially raised by Confucius; and Buddhist philosophers like Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Asanga, and Dharmakirti continued to work out the implications of issues initially investigated by the Buddha.

If we adopt this view of the history of ideas, we must struggle with what it means for us to call ourselves “Buddhists” today. Is Buddhism a matter of dogma—must everything the Buddha said be true by virtue of the fact that he said it— or does being a Buddhist mean we’re seriously engaged in exploring the issues the Buddha addressed— that while we agree with much of what he taught, there are areas where we are not quite so sure, and others where experience has taught us to think differently?

If we think of the Buddha as being divine or believe his enlightenment gave him privileged access to truth we’re stuck with having to believe everything he taught. But if we believe in empiricism and inquiry, things can only be considered true when there is evidence that warrants belief. Even if we could somehow bring ourselves to believe that the Buddha was different from every other human being who ever lived—that he was infallible—we would still need to be able to authenticate that all the thousands of discourses attributed to him were in fact his exact words—not later fabrications or elaborations—and that he spoke so clearly that there could never be a question of how to interpret what he taught.

This blog advocates a modern form of Buddhism that is naturalistic, pragmatic, eudaimonic, and cosmopolitan. Naturalistic means not relying on supernatural explanations for phenomena—explanations that rely on magic, miracles, gods, demons, witchcraft, spirits, occult energies, or ghosts. It also means not relying on explanations that directly contradict the scientifically arrived at laws of physics. This does not mean that science completely understands the nature of reality, nor does it mean that some of science’s current ideas will not eventually be proved wrong. It does assume that future scientific advances must be based on either the principles of efficient cause-and-effect or the principles of probability. This is an unproveable assumption; it may eventually prove to be mistaken. But it is a belief that has led to greater human progress than beliefs in magic, spirits, or witchcraft.

A naturalistic Buddhism does away with all the aspects of Buddhism that are non-naturalistic. It excludes the various hell and heaven realms of rebirth; the existence of mythological beings and celestial bodhisattvas; the existence of pure lands and Buddha fields; the existence of a transcendental realm of nirvana; the existence of supernatural powers of Buddhas, mantras, and relics; supernatural understandings of karma and merit; and the existence of unembodied mental events. Rebirth would also be a non-starter: how could the mental residue of a deceased person persist in non-physical form and then get physically implanted in a developing embryo?

Pragmatism is a form of naturalism and empiricism originating with the work of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism views ideas as useful or un-useful tools. The laws of physics are not laws that particles, waves, and fields obey the way humans obey traffic laws. They are mathematical principles that enable us to predict observable outcomes with remarkable accuracy— and hence useful tools.

Ideas can be either productive or unproductive—they either help us address problems we wish to solve or they do not. We can only distinguish the pragmatic value of two ideas by observing their consequences.

We can think of Buddhist tenets and practices in pragmatic terms—as either useful or not in attaining sets of goals. We can evaluate them in terms of the goals that are central to living well: do they make us happier, less vulnerable to stress, or more considerate of others? There are other possible goals—attaining nirvana or a more auspicious rebirth, for example. But since it’s difficult to define exactly what nirvana is and whether or not another person has attained to it—and since it is impossible to know, if people are in fact reborn, what “realm” they are reborn into—there’s no way for a pragmatist to test these ideas to establish their value.

On the other hand, it’s possible to devise ways of measuring whether people are happier, more compassionate, whether they think their lives are going well, or whether their peers think they are admirable. Happiness, compassion, life satisfaction, and admirability are all partial—albeit imperfect— ways of measuring whether something helps us to live better.  A good deal of empirical research is currently underway seeking to discover whether mindfulness, lovingkindness, and self-compassion do, in fact, improve people’s lives. While the jury is still out, it’s at least something we’re in principle capable of investigating.

It’s also something we each can investigate on our own. Whether or not mindfulness meditation is useful for everyone, or for the average person, we can investigate whether it seems useful for us.  It’s the same with other Buddhist practices, such as practicing equanimity, seeking harmonious relations with others, or evaluating whether fulfilling a desire is concordant with our higher-order goals and improving our well-being.

As we do this, we may discover that certain Buddhist practices no longer make sense for us—they don’t improve our lives. For example, we may discover that trying to rid ourselves of all our desires is not only impossible, but counterproductive.  Or we may discover that trying to impartially love everyone—to feel the same way about our children that we do about our insurance salesman—is not only beyond our capacity but would rob our children of the special love they need. We may discover that special relationships with family and friends add something important to our lives—that our lives would be impoverished without them.  So we may revise the Buddhist tenets to fit our discoveries. We may decide that while it’s worthwhile to try to establish a compassionate attitude toward everyone as much as we can, it is also worthwhile to have sets of special relationships with family and friends. Pragmatism teaches that every idea can be tested through experience. It also teaches us  that the conclusions we arrive at are tentative at best and open to revision given more experience.

This idea that Buddhist practices enable us to live better lives—to cultivate the virtues and wisdom that are the prerequisites for good lives — is what makes this naturalistic, pragmatic Buddhism also eudaimonic. Eudaimonia was Aristotle’s word for a life that met the dual criteria of being subjectively happy and objectively good. Aristotle believed we achieved eudaimonia through cultivating a set of moral and intellectual virtues— similar to the Buddha’s idea that we are at our best when we practice morality (sila) and acquire wisdom (prajña) and Confucius’s belief that cultivating morality and wisdom were the highest human goals. Contemporary moral philosophers label all three of these approaches—Aristotelean, Buddhist, and Confucian—as virtue ethics approaches. All three are about building character and  judgment and finding ways to live happily and harmoniously with others—ways that not only make us happier, but that also take the happiness of others into account.

Finally, I advocate a cosmopolitan stance. We’re not only members of families, tribes, communities, and nations—but also citizens of the world. This means that we do not consider the Buddha’s voice the only voice worth listening to.  What the Buddha said is important, but so is what Aristotle, Confucius, the American pragmatists, the romantic poets, the transcendentalists, the existentialists, and modern scientists have said.  We identify wise people from the past and present—Aristotle, Confucius, Epictetus, Laozi, Jesus, St. Paul, Hillel, Maimonides, Rumi, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Rorty, and Rawls—and we’re interested in what they have to say, too. We happily identify as Buddhists but we aren’t exclusively Buddhist. Being closed-minded is never a virtue. Especially if we believe we are best off when we widen our horizons through considering others’ perspectives—that truth is never any one person’s sole possession but is, by its very nature, intersubjective.

So, what does a Buddhism that’s naturalistic, pragmatic, eudaimonic, and cosmopolitan look like?  How is it different from traditional forms of Buddhism? How can we practice it, and what do we gain from it? This is what I have been exploring and will continue to explore in this blog.

Do we lose anything with this new kind of Buddhism?  The biggest thing that we lose is what Zen Master and psychoanalyst Barry Magid calls our curative fantasies: Our fantasies that Buddhist practice can lead us to some permanent and perfect happily-ever-after ending—that with diligent practice we can transcend our tragicomic human condition. There’s no nirvana at the end of the rainbow.  We will never be omniscient, imperturbable, and unceasingly compassionate. We will never be beyond the reach of anxiety, grief, pain, and regret. We will never be at a place where self-centered desires are completely extinguished this side of the grave. This is a Buddhism for grown-ups. It is a Buddhism that says we can do better, we can be happier, we can be kinder, we can be less selfish, we can reduce the suffering of others, we can be more equanimous—but never perfectly so. And there will never be a time or place in our lives where we can be all these things without continued effort—where we are free from the possibility of back-sliding. We lose, in other words, a belief in magic. We are condemned to see reality as it is, ourselves as we are, and engage in endless practice. The goal of practice is to make things better for ourselves, our families, our friends, our society, and the world writ large—but only one bit at a time.

Given this more modest set of goals, what sense can we make of words like enlightenment or awakening? First, enlightenment or awakening cannot be a final, specific end-state. It is a horizon we can aim at and make progress towards, but not a final state we can achieve. We can always become more enlightened and more awake, but there is no such thing as total enlightenment.

But what does it even mean to become more enlightened or awake?  It helps me to think of enlightenment not as a single dimension, but as a set of semi-independent dimensions.  We are more enlightened when we are more mindful and present in our lives. We are more enlightened when we approach situations with an attitude of “how can I help?” and not “what will I get out of it?”  We are more enlightened when we develop our capacity to reflect on our whims, desires, and urges rather than impulsively act on them. We are more enlightened when we cultivate the virtues of benevolence, courage, truthfulness, and fairness. We are more enlightened when we are less self-focused and better able to listen to, appreciate, and learn from other’s viewpoints. We are more enlightened when we appreciate the ways in which we and the world are not made up of discrete, unchanging things, but out of deeply interconnected, mutually inter-affecting, ever-changing processes. We are more enlightened when we understand our opinions are just that —opinions—that there’s an awful lot we don’t know, and much of what we think we know is probably wrong.

But as Zen master Bernie Glassman was fond of saying (paraphrasing the character of The Dude in The Big Lebowski), “That’s just my opinion, man.”

]]> https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/12/toward-a-naturalistic-pragmatic-eudaimonic-and-cosmopolitan-buddhism/feed/ 9 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/07/wash-your-bowl/ https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/07/wash-your-bowl/#comments Sat, 06 Jul 2024 20:48:29 +0000 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/?p=1253 Continue reading "Zhaozhou’s “Wash Your Bowl!”"

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Last week I had to share my understanding of Book of Serenity Case 39 and defend it in dharma combat as part of a shuso hossen ceremony.  I am particularly fond of Case 39, and thought I would share some thoughts about it here:

Case: A monk asked Zhaozhou, “I have just entered the monastery: please give me some guidance.”

 Zhaozhou said, “Have you had breakfast yet?”

 The monk said, “Yes, I’ve eaten.”

 Zhaozhou said, “Then go wash your bowl.”

Zhaozhou Congshen— who was born in the 8^th century and lived through most of the 9^th— is one of the most beloved figures in Chinese Zen—he appears in 20 koans — more than any other Zen Master except Yunmen.

Zhaozhou studied with his teacher Nanquan Puyuan until his teacher died. At that time Zhaozhou was fifty-seven years old. For the next twenty-three years, he wandered from teacher to teacher and monastery to monastery growing his understanding. Legend has it he was eighty years-old when he first became the abbot of a monastery where he continued to teach a small group of students for another forty years.

His teachings are always short, pithy, and down-to-earth.  He never talks about  ethereal topics but speaks in a language that is direct, earthy, and rooted in everyday life. It’s as if he’s trying to convey through his very language that  Zen is not something magical or other-worldly but something right here, right now —something right in front of your nose and right under your feet in each and every moment.

Unlike many of the Zen masters who appear in koans, Zhaozhou never shouts at his pupils or beats them with his stick. Instead he uses simple language to point beyond language. Many of his koans have an element of kindness to them that we might call “Grandmotherly Zen.”

In this koan a student has come to the monastery looking for guidance.  Zhaozhou’s first comment is grandmotherly : “Have you eaten yet?”  What could be more grandmotherly than that? When the student replies he has, Zhaozhou then instructs him to wash his bowl. What kind of teaching is that?

First, it’s an instruction to pay attention to the present moment—what’s needed in this moment. See what’s needed in this moment and do what the moment calls for.  And do this moment by moment.  All we ever have is this moment. Last moment you were hungry and filled your bowl. Now that moment is over, and it’s time to wash it. Next moment you might be tired and it’s time to take a nap. The next moment there’s a student in front of you and it’s time to teach. This whole approach can be summarized as “do the next right thing.” But knowing what’s right means being intimate with the full intricacy of each moment as it unfolds.

Zhaozhou’s advice also is a call for taking personal responsibility for one’s life and owning it all.  It’s your bowl, take care of it;  If it’s your mess, clean it up.  We’re responsible for taking care of everything that falls within the small purview of our lives.  This is the Bodhisattva way.

And just when we’re in danger of thinking we understand everything Zhaozhou means, there’s a completely different way to understand this koan. “Have you eaten yet?” can be a metaphorical way of asking whether you’ve absorbed Zen’s teachings or tasted enlightenment yet.  Zhaozhou’s advice also seems to mean that whatever understandings you have are yesterday’s understandings—yesterday’s opening to awakening.  Don’t try to cling on to it—don’t let the stink of Zen stick to you. Don’t be puffed up about past realizations and accomplishments.  Zhaozhou’s freedom from the stink of Zen is evident in his poetry:

The cock crows in the early morning.
Sadly, I see as I rise, how worn out I am.
On my head are pecks of grey ashes.
Originally, I intended to practice to help save others.
Who would have suspected that instead, I would become an idiot?

To this way of understanding, “wash your bowl” is advice to let go of what was. Don’t hold on to it. Be ready for what the next moment has to offer. Every moment is a dharma door, an opportunity for a new understanding or realization, one that may be deeper and more nuanced than the one you’re tempted to cling to.

On a more personal note, I am, in essence, a lazy person.  As a youngster, my parents often had to remind me to do my chores.  As a college undergraduate, dirty clothes piled up on a chair until I had no choice but to do the laundry. In the same way, dirty dishes piled up in the sink.

I’m still basically a lazy person, but I’ve learned to be more attentive to what needs to be done, and even to enjoy taking care of it.  I’ve developed a more positive view towards doing the laundry and washing the dishes. That’s not to say I’m still not basically lazy.  My wife can attest to that.

One of my great pleasures each week is setting up the Zendo on Saturday mornings—putting out the chairs and mats, setting up the altar with flowers and incense, setting out the gong, mok, and clappers, putting chant books under the mats, setting up the tea service and boiling the water, making sure the Zendo is warm in winter and cool in summer, setting up Zoom for those who can’t attend in person.

It takes about 45 minutes to do all this. Other groups may have used the zendo room during the weekdays, and there are tables to be disassembled and removed, or they’ve borrowed our incense lighter and haven’t returned it and I have to search elsewhere for another one, or sutra books have magically disappeared and new ones must be printed.

Who could have imagined this would be a joy—everything put in order and put right—and not a chore!  A place for everything and everything in its place. But also, not being too rigid because there will always be surprises and imperfections.

This is an important part of the Zen way—to embrace and appreciate every aspect of our lives and not assume there are good parts and bad parts—parts to be enjoyed and parts to be endured. We’re here for the full catastrophe of our lives.  Let’s be whole-heartedly present for it all.

]]> https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/07/wash-your-bowl/feed/ 4 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/05/some-thoughts-on-the-israel-hamas-war/ https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/05/some-thoughts-on-the-israel-hamas-war/#comments Wed, 15 May 2024 21:17:49 +0000 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/?p=1243 Continue reading "Some thoughts on the Israel-Hamas War"

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I usually only write on Buddhist topics for this blog, trying my best to avoid political statements of one kind or another.  But I’ve been thinking about the Israel-Hamas war for seven months now and watching the campus protests that have sprung up in its wake.  I’ve struggled back and forth between sharing my thoughts and keeping this blog a conflict-free zone. Part of my reticence is due to knowing how many of my Buddhist colleagues disagree strongly with my opinions — and I don’t  want to alienate friends unnecessarily. But I just finished filming a course for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review on the relationship between the virtues and the well-lived life, and one of those virtues is courage. So I have decided to be courageous—to throw caution to the winds and let the chips fall where they may.  An on-line Buddhist friend who knows my thoughts on this issue suggested I needed to decide whether I was Buddhist or Jewish.  I am clearly both and have no intentions of relinquishing an important part of myself in order to be approved of or appear politically correct. I feel sorry for those Jewish students who feel the need to submerge or deny aspects of their heritage and identity in order to fit in with their peer group. I guess old age is a blessing—I’m too old to worry about whether I fit in anywhere.

If this is not a topic that interests you, please feel free to stop reading right  now— I’m just getting something off my chest and have no intention of writing about it again.

If you asked me to make a list of Israeli political, religious and social policies I disapprove of or Israeli politicians I don’t like, it would make for a fairly long list.  But I suspect it would be just as long as my list of American social, political, and economic policies and politicians I disapprove of, or of Chinese political, social, and economic policies I disagree with. The main thing is, none of these disagreements leads me to think that Israel, the United States, or China doesn’t have a right to exist or defend itself and its interests. The idea that Israel alone has lost its right to exist because it is a “settler colonialist project” can only be taken at face value if we also agree that other “settler colonialist” projects like the United States, Canada, every South American country, Australia, and New Zealand have also lost the right to exist for similar reasons. And also Russia, China, and all the other empires that have grown over the centuries as they absorbed and resettled adjacent territories—they too were once—and in many ways remain—settler-colonialist projects.

One can sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from Israel during the 1948 war.  We must remember, though, that an equal number of Mizrahi Jews were expelled from Islamic countries during that war. Israel absorbed the 850,000-1,000,000 Jews expelled from middle eastern countries and made them Israeli citizens. Most Israelis are descendants of Jews who lived for centuries in the middle east and have no historic connection to Europe. The surrounding Arab counties—Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan—did not allow the Palestinian refugees to become citizens of their countries and kept them in refugee camps around the Israeli border.  They promised the Palestinian refugees would return to their homes once they defeated Israel on the battlefield—something they couldn’t accomplish.

This situation is not so very different from that caused by the terribly violent partition of India and Pakistan after Indian independence in 1947.  Millions of Muslims fled or were expelled from India and moved to Pakistan, while similar numbers of Hindus fled Pakistan for India.  It’s estimated that 14.5 million people were displaced in that conflict. None of those refugees and their descendants are demanding a right to return. Wars have their consequences. This idea of restoring historic borders after history has moved on has a name—irridentism. Hitler’s assertion that the Sudetenland and Austria were part of the Third Reich, or Putin’s assertion that the Ukraine is part of Russia are examples of irridentist policies. The Palestinian claim to Israel is no different.

The original U.N. mandate that created Israel divided the British held territory of Transjordan into two states—one quarter of the territory was to become the Jewish state of Israel, and the other three quarters were to become Palestine.  It wasn’t Israel that prevented the Palestinian state from forming—the Arab world was never willing to accept any partition that allowed Israel to exist, and the rest of the partition became modern day Jordan. Attempts to create a two-state solution—like the attempts at Oslo and Camp David—ended in failure largely because the Palestinian Liberation Organization could not give up its maximalist demands to accept a brokered agreement, including giving up the Palestinian so-called “right to return.”

Over the years, the Israeli experience with the two West Bank intifadas that targeted Israeli civilians and repeated attacks from Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah have driven Israeli public opinion increasingly rightward, so that public opinion no longer supports the only possible solution down the road, which is a two-state solution. The October 7^th attack has solidified this Israeli position, with the unfortunate consequence of probably delaying eventual Palestinian statehood for at least another decade or two. Netanyahu is a corrupt, cynical and self-serving politician, but you cannot blame current Israeli public opinion regarding a two-state solution on him. My major gripe (among many) with Netanyahu was the failure of his administration to protect the Israeli border with Gaza on October 7^th. Had the IDF been properly positioned and been able to respond appropriately, it could have effectively repelled the Hamas incursion without the terrible Israeli losses that ensued. Then the Israeli response to October 7^th could have been more limited and muted—just tit for tat— without the need for the full scale invasion that has killed and displaced so many.

Once Hamas, the Iranian sponsored Islamist terrorist organization—an organization which like the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS aspires to a world-wide caliphate—and in Hamas’s case, the elimination, expulsion, subjugation, or conversion of Jews everywhere—attacked Israel on October 7^th in an unprovoked attack that killed over 1,200 Israelis, targeted 8,000 missiles at Israel, and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli citizens—it became a legitimate target of the Israeli military. Israel has every right to dismantle and disarm the only organization in the region with true genocidal intent.  Can you imagine how the U.S. would have responded to a similar attack on American soil?

Once warfare begins against an enemy which has built 400-500 miles of tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure and uses schools, mosques, hospitals, and UNWRA facilities as safe havens for its 30,000 fighters, there is no way to avoid a fairly high number of civilian casualties. This is the nature of modern urban warfare. While I will not defend every Israeli tactical and strategic decision, let me remind readers that the allied forces in World War II probably caused as many as 1,500,000 civilian casualties as they bombed German and Japanese cities to bring the war to an end. While 34,000 casualties seems like a lot and is cause for genuine grief and regret—the number is small compared to the number of casualties in other recent middle-eastern wars: over 500,000 in the Syrian civil war, 377,000 in the Yemini civil war, 90,000 in the Lebanese civil war, 500,000 in the Iran-Iraq war. This is not “genocide” but the expectable outcome of urban warfare. This is not to  deny there may be IDF units and individuals that committed war crimes or that some Israeli policies may have violated modern rules of war — nor is it to say that the Israeli war policy is strategically correct.  General Petraeus and others have made thoughtful criticisms of Israeli strategy.  But every side in every war has sometimes committed war crimes, brutalities, and made tactical and strategic errors.  Israel is no more culpable than other countries—including the U.S.— in this regard. Remember Dresden, Hiroshima, My Lai, and Abu Ghraib.

And now for a word about American students protesting against this war.  I protested against the American Vietnam and Iraqi wars—I organized the very first antiwar protest at my college in 1965. I can appreciate that students are upset by the footage of displaced, injured, and killed Palestinians and the widespread destruction of Gazan infrastructure.  If all they were saying was “give peace a chance” and expressing a hope for a two-state solution, I would be better able to sympathize with them. But when they demand that American universities divest from the only democracy in the middle east, or that Israel has no right to exist as the ancient Jewish homeland and the refuge for persecuted Jews everywhere, or that the U.S. stop supporting an ally surrounded by Iranian proxies aimed at its destruction—then they lose any sympathy I might otherwise have for them.  When I demonstrated against the Vietnam and Iraqi wars, I didn’t demonstrate on behalf of a Viet Cong victory or Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government.  The student celebration of October 7^th as a victory for the oppressed reminds me of Michael Foucault’s celebration of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascendence to power in Iran as a great humanist victory—a deeply mistaken view of what constitutes civilizational improvement or the true voice of the Iranian people.

And it is also a mistake to think one can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic. Religious Jews turn towards Jerusalem and pray in that direction three time daily and have done so for thousands of years. The book of Genesis is a book fundamentally about the relationship of Jews to the land of Israel—for example, how Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah to bury Sara—how much he paid for it and who witnessed the purchase. Every Passover seder concludes with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem!” The idea that one can separate Judaism from its historic ties to the land of Israel is a travesty. We Jews will never be displaced from our historic homeland again as long as it is within our power to resist. Any political movement that thinks we would be willing to be displaced again had no understanding of Jewish history and determination.  And anyone who believes Jews would be willing to live in a non-Jewish state with a Palestinian majority is living a fairy tale. That will never happen—and holding on to that fantasy is the main impediment to the formation of a Palestinian state.

I am not a religious Jew—I’m a practicing Buddhist priest.  But I am an ethnic Jew with strong ties to my people and heritage. I know enough Jewish history to know that Jews have been discriminated against and expelled from every European or middle-eastern country where they’ve lived. There have been periods of relative golden ages in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, but they have never lasted forever. They eventually come to an end. Now is a current golden age for Jewry here in America, but antisemitism on the left and right has persisted like a low-grade fever and is resurgent again.  It’s important to me that Israel remain a place of potential refuge for American Jews should things here eventually turn sour. Maintaining our historic homeland is crucial for insuring the continued Jewish existence as a people.

None of this is to deny empathy for Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories.  I hope their lives and conditions improve and wish them peace in their own independent country. May it come to pass sooner rather than later.  Some of this will require a political sea change in Israel.  Some of it will require Palestinians to accept they will have to live side-by-side with a Jewish state of Israel. If there can be 23 countries in the world that are either “Islamic Republics” or have Islam as their constitutionally enshrined state religion, surely there can be room for one Jewish state.

]]> https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/05/some-thoughts-on-the-israel-hamas-war/feed/ 36 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/03/buddhism-and-authenticity/ https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/03/buddhism-and-authenticity/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:19:09 +0000 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/?p=1219 Continue reading "Buddhism and Authenticity"

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We want our Buddhist practice to be “authentic” in two different senses of the word: First, we want it to be authentically Buddhist­—a genuine part of the current of thought originating with the life and teachings of the historical Buddha and remaining, in important senses, faithful to it. Second, we want our practice to be authentic in the sense that we can practice it wholeheartedly without inner division, false consciousness, or pretense. We want it to be consonant both with our present understanding of ourselves and the world, and with our aspirations to transcend our present capabilities and understandings in ways that lead to higher levels of well-being. The first “authenticity” is about faithfulness to a tradition; the second about faithfulness to current and future visions of ourselves. Unfortunately, what it means to be faithful is rarely simple or straightforward—neither “traditions” nor “selves” are static entities—they continuously evolve and are subject to reinterpretation. In addition, there are dialectical tensions between the two kinds of authenticity—being true to a tradition and to oneself— and they are not always in harmony.

The question — “Is this the Buddhism of our ancestors?” — is a perennial one. Every Buddhist school makes claims to its authenticity, often playing fast and loose with history to prove its point, but every successful Buddhist movement to claim or restore an idealized past inevitably ends by re-creating a new Buddhism for its time and place. These Buddhisms can’t help but reflect the consciousness of the historical era in which they are “rediscovered.” If, by some miracle, they resisted contamination by the Zeitgeist, they’d be of no value to their practitioners who, prisoners of their own time, are incapable of turning back consciousness and authentically inhabiting another one. This is a function of the second type of “authenticity”—one’s ability to fully inhabit and embody a practice.

The effort to rediscover the “real” Buddhism is a recurrent theme in Buddhist history. Buddhism is always being lost and rediscovered, but each rediscovery is never the restoration of something old, but a reinvention relevant to its place and time. In our present day, Stephen Batchelor—a person I otherwise agree with on most particulars—at times seems to think one can recover a pre-Theravada Buddha who never believed in rebirth. All that rebirth stuff, he seems to be saying, got tacked on later. Of course there is no way of knowing for certain—we know next to nothing about the historical Buddha. But why re-create a Buddha who is “just like us”—why not leave him a prisoner of his own time and place in the same way we are prisoners of ours? If we can recognize Plato was mistaken on some matters but still appreciate his central importance to Western philosophy, why can’t do the same when it comes to the Buddha?

Authenticity and Theravada

Theravada Buddhists sometimes claim their tradition represents the “most authentic” form of Buddhism. Theravada, as such, did not exist during the Buddha’s lifetime, however, and there were multiple pre-Theravada Buddhist schools that evolved in the centuries following the Buddha’s death. Theravada emerged from one branch of these schools—Sthaviravada-Vibhajivada—between 200 and 100 BCE. It developed its own commentarial tradition in Sri Lanka in relative isolation from later developments (Madhyamaka, Yogacara, Tathagatagarbha, Tantra) on the Indian subcontinent or in Gandhara.

Theravada views these later mainland developments as corruptions of the Buddha’s authentic teachings. This reflects, in part, the assumption that only the founding teacher gets to define a tradition and that later interpreters and elaborators should be viewed with suspicion. This makes sense if the founding teacher is omniscient and infallible and the canonical record of his teachings is accurate and complete. But what if one views the Buddha as an extraordinarily wise teacher, but still just a fallible human being? Then the argument doesn’t work. It would be like arguing that authentic Western philosophy ended with Plato and we shouldn’t bother with Aristotle, Spinoza, Hume, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, or Wittgenstein; or that authentic Confucianism ended with the Analects, and we should ignore Mencius, Xunzi, and Zhu Xi. Why freeze a tradition in amber when it is just getting underway?

The Theravada claim that its practices and teachings are identical to the original Buddha’s also doesn’t withstand analysis. A good deal of current Theravada teaching is derived from Asian Buddhist modernist movements in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma. The meditation methods of Mahāsī Sayadaw and Ajahn Chah are reinterpretations of traditional practices developed in the wake of Ledi Sayadaw’s (1846-1923) vipassana revival. Ledi Sayadaw taught a form of meditation the laity could practice without mastering the jhanas. Braun (2018) wrote while his method could be found in canonical texts, “it had been considered less than ideal and was little taught. Suddenly, it became the norm.” Modern vipassana also differs from the esoteric Southeast Asian Boran Kammatthana form of meditation that immediately preceded it in much of Southeast Asia. The point is, Theravada is a living tradition, and every teacher introduces innovations in how it is taught and practiced—the methods taught by Ajahns Chah, Maha Bua, and Buddhadasa were distinctively different. It is not an unchanging teaching. This is how it should be—unless you believe there is only one right way to do things and one size fits all.

The claim Theravada Buddhists can make is that the Pali canon, as transcribed in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE, contains the earliest distillations of the orally transmitted teachings of the Buddha. On the other hand, not all the over 10,000 suttas in the Pāli Nikayas were composed during or shortly after the Buddha’s lifetime—there are scholarly reasons to believe the corpus gradually expanded in the centuries following his death. Some suttas read as if they might be accurately reported discourses of the Buddha, but others—like the tales of interactions with mythological devas, brahmas and yakkhhas in the Samyutta Nikaya—seem more like literary inventions. In addition, there may be a few Pali suttas that were composed contemporaneously with—or even later than—the earliest Mahayana sutras. The oldest surviving ancient Buddhist manuscript is a Gandhari Prajnaparamita text carbon dated to between 84 BCE and 74 CE—the same general era when the Pali suttas were first committed to writing in Sri Lanka. While most Pali suttas are certainly older than most Mahayana sutras, perhaps not all are.

Authenticity and Mahayana 

As new sutras made their appearance in India and China from 100 BCE on, Mahayanists felt the need to justify their authenticity as buddhavacana, or the “word of the Buddha.” Many gambits were tried to “establish” their provenance. Sutras might be declared “hidden” or “secret” teachings entrusted only to the Buddha’s wisest disciples; or they might be claimed to have been rescued by Nagarjuna from mythological serpents at the bottom of the sea; or it might be claimed that when the Buddha spoke, students with different capacities heard different teachings; or it might be claimed the sutras were uttered by a Sambhogakaya Buddha while the hearer was in a state of samadhi. None of these Mahayana gambits sound convincing to modern ears, and scholars generally accept that the Mahayana sutras are not the words of the historical Buddha in the same way at least some Theravada suttas probably are.

But the question of whether the historical Buddha actually spoke the words may not be the most important one. It may be more important that innovative teachings be consistent with the overall intentions of the Buddhist project and help people make better sense of their practice. Innovations such as Madhyamaka “emptiness,” Yogacara “storehouse consciousness,”  Tathagatagarbha “buddha-nature,” the Huayan imagery of “Indra’s Web,” or the Lotus Sutra’s “skillful means” can solve problems in Buddhist theory or introduce new possibilities for Buddhist practice. It is up to each practitioner to decide whether these innovations are improvements on earlier understandings or impediments to practice and awakening.

Influence, Change, Return, and Reinvention 

As the Buddhist tradition was transmitted via the Silk Road to China and Tibet and eastward to Korea and Japan, it underwent another series of transformations. Chinese Buddhism was influenced by Daoist and Confucian thought, and Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism by local indigenous beliefs. As Buddhism moved West, it was influenced by romanticism, transcendentalism, existentialism, phenomenology, the European enlightenment, psychoanalytic and humanistic psychology, the Judeo-Christian tradition, neuroscience, and a variety of other influences.

There is no shortage of critics who view the Sinification of Indian Buddhism, the Japanification of Chinese Buddhism, and the Westernization of American Buddhism as historical mistakes. Piya Tan (2009) rues the Sinification of Indian Buddhism, Chuan Zhi (2019) the Japanese corruption of Chinese Zen, and Thanisarro Bhikkhu (2012) the corrupting influence of German Romanticism on contemporary Western Buddhism. There is a recurrent wish in Buddhist circles for a return to a purer form of Buddhism—the way it was before it became corrupted by foreign influences—whether the influences were of competing Indian darshanas, or indigenous influences in the newer cultures to which it spread.

But this return to a purer form of Buddhism is a myth. The Buddha did not invent the Dharma ex nihilo. He was attempting to find a middle-way between the competing religious and philosophical beliefs that existed during his lifetime. In other words, he was influenced by the indigenous religious and philosophical beliefs of the culture in which he was raised. The Sramana movement existed long before he ever joined it.

The Buddha’s endorsement of rebirth or of various mythological beings may reflect the influence of pre-existent cultural beliefs rather than being essential to the Buddha’s unique spiritual revelation—with the caveat that his unique spiritual revelation could only have occurred within the constraints of the symbols and understandings available to him at the time. From this point of view, there is no pure Buddhism—only influences upon influences all the way down. As Thich Nhat Hanh wryly observed, Buddhism is made up entirely out of non-Buddhist elements.

In addition, Buddhist traditions have not only been shaped by these influences but have adapted themselves to become more relevant to the concerns of different civilizations and eras. Consider how Engaged Buddhism has emerged to meet the exigencies of crises affecting contemporary societies, or how, as Chinese Buddhism became more “Chinese,” it became less concerned with stepping off the wheel of rebirth and more a way of becoming intimate with the world.

While the idea of a return to a pure Buddhism may be a myth, myths often contain important psychological insights. Religious traditions need continual liberation from ideas and practices that have become ossified, obsolete, rote, or counterproductive. What speaks to one culture—or a generation within a culture—may not speak to all cultures and all times. In the Blue Cliff Record, a monk asks Zen Master Zhaozhou, “You often say, ‘The Way is not difficult, only don’t pick and choose.’ Hasn’t that become a cliche?” The question of whether a teaching or practice is alive or dead is something open to continuous inquiry.

Zen And Authenticity

Is the Zen we practice today the same Zen practiced by the ancient Tang Dynasty Zen masters? We know from Buddhist scholars like Alan Cole (2016) and John McRae (2001) that Song Dynasty Zen was qualitatively different from Tang Dynasty Zen. The Tang Dynasty masters were more traditional in their teaching styles than we probably imagine them, but in their retellings, the Song Dynasty intelligentsia transformed them into the dramatic, mythological figures we recognize today with their fly whisks, blows, and shouts. While the Tang Dynasty masters studied the Mahayana sutras, Song Dynasty Zen produced its own prodigious literature—The Platform Sutra, The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, the Sandokai, the Xinxinming, The Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, The Recorded Sayings of Linji, The Blue Cliff Record, The Gateless Gate, and The Book of Serenity—which would become the prime focus of latter-day Zen students. It’s not entirely clear what type of meditation the earliest Zen masters practiced as the early masters did not leave meditation manuals behind. On the other hand, many of today’s Zen practices— whether silent illumination or koan practice—only get clearly described around the eleventh century. While there are lines of continuity in Zen practice over the past 1,500 years, there is also a process of change, development, and, at times, discontinuity.

Mixed continuity and discontinuity is also the story of Japanese Zen. Eihei Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, left Japan to go to China to find “the real Zen.” He was dissatisfied with thirteenth-century Japanese Zen and went in search of something “more authentic.” He met his teacher in China, became enlightened, and brought his understanding back to Japan. His religious and literary masterpiece, the Shobogenzo, remains a central text for Zen practitioners the world over. Dogen’s search for the “real Zen” is another example of the perennial search for a “real Zen” that no longer exists and must be rediscovered.

Four hundred years after Dogen, his flame had dwindled to a mere flicker. Koan study devolved into receiving written “approved solutions” from one’s teacher drawn from koan verses, esoteric mantras, and Taoist doctrine. There were pockets of awareness about the fallen state of Japanese Zen: Shido Mu’nan (1603-1676) criticized the priests of his day as “the worst sort of evil there is, thieves who get by without having to work.” Confucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan (1609-1691) thought Zen teachers were prepared to “flatter any daimyo (feudal warlord), millionaire, or rascal” and proclaim him enlightened. Dokuan Genko (1630-1698) said “those nowadays who claim to be Dharma heirs are merely receiving paper Zen.” Mangen Shiban (1703) thought authentic Zen had ceased to exist after the first five or six generations of Japanese Zen teachers. Menzan Zuiho (1768) observed contemporary monks “neither uphold the precepts, practice meditation, nor cultivate wisdom.”

While Dogen’s Shobogenzo was considered a “secret treasure,” no commentaries were written on it for nearly four centuries. Fragmentary Shobogenzo texts were handed from teacher to student to signify transmission, but it was the text’s possession that mattered, not its meaning.  Dogen’s writings didn’t resume their central place in Soto Zen until Tokugawa scholars revived his works as part of a back-to-basics movement based on “fukko,” or “return to the old.” But this was not so much a return to original Dogen Zen—many of the old ways had in fact been lost forever—but a re-imagination and reconstruction with Dogen’s texts as their guiding inspiration.

During the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769) systematized and re-energized koan study and Manzen Dohaku (1636-1741) restored face-to-face transmission. Scholars like Menzan Zuiho reintroduced the monk’s hall as the place where monks slept, meditated, and ate, and re-familiarized Soto Zen with Dogen’s writings. This has led Haskel (2001) to conclude “Japanese Zen as we know it today is Tokugawa Zen, a teaching that looks back to its medieval roots but does it through the prism of its own special concerns.” But that is an overstatement—today’s Japanese Zen isn’t Tokugawa Zen. It’s Tokugawa Zen as reimagined through the prism of the Meiji restoration.

During the Meiji Era (1868-1889) the new government, viewing Buddhism as an “ancient evil,” initiated a policy of separating Buddhism from Shinto and then eradicating it: nearly 18,000 temples were closed and over 60,000 monks and nuns forcibly laicized. To survive, Japanese Buddhism had to redefine itself in response to government persecution, rising Japanese nationalism, and the encroachment of Western science and religion. The New Buddhism (Shin Bukkyō) movement was a part of that response, reformulating Buddhism with an eye towards the West, and its members (including D.T. Suzuki and Shaku Soen) had a significant impact on how Zen came to be understood in the West. In the more than century that has subsequently passed, transformation and change have continued unabated. The Kyoto School—the academic movement interpreting Zen in the light of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—had a significant effect on Japanese Zen, as did the wars of Japanese imperialism, the American occupation, and the post-war Japanese reconstruction. So did Kodo Sawaki’s (1880-1965) promotion of zazen as a lay practice and the emergence of Sambo Kyodan as a hybridized Soto-Rinzai lay lineage.

This story of change, innovation, and reinvention is not unique to Zen: One could tell a similar story about any school of Buddhism—Theravada, Mahayana, or Vajrayana. Buddhism is always decaying, dying, dead and gone—and then reborn again, the same but different. This is the one way the doctrine of rebirth turns out to be literally true.

One final Zen story. It’s the tale of Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler, the current abbot of Green Gulch Farm, drawn from Two Shores of Zen (2009), his searingly honest portrayal of his experiences in American and Japanese Zen settings. As Rutschman-Byler begins his narrative, he finds himself questioning the authenticity of American Zen, worrying it offers a diminished promise of awakening. He is disdainful of non-celibate monastics, the democratic weakening of monastic hierarchies, comfortable monasteries with heated rooms and gourmet meals, and Zen teachers who act as spiritual friends rather than inspiring devotion as enlightened beings. Like Dogen going to China, he goes to Japan seeking a more authentic Zen experience. It is yet another version of the belief that real Buddhism has been lost, and one must search for a more authentic one.

What he discovers in Japan are twin aspects of Japanese Zen in decline: on the one hand, a nearly moribund family-temple “funeral” Buddhism, and on the other hand, an austere, demanding practice with a master who —while possessing the hallmarks of a possibly enlightened being—is aging, infirm and has left no Dharma heirs; whatever tradition he represents is dying with him. His temple is populated with Japanese students who, failing to duplicate their master’s attainments, sneak off at night, and Westerners devoting themselves to an ascetic ideal that’s no longer possible for them. Rutschman-Byler struggles with the austerities and politics of monastic life and the unruly resistance of his own human nature—his cravings for sex, romance, carbohydrates, and an end to the bitter winter cold. In doing so, he devotes himself to a practice that threatens to undermine his sanity and harden his heart. He returns home chastened, and more-or-less reconciled to an imperfect American Zen:

Whichever path is better, or more traditional, or more conducive to real spiritual understanding and compassion, the basic fact that I’m left with is that simply I am a Western Buddhist, and that try as I might, my … Western Buddhist values underlie my practice. I have tried, and failed, to force myself to think that [Japanese-style] monastic practice is better than, or finally even necessary … for meaningful, everyday worldly practice. Have I lost anything in that? Yes. Have I gained something?— indeed, my whole life, just as it is, reclaimed and renewed as precisely the territory of unsurpassed enlightenment (pp. 182-183).

 Sometimes being more “authentic” to a tradition ends up being less true to oneself.

Authenticity to Oneself

Authenticity to oneself emerges as a major theme in the writings of Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, eventually becoming so central to modern life that philosopher Charles Taylor calls our era “The Age of Authenticity.” This search for authenticity is an inevitable aspect of modernity: we feel adrift amidst competing traditions which have lost their compelling authority, and competing visions of ourselves that call out for embodiment and enactment. Which path constitutes a genuine movement of the “true” self in its unfolding and actualization, and which is mere play-acting and posturing?  Is there a “true self” to develop and express, or is “emptiness” and “formlessness” our true home? If nothing is genuinely “authentic,” how are we to fashion ourselves? What are the goalposts and guidelines? What do we even mean by “authentic?”  We Western convert Buddhists find ourselves in an awkward position. We’re postmoderns par excellence —doubters, questioners, and searchers — rejecting our birth religion and setting ourselves adrift. We want to ground ourselves in something authentic but are incapable of the kind of faith in a new religion we could not give to our old.

There are, however, aspects of Buddhism that are uniquely suited to our postmodern sensibilities. The doctrine of emptiness fits hand-in-glove with the process-relational aspects of postmodernism—the understanding that at bottom there is no bottom: no unchanging essence that stands behind us or anything else. It’s process and flux all the way down, and the bits and pieces we borrow to create ourselves are not “ours” but borrowed from our culture, memes afloat in the hive mind. The question is, which borrowings and adoptions carry something valuable forward — liberate and actualize potentials in a positive way—and what criteria should we adopt to evaluate our progress? Modern Western Buddhism reinforces and develops several criteria—presence, awareness, immediacy, whole-heartedness, integrity, openness, and  interconnection — that resonate with Western romanticism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and existentialism and wed them to a humanist ethics of empathy, mutual understanding, compassion, fairness, justice, and liberation.

Is this modern Western Buddhism an “authentic” Buddhism?  It’s not your grandfather’s Buddhism. It’s not Theravada. It’s not Bodhidharma Zen. It’s not Dogen Zen. But Western Buddhism is completely authentic in another sense.  It’s authentic in that we can completely get behind it. It’s a platform on which we can authentically practice without pretense and without cutting off or eliding what we sense deeply and irrevocably in our bones.

Will it take us to the Other Shore? Do we still believe in that other shore—a final destination that is permanent, wholly transcendent, and beyond all suffering? What our modern Western Buddhism can do is move us continually forward beyond our selves, breaking the chains of habit, prejudice, and character, opening us to deeper levels of interconnectedness, opening our hearts, lessening our clinging and egocentricity, developing our equanimity and acceptance, and enabling the continual questioning that makes our never-ending journey an adventure worth living. It’s not another shore exactly, but it’s a process we can authentically devote ourselves to.

Modern Western Buddhism isn’t the final version of Buddhism; it’s just ours. The next historical era will require something new—something drawing different water from the Buddhist well and blending it with insights specific to its time and place. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “philosophy can never revert to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.” Every great philosopher changes the world so that we can never quite see things the same way again. We can’t live as if Hume, Descartes, Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche never existed — whether we’ve read and understood them or not, our culture has been changed by them, and we’ve been changed along with it. In the future some new philosopher will think new thoughts, invent new metaphors, address new problems, and change the ways our descendants will understand and practice the Dharma. As a 2,500 year old conversation on awakening and liberation, the well of Buddhism is deep — it will always have something valuable to contribute. And once again, it will be reborn, the same but different.

References

Braun, Erik (2018). The Insight Revolution, Lion’s Roar, July 5. https://www.lionsroar.com/the-insight-revolution/

Chuan Zhi (2019). Exploring Chan: An Introduction to the Religious and Mystical Tradition of Chinese Buddhism.Songlark.

Cole, Alan (2016). Patriarchs on Paper: A Critical History of Medieval Chan Literature. University of California Press.

Haskel, Peter (2001). Letting Go. The Story of Zen Master Tōsui. University of Hawaii Press.

McCrae, John (2003). Seeing Through Zen. University of California Press

Rutschman-Byler, Jiryu Mark (2009). Two Shores of Zen: An American Monk’s Japan. Lulu.com

Tan, Piya (2009). How Buddhism Became Chinese, 3^rd Revision. https://www.themindingcentre.org/dharmafarer/sutta-discovery/sd-40-49

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (2015). Buddhist Romanticism. Metta Forest Monastery. https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/BuddhistRomanticism200728.pdf

]]> https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2024/03/buddhism-and-authenticity/feed/ 5 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2023/10/review-of-revamp-writings-on-secular-buddhism/ https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/2023/10/review-of-revamp-writings-on-secular-buddhism/#comments Tue, 17 Oct 2023 21:45:08 +0000 https://www.existentialbuddhist.com/?p=1209 Continue reading "Book Review of Revamp: Writings on Secular Buddhism"

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Winton Higgins is a prominent Australian secular Buddhist, and Revamp: Writings on Secular Buddhism (Tuwhiri, 2021) has been hailed by Stephen Batchelor, as “the most comprehensive account of secular Buddhism currently available.” Since Stephen Batchelor’s name is, in some ways, almost synonymous with secular Buddhism, this is high praise indeed. Higgins has been influenced by many of the same authors who have been important to my own development—Stephen Batchelor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David McMahan, Alasdair McIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty—just to name a few. We have similar views on what modern Buddhism ought to look like: focused on individual and collective flourishing, pragmatic, ethical, humanistic, non-metaphysical, and socially engaged. We also agree on a Buddhism that leads to an enlarged sense of being—more present, embodied, heartfelt, and caring—and not a relinquishment of that which makes us most human.

Revamp is easily readable and a good place to start for readers wanting a quick snapshot of what an important stream of secular Buddhism looks like today. (Actually, Stephen Batchelor’s books might be better places to start—but Revamp thoroughly summarizes Batchelor’s thinking.) The book includes discussions on how Buddhism intersects with existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and other contemporary currents of thought; an extended commentary on Pope Francis’s encyclical on protecting the Earth, Laudato Si’; a critique of neoliberalism; and an extended argument for economic democracy.

While I agree with much of what Higgins has to say, I wish I could say I liked the book better. While Higgins is sympathetic to the pragmatist philosophical tradition, his book contains a good deal of black-and-white thinking on a variety of topics. He contrasts secular Buddhism (good) with traditional, institutional, religious, and monastic Buddhism (bad). He contends (along with Stephen Batchelor) that we can discern what the historical Buddha thought apart from (what Higgins would call) the layers of superstition, mythology, metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, self-purification, hierarchy, patriarchy, and ritual he believes got added by those who came later. It’s no accident that this excavated historical Buddha sounds suspiciously like a contemporary secular Buddhist: non-metaphysical, pragmatic, and existential.

The idea we that we can extract an authentic historical Buddha apart from all the ways the Buddha is portrayed in the traditional Buddhist canons parallels the belief that we can discover the real Socrates apart from Plato’s dialogues, the real Jesus apart from the Gospels, the real Confucius apart from the Analects, or the real Laozi apart from the Daodeching. I personally think these are hopeless tasks. We can make highly educated guesses about the historical context in which these sages lived (Johannes Bronkhorst’s Greater Magadha is a case in point), but the only Socrates, Confucius, Laozi, Jesus, or Buddha we can really know are the ones who are the protagonists of narrative or epigrammatic texts—the living people who were the bases for these texts are forever lost to history. What we can do is discover which of the actions and words of the protagonists in these texts resonate for us today and speculate about what they might have meant to hearers long ago. I suspect every culture and era interprets or reconstructs a Buddha for its time and place.

Higgins ends his book with a one-sided analysis of the history of capitalism, market economies, neoliberalism and globalization and the need to transition society towards some form of democratic socialism. This section of the book is more jeremiad than thoughtful analysis.

The following quote from the book will give you the general flavor of his analysis:

“The earth and its creatures will never be safe while the institutions of the Washington consensus and Wall Street’s and the City of London’s kleptocrats continue to dictate the basic settings for economic activity – notwithstanding the temporary gains that activists in civil society achieve.”

If this style of analysis appeals to you, you will like the rest of this chapter. To me, it’s another example of black-and-white thinking. I don’t think Higgins has a deep understanding of economics—the reasons how and why things have evolved as they have or the forces that might facilitate or impede an evolution towards greater economic democracy. His heart is in the right place—he has a grand moral vision of how a better society might differ from ours—but no roadmap for how to get from here to there.

I agree with Higgins that the way we carry on our economic activity needs reform, and that the levels of inequality we see in industrialized societies and between the global north and south is a moral disgrace. I also agree that our economic activity is destroying the eco- and  bio-systems our lives and the lives of many species depend on. Finally, I agree that morally realigning our priorities is an important part of an engaged Buddhism. But I believe the best way to achieve improvement is not by “ending” capitalism, globalization, or multinational corporations, but by strengthening the countervailing powers that constrain them: i.e., labor unions, environmental groups, governmental anti-trust, consumer, and environmental watchdogs, political parties that favor progressive taxation, universal healthcare, affordable post-high school education, affordable housing, and a living wage, and so on. As awful as the world is, and as much work as there is left for us to do, Higgins never really grapples with the fact that the capitalism he laments, for all its warts, has lifted more people out of dire grinding poverty and hopelessness in both rich and poor countries alike than any system that preceded it. So, one cheer for capitalism.  Now let’s try to do better.

To summarize, this book is best when it describes the reasons why a naturalized, psychologically- and ethically-oriented understanding of Buddhism might be the best fit for people like us living in late modern cultures. It is weakest when it tries to read this modern Buddhism back into ancient history, when it sets other forms of Buddhism up as strawmen to define itself against, and when it ventures from moral into economic analysis.

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Linda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer’s Reflective Meditation: Cultivating Kindness and Curiosity in the Buddha’s Company (2023, Precocity Press) is a lively written conversation between the authors on their understanding of meditation and the meditative path. Linda Modaro is the founder and lead teacher at Sati Sangha, a Southern California based online meditation community, and Nelly Kaufer is the founder and lead teacher at Pine Street Sangha in Portland, Oregon. The book was edited by prominent Australian secular Buddhist Winton Higgins and originally published in New Zealand under the Tuwhiri imprint, which is a secular Buddhist press.

This is a book that I think can be very helpful, especially (but not only) for beginning meditators. The authors provide a free, open, non-prescriptive approach to meditation. If you’re sitting still and paying attention to whatever experience is arising right now, then you are meditating correctly, regardless of what the content of that experience is. In this way, their approach to meditation, although steeped in the Insight Meditation tradition, is more like Zen shikantaza (just sitting) then the usual Insight Meditation instructions. So, for example, if you spent your time on the cushion daydreaming or brainstorming instead of breath-focused or sensory-focused, you weren’t being a bad meditator—that was just the way your mind happened to be disposed at that moment.  As you reflect back on that daydream, maybe that daydream can open up or reveal to you who you are, who you wish to be, and how your mind works. Everything that occurs during meditation thus becomes grist for the dharmic mill.

The authors also maintain a Middle Way dialectical focus. For example, they emphasize finding a balance in meditation between “making effort” vs. “letting be.” The middle way, they helpfully point out, is not a perfectly maintained balance between these two polarities, but a moving back-and-forth wisely between them. Sometimes more efforting is required, sometimes more letting be is required. The authors believe one can trust oneself to develop a sense for when each of these polarities is required as one gradually gains one’s meditative sea legs. Ultimately no one else can be the arbiter telling you how your meditation ought to be or what you ought to discover on your meditative path. We all come from different places, have different needs and distinct personalities, and our path cannot be ultimately predefined. We can only proceed from where we are, and only in ways that make sense to us. While the authors offer suggestions from traditional Buddhist teachings—the four noble truths, the bramhaviharas, the seven factors of enlightenment, Nagarjuna’s tetralemma, etc.—they allow these teachings to resonate with readers in different ways—kind of like the 12-Step Program advice to “take what you need and leave the rest.”  Their non-authoritarianism is deeply steeped in feminist values of non-domination, tending, and befriending, and their approach is refreshing. They call their approach “reflective meditation” because they recommend a period of reflection after meditating to allow one’s meditative experience to resonate, and also recommend the sharing of those reflections within the sangha. I am undecided as to whether I agree with this emphasis on post-meditation reflection or not—I can see its possible benefits, but also its possible drawbacks. For the right people, however, this might be the exactly right approach, although it may not be for everybody. As they say, different strokes for different folks.

In my own sangha we read a few pages from a selected book before each weekly gathering.  Over the past year we have read books by Toni Packer and Kosho Uchiyama. They each describe different approaches to Zen-style meditation, and reading different voices and approaches helps members understand how there is no one universally right way to meditate  I am going to have my sangha read Reflective Meditation next. I think it will help members who are self-critical about their meditation, who believe they are “bad meditators” or who worry over if they are “doing it right” to move beyond those judgements.  And that’s a form of liberation all in itself.

It is hard to know how to even begin to review of a book of the beauty, depth, nuance, and complexity of David McMahan’s excellent Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds (Oxford, 2023). David’s previous book—his seminal The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford, 2009)—is undeniably the most important book about Buddhist modernism written in this century, and Rethinking Meditation is destined to take its place alongside it as an indispensable classic.

Rethinking Meditation is really two books in one. The first half of the book dismantles the myth that the Buddhist meditation we practice today is the timeless practice handed down from the Buddha. McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time. Every culture and era has “filters” and “magnets” that de-emphasize some aspects of the Buddhist tradition while amplifying others. Thus, modern Western meditators filter out classical Buddhist themes that are incongruous with late modern Western culture (e.g. rebirth, the foulness of the body) and emphasize themes that are culture-congruent and relevant to the moment (e.g. interdependence, secular re-enchantment, savoring the moment). As a result the ways in which an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 B.C. understood meditation and the purposes to which he put it, and those of an American “convert” Buddhist in 2023 are remarkably different. For example, the ancient Indian monk contemplated the foulness of the body—how it was filled with phlegm, pus, and bile—and engaged in charnel ground meditations to watch bodies decompose in order to disenchant himself with and disidentify himself from his body. Modern mindfulness meditators, on the other hand, engage in the body scan to experience the body more fully, to re-inhabit and become more intimate with it, and live a fully embodied life

McMahan also dismantles the idea that meditation is like a “science of mind” that enables  practitioners to objectively discover the “way things really are”— the true, unchanging nature of reality. McMahan describes how the various mental maps offered by the different schools of Buddhism help shape and limit the kinds of insights practitioners are likely to discover through meditation. These maps include the Abhidharma lists of mental states, the eight jhanas, and innatist views on uncovering/actualizing an already existent Buddha-nature. It makes a great deal of difference whether one thinks one becomes a Buddha through developing and embodying certain views, mental states, attitudes, and competencies (e.g. the paramitas and brahma-viharas) or whether one views enlightenment as an uncovering and realization of the Buddha one already is. McMahan is nuanced here, however, and also raises the possibility that meditation also has a deconstructive potential to liberate thinking from pre-established categories—the possibility suggested by Nagarjuna’s tetralemma and Zen’s admonition to go beyond “words and letters.” Thus different strands of the Buddhist tradition both constrain and liberate discovery. What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation. But even when meditation encourages us to transcend our categories, we are all still limited by our social imaginaries, our conditioning, our mental habits, and the constraining visions of our traditions.

In exploring the deconstructive potential of meditation, McMahan gives a brief historical survey of the Prajnaparamita and Madhyamaka traditions. If I have one nit to pick with McMahan here, it is that he relies too heavily on the mainstream Western scholarly interpretive tradition that can be traced back to translator (and Theosophist) Edward Conze. That tradition has attracted critical attention from scholars (Jayarava Attwood and Matthew Orsborn) who question Conze’s translations and interpretations. I am not an expert and have no idea who’s right in this dispute. Perhaps more importantly, the rightness or wrongness of this interpretation does not affect McMahan’s key points. McMahan is a scholar of modern Buddhism, not Indian Buddhism, and relies on others for his information here, but readers should be aware he relies on mainstream scholarly opinion which may be subject to revision.

In explaining how our ideas about mediation change, McMahan emphasizes the social imaginaries that define the ideas and practices that are possible within any particular culture and time. To make his point, he describes how psychiatric illnesses manifest differently in different historical eras depending on changes in the social imaginary—for example the malady of “grand hysteria” that characterized much of 19^th century psychiatry—the illness described in great detail by Charcot, Janet, Freud, and Breuer—is a relative rarity today, whereas contemporary clinicians are more likely to encounter patients with borderline personality disorder.  There are connections that link 19^th Century hysteria with 20^th Century borderline personality disorder—they may be variant expressions of the “same” disease—but that is just the point—there is no “same disease”—there are just different possibilities provided by cultures for the expression of symptoms given similar tragic life histories. In one rare error, McMahan writes that chronic fatigue syndrome and anorexia nervosa are “newer” conditions that didn’t exist in the 19^th century. But chronic fatigue was around in the 19^th Century when it used to be diagnosed as neurasthenia, and Janet devoted a full book chapter to describing anorexia nervosa in 19^thCentury French patients. But interestingly enough, Janet’s patients never described wanting to be thin as their motivation for stopping eating. The disease symptomatology was otherwise the same as it is now, but in that one respect, it was different: another example of McMahan’s point that diseases change with changes in the social imaginary. We can forgive McMahan his minor historical error—psychiatry is not his area of expertise. And his main point—how possibilities for expressing illness change with the social imaginary—is undoubtedly correct. And his point about changing psychiatric presentations was really just offered as an example of how similar kinds of social processes might also affect meditative practice.

In the final part of his book, McMahan explores three aspects of late modern culture that strongly affect contemporary understanding of meditation and Buddhist practice: the ethics of appreciation, authenticity, and autonomy. We can understand how the value of appreciation affects modern Buddhism when we consider how mindfulness meditation is oriented towards discovering the pleasures of embodiment, the savoring of the tastes of food, “stopping to smell the roses,” and discovering new satisfactions in mundane repetitive tasks such as doing the laundry.  We see it also reflected in the title of Maezumi Roshi’s book, Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice. This ethic of appreciation is not something we find in early Indian Buddhism but it characterizes a good deal of modern Buddhism in East Asia and the West.

The ethic of authenticity is reflected in the idea that we have an authentic self (as opposed to a socially-conditioned self) that needs to be uncovered, actualized, and expressed. We see this ethic reflected in the idea that meditation involves “going within” to discover one’s genuine self.  Of course, early Indian Buddhism insisted there was no such thing as an essential or unchanging self.

The ethic of autonomy involves what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered” self—a self that is self-determining and individuated from family and culture—an independent rational observer in control of his or her appetites and desires and able remain unperturbed by untoward life circumstances.  We see this reflected in the idea that meditation builds inner Imperturbability and peace regardless of external circumstances, and that we are responsible for our own happiness.

McMahan suggests that we replace the idea of the autonomous self with what he calls “situated autonomy”—the acknowledgement of our embeddedness in social structures, and the simultaneous acknowledgment that practices like meditation can enhance our agency through increasing our awareness of possibilities  McMahan points out there are aspects of the Buddhist tradition that mitigate against this autonomous self. The inner citadel model of the self is in conflict with late modern perspectives on the plural, contingent, dialogical, and interdependent nature of selves—perspectives that dovetail with traditional Buddhist views on non-self, dependent origination, and emptiness. The interdependent self introduces the possibility of an ethical responsibility towards all beings and towards the natural environment that mitigates against the individualized buffered self. This leads to an Engaged Buddhism that is not just about feeling good but doing good—and doing good in ways that undermine systemic forms of privilege and oppression. But nuanced as always, McMahan points out that this new Buddhist interdependence is a modern secularized variant—it aims at a better world in this life rather than a future life, or though transcending the world completely to arrive at nirvana.

I have not sufficiently commented on the beauty of McMahan’s prose. There are very few academic writers who write as beautifully as he does—at times lyrically and poetically—and yet never losing precision, complexity, and nuance. You will want to read this book all at once, but the ideas are complex enough it ought to be read slowly.

Rethinking Meditation is a book you will want to have on your bookshelf.  It examines  “traditional” Buddhist and secular mindfulness rhetoric and will help you think more clearly about how the changing nature of meditation is affected by historical, social, and cultural contexts.

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