When he was approximately fifteen years old, Tominaga Nakamoto 富永仲基 (1715–1746) was expelled from the merchant academy in Ōsaka, which his father had enrolled him in, for writing an essay that was critical of Confucianism. He may also have been forced to leave home, but little is known with certainty about Tominaga’s life. A few years later, he apparently found employment as a proofreader at Manpuku temple of the Ōbaku Zen sect in Uji. Buddhist monks traditionally copied sūtras by hand, and it was Tominaga’s job to check for copying errors. This allowed him to read very many sūtras, inspiring him to write a book, 出定後語 Shutsujōgogo,1 which was published in 1745, less than a year before his death at the age of 32.2
In this book, Tominaga argued that the Mahāyāna sūtras were not recordings of the actual words of the Buddha, and that even much of the Pāli canon dates to a time long after the Buddha’s death. He distinguished a number of historical stages in the development of Buddhist thought and the sūtras representing that thought, with much of the Pāli canon as the oldest layer, followed by the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras, the Lotus Sūtra, the Flower Garland Sūtra, and so forth. Centuries later, modern Buddhology largely confirmed Tominaga’s thesis.
Tominaga based his thesis on an approach he called 加上 kajō. Theories and ideas are based on earlier theories and ideas and on the attempt to overcome problems associated with those earlier theories and ideas. A close reading of texts, therefore, makes it possible to reconstruct the order in which they were written. He also argued that the meaning of terms differs from period to period and between schools and sects, and that the form and content of ideas is influenced by cultural circumstances and characteristics. In ancient India, magical thought was highly valued, according to Tominaga, while in China there was a preference for literary refinement. This led to different styles of thought, but if these cultural elements would be peeled away, a shared common core, the quest for goodness, would be revealed.
As far as I know, Tominaga was the first to recognize that Buddhism developed in various stages, continuously reinventing itself and continuously adapting to its social and cultural environment and to the needs of the age. His ideas weren’t well received at the time, except by the “nativist” 国学 Kokugaku school of thought that used the theory that the Mahāyāna sūtras were not the words of the Buddha as a tool to attack Buddhism. This tool got blunted, however, and in 1887, Inoue Enryō 井上圓了, the father of Japanese Buddhist Modernism, wrote that he considered it irrelevant whether the Mahāyāna sūtras were or were not the words of the Buddha, or even whether the Buddha actually ever existed at all.3
This Buddhist Modernism was itself, of course, another adaptation of Buddhism to changing social and cultural circumstances. In the 1880s, in response to the threat of Western modernity, Buddhist reformers in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Japan aimed to present Buddhism as a rational, modern philosophy, rather than as a mystical, backward religion. Around the same time, a similar rationalist reconstruction of Buddhism came up in the West. There, early Buddhologists took a scripturalist approach that was heavily influenced by Protestant theology, while others saw in (their interpretation of) Buddhism a more rational or secular alternative to the dogmatic religiosity of traditional Christianity.4
From these converging trends the various currents of Buddhist Modernism and Western Buddhism arose. While there is much variety, there is also much that all varieties of Buddhist modernism share. Most obviously, they all arose in response to (Western!) modernity and secularization, but they also share an emphasis on the rational elements in Buddhism, on lay followers (rather than on monks and nuns), and on this-worldly concerns (rather than on the afterlife). Additionally, many varieties of Buddhism promote a kind of scripturalist “authentic” Buddhism, and almost all of them focus heavily on meditation.
Tominaga’s insight that the form and content of ideas is influenced by cultural circumstances and characteristics is now relatively commonplace, of course, but interpretation is likewise influenced by cultural context, and not everyone is equally aware of such effects. The aforementioned Kokugaku school is an interesting example hereof. This Japanese school of thought, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, argued against Chinese intellectual and cultural influence, and especially against Confucianism, but was unconsciously influenced by then dominant aspects of (neo-) Confucian thought (and to a lesser extent by Daoism as well) in a number of ways.5 Kokugaku is by no means unique in this respect. In the contrary, every interpretation takes place from within a cultural context, and the less aware one is of that cultural context, the greater its unconscious influence.
This kind of unconscious influence in interpretation is a form of “cultural bias”, that is, interpretation in terms of, through the lens of, or by the standards of one’s own culture, wherein “culture” doesn’t just refer to spatial separation, but temporal separation as well. For example, a modern Greek may wholly misunderstand an ancient Greek writer if she is insufficiently aware of relevant cultural contexts. “Contexts” is plural here, as there are (at least) two cultural contexts that matter. To avoid cultural bias and misinterpretation, one (i.e., the interpreter) needs to understand, first, how the cultural context of the writer of a text shaped the ideas in that text, and second, how the cultural context of the interpreter shapes the interpretation of those ideas. Nowadays, scientists involved in various kind of cross-cultural interpretation (in the same sense of “culture”) tend to be well aware of this and have developed various tools to try to avoid or minimize cultural bias, but as mentioned, awareness of cultural bias is less widespread outside such scholarly circles.
Throughout history, Buddhism has been reinterpreted again and again through the lens of cultural concerns of the day. This is one of the drivers of the profusion of sects and schools of Buddhism, as observed by Tominaga (see above). Western Buddhism is no exception in this regard, and is, in fact, a particularly interesting case of how contemporary concerns shape the interpretation of ideas. Western Buddhism is very heterogeneous and fragmented, of course, as I have argued before, but there are common threads throughout, and these are closely related to the Modernist roots of Western Buddhism. (There is also a very strong New Age influence on the ideas of many Western Buddhists, but I have already written about this before, and will mostly ignore this aspect of Western Buddhism here.)
One of these common threads is a kind of bias blind spot (mixed with Orientalism). That is, many Western Buddhists are convinced that their interpretation of Buddhism is objective and not influenced by cultural bias, while the interpretations of others – including those of many Asian schools of Buddhism – are “corruptions of the Dhamma”. This objectivity is illusory, of course, as all interpretation takes place from within a particular cultural and ideological context. There is no neutral point of view or “God trick”6 that allows some kind of perfectly objective interpretation, and the less aware someone is of their own cultural and ideological biases (or in other words, the stronger their belief that they have no such biases), the more their interpretation(s) are shaped by those biases. Conversely, greater awareness of the biases fostered by one’s cultural context makes it easier to recognize and avoid their influence on interpretation. And consequently, one cannot hope to really understand a text from another culture without understanding one’s own culture first. This, however, requires recognizing that some aspect of the way things are (and the way one is used to) might not be “natural” or “normal”, but might be culturally specific, and that is a bit like a fish spontaneously understanding water.
It should go without saying that understanding a text requires knowledge of the cultural context a text was written in. One cannot (fully) understand Xunzi 荀子 without understanding his cultural context, for example. And to some extent, such knowledge can also help in limiting cultural bias. The more one knows about the cultural context of some text, the less the influence of one’s own cultural context in interpreting it, but the latter never completely disappears, and as explained above, mere knowledge of the other’s culture is insufficient. And it should be fairly obvious that lacking sufficient knowledge of both the other’s culture and of one’s own can only lead to disastrous misinterpretation.
It should be equally obvious that an attempt to uncover cultural bias in some variety of Buddhism is doomed to failure if that attempt is (merely) based on a comparison with another variety that is just as biased. Hence, to understand how cultural bias shaped Western Buddhism, we first need a reconstruction of the relevant ideas upheld by the Buddha that is as unbiased as possible, and then analyze how those ideas were transformed by Western cultural assumptions and concerns. The first task is especially difficult, but fortunately, there have been many highly qualified scholars trying to do exactly that, so we can probably get fairly close by combining some of their insights.
the cultural context of the Buddha
While the Buddha lived in India, his cultural context wasn’t primarily determined by the Vedic culture that was dominant in most of India (and that later gave rise to Brahmanic culture and much, much later to Hinduism), but by a subtly different Indian culture that is associated either with śramaṇas (wandering mendicants) and/or the Greater Maghada region.7 Some of the cultural characteristics that appear to be specific to Greater-Maghadan culture include the worship of trees, snakes, and stūpas,8 for example, but a potentially more important difference has to do with medicine.
According to Kenneth Zysk, “Vedic medicine may be characterized as a magico-religious system”,9 while Greater-Maghadan medicine seems to have been more empirical and rational. The reason why this may be relevant is that the Buddha was a śramaṇa and that according to the ancient Greek historian Megasthenes, there were two kinds of śramaṇas: forest-dwellers and physicians. The latter were “humanitarian philosophers” and “men […] of frugal habits” who went “about begging alms from village to village and from city to city” and who cured diseases.10 It is often suggested that the form (but not the content) of the Four Noble Truths is derived from medicine,11 and given these aspects of the Buddha’s cultural context, this is quite a plausible suggestion.
Possibly, the most important ideas in the Buddha’s cultural environment have a Greater-Maghadan origin as well. Belief in rebirth or reincarnation and karma was still absent in early Vedic religion, and the same is true for the related notions of saṃsāra and mokṣa. These started to develop in the Upanishads (i.e., the next stage in Vedic culture), some of which probably predate the Buddha, but they are fully present (in an apparently more mature form, moreover) in all three main religions that developed in Greater Maghada around this time: Jainism, Ājīvikism,12 and Buddhism. Regardless of these ideas’ precise source, it is indubitable that they were very prominent features of the Buddha’s cultural context (and of the other Greater-Maghadan religions as well) and that they (later?) became part of the common ground of virtually all Indian religion and philosophy, although not always in the exact same form. Moreover, even if these ideas did not originate in Greater Maghada, they were already well established there – and thus in the Buddha’s cultural context – during the Buddha’s lifetime (and even during the lifetimes of the founders of the ascetic religions Jainism and Ājīvikism which were earlier than the Buddha’s).
Rebirth, karma, saṃsāra, and mokṣa were cornerstones of the Buddha’s cultural context, but he did not uncritically accept every aspect of the (then) received view. That received view – which is shared by the two other Greater-Maghadan religions as well as many religions and philosophies that grew out of Vedic religion and its Brahmanic descendant13 – is roughly the following:
When someone dies, they are reborn or reincarnated. Rebirth/reincarnation is caused or driven by karma. Life inherently involves suffering, and therefore, an eternal sequence of lives implies eternal suffering. This eternal sequence of lives is called saṃsāra. It is imperative to (try to) escape saṃsāra (i.e., the eternal sequence of lives with eternal suffering). This escape is called mokṣa.
Aspects of this received view differed between religions. Some of these differences are terminological – the Buddha rarely used the term mokṣa, for example, and more often used the term nirvāṇa, which refers to the result of mokṣa – while other differences were more substantial. Religions disagreed about what, if anything, is reborn, about the nature of karma, and about how to achieve mokṣa/nirvāṇa. Perhaps, the most important difference between the Buddha’s views and what appears to have been the received view in Greater Maghada specifically (which was preserved in the two ascetic religions) has to do with karma. The received view was that karma was more or less synonymous with action, and thus that action causes rebirth. Hence, Jainism and Ājīvikism proclaimed that mokṣa requires non-action, or in other words, asceticism (and ideally, even starving yourself to death). The Buddha, however, rejected this view of karma as well as the asceticism it promoted. Instead, he claimed that intentions or volitions (cetanā) (or intentional/volitional actions) rather than (all) actions cause rebirth (through karma). This is what is meant with the famous saying in Chakkanipāta (AN 6.63) that “it is volition [cetanā], bhikkhus, that I call karma” (often translated as “it is volition that I call the deed” or something similar).
on “suffering”
The common idea that life inherently involves suffering (and thus, that endless lives imply endless suffering) calls into question what exactly is meant with “suffering” here. Sanskrit duḥkha (Pāli: dukkha) is usually translated as “pain” or “suffering” in neutral contexts. (In specifically Buddhist contexts, “unsatisfactoriness” is another relatively common translation. More about this below.) Duḥkha is typically contrasted with sukha, meaning something like happiness, pleasure, or bliss. The etymology of both terms is uncertain and disputed, and some suggestions appear rather far-fetched. Hermann Jacobi suggested well over a century ago that the etymological, literal meaning of the two words is “well standing” and “badly standing”, and this remains the most plausible analysis I have seen.14 But in this case, etymology doesn’t really tell us anything relevant.
There are no written sources from Greater Maghada dating to the time that its three religions arose, as Greater-Maghadan culture had no writing yet at that time. The Jain Agamas were written down in the fifth century CE, more than a millennium later, and the Pāli Canon of Buddhism dates also to at least five centuries later.15 The oldest Indian texts are the Vedas, but those belong to Vedic culture, and we cannot just assume that the Greater-Maghadan concept of duḥkha was exactly the same as the Vedic concept. Unfortunately, lacking other contemporary sources, there is not much else we can do either.
Duḥkha does not occur in any of the four Vedas, and its opposite, sukha is rare as well and almost exclusively used in reference to chariots (which fits the aforementioned “well-standing” etymology),16 but both terms occur in the Brāhmanas and Āraṇyakas, the next layer of Vedic texts, which predate the Buddha by a few centuries. In those,
the terms sukha and duḥkha are used with fair frequency, almost always together, and with a semi-technical psychological meaning. In these passages sukha and duḥkha are the experiences of the “body,” as “actions” are of the “hands,” and “sight” of the “eyes.” Buddhist texts never reveal an acquaintance with this technical usage but it no doubt was in the background of their descriptions of sukha and duḥkha as the characteristic experiences of man.17
Hence, in the Vedic sources, duḥkha is a broad notion similar to “pain”, “suffering”, or “distress”. The same is true for the Pāli Canon and the Jain Agamas. The Pāli and Prakrit equivalents of duḥkha found there refer to a similarly broad notion – that is, duḥkha includes pain, sickness, sorrow, loss, existential dread and more.
It is sometimes suggested that “suffering” is not a good translation of duḥkha and to some extent that is correct. A key aspect of the English notion of “suffering” (and its equivalents in many European languages) is involuntariness. Pain, on the other hand, can be voluntary (as in case of the pain involved in getting a tattoo, for example). For this reason, pain is sometimes contrasted to suffering in English-language and related cultural contexts, while in the Indian cultural context, pain (including mental pain) is part of – and perhaps even the paradigmatic aspect of – duḥkha.
Eric Castell and Thomas Metzinger have suggested independently that “suffering” is related to threats to someone’s self-concept, which is interesting when considering the appropriateness of this English word as a translation of the Buddhist notion of duḥkha specifically. Castell’s definition of “suffering” (which is by far the most influential definition of that concept in the context of medicine and nursing) is “the state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of a person”,18 wherein the term “person” refers more or less to someone’s self-concept or the things and capabilities that matter most to someone and which are, therefore, part of one’s self-concept. Much more recently, Metzinger argued that suffering is “owned” by a person and that “the essence of suffering lies in the fact that a conscious system is forced to identify with a state of negative valence and is unable to break this identification or to detach itself” (which also emphasizes the aforementioned involuntariness of suffering).19
Significantly, what appears to be most problematized about duḥkha in the Indian religious traditions is not so much pain, but more subtle forms and aspects of suffering such as its involuntariness and its subversion of what tends to matter to us most – what Castell called “the intactness of the person” – and these are exactly what separate suffering from mere pain. Consequently, while “suffering” and duḥkha are not strictly identical indeed (but words from different languages rarely are), the first is a reasonably accurate translation of the second.
the Buddha’s central teaching in its cultural context
It is traditionally believed that the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11; the title of this sūtra can be translated as “setting the Dharma wheel in motion”) is the Buddha’s first “sermon”, but there are reasons to doubt this traditional account. At the very least, this sūtra was heavily edited, but it might even be a later construction entirely.20 Richard Gombrich has suggested, for example, that instead of recording the first sermon, “the compilers of the Canon put in the first sermon what they knew to be the very essence of the Buddha’s Enlightenment”.21 In either case, however, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta provides a convenient summary of the Buddha’s core ideas, and much of the rest of his teachings could be seen as elaboration and explanation of these core ideas.
The sūtra opens with a rejection of asceticism and hedonism and suggests a “Middle Way” leading to vision, knowledge, peace, awakening, and nirvāṇa. “Asceticism” here refers to Jainism, Ājīvikism, and/or other related religions that arose in Greater-Maghada prior to the Buddha’s lifetime. Note that it is believed that the Buddha tried some form of asceticism (i.e., one of these) before rejecting it, and that his main reason for rejecting asceticism was already explained above. To repeat, the ascetic religions accepted the (received?) view that all action produces karma and that karma leads to rebirth, and thus, that non-action – that is, asceticism – is the path towards liberation from saṃsāra. The Buddha rejected the foundation of this view, however, and claimed that only volitional or intentional action causes karma (or that volitions/intentions cause karma). Hence, asceticism doesn’t work. What is required to achieve liberation is not non-action, but the absence of volition/intention. It is for this reason that the Buddha rejected asceticism, but to be clear, this didn’t mean that he advocated its opposite either. Instead, he suggested a “Middle Path”, and that Middle Path, he continues to explain in the sūtra, is the Noble Eightfold Path.
After introducing the Noble Eightfold Path, he lays out what is arguably the most important doctrine in all of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths (4NT). The following is a translation of these “Truths” by Bhikkhu Boddhi:
[NT1] Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
[NT2] Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.
[NT3] Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.
[NT4] Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.22
The first Noble Truth (NT1), which must be “fully understood” (parijārāti: “comprehend”, “recognize”) according to the sūtra, explains the nature of suffering. The examples given – birth, aging, illness, death – suggest that life inherently involves suffering. This is, of course, the “orthodox” or received view mentioned above. Hence, the Buddha isn’t saying anything new here. What follows is more like a definition than further examples: “separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering”. Notice that this implies an extremely broad view of suffering. Not getting the birthday present that you wanted is suffering. Displeasure is suffering. Hunger is suffering. Physical pain is suffering. Oppression is suffering. Loss is suffering. And so forth.
“The five aggregates subject to clinging” are the skandhas (Sanskrit) or khandhas (Pāli), the five material and mental “aggregates” (form/matter, sensation, perception, mental formation/construction, and consciousness) that play central roles in craving/clinging (and its opposite) due to ignorance. Interpretation of the skandhas and what role exactly they play in the ignorance–craving–karma–rebirth–suffering nexus has been subject to extensive debate within Buddhism and differs significantly between schools. Because of this, and lacking other (relatively) neutral means of disambiguation, it is virtually impossible to say what the Buddha meant exactly, and it is even possible that the Buddha didn’t mention the skandhas in NT1 at all. If this sūtra was heavily edited indeed, then, given the prominence of the skandhas in later (but still early) Buddhism, this is one likely later redaction. Nevertheless, we cannot just assume that and discard it on such speculative grounds, of course! As it is, the text identifies the skandhas with suffering. Skandhas are objects of craving/clinging (or its opposite), which is the origin of suffering according to the Second Noble Truth (NT2), and thus, the last phrase of NT1 plays the role of a bridge to NT2.
The Second Noble Truth (NT2) identifies craving as the cause of rebirth. While NT1 follows Greater-Maghadan orthodoxy, here the Buddha presents a decidedly unorthodox view. The nature of the Buddha’s deviation from the received view in NT2 has already been explained above. Contrary to the orthodox theory of karma being the result of all action, the Buddha linked karma to volitions/intentions or volitional/intentional actions. Volitions or intentions are inseparable from desires or cravings, however. A volitional action is an action rooted in a desire. Hence, the Buddha’s claim in NT2 that craving (or desire) leads to rebirth (or “renewed existence”) is shorthand for a slightly longer causal chain: craving/desire produces volitional/intentional action, which produces karma, which leads to rebirth. This causal chain has a further extension, moreover, as craving is itself ultimately caused by ignorance (as already hinted at above), specifically, ignorance of the impermanence of all things, of the non-existence of the self, and of the nature of suffering.
Craving also more directly causes suffering in this life, of course, both for the person who has the craving themself as well as for others. Perhaps, the best example of the former are pretas (hungry ghosts) who always hunger for something, but can never satisfy that craving. In regard to the latter, the Buddha explicitly mentions in the Akusalamūla Sutta (AN 3.69) that greed – that is, craving for wealth – causes suffering for others. (And it is such greed that leads to rebirth as a preta, by the way.) However, while craving in these ways also causes suffering more directly (i.e., in this life), that is not what NT2 is about, which should be obvious from the start: craving “leads to renewed existence”, and that is the problem.
The explicit mention of the “craving for existence” and the “craving for extermination” is significant, of course. The former refers to a deeply rooted psychological desire or even need for immortality. The latter refers to the desire for a final release from endless suffering in saṃsāra through liberation23 and the achievement of nirvāṇa. Arguably, these are our strongest, deepest rooted cravings or desires, and as such, they play central roles in shaping our volitional/intentional actions (and thereby, karma). (Which means that the very desire for a cessation of rebirth causes further rebirths!)
Further explaining NT2, the sūtra states that the origin of suffering – that is, craving – must be abandoned (pajahati: “give up”, “renounce”, “let go of”), and this makes perfect sense considering the foregoing. If craving causes karma, which causes rebirth, which causes endless suffering in saṃsāra, then the solution is to abandon or give up craving; and that, exactly, is the gist of the remaining Noble Truths.
The Third Noble Truth (NT3) identifies the cessation of suffering with the complete (“remainderless”) cessation of craving. Again, this is an obvious implication of NT2: craving causes karma, which causes rebirth, which causes endless suffering in saṃsāra, and therefore, a cessation of craving breaks this causal chain, leading to a cessation of suffering. No more craving/desire means no more volitional/intentional action and thus no more rebirth-causing karma. Abandoning craving is the path towards ending rebirth, and thereby achieving liberation from suffering. The latter is, as explained above, the common goal of virtually all Indian religions in the Buddha’s cultural environment, and is typically referred to as mokṣa. The Buddha’s path towards this goal is fundamentally different, however, which is the consequence of his association of karma with cetanā (i.e., intention or volition), as expressed among others in NT2.
The Fourth Noble Truth (NT4), finally, presents the path that needs to be “developed” (bhavati24) to achieve the cessation of craving, and thereby the cessation of rebirth and suffering (i.e., nirvāṇa). This path is the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the “Middle Way”, which according to the sūtra, leads to vision, knowledge, peace, awakening, and nirvāṇa.25
In summary, the Buddha largely accepted the worldview of his cultural environment including the ideas that life inherently involves suffering, that karma leads to rebirth, and that an endless cycle of rebirths implies infinite lives with infinite suffering. Where he fundamentally deviated from what appears to have been the received view in his cultural context is that he argued that craving is what (through volition/intention) causes karma. This is the essence of the Second Noble Truth (while the First follows orthodoxy until its last phrase). The Third Noble Truth directly follows from the Second: if craving causes karma, which causes rebirth, which causes endless suffering, then an abandonment (or cessation) of craving brings about a cessation of suffering.
Throughout most of the history of Buddhism, this basic picture didn’t change much, even though it has been elaborated and dressed up in a variety of ways. The goal has always been to reach a stage on the path that (among others) eliminates the craving that generates karma, and thereby end rebirth and associated suffering. Sectarian views differ on the exact nature of that stage and how to reach it, but not on the goal (i.e., liberation from saṃsāra), nor on the nature and cause of suffering. Only with the rise of Buddhist Modernism, an alternative, competing, and quite unorthodox picture arose; and it cannot be overstated how strange that picture is. Buddhism has never been about benefits in this life,26 yet that’s all that Western Buddhist Modernism is about; and there is much more about Western Buddhism that is strange from the perspective of the cultural contexts of Buddhism’s emergence and flourishing. However, all of this “strangeness” disappears upon a shift of perspective – what explains the radical divergence of modernist Western Buddhism from traditional Buddhisms is modernist Western culture and ideology.
cultural biases of Western modernism (1):
secularization and cultural hegemony
Whole bookshelves (if not libraries) can be filled with analyses of modern Western culture, but fortunately, not all of that is equally relevant here. So I’ll just focus on those aspects of the cultural context that play the most important roles in the modernist re-interpretation of the Four Noble Truths, and thereby, of what Buddhism is about. That’s still a lot, however, and what complicates matters further is that many of the relevant cultural trends interact with and/or reinforce each other.
Secularization is an obvious starting point, but not an unproblematic one. “Secularization” refers to the idea (or ideas) that society in some relevant sense has become more “secular”. The latter term is somewhat ambiguous, however, and can mean quite different – even contradictory – things depending on what it is applied to. The adjective “secular” derives from Christian Latin saeculum, which was used mainly to refer to the world (or worldly affairs), as opposed to the church (or churchly/religious affairs).27 Hence, “secular” can refer to non-monastic clergy, to that what is not concerned with religion or what does not serve religious goals, to this world or the natural world as opposed to the spiritual world or a/the supernatural world(s), to this (temporal) world as opposed to the “eternal” world or some kind of heaven or afterlife, to worldly (sociopolitical and economic) affairs as opposed to affairs of the church and religious affairs, and so forth. “Secular” in this sense, can also be an antonym of “religious” or “sacred”. By implication, the term “secular” is mostly a negative term. That is, it denotes what something is not: not monastic, not religious, not sacred, not spiritual, not supernatural, and so forth. And the most central of these oppositions is that to religion. Often “secular” just means “non-religious”.
“Secularization”, on the other hand, is a sociological term referring to certain changes of the social roles of religion. For much of the twentieth century, the ruling paradigm in the sociology of religion was the idea that modern societies are becoming increasingly secular, but this paradigm has been kicked of its pedestal more recently.28 Furthermore, the secularization thesis is a bit of a jumble as it concerns a number of very different and more or less independent social developments, as José Casanova has pointed out: “secularization as differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms, secularization as decline of religious beliefs and practices, and secularization as marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere”.29 Arguably, of these aspects or facets of secularization, the third is the most important. In a secularized society, religion is (mostly) marginalized to the private sphere. A related notion is that of secularism, which refers to a thin ideology focused on exactly this marginalization of religion to the private sphere (and especially out of the political sphere).
Now, two things must be noted in regard to the foregoing. First, while the traditional notion of “secular” – among others – has to do with how a religion or religious institution engages with society, “secularization” (as well as “secularism”) refers to how a society engages with religion. It is society that becomes more secular according to the secularization thesis, not religion. Consequently, when a religion or religious institution becomes more activist or socially engaged, it becomes more secular (in the sense of increasing worldly concern; see above), but less secularized (or strictly speaking, its adherents are becoming less secularized). However, this subtle difference between “secular” and “secularized” is often overlooked, and under the influence of secularization, the term “secular” is sometimes (perhaps even often) abused to refer to religions that are actually less worldly concerned (and thus “anti-secular”) because they have retreated into the private sphere (i.e., secularized).
The second “thing” that must be noted is that the traditional secularization thesis oversimplifies social reality and that it is easy to point out social developments and phenomena that appear to directly contradict the thesis.30 The second facet of secularization mentioned by Casanova, “decline of religious beliefs and practices”, may appear to be true in many – but certainly not all! – societies, but often this apparent “decline” is really a shift to alternative forms of spirituality such as New Age beliefs.31 Hence, what may be in decline in many (but again, not all) societies is traditional religion (or traditional variants thereof, and/or traditional religious authority), but not religion per se. Similarly, “secularization as marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere”, the third and most important facet of secularization mentioned by Casanova, also appears to be contradicted by religiously motivated activism against abortion, against changing ideas about sexuality and gender, and so forth. I think it is a mistake to quote such examples as evidence against secularization, however, but to explain that, I must introduce some other key concepts first.
Above I mentioned that secularism is a “thin ideology”, but didn’t explain what that means. The notion of thin ideology was introduced in the late 1990s in reference to nationalism and was used about a decade later to describe populism. Contrary to a “thick ideology”, a “thin ideology” is limited in scope. A thin ideology is sentiment more than theory and (relatively) narrow in its focus, while a thick ideology involves political theory and includes a much broader picture of what is and is not sociopolitically and economically desirable. Nationalism and populism could be considered thin ideologies in this sense indeed, as they have very narrow scopes (or focus) and rarely involve (much) political theory.32 Prototypical examples of thick ideologies are socialism, anarchism, fascism, and neoliberalism. What contrasts these to thin ideologies is – most of all – their much wider scope. That is, these thick ideologies include much more detailed and wide-ranging pictures of the ideal society than thin ideologies do.
Both thin ideologies and thick ideologies are political ideologies, but there also is a sociological notion of ideology that is much more important here. Ideology in the sociological sense is the collection of ideas, values, beliefs, perspectives, knowledge claims, and so forth that serve the interests of a social class, specifically (unless specified otherwise) of the ruling class. (Notice that both thin and thick political ideologies can be part of ideology in the sociological sense.) These ideas etcetera spread throughout society due to the social dominance of the ruling class. The notion of ideology in this sense was introduced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ in The German Ideology, written around 1846 but first published in 1932. The term gained a life of its own, however, and has been used by Marxists and non-Marxists in a variety of related senses. In its original form, the notion of ideology is captured most briefly in Marx’s and Engels’s claim that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”,33 but a more generalized version of the notion is that “ideology” refers to the values and ideas etcetera that serve the interests of some privileged social group and that have become the dominant, “common sense” ideas because of the social dominance of that group. (Hence, while the Marxist notion refers explicitly to class, there can be race ideology as well, for example, or gender ideology. The latter is the collection of ideas that serve the interests of the privileged gender, that is, males.34)
A related notion is that of cultural hegemony, or just hegemony for short, which was introduced by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935.35 According to Gramsci, the state’s or ruling elite’s control over the people can be maintained by two and only two means: coercive power and hegemony. The latter is the people’s spontaneous and uncritical acceptance of, or consent to the sociopolitical status quo (as well as their unconscious adoption of the values, desires, ideas, beliefs, perspectives, knowledge claims and so forth that serve the interests of the state and/or ruling elite by supporting that status quo). These two bases of power aren’t mutually exclusive. Rather, the “normal” situation
is characterized by the combination of force and consent [i.e., hegemony], which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. Indeed, the attempt is always made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion […].36
Hegemony is (usually) not planned or actively organized – it is not some kind of conspiracy. It is spontaneous consent – not coerced acceptance. Gramsci suggested that this spontaneous consent is caused by the prestige and confidence that the socially dominant group(s) enjoy(s), but also that “the intellectuals” and the “organs of public opinion” play an essential role in spreading the worldview of the ruling group(s) to the masses. Hence, hegemony is a more or less automatic social process. Three decades earlier, Thorstein Veblen described a similar social process of what he called “emulation” in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, but in his theory what is emulated are the norms of “the good life” rather than the ideological underpinnings of the sociopolitical and economic status quo.
The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern civilised communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata. The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal.37
In distinction from Veblian emulation of ideals and standards, Gramscian hegemony depends for its success on invisibility. Hegemony reaches maximum effectiveness when the hegemonic values and beliefs do not need to be supported or promoted anymore; when it becomes unnecessary to say that “there is no alternative” (one of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite slogans), because everyone already believes that there is no alternative, because the very idea of an alternative has become incomprehensible. This invisibility of cultural hegemony is particularly important in the present context. Hegemonic values and beliefs are the default or common sense values and beliefs within their cultural context, and because of that, we are not inclined to become consciously aware of them. Of course, much the same is true for other cultural biases, which is a key point of this article. Without an explicit awareness of our own cultural, hegemonic, and ideological predispositions, we inevitably interpret the ideas of others through the distorting lenses and filters created by those predispositions. And therefore, to understand how cultural (etc.) bias shaped Western Buddhism, we need to become aware of the role of the dominant ideologies, hegemonic values and beliefs, and other kinds of cultural and ideological biases that we are not normally consciously aware of, but that influence or even co-determine how we see, how we interpret, and how we think.
A few paragraphs back, I wrote that I think it is a mistake to point at religiously motivated activism against abortion or against changing ideas about sexuality and gender as evidence against secularization. While examples like these may seem to clearly refute the key facet of secularization as marginalization of religion to the private sphere, it is important to realize that the public, activist, and thus apparently not “secularized” face of religion does not in any way threaten hegemony or the interests of the ruling elite or state. Religion is allowed a public role only in as far as it doesn’t conflict with key hegemonic values and beliefs and doesn’t threaten the sociopolitical and economic status quo and the ideological basis on which it rests. Religion, then, is allowed to affect the private lives of ordinary people (but rarely the elite!) in this way, but not to play any significant political or economic role. Hence, this is hardly a counter-example to secularization as marginalization of religion to the private sphere.
Furthermore, secularization is itself an instrument of hegemony. The marginalization of religion to the private sphere – except in areas where it doesn’t really matter (from a hegemonic perspective, at least) – disables it as a potential threat to the sociopolitical and economic status quo. (By allowing or co-opting the “harmless” public role of religion mentioned in the previous paragraph, it may even become an enthusiastic supporter of the status quo.) From a historical perspective, this is interesting, as religion has always been a tool of hegemony – that is, religion has always been used to keep the masses in line and to condition them to accept the status quo (for example, by conditionally promising people a better afterlife or rebirth). Perhaps, the rise of capitalism necessitated a switch in Europe, as pre-modern Christianity objected to usury and other rent-seeking practices that are more or less defining aspects of capitalism. The incompatibility of traditional Christianity and capitalism, then, was solved by marginalizing the former into the private sphere. To be clear, this is mere speculation. What’s more important is the change itself. Religion used to be an instrument of hegemony everywhere. That is not to say that there haven’t been anti-hegemonic religious movements, of course. But as far as I can see, in all cultures religion has been used as a tool to condition people to accept the status quo. Somehow, for some reason, this changed in Western modernity and religion was increasingly denied a significant public role, and (or because) that denial itself became an instrument of hegemony.
It is worth noting that the theory of hegemony explains both secularization (as the process of marginalization of religion to the private sphere) and its exceptions. Secularization/marginalization serves the interests of those who profit from the status quo by disabling religion as a potential threat thereto. Exceptions occur in areas that are of little concern to those who profit from the status quo and may even result in enlisting religion as a supporter of hegemony. Furthermore, while it must be emphasized that not all cultural biases are hegemonic (or related ideological) biases, many of the biases that matter most in the present context are related to cultural hegemony/ideology, and it is largely for this reason that I spend so much attention to this topic.
The most important cultural biases that have no obvious relation to cultural hegemony are rooted in 19th century cultural trends. Already mentioned above is secularity (in distinction from secularization), which has two key facets that matter here. The first is a kind of anti-supernaturalism and rationalism, which originates in a 19th century reaction to the perceived irrationality and dogmatic supernaturalism of traditional Christianity. “Anti-supernaturalism” here refers to the rejection of overt supernatural elements in religion, such as gods, angels, miracles, and so forth. It is not the same as “naturalism”, as those who reject such overt supernatural elements, may still believe in less obviously non-naturalist entities and explanations, such as souls, immaterial minds, or various (other) violations of physics. The second is a kind of democratization of religion by shifting the emphasis from monastics to the laity.
The other kind of cultural bias without an obvious hegemonic association is a cluster of beliefs and ideals with roots in Romanticism and 19th century counter-cultural movements like New Thought and Theosophy (that eventually gave birth to the New Age movement). Authenticity as a cultural ideal goes back to these trends and movements. As do beliefs in authentic or “true selves” and the notion that one should try to discover or become one’s true/authentic self, or similar ideas. It is worth noting that these ideas are very Western, while this may not be the case (to the same extent, at least) for the two facets of secularity mentioned in the previous paragraph – anti-supernaturalism and an emphasis on lay practice are also found in the South and East-Asian traditions, for example.
cultural biases of Western modernism (2):
individualism, pathologization, and usefulness
Let us return to the hegemonic and ideological trends and biases in Western culture. The most important of those has been discussed already – it is secularization as marginalization of religion to the private sphere, or in other words, the elimination of religion as a significant political force and potential threat to the sociopolitical and economic status quo. There are, however, at least three other clusters of hegemonic values and beliefs that are nearly (or even just) as important. The first of these has to do with variants and aspects of individualism and egocentrism; the second with the pathologization of the consequences of human/system mismatches; and the third with the idolization of usefulness or benefit.
Individualism as a “cultural dimension” is typically associated with Western culture. Especially since Geert Hofstede’s seminal research on international cultural differences in the 1970s,38 the “individualist” West is often contrasted to the “collectivist” East. This contrast may be slightly misleading however. W. Arthur Lewis was one of the first to suggest that individualism may be a result of wealth or economic growth,39 and there is indeed a positive correlation between wealth (i.e., GDP) and Hofstede’s measurement of individualism with a time gap of several decades (that is, the highest correlation is between GDP roughly half a century before the measurements of individualism), which seems to confirm Lewis’s suggestion.40 Further supporting this idea, according to the Japanese social psychologist Yamagishi Toshio, the Japanese are now just as individualist as Westerners, but there is considerable friction between their actual individualism and persisting collectivist expectations.41
For the Western neoliberal leaders that came to power in the 1980s – Reagan and Thatcher being the most famous – the cultural individualism that characterized the West wasn’t nearly enough. They aimed, among others, for a cultural revolution to root out the remnants of collectivism. Any kind of collectivity, any kind of social/collective solidarity, anything that could stand in the way of pure selfishness, and even the very concept of “society” had to be denied or abolished. “There is no such thing as society,” Thatcher claimed. “There are individual men and women, and there are families”.42 Neoliberalism became hegemonic, and consequently, changed the world and many of the people inhabiting it. Egocentricity has become normalized, resulting in what Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell have called “the Narcissism Epidemic”,43 and what I called “the Hegemony of Psychopathy” myself.44
While cultural individualism may be an effect of increasing wealth and egocentric hyperindividualism is a key ideological aspect of neoliberalism, there is another variety of individualism (or something closely related to individualism, at least) that seems to be more specifically Western. This is the normative ideal of autonomy. Western philosophers as different as Kant and Nietzsche, as well as virtually every 20th century mainstream thinker, has espoused some version of the ideal of individual autonomy. Many thinkers have even assumed that men essentially are (rather than merely should be) atomic autonomous individuals.45 Hobbes “state of nature” is an obvious example; mainstream economics is another. Furthermore, the normative ideal of individual autonomy is also a cornerstone of (classical) liberalism and neoliberalism.
The second aspect of cultural hegemony I mentioned at the beginning of this section is “the pathologization of the consequences of human/system mismatches”. This tendency could be seen as a corollary or implication of individualism and the core hegemonic belief that the sociopolitical and economic status quo is normal or “natural”. Given the denial of the social and systemic and the glorification of the individual (as Thatcher literally did in the quote above), any kind of distress or suffering can only be due to individual shortcomings or failure, even if the real causes are of a social or systemic nature. The latter is, of course, exactly the point: the status quo must be maintained. That’s ultimately what cultural hegemony is about. If individual problems resulting from a mismatch between systems and the needs of individuals cannot be the system’s fault, because the system is “natural” or “there is no alternative” (to quote Thatcher once more), then work-related stress or depression, economic insecurity and poverty, and so forth are purely individual problems and responsibilities. Or in other words, if you’re somehow no longer able to cope with some social system that you’re a part of, then you are sick (or weak or deficient, etc.), and not that system.
Lastly, there is a strong tendency in Western culture to equate value with practical utility, usefulness, or benefit, although this tendency may be of Anglo-Saxon origin and is (or was?) certainly much stronger in English-speaking Western countries than in the rest of the West. This tendency is sometimes called “utilitarianism” or “materialism”, but both terms are very misleading. “Utilitarianism” is a moral theory holding roughly that the right thing to do is whatever leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. The term “materialism” refers to a number of unrelated theories that hold that in some material sense the “material” is primary and the “ideal” (existentially or otherwise) depends (or supervenes) on the “material”. Neither of these -isms has anything to do with glorifying utility or benefit. A good example of the (ab-) use of the term “materialism” in this context is Chögyam Trungpa’s notion of spiritual materialism, which refers to a self-centered consumption of elements of Buddhism focused entirely on their usefulness.46
The remainder of this article will discuss a number of examples of cultural bias and ideology (including cultural hegemony) in Western Buddhism and Buddhist modernism. It must be noted, however, that these are merely illustrative examples, and that any of these deserves much closer scrutiny. Furthermore, it is not my aim to give some kind of complete or comprehensive overview of all cultural biases and ideological/hegemonic “corruptions” in Western Buddhism and/or Buddhist modernism. Such an overview would far exceed the scope of an article like this. Instead, I will focus on the examples that I find most interesting and/or most important.
Before proceeding to a discussion of these “illustrative examples”, let’s briefly go over the list of main cultural and ideological/hegemonic biases mentioned in this and the previous section. First of all, I made a (sometimes overlooked) distinction between secularity as de-supernaturalization and secularization (and secularism) as (mainly) the marginalization of religion to the private sphere. Related to these, the trend of de-monasticization, which is a defining aspect of Buddhist modernism, shifts the emphasis from monastic to lay practice. Quite unrelated to these, on the other hand, Western culture tends to idolize authenticity and an authentic or “true self”, as well as (usually selfish) usefulness, utility, or benefit. The latter – in its selfish variety – is related to another important aspect of Western culture: competitive and egocentric individualism and the normalization of narcissism and cultural psychopathy as extreme varieties thereof. Lastly, and closely related to this individualism, there is a tendency to pathologize kinds of suffering caused by social systems (resulting effectively in a culture of “blaming the victim”). Of these cultural and ideological biases, secularization as the marginalization of religion to the private sphere (or privatization, for short) is the most important, in my opinion, while de-monasticization, on the other hand, is relatively uninteresting and will receive no further attention below.
example 1: pretas
In Buddhist cosmology, pretas or “hungry ghosts” (a literal translation of Chinese and Japanese 餓鬼) are one of the six kinds of beings (with associated realms) one can be reborn as. Pretas (typically) have insatiable desires. They have enormous bellies and tiny mouths (and/or pencil-thin necks) and are, therefore, incapable of satisfying their hunger. The Petavatthu (part of the Khuddaka Nikaya) includes many stories of people being reborn as pretas due to their greed, miserliness, or stinginess. What makes greed (etc.) so bad from a Buddhist perspective that it has such an adverse karmic consequence is, perhaps, most clearly explained in the Akusalamūla Sutta (AN 3.69). There, the Buddha explains that greed (etc.) causes suffering for others. And indeed, the immediate consequences of greed and miserliness that cause later rebirth as a preta in the Petavatthu stories are always some kind of (continued) suffering for others (although in some stories this other or these others manage to avoid that due to their own acuity).47
Pretas (and the cosmology they are part of) do not fit well in modernist or Western Buddhist frameworks, partially because of the de-supernaturalizing and demythologizing tendencies therein. Rebirth – and especially rebirth as some apparently supernatural being (or in some apparently supernatural realm) – tends to be hard to accept for most Westerners, especially those with a more secular worldview. (But also because the doctrine of rebirth has no practical utility in this life.) Moreover, the underlying ethics doesn’t fit well in a Western self-centered worldview either. In a recent book about the role of pretas in Buddhist thought, Adeana McNicholl writes that
the dismissal of indigenous cosmologies can be traced back to colonial knowledge production, in which scholars, in conversation with Asian Buddhist modernist reformers, developed new forms of Buddhism tailored to modern scientific rationalist, romantic, and monotheistic religious discourse. These new, hybrid forms of Buddhism, often called Buddhist modernism, frequently presented demythologized visions of Buddhism that psychologized cosmology […]. While Buddhist modernism is not a purely Western discourse, this reading is particularly common in contemporary Western interpretations of Buddhism that suggest that the different realms of rebirth act as metaphors for mental, affective states – in the case of pretas, this is often a state of addiction or a greedy mindset. This reading is not unique to practitioners but has also been adopted by scholars of Buddhist ethics.48
McNicholl gives two examples of Western scholars adopting such a psychological understanding of pretas and the associated realm of rebirth, Charles Goodman and Jay Garfield. As mentioned, greed leads to rebirth in the preta realm (i.e., as a preta), and this association of the preta realm (as one of the six realms of rebirth) with “a particular reactive emotion” – according to Goodman – opens the way “for us to understand the Six Realms psychologically, as the imagined worlds projected by each of these reactive emotions. Under the influence of emotional confusion, we see the world in distorted ways; […]”.49 Somewhat similarly, for Garfield the “real ethical punch” of pretas is “metaphorical”: “they remind us […] of what it is to be in a state in which nothing can satisfy us, in which every expression of affection or appreciation is inadequate, in which no amount of material possession can make us feel secure”.50
These “psychological understandings” of rebirth as a preta completely miss the point, however. As briefly explained above, rebirth as preta is the karmic consequence for causing suffering for others due to one’s greed. In the psychological reading, however, the preta status is merely a metaphor for the suffering that greed causes for oneself. In that understanding, being greedy effectively is a kind of suffering, as greed always implies dissatisfaction. While this may be the case, it is not what preta narratives are about. Those narratives are concerned with the badness of causing suffering for others and its karmic consequences.
Interestingly, at least three kinds of cultural/ideological biases are at play here. The most obvious and least interesting was already mentioned: the de-supernaturalizing (and/or demythologizing) tendency. The other two are secularization (as marginalization of religion to the private sphere) and narcissistic individualism. The psychological understanding of pretas is entirely self-centered – others play no role. And by ignoring those others and their suffering as well as the implied badness of causing suffering for others (due to greed or otherwise), greed becomes an entirely private issue. Greed is no longer bad because of what it does to others, but because it causes suffering for oneself and makes one “see the world in distorted ways”.
It is worth noting, by the way, that the theory of karmic consequences of our intentional actions (like rebirth as a preta due to greed) suggests the presupposition of a kind of “just” universe (although this is not a Buddhist way of phrasing it). Not all Buddhist thinkers seem to have this accepted this presupposition, however. According to Nichiren 日蓮 (13th century Japan), for example, the world had fallen in decline and it was the responsibility of Buddhist practitioners to establish a “Buddha land” (in this context apparently referring to a Buddhist utopia) in the “threefold world” (which includes the preta realm and the other realms of rebirth).51 An obvious implication of this idea is that Nichiren’s Buddhism cannot be secularized (in the privatization sense).
example 2: duḥkha/dukkha
Above,52 I explained why “suffering” is a reasonably accurate translation of the key notion of dukkha/duḥkha (Pāli, resp. Sanskrit). Like suffering, dukkha is a very broad notion including mental and physical pain, loss, anxiety, dread, and much more. That this was very much how the Buddha understood the notion is made quite clear by the first of the Four Noble Truths (also quoted above):
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.53
The examples of dukkha/suffering in this passage appear to be selected to illustrate that life inherently involves suffering,54 but in addition to these examples, the Buddha also states that “separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering”. This sounds much like a rough definition of how he understood dukkha, and it is worth noting that this “definition” implies that poverty, hunger, oppression, physical pain, economic unfairness or injustice, sickness, and much more, are all (also) examples of dukkha. Furthermore, the traditional biography of the Buddha suggests a similarly broad understanding of dukkha. According to the Jātaka tales, the kinds of suffering the Buddha witnessed and that motivated him to become a śramaṇa were aging, disease, and death. The story is probably apocryphal, but it suggests that in the early Buddhist tradition the concept of dukkha and the kind of suffering Buddhism was concerned with was broad indeed. Furthermore, this didn’t significantly change either throughout most of the Buddhist tradition. For example, in Chinese sūtra translations and other East-Asian Buddhist text, dukkha is rendered as 苦 ku, which in general usage means “suffering” in a very broad sense. And consequently, the Buddhist commitment to alleviate dukkha/苦 motivated a very wide range of “Buddhist activities [that] included road and bridge building, public work projects, social revolution, military defense, orphanages, travel hostels, medical education, hospital building, free medical care, the stockpiling of medicines, conflict intervention, moderation of penal codes, programs to assist the elderly and poor […], famine and epidemic relief, and bathing houses”.55 Moreover, the list of moral duties of a Bodhisattva in Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi isn’t much less broad than these Chinese monastic activities.56
Buddhist scholasticism was much concerned with classifying aspects of doctrine and given the many kinds and varieties of dukkha/suffering it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they classified dukkha into three different kinds as well. The most basic kind of dukkha is physical and mental pain, which may even include dissatisfaction, annoyance, boredom, and fatigue. The second, more subtle kind of dukkha derives from change and the impermanence of everything. Any gain, any achievement, any satisfaction, any positive sensation or emotion, and so forth only lasts for a brief while, leading to unhappiness and craving for more after it has drained away. The third, even subtler kind of dukkha results from the fact that this change and impermanence is fundamentally outside of our control because everything is (inter-) dependent or conditioned. Nothing is permanent and nothing is independent of causes, conditions, and other things, including we, ourselves. Dukkha in this third sense, sankhara-dukkha, is related to existential dread and to a general dissatisfaction resulting from the fact that things never are or can be as we expect them and as we want them to be.
An often overlooked aspect of most varieties of Buddhist modernism and Western Buddhism is a reinterpretation of dukkha by narrowing that notion to something resembling sankhara-dukkha. In this interpretation, the Four Noble Truths, and Buddhism in general, is really just concerned with sankhara-dukkha or suffering in some similar narrow sense. In such narrow views, dukkha is simply a kind of unsatisfactoriness of life caused by an inevitably frustrated desire for permanence. Hence, dukkha is personal/individual and psychological or mental. It is a kind of stress more than a kind of pain. In broader views, on the other hand, dukkha includes this unsatisfactoriness, but also physical pain and worldly suffering. While such broader views were the default until fairly recently, in the 20th century this changed, which also affected English translations of the term dukkha. From the 1970s onward “unsatisfactoriness” became a fashionable translation. As far as I know, the first to translate dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness” was Sinhalese professor of Sanskrit, O. H. de A. Wijesekera in two publications from 1960.57 This new translation was picked up by other writers in Sri Lanka – not coincidentally, one of the birth places of Buddhist modernism – and started to spread to the West about a decade later. There is, thus, a clear link between the translation as “unsatisfactoriness” and Buddhist modernism.
What motivated the narrowing (i.e., reinterpretation) of dukkha is probably secularization. As explained above, a key aspect of secularization is the marginalization of religion to the private sphere. That is, religion is denied a public, sociopolitical (etc.) role. In case of Buddhism, to deny Buddhism its traditional public and sociopolitical role(s), dukkha had to be restricted in such a way that Buddhism would no longer be legitimately concerned with suffering in the broad sense. If you subtract the category of sankhara-dukkha from dukkha in the broad sense, what you are left with is pain and “worldly suffering” (including poverty, for example). By redefining dukkha as merely sankhara-dukkha, worldly suffering is no longer of concern to Buddhists, and Buddhism is just about the purely private (and psychological) existential dread (etc.) of sankhara-dukkha. Consequently, Buddhism has no public role and has no legitimate reason to engage with social, political, and economic affairs. That, again, is secularization.
There are, however, obvious exceptions to this trend, namely, engaged and radical Buddhism. While these varieties of Buddhism tend to be modernist (in at least some sense) as well, they typically reject the narrowing/reinterpretation of dukkha and the secularization (as privatization) that motivates it. Mainstream Western Buddhists who uncritically accept hegemonic secularization sometimes express dismay with such broad interpretations of suffering. For example, James Deitrick accused engaged Buddhists of forgetting “the most basic of Buddhism’s insights, that suffering has but one cause and one remedy, that is, attachment and the cessation of attachment”.58 This, however, turns things on its head. It is Deitrick and other Western Buddhists and Buddhist modernists that are forgetting something, namely, that for the Buddha and the Buddhist tradition dukkha is an extremely broad notion, and thus, that the engaged Buddhist interpretation is orthodox, while their narrowing/reinterpretation of dukkha is an (unconsciously) ideologically motivated corruption. By the same token, most translations of dukkha other than “suffering” are similarly ideologically motivated corruptions.
example 3: benefit
While observing conversations in secular Buddhist groups on Facebook and Reddit, I have all too frequently noticed a particular kind of sentiment that is sometimes expressed more subtly, and sometimes crudely explicitly. What matters to many of these self-professed “Buddhists” is that their “Buddhist” practice benefits them, and the only valid criterion to judge that practice is that “it works for them”. Others have noticed this trend as well, and it has been mentioned in a number of publications on Western Buddhism in the past decade.59
Above, I mentioned that the (deservedly rather controversial) Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa called this what-is-in-it-for-me attitude spiritual materialism. According to Chögyam, “ego is able to convert everything to its own use, even spirituality”.60 “There are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques”.61 Half a decade ago, Roos Vonk and Anouk Visser investigated this claim, and found that “spiritual” practice, such as meditation, can lead to increases in narcissism, self-absorption, and sense of superiority – that is, to a “distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality” indeed.62 However, these are extreme cases, I suspect. While a focus on (selfish) benefit and/or an equation of value (specifically, the value of Buddhism) with usefulness appear to be very common among Western Buddhists, I think (or hope, at least) that it would be inaccurate to say that a majority of them are self-absorbed narcissists.
While this should go without saying, it might be worth pointing out (again) that the common what-is-in-it-for-me attitude is quite un-Buddhist. Buddhism has never been about benefits in this life. This doesn’t mean that Buddhist text never mention benefits of practice, however. In the contrary! But those benefits aren’t a goal – they are either side-effects or skillful means to lure practitioners (further) onto the path.
The benefit or usefulness doesn’t have to be aimed at the practitioner, of course. And in one way or other, Buddhism has always been made useful to the ruling elite. This isn’t some peculiarity of Buddhism, of course – as already mentioned above, all religions have been used as tools of hegemony. Even if there have been many anti-hegemonic religious movements (such as liberation theology, radical Buddhism, and so forth), the religious mainstream has always served a key role in preserving the sociopolitical status quo. While I’m by no means a fan of Slavoj Žižek, his analysis of Western Buddhism in this perspective is spot on. Moreover, in Žižek’s notion of Western Buddhism as “fetish”, there is a kind of double usefulness at play. That is, (Western) Buddhism is made useful for those who benefit from the status quo, and at the same time (albeit it in a limited way) for the practitioner as well.
A “fetish”, in Žižek’s analysis is a tool “to cope with harsh reality”. A fetish allows people “to accept the way things are – because they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to defuse the full impact of reality”.63 (Notice that the “usefulness” of Buddhism in this sense is an example of what I called ” the pathologization of the consequences of human/system mismatches” above.) And thus,
when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question: ‘OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality “the way it really is”?’ ‘Western Buddhism’ is such a fetish: it enables you fully to participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle really is – what really matters to you is the peace of the inner self to which you know you can always withdraw …64
And consequently, Western Buddhism is the “perfect ideological supplement” to capitalism,65 because its “meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, fully to participate in capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of sanity”.66
example 4: true selves
Given the Western obsession with the self and especially with authentic or true selves, it is no surprise that the Buddhist doctrine of no-self is especially hard to swallow for Westerners. “Fortunately”, the East Asian tradition – Zen especially – has provided the materials to undermine this Buddhist core notion.
Around 1760, Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴 wrote the extremely influential poem Zazen Wasan 坐禅和讃67 that includes the line “自性即ち無性にて”. If we ignore the last two kana that don’t matter here, what this means is that “self-nature is (identical with) no-nature”. 自性 is the Chinese translation of the Indian Buddhist philosophical concept of svabhāva, which literally means “own-being, and which refers to a kind of ontological independence.68 To have svabhāva means to be ultimately real, so this phrase could be interpreted as saying that what is ultimately real has no nature or essence, or in other words, is empty, which is pretty much standard Buddhist philosophical doctrine. Translations of this passage vary, however, from more close-to-literal “self-nature is no-nature” to “true self is no-self”. The latter has become a slogan of Western Zen, but has no equivalent in Japanese Zen or Chinese Chan. It appears to be an ill-advised attempt to make core Buddhist ideas more palatable to Western audiences. Moreover, it sounds a lot more similar to the Hindu doctrine that the absolute self (paramātman) is selfless (i.e., lacking personality or individuality), than to any Buddhist doctrine. Regardless, the goal of finding one’s “true self” has become a central trope of Western Zen (and much of Western Buddhism in general) that appears to be absent in its East-Asian parent traditions.
Hakuin’s poem is steeped in Buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha or buddhadhātu, 佛性 ch. foxing / jp. busshō) and hongaku 本覺doctrine. Buddha nature is, perhaps, the single most influential doctrine in East-Asian Buddhism. The concept of Buddha nature refers to two fundamentally different notions that, unfortunately, have not been kept apart as much in Buddhist writings as they should have. To distinguish these two notions, the Japanese Buddhist philosopher Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗 proposed the terms innate and immanent Buddha-nature doctrine (仏性内在論 busshō naizai ron vs. 仏性顕在論 busshō kenzai ron).69 The former is the idea that all sentient beings have the capability of (eventually) achieving awakening. The latter is the metaphysical idea that all of reality is, consists of, or has Buddha nature; that Buddha-nature is the ultimate reality of everything; or that Buddha nature is the underlying metaphysical ground (dhātu) of everything. In other words, innate Buddha nature is the capability to achieve awakening; immanent Buddha nature is (roughly) ultimate reality.
Hongaku is a further elaboration of Buddha nature thought that has been very influential in Japan. According to the hongaku doctrine, we do not just have a capability to achieve awakening (as “standard” innate Buddha nature doctrine holds), but we already are awakened and merely need to rediscover that awakening. Finding one’s Buddha nature in that understanding is rediscovering this intrinsic awakened state. In Western Zen, the term “true self” is often used in this context (but in Japanese or Chinese texts about the topic, no term is used that would be accurately translated as “true self”). Thus, finding one’s true self really means nothing but rediscovering one’s inherent awakened state.
This, however, does not appear to be how many Western (Zen) Buddhists interpret these ideas. For many of them, finding one’s true self is too strongly associated with dominant Western notions of individuality, the authentic self, and so forth. For many Western Buddhists, finding one’s true self is something like finding one’s self-defining essence, which is the very thing that does not exist according to Buddhism. “True self” is a very poor translation for certain philosophical notions in (mainly East-Asian) Buddhism. Probably, this translation was chosen to appeal to Western audiences, but this has spectacularly backfired and has ended up undermining Western Buddhism (as Buddhism) more than help it grow.
concluding remarks
The Sinhalese variant of Buddhist modernism is often called Protestant Buddhism. The latter term was originally introduced by Gananath Obeyesekere in 1970,70 and further developed in a 1988 book co-authered with Richard Gombrich,71 Among the defining features of Sinhalese Protestant Buddhism are Theravāda fundamentalism and a rejection of “later accretions” and especially Mahāyāna. Obeyesekere and Gombrich write that
the fundamentalist suspicion of “later accretions” has been influential. The [Christian] missionaries [in Ceylon/Sri Lanka] sometimes conceded certain qualities to the Buddha and his teachings but claimed that contemporary Buddhism was degenerate and moribund; Protestant Buddhists generally accepted this evaluation.
Furthermore, Protestants defined their position vis-a-vis Roman Catholicism, which they caricatured as a mass of ritual and superstition. In the eyes of Protestant Buddhists, Mahayana holds an analogous position: the pristine simplicity of the faith has been obscured by mumbo jumbo.72
There is an important current within Western Buddhism that largely shares this view. Mahāyāna and other later accretions (sometimes with an exception for Zen) are discarded as “corruptions of the Dhamma”, in favor of some kind of reconstructed original Buddhism. As already mentioned in the introduction of this article, such “reconstructions” are often reinterpretations through the biased lens of whoever is doing the reconstruction.73 Indeed, most Western Buddhism and some other varieties of Buddhist modernism are much more deserving of the qualification “corruption of the Dhamma” than Mahāyāna. While there are subtle differences between Mahāyāna and earlier Buddhisms, nothing fundamental was changed. There are no fundamental differences between Mahāyāna, Theravāda, and early Buddhist interpretations of the Four Noble Truths and what this doctrine implies. There are no fundamental differences in regard to practice or philosophical foundations. Sure, the are differences, but those differences are subtle, especially in comparison with the corruptions described in the four examples of Western cultural/hegemonic bias in the preceding four sections.
In fact, I think that the corruption of Buddhism in the hands and minds of Western “Buddhists” is so fundamental and far-reaching, that I’m not convinced it is still appropriate to apply the term “Buddhism”. Each of the four examples of Western cultural/hegemonic bias described above turns Buddhism on its head. All four of them together produce something that only very superficially resembles Buddhism. What passes for “Buddhism” in the West is often better described as ideology and cultural bias with a very thin layer of “Buddhist” veneer.
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Notes
- Tominaga Nakamoto 富永仲基 (1745), 『出定後語』, reprinted in: Mizuta Norihisa 水田紀久 & Arisaka Takamichi 有坂隆道 (eds.) (1973), 『日本思想体系』, Volume 43: 『富永仲基 山片蟠桃』(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店): 106–38.
- Shaku Tesshū 釈撤宗 (2020), 『天才 富永仲基：独創の町人学者』 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha 新潮社).
- Inoue Enryō 井上圓了 (1887),『仏教活論序論』 [Prolegomena to a Living Discourse on Buddhism], in: (2003),『井上円了選集』, Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Tōyō University 東洋大学): 327–93, at 327–28.
- e.g., David McMahan (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- e.g., Peter Nosco (2014), “Kokugaku Critiques of Confucianism and Chinese Culture”, in: Chun-chieh Huang, John Allen Tucker (eds.), Dao companion to Japanese Confucian philosophy (Springer): 233–56.
- Donna Haraway (1988), “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective”, Feminist Studies 14.3: 575–99, at 582.
- The foremost advocate of the latter is Johannes Bronkhorst. See: Johannes Bronkhorst (2007), Greater Maghada: Studies in the Culture of Early India (Leiden: Brill).
- Bronkhorst, Greater Maghada. Bryan Levman (2013), “Cultural Remnants of the Indigenous Peoples in the Buddhist Scriptures”, Buddhist Studies Review 30.2: 145–80.
- Kenneth Zysk (1985), Religious Medicine: The History and Evolution of Indian Medicine, Reprint Edition (Oxon: Routledge, 2017), p. 7.
- Reported by Strabo, as Megasthenes original book on India is unfortunately lost. Translation, as well as the original Greek, in: Strabo & Horace Jones (23 B.C.E./1930), The Geography of Strabo with an English Translation by Horace Leonard Jones, Vol. 7 (London: Heinemann), pp. 102–5.
- As far as I know, the first to suggest this was Hendrik Kern in his History of Buddhism in India published (in Dutch) in 1882. Hendrik Kern (1882), Geschiedenis van het Buddhisme in Indië, Vol. 1 (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink), p. 207n4.
- Now extinct.
- Some of these developed many centuries later into what is now known as Hinduism, but is terribly anachronistic to use that term in the present context.
- Hermann Yacobi (1881), “Ueber Sukha und Duḥkha”, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen 25.4: 438–40.
- “At least”. The history of the Pāli Canon is complicated. See A Note on the Pāli Canon.
- Paul Younger (1969), “The Concept of Duḥkha and the Indian Religious Tradition”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 37.2: 141–52.
- Ibid., 144–5.
- Eric Castell (1982), “The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine”, The New England Journal of Medicine 306.11: 639–45, p. 640. Eric Castell (1991), The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 33.
- Thomas Metzinger (2017), “Suffering”, in: Kurt Almqvist & Anders Haag (eds.), The Return of Consciousness: A New Science on Old Questions (Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation): 237–62, p. 246.
- e.g., Tilman Vetter (1988), The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism (Leiden: Brill). Richard Gombrich (2006), Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, second edition (London: Routledge). Johannes Bronkhorst (2009), Buddhist Teaching in India (Boston: Wisdom Publications).
- Gombrich (2006), Theravāda Buddhism, p. 62.
- Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, SN 56.11. Translation: The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya, translated by Bhikkhu Boddhi (Somerville: Wisdom, 2000), p. 1844.
- That is, mokṣa, although as mentioned above, the Buddha rarely used this term.
- Bhavati means (among others) “be”, “exist”, “become”, “happen”, “occur”, and so forth. Most often it means something like “become” or “get”.
- There is something strange about the Noble Eightfold Path in the form found in this sūtra, as I explained in the section on NT4 in (Post-) Buddhism without Rebirth, but this is of fairly limited relevance here.
- Sure, benefits in this life are sometimes mentioned, but these are either side-effects or “skillful means” to lure practitioners (further) onto the path. (Notice that while “skillful means” is mostly associated with Mahāyāna, the use of the promise of short-term benefits to lure people (further) onto the path is also common in Theravāda and can be found in Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, for example.) Additionally, practices of offerings and prayers to receive various kinds of worldly benefits have developed, but these have never been a core feature of Buddhism. (Although rituals for the protection of the state where a key reason for Japanese governments to sponsor Buddhism.)
- The term saeculum was also used to refer to a “generation” or an “age” or related notions, and this kind of use of the term survived in some specific (mostly scientific) contexts, although it is now quite rare (and completely irrelevant here). “Secular” in this sense can mean “once in an age or other (very) long period”, or “lasting for a very long time”.
- e.g., J.C.D. Clark (2012), “Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narrative’”, The Historical Journal 55.1: 161–94.
- José Casanova (1994), Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 211.
- Again, see for example: Clark (2012), “Secularization and Modernization”.
- Most New Age believers appear to be unaware of the New Age roots of their beliefs, however, and call themselves “spiritual” or “spiritual, but not religious”, or something similar. On New Age, see: Western Buddhism and the New Age; and: Margrethe Løøv (2024), The New Age Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- About the notion of a thin ideology, see, for example: Michael Freeden (2003), Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 98; and: Ben Stanley (2008), “The thin ideology of populism”, Journal of Political Ideologies 13.1: 95–110.
- MEW3, 46; my translation.
- I’m aware that the term “gender ideology” is often used with a different meaning, but that is irrelevant here.
- Antonio Gramsci (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers)
- Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 80.
- Thorstein Veblen (1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 59.
- Geert Hofstede (1980), Culture’s Consequences, First edition. Second, revised and updated edition: 2001 (Thousand Oaks: Sage).
- W. Arthur Lewis (1955), The theory of economic growth ( Londen: George Allen & Unwin).
- Lajos Brons (2005), Rethinking the Culture-Economy Dialectic, PhD Thesis, University of Groningen.
- Yamagishi Toshio 山岸 俊男 (2015), 『「日本人」という、うそ: 武士道精神は日本を復活させるか』 (Tokyo: ちくま文庫).
- in Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987.
- Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell (2009),The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Atria).
- Lajos Brons (2017), The Hegemony of Psychopathy (Santa Barbara: Brainstorm).
- I’m using the gendered term “men” (instead of “humans”) on purpose here, as the ideal of authenticity appears to be related to masculinity.
- Chögyam Trungpa (1973), Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Boston: Shambala, 2002).
- It is important not to misunderstand rebirth as a preta as “punishment” for being greedy or stingy in this life. Punishment in the afterlife is a core concept of the Abrahamic religions that is entirely absent in the Buddhist tradition. Karma does not involve judgment and adverse karmic consequences – that is, a bad rebirth – is not “punishment”. Rather, karma is conceived of more like a natural law, and bad rebirth is, thus, a natural consequence.
- Adeana McNicholl (2024), Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 17–8.
- Charles Goodman (2017), “Modern and Traditional Understandings of Karma”, in: Jake Davis & Owen Flanagan (eds.), A Mirror is for Reflection: Understanding Buddhist Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press): 131–45, at p. 135.
- Jay Garfield (2021), Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 64.
- Mainy in his Establishing the Peace of the Country 立正安國論, T84n2688. Translation in: Philip Yampolsky (ed.) (1990), Selected Writings of Nichiren, Translated by Burton Watson and Others (New York: Columbia University Press).
- In the section “on ‘suffering’”.
- Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, SN 56.11. Translation: The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya, translated by Bhikkhu Boddhi (Somerville: Wisdom, 2000), p. 1844.
- See the section “the Buddha’s central teaching in its cultural context” above.
- Stephen Jenkins (2003), “Do Bodhisattvas Relieve Poverty?”, in: Christopher Queen, Charles Prebish, & Damien Keown (eds.), Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism (London: RoutledgeCurzon): 38–49, at 39.
- Asaṅga (4–5th ct/2016), The Bodhisattva Path to Unsurpassed Enlightenment: A Complete Translation of the Bodhisattvabhūmi, Translated by Artemus Engle (Boulder: Snow Lion).
- O. H. de A. Wijesekera (1960), The Three Signata: Anicca, Dukkha, Anattā (Kandy: The Wheel / BPS). O. H. de A. Wijesekera (1960), The Concept of Peace as the Central Notion of Buddhist Social Philosophy (Kandy: Bodhi Leaves / BPS).
- James Deitrick (2003), “Engaged Buddhist Ethics: Mistaking the Boat for the Shore”, in: Christopher Queen, Charles Prebish, & Damien Keown (eds.), Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism (London: RoutledgeCurzon): 252–69, p. 263. Emphasis in original.
- For example: C. W. Huntington (2015), “The Triumph of Narcissism: Theravāda Buddhist Meditation in the Marketplace”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83.3: 624–648. Ronald E. Purser (2019), McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (London: Repeater).
- Chögyam Trungpa (1973), Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Boston: Shambala, 2002), p. 7.
- Ibid., p. 3.
- Roos Vonk & Anouk Visser (2020), “An exploration of spiritual superiority: The paradox of self-enhancement”, European Journal of Social Psychology 51.1: 152-65.
- Slavoj Žižek (2006), The Universal Exception (New York: Continuum), pp. 253–4.
- Ibid., p. 254.
- Ibid., p. 252. In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), Žižek suggested that the same is true for Asian Buddhism, by the way, and for largely the same reasons (p. 26). Ronald Purser made a similar claim about the relation between Mindfulness and capitalism in McMinfulness (mentioned a few notes above this one).
- Žižek, The Universal Exception, p. 253.
- There are many English translations with many different translations of the title, but they typically are variations of “Song of meditation”.
- Lajos Brons (2023), “What is real?”, Organon F 30.2: 182–220.
- Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗 (2000), 『道元思想論』 (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan).
- Gananath Obeyesekere (1970), “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon”, Modern Ceylon Studies 1: 43–63.
- Richard Gombrich & Gananath Obeyesekere (1988), Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
- Ibid., pp. 220.
- What I wrote there is that “every interpretation takes place from within a cultural context, and the less aware one is of that cultural context, the greater its unconscious influence”.