Buddhist modernism

“Mindfulness” in modern discourse – whether among meditation teachers or clinicians – is defined in various ways, but generally circle around “bare, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness.” Nonetheless, although mindfulness (in Pali, sati) is one of the most fundamental concepts in the Early Buddhists Texts (EBT), one would be hard-pressed to find a definition or description of mindfulness there that remotely resembles such circulations. In this essay I will try to account for our modern definitions of mindfulness and how they might be reconciled with the EBT.

1-0-+1-runs. Khedrup Gyatso, it turns out, acts as both the secular center's fi gurehead and the family's moral anchor, sharing his time between the center, where he greets visitors and helps run a foreign-funded NGO off ering scholarships to rural Tibetan girls, and the monastery, where he off ers free teachings about traditional Tibetan grammar and local history.

In an engaging and comprehensive scholarly and ethnographic study of current trends in meditation-based convert Buddhist groups in North America, Ann Gleig attempts to answer McMahan’s question. Her volume reveals that central modernist features as outlined by McMahan and others (Baumann 2001, Lopez 2012)—such as privileging individual experience and meditation over ritual, the appeals to the rational and scientific foundations of the Buddhist tradition over its “traditional” or “cultural” elements, and its mostly white, liberal, and upper-middle-class audience—have become increasingly questioned across American convert groups. Modernity, Gleig concludes, can no longer contain these current developments that are better defined by its postmodern features, such as “its suspicion of meta-narratives of science and universalism; its reevaluation of religious epistemologies, practices, and communities discarded and denigrated in modernity and its celebration of difference, diversity, and hybridity; and its challenge to assimilative modern liberalism”

In recent years, contemplative practices of meditation have become increasingly mainstream in American culture, part of a phenomenon that scholars call “Buddhist modernism.” Connecting the embodied practice of meditation with the embodied practice of democracy in everyday life, this paper puts the radical democratic theory of Jacques Rancière into conversation with the Zen writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Thomas Merton. I show how meditation can be understood as an aesthetic practice that cultivates modes of experience, perception, thinking, and feeling that further radical democratic projects at the most fundamental level. Reading the landscape of Buddhist modernism to draw out democratic possibilities, we can understand contemplative practices like meditation as a form of political theorizing in a vernacular register. Buddhist modernism works as a practice of everyday life that ordinary users can employ to get through their days with more awareness and attentiveness, to reclaim and reauthorize their experience, and to generate more care and compassion in ways that enable, enact, and extend the project of democracy itself.

Open Access Link here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/3/htm

In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typically regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern Buddhism in the western world. Yet significantly less has been said about its influence in Asia and especially in India, where it has an equally rich and varied history. While most scholarship has focused on its connections to the Sinhalese Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala and his popular campaigns to ‘liberate’ the MahaBodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, the singular focus on Dharmapala has obscured the poem’s much more expansive and enduring impact on a wide array of colonial Indian publics, regardless of caste, region, religion, ethnicity or language. The article explores the early history of its numerous adaptations, dramatizations, and translations in various regional languages. In providing an analysis of the poem’s Indian publics, the article shows how regional, political, and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste.
Keywords: modern Buddhism; Edwin Arnold; Light of Asia; India; public culture; colonialism; vernacular publics; world religion; Orientalism

Scholarship on religion has often centered on the gaps between academic analysis and the self-understanding of religious people. In the study of Buddhism in America, however, many scholars and practitioners share cultural histories, material circumstances, and textual space. This article examines the nature of the relationship between particular academics and particular convert Buddhists to argue that they share a way of thinking about religion: perceiving a strong dichotomy between modernity and tradition, and a resulting willingness to take Buddhist modernist narratives at face value as descriptions of religious life. This normative modernism, along with reactions against it, leads to the collapse of descriptive and prescriptive discourse on American Buddhism. By contrast, scholarship that does not participate in the dichotomy between modern and traditional religion reveals a much richer, messier, and more accurate picture of Buddhism in America, and the Buddhists whose practices and self-representations exceed the boundaries of modernism.

‘Mindfulness’ has become a buzzword, yet its meaning and origins have received relatively little critical consideration. This article places the current ‘mindfulness movement’ in context, examining the evolving discourse surrounding the concept of mindfulness. Through the first systematic etymology of the term, drawing from old Western and Buddhist writings, contemporary psychology and popular media, it is established that the contemporary understanding of mindfulness has been substantially simplified and divorced from its origins. However, quantitative data suggests that this manoeuvre was essential for the mainstreaming of the concept. Moreover, the resulting momentum has stimulated a new and dynamic discourse about the relationship between ‘secular’ mindfulness and Buddhism, sparking questions about ‘McMindfulness’, ‘stealth’ Buddhism and cultural imperialism. Therefore, this article argues that the recontextualisation of mindfulness created the scaffolding that supported the emergence of a deeper and more meaningful conversation about its implications for Buddhism and society that we see today.

(Please email me at j.sun@student.unimelb.edu.au if you would like a copy!)

As the first of three articles, the present essay explores the character of selected aspects of early Buddhism in order to assess its potential relevance as a reference point for those engaged in research on mindfulness in psychology. The exploration, which proceeds in critical dialog with suggestions made by Donald Lopez Jr. and Evan Thompson, covers the topics of the Buddha’s omniscience, Buddhist cosmology, the notion of karma, the role of rebirth, the past lives of the Buddha, and the role of religious authority vis-à-vis the scope of personal investigation in early Buddhist thought. The present paper is meant to serve as a corrective to an apparent tendency in recent scholarship, as part of an in itself deserved criticism of exaggerated positions taken by Buddhist modernists, to overlook or even deny rational dimensions of Buddhist thought, here in particular taken up from the viewpoint of its earliest phase. This tendency appears at times to be based on a lack of historical perspective or understanding of Buddhist doctrines and their development.

The Buddha and the barcode is a short (85-page) introduction to contemporary Buddhism. Beautifully designed by artist Bernadette Acht, its chapters cover the basics of Buddhism, its rise in popularity in the west, Buddhism and the modern world, the benefits of Buddhist practice and Buddhism as a media phenomenon. Rather than trying to convert readers or give an academic account, the book focusses on what ordinary people across the world do with Buddhism in their own lives.

The Sasana is Buddhism as it occurs in time and space, that is, in its social, historical and personal contexts. This book looks at the Buddha-Sasana as an organism, that was structured in a certain way by the Buddha, largely through the formation of the monastic institution and that fulfils certain functions and that has proven to be of remarkable durability. It traces the history of the Sasana and the way it manages to adapt to new cultural influences and looks at the shape of the Sasana as it encounters modernity.

A strand of Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalism that emerged in 2008 offers an unconventional rejoinder to evangelical efforts to intensify conversions. Pentecostals assert that Christ offers instantaneous salvation whereas Theravada Buddhism demands slow passage through many lifetimes of suffering. In contrast to concomitant political efforts to curb conversions, one maverick Buddhist monk implicitly responded to such competitive theological provocations by enlisting devotees to engage in ritual and moral cultivation to foreshorten the far-future arrival of the messianic Bodhisatva Maitreya. Neither derivative, nor 'syncretic', the maverick's efforts to fortify Buddhism are nevertheless dialogically responsive to multiple sources of religious competition. Following the traffic of aspiration, contestation, and charismatic affinity between Buddhism and rival religiosities, on one side, and within Buddhism, on the other, the ethnography discloses a multi-religious milieu. Within it, several competing religiosities stir the anxieties of Sinhala Buddhist nationalists. Old and new rivalries pose constraints, even as they provide fodder for religious innovation.

Sidkeong Namgyal Tulku was a colourful figure in the history of Sikkim. This crown prince was an incarnated lama as well as a student at Oxford, and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society. This article considers the various roles of Sidkeong Tulku in the light of a Tibetan work by his hand, which has been previously not connected to his person. Written in 1909, it consists of ‘monastic guidelines’ (bCa’ yig) which are a clear witness to the time and circumstances they were written in. This traditionally framed work, authored by a supposed Buddhist modernist, addresses the education of monks, monastic economy, sex, and preaching to the laity. These guidelines shed light on the changing status of the monastery in Sikkim, in the midst of reforms and threats to Sikkimese sovereignty. In this article I examine the contents of these guidelines in the context of its author’s eventful but short life, against the political, religious and social backdrop of a Buddhist kingdom in turmoil.

(note: this is the corrected DOI) A primary conceptual framework for Buddhism in contemporary popular religious culture is as a kind of psychology. This representation dates from the nineteenth century, when apologists took advantage of the new cultural discourse of psychology to explain Buddhism in ways that made it accessible, familiar, acceptable, and more easily incorporated into modern, religious consumerism. This essay is a hermeneutic examination of this psychologizing discourse. It describes three forms of that discourse, identified here as "interpretation of," where Buddhism is seen in psychological terms, "interpretation as," where Buddhism becomes a form of psychology, and "interpretation," where the interpretive act is erased and Buddhism and psychology become unproblematically identical.

The Sutra on the White Lotus of the Sublime Dharma (Sk., Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra; Ch., Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng; Jp., Myōhō renge kyō), commonly known as the Lotus Sutra, is arguably the most influential sutra of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and certainly one of the most revered sacred texts in East Asia.  Via parables and short stories, the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra indirectly present a number of core doctrines of the early Mahāyāna, the form of Buddhism that first emerged in India and West Asia roughly five centuries after the death of the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–486 BCE) and would eventually come to dominate East Asian Buddhism. The Lotus Sutra is a devotional text rather a philosophical one—i.e., it seems intended to work on the level of the emotions and the senses rather than the intellect. And yet, despite its otherworldly aspects, the Lotus Sutra has been employed over the centuries as a political text, both as a tool for maintaining the status quo and—especially in the twentieth century but with a few historical precedents—as an inspiration and justification for political transformation or reform. This chapter explores some of the various ways in which the Lotus Sutra has been understood and utilized as a political text.

In contemporary Western meditation-based convert Buddhist lineages,  the term ‘dark night’ has been adopted in order to describe a variety of meditation-related difficulties. While the term dark night is not a Buddhist term - rather it is an abbreviated form of the expression ‘dark night of the soul’ and derives from Christian mysticism - it has recently been appropriated in postmodern Buddhist discourses. The Buddhist dark night is referred to in a range of media, including popular news articles, discussion forums, blogs, podcasts, and texts and meditation manuals written by well-known contemporary meditation teachers. Despite the proliferation of the phrase, there has been much confusion regarding what the term dark night actually refers to in a Buddhist postmodern context. Given that the study of meditation-related difficulties is becoming an area of interest in both the sciences and the humanities, I argue that it is important to delineate the term dark night in Buddhist postmodernism. Hence, I have utilised discourse analysis in order to examine several primary sources that refer to the Buddhist postmodern dark night. Based on this analysis, I argue that there are three dominant discourses regarding the dark night in Buddhist postmodernism: 1) the ‘dukkha nana’ discourse; 2) the ‘insight gone wrong’ discourse; and 3) the meditation ‘adverse effects’ discourse. While these discourses appear, on the surface, to be quite different, they are linked by a common theme; that is, an attempt to differentiate between Buddhist meditation-related difficulties and Western psychopathology.

Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century China experienced an important moment of transformation, involving shifts in the political system, social customs, and intercultural relations; an overall atmosphere that affected the religious domain as well. Buddhists responded to the new milieu by repositioning themselves in Chinese society, reinventing their cultivation practices, and reviving certain schools, teachings, and scriptures. This research explores the renaissance of Āgama studies in this Chinese context. In the first part of the chapter (section II), Stefania Travagnin provides an overview of the main voices of the new Āgama scholarship, their arguments and major works, with attention to the intellectual domain within which these protagonists, from Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) to Lü Cheng 呂澂 (1896–1989) and Master Dongchu 東初 (1908–1977), were trained and operated. The impact of Buddhist publishing and the influence from Japanese Buddhist scholarship were important contextual factors that this part of the chapter also analyses. Travagnin then continues with an inquiry into Master Yinshun’s 印順 (1906–2005) specific contribution to Āgama studies, with particular attention to his understanding and classification of the Āgamas according to doctrinal concepts such as the aṅgas (section III). The last part, by Bhikkhu Anālayo, addresses the ‘aṅga question’, and offers a critical assessment of the theory according to which during an early stage in the transmission of the early Buddhist
discourses the three aṅgas of sūtra/sutta, geya/geyya and vyākaraṇa/veyyākaraṇa served as guiding principles of textual assemblage, comparable to the function of the scriptural collections now known as Āgamas or Nikāyas (section IV).

This article explores the online debate in the Tibetan-language blogosphere over a burgeoning ethical reform movement. Annually, whole villages and clans in nomadic areas along the eastern reaches of the Tibetan plateau are committing to a newly formulated set of ten Buddhist virtues that include vows not to sell yaks for slaughter, not to fight with weapons, and not to drink, smoke, or gamble. Spearheaded by Khenpo Tsultrim Lodrö and cleric-scholars at Larung Buddhist Academy concerned with the erosion of social values in the face of state modernization policies, novel vow ceremonies have generated a new level of commitment to Buddhist ethics among Tibetan nomads while spawning controversy over the role of religion in the public sphere. A set of virulent critiques of ethical reform have appeared since 2012 in Tibetan blog posts by well-known intellectuals like Jamyang Kyi and Notreng. This article examines the secular terms through which clerical authority is criticized in the Tibetan blogosphere and several responses that address the polarizing tendency of online debate due to the circulation of misinformation and slander. How is the Tibetan blogosphere creating a new public forum for the secular critique of religion? On what grounds are Tibetan bloggers challenging Buddhist clerical authority online? How do monastics and their supporters advocate, in response, for the role of Buddhism in governing Tibetan social values and practices?

This article challenges two general assumptions shared by scholars of Western Buddhism: (1) that the earliest Buddhist missions to the West were those established in California from 1899 onwards; and (2) that Ananda Metteyya’s (Allan Bennett’s) London mission of 1908 was the first Buddhist mission to London and thus to  Europe. Recent collaborative research by scholars in Ireland and Japan demonstrates instead that the Japanese-sponsored ‘Buddhist Propagation Society’ (BPS) launched in London in 1889 and led for three years by the Irish-born Japanese Buddhist Charles Pfoundes predates both of the above-mentioned ‘first’  Buddhist missions.

In this article we offer a first attempt to document the nature,  activities and significance of the London BPS, drawing on Japanese and UK sources to examine Pfoundes’ role and that of his Japanese sponsors. We discuss the nature of Pfoundes’ Buddhism, the strategy and activities of the London BPS and the reasons for its eventual demise. The conclusion examines the links between the BPS and the later ‘first’ Japanese Buddhist missions in California and asks what hidden connection there might be between Pfoundes’ missionary campaign in London in 1889-92 and Ananda Metteyya’s return from Burma as the ‘first’ Buddhist missionary to London, almost two decades later.

Open access article in themed section entitled: Global Encounters, Local Places. Connected Histories of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the Himalayas.

Alexandra David-Neel had already been acquainted with the Himalayas for a long time before the visits to Tibet in 1924 that would make her a mainstream figure of modern Buddhism. In fact, her encounter with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism can be linked with Sikkim, where she arrived in 1912 after visiting India. An exploration of her Sikkim stay invites us to reconsider the self-fashioning of David-Neel’s image as an explorer of what she called the “land of marvels.” This paper highlights her construction of Sikkim as the locality that helped her create her singular vision of Tibet. Her encounters with local Buddhists in Sikkim provided her with the lofty images of a spiritual Tibet that she contributed to publicizing in the wake of the globalization of Buddhism.

As a result of the unique social and geopolitical position of Hong Kong, Buddhism in the former British colony since the early 20 th century has gone on a course different from its Mainland counterpart. The favorable environment in Hong Kong also catapulted Hong Kong Buddhism to the forefront of some of the latest developments in Chinese Buddhism or Buddhism within the Chinese societies. The rapid development of Theravāda Buddhism in Hong Kong since the 1990s is one of the latest of such developments and its continual impact to both local Buddhism as well as the Mahāyāna-dominated Chinese society at large will require proper evaluation.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Asian Buddhist monks have been associated in American thought with science, rationality and anti-coloni-alism. Though the narrative of nineteenth century 'Buddhist Modernism' is routinely invoked to explain this, a more illuminating genealogy of this 'modernist monasücism' identifies deeper roots in anti-Catholicism. This paper explores these roots through a genealogy of the Buddhist Modern-ist Monk Beginning with the seventeenth century travel journals of Jesuit missionoeries, it winds its way through varied British rhetorics to nineteenth century Sri Lanka, and ends in Chicago, at the World's Parliament of Religion of 1893. There, these intertwined discourses coalesced in the form of the Buddhist Modernist Monk a figure now familiar and beloved in American culture as an embodiment of compassion and rationality, yet with a history of prejudice and politics that has yet to be meaningfully explored. As we acknowledge anti-Catholicism's centrality to the history of the Modernist Monk, we are necessarily reminded of the moral ambivalence of the 'science-religion' dichotomy that fuels his mystique. At minimum, future analyses must critique the presumption of such supra-historical binaries, and deploy an open framework attentive to the contradictions and relations of reciprocal determination that characterize his genealogy. In the fall of 2005, the world's most famous Buddhist monk found himself at the center of an international scientific controversy. A long-time supporter of neu

Panel presentations at the 77th Annual Convention of the Japanese Association for Religious Studies 第77回学術大会パネル報告
Chair and commentator: Yoshinaga Shin'ichi 吉永進一
Presenters: Hioki Naoko 日沖直子, Suemura Masayo 末村正代, Okamoto Yoshiko 岡本佳子, Moriya Tomoe 守屋友江
English titles follow after Japanese abstracts.

Shinnyo-en, and other twentieth-century Buddhist lay movements emerging from older monastic and temple institutions, reconfigures elements of “traditional” Buddhism and “folk” religion to meet the conditions of modernity. Shinnyo-en’s founders and their successors envisioned a particular strategy for being Buddhist in modernity, one which aligns with some, but not all, scholarly characterizations of Buddhist modernism. As a result, Shinnyo-en and other lay organizations have largely remained on the margins of Buddhist studies despite their apparent popularity and proliferation. This article offers a new category for theorizing and positioning such organizations as contramodern—connected with, but divergent from mainstream forms of Buddhist modernism. In this light the emergence of Shinnyo-en in the 1930s, and the soteriological centrality of its founders’ lives, can be better understood in their historical and social contexts as being both connected to over one-thousand years of Shingon tradition and completely unique. The concept of contramodernism opens scholarly discussion of the many forms of Buddhism extant in modernity to those movements and organizations that are historically new, yet not entirely modernist.

This paper studies the ways that "Walker," a short film by the Malaysian-Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, visualizes the relationship between Buddhism and modernity. Via detailed film analysis as well as attention to sources in premodern Buddhist traditions, this paper argues that its filmic performance of Zen walking meditation serves two functions: To present slowness and simplicity as prophetic counterpoints against the dizzying excesses of the contemporary metropolis; and to offer contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource for life in the modern world. By instantiating and cultivating critical shifts in viewerly perspective in the manner of Buddhist ritual practice, "Walker" invites us to envision how a place of frenetic distraction or pedestrian mundaneness might be transfigured into a site of beauty, wonder, and liberation.

Keywords: Buddhism and modernity; contemplative studies; kinhin; slow cinema; transnational Chinese cinema; Tsai Ming-Liang; walking meditation; Zen ritual

This article synthesizes and clarifies the significance of the last half-century's developments in Bhutan's politics within the frame of Buddhist political thought. During this time, Bhutan has held a curious position in the international community, both celebrated as a Buddhist Shangri-La defending its culture in the face of globalized modernity, and at times, criticized for defending its heritage too conservatively at the expense of ethnic minorities' human rights. In other words, Bhutan is praised for being anti-modern and illiberal and denounced for being anti-modern and illiberal. As an alternative to understanding Bhutan vis-à-vis this unhelpful schema, and in order to better grasp what exactly is underway in Bhutan's political developments,

“Humanistic Buddhism” is generally acknowledged as a purely modern phenomenon in the history of Chinese Buddhism which came into being only after the advent of reformist activities in both monastic and lay circles since the late nineteenth century. In my paper I will show that several central aspects of “Buddhism in the human realm” can be found in the Zhaijiao (“Vegetarian Sects”) tradition in late imperial China and Taiwan.
Zhaijiao is a common collective designation given to the three religious traditions: Longhuapai 龍華派 or “Dragon Flower Sect,” Jintongpai 金幢派 or “Gold Pennant Sect,” and Xiantianpai 先天派 or “Former Heaven Sect.” Founded during the late Ming through mid-Qing period in southern China, they were introduced to Taiwan by the middle of the eighteenth century. Today, Zhaijiao is regarded as a form of lay or popular Buddhism both by the general public as well as by most (Western) scholarship. These sects, however, share many traits with the rich tradition of “popular religious sects” which fl ourished in late imperial Southern China.
I will show that this strand of “non-monastic” popular Buddhism already highlighted many aspects of renjian Fojiao which may alert us to rethink the conventional genealogy of “Humanistic Buddhism” in modern China.

In his later life Maurice Merleau Ponty changed his understanding of how human beings know Being and how human beings know phenomena. His mature understanding went far beyond the early phenomenology of Husserl. His understanding and intellectual position about the subjectivity of mind alone with its corresponding subject object duality dissolved into a experience of non duality within appearance. His dualistic understanding about Being changed to the vast nondual awareness of Being as the source of both subjectivity and objectivity. Before his work on the Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty's thought was contained by equating subjectivity with mind alone and with object alone. His view was dualistic and the source of knowing was located in mind alone. Mind means the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and fantasy.

Der Gebrauch von psychoaktiven Substanzen zu religiösen oder spirituellen Zwecken ist unweigerlich verbunden mit Fragen nach dem Verhältnis dieses „set“ und „setting“ zu konventionelleren und traditionellen Formen von Religiosität und Spiritualität. Dieser Vortrag beleuchtet dieses Thema für den Fall des Buddhismus und stützt sich dabei auf die wenigen akademischen Studien zu diesem Thema sowie auf traditionell-buddhistische Sichtweisen. Dabei wird auf die Fragen eingegangen, ob eine zeitgenössische buddhistische Praxis und der Gebrauch von Entheogenen vereinbar sind; ob es in der Geschichte des Buddhismus Präzedenzfälle für den religiösen Gebrauch von psychoaktiven Substanzen gibt; und schließlich welche traditionellen buddhistischen Sichtweisen es zu Entheogenen und deren Nutzen, Wirkungen und Gefahren gibt.

In the frame story of Heart of Darkness, Marlow is compared several times to a meditating Buddha. While Conrad criticism has considered these references from a philosophical point of view, it has not yet engaged how they relate to the main story's representation of the politics of colonial rule. Focusing on this complex relation between Enlightenment — East and West — and colonialism, the novella presents a broad-ranging critique of both Buddhist and European Enlightenment when they try to impose their vision on the world. The novella further suggests a distinction between absolute enlightenment and what the narrator calls " spectral illumination " — insights that are not forced onto the world, but rather continually emerge from it. This other politics of illumination calls on us to continually reinterpret and transform the world, while refusing the false hope of any final and conclusive enlightenment.

The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian's journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to