My notes from McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism

My notes from The Making of Buddhist Modernism 

David L. McMahan

2008 Oxford University Press

“Buddhist modernism is a dynamic, complex, and plural set of historical processes with loose bonds and fuzzy boundaries.” (6)

Heinz Bechert, Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Modernized Buddhism word cloud: global over local, liberal, democratic, nonhierarchical, “rational,” romantic, meditation (as sine qua non of Buddhist practice), ecumenical, “privatization of religion,” universal, gender, equality, engaged, political, social justice, detraditionalization, hybrids (and hybrids of hybrids)

Asian modernizers include 14^th Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sulak Sivaraksa, Chogyam Trungpa, Walpola Rahula, and D.T. Suzuki.

Detraditionalization, Demythologization, Psychologization (42)

•  Shift from external to internal authority
•  From institutional to privatized religion
•  From transcendence to immanence, negative to positive evaluation of human nature (43)
•  Reason, experience, and intuition valued over tradition
•  “essence” of Buddhism being about internal experience rather than social realities (43). Universal mysticism.
•  Lay sympathizers, non-exclusive and eclectic, consciously feel free to adopt or reject any component at will. (44)

Demythologization

•  E.g. Wheel of rebirth (45), psychologization of which is entirely modern.
• 
•  “the process of trying to extract—or more accurately, to reconstruct—meanings that will be viable within the context of modern worldviews from teachings embedded in ancient worldviews.” (46)
•  Demythologization internalizes what in traditional accounts are ontological realities. (47)
•  W. Rahula’s chapter “Buddhist Attitude of Mind” is an unwitting primer on demythologization and detraditionalization. (50)
• o Freedom of thought self reliance
• o Tolerance pragmatism
• o “come and see” contra “come and believe”
•  Based on very selective reading
•  Excludes and obscures miracles, magic, supernatural, heavens and hells, merit
•  Focus on elite literature occludes ritual, devotion, and exorcism that are actually ore central to Buddhists’ lives than abstract doctrines. (51)
•  Idealized, textualized, orientalist

Psychologization (52)

• o E.g., psychological interpretation of the six realms as mental states
• o Originated with A.F. Rhys Davids (1843-1922) and Caroline A.F. Rhys Davids (1857-1942), Pali Text Society: Buddhism as ethical psychology.
• o Jung’s 1922 preface to the Tibetan Book of the Dead
• o Archetypes, collective unconscious
• o Neutralized the pantheon as facets of mind
• o Actually there are multiple levels of interpretation, and in no Tibetan tradition are the bardo appearances rendered wholly psychological entities. (54) To Tibetans they are real. Similarly, images, rupas, are more than symbolic. See the “Shukden affair” involving the 14^th Dalai Lama. (55)
• o D.T. Suzuki, collective unconscious as dharmakaya (56). Also Jung’s preface to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Later, Fromm’s collaboration with Suzuki, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.
• o Fromm: Zen as radical psychotherapy, unearthing entire subsconscious, thereby overcoming alienation and bringing the practitioner to wholeness. (56)
• o Perls’ Gestalt and Maslow’s peak experience concepts were influenced by similar interpretations of Buddhism.

Three broad discourses of Western modernity (62), with which Buddhist modernisms have at times harmonized and at times critiqued:

Scientific rationalism

Romanticism and its successors

Western monotheism

Buddhism and Scientific Rationalism

• o Rationalism opens the possibility of nihilism while also attempting to stave it off. (63)
• o Sōen Shaku (1859-1919), 1893 World Parliament of Religions, Chicago. First Zen teacher in the U.S., outside of immigrant communities. One of the most important early founders of Buddhist modernism. “Buddha’s teachings are in exact agreement with the doctrines of modern science.” (64)
• o Karma was mapped onto modern ideas of causality
• o Kālāma Sutta – don’t trust doctrines (64)
• o “Core-versus-accretions” model of Buddhism, whereby practices and doctrines incommensurate with modern values are delegitimized as “cultural accretions.” (65)
• o Even Pali texts feature unseen beings, the six realms, Mount Sumeru, gods above and heavens below, etc. These were taken literally. (66)

Placing Buddhism Between Rationalism and Christianity

• o Sōen, extensive. (67) Not atheistic. In harmony with Christianity, but superior. Pitted a demythologized Buddhism against the straw man of a very mythologized Christianity. (68)
• o The first wave of European and American commentators characterized Buddhism as atheistic, nihilistic, quietistic, pessimistic, and idolatrous. Buddhists responded with assertions of Buddhism as optimistic, activist, etc. constituted the first elements of Buddhist modernism. (69)
• o Resistance to colonialism and missionization
• o Protestantization of Buddhism: emphasizing this world, blurred the distinction between monk and laity, deemphasized ritual, proffered individual salvation. (70)
• o Transcendentalists saw different paths leading to one ultimate reality. “Spiritual” vs. material, also vs. “religion.” “Mystical experience” and serene contemplation. Perennial philosophy (16^th c. Augustino Seuco, later Leibniz). Amalgamating Neoplatonism, German metaphysics, Buddhism, and Vedanta. (71) Casting B. as one of many paths to a metaphysical absolute was a crucial move in its entrance into the discourses of modernity. 
• o D.T. Suzuki extracted Zen from Buddhism, calling it the “ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion,” the purest form of the perennial philosophy, and proceeded to privilege Japanese Zen. (72)

Rehumanizing science

Combining an embrace and a critique of science

“inner science”

Buddhism Modernisms and Romantic-Transcendentalist Discourse (76)

• o Herder and Schlegel: India as home of pristine wisdom….Most focused on Hindu literature.
• o East-West dichotomy. East as intuitive, spiritual, feminine, natural…
• o The western metaphysic most often hybridized with Buddhist modernism comes from German Romantics including Schiller, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Herder, and Hegel (77). Schelling: Nature as organism, subject and object not divided. One in the many. Ineffability.
• o Schleiermacher’s influential identification of the essence of all religion as an internal experience, one beyond duality of subject and object, experiential. (78)
• o Living, organic universe. Living force. Coleridge, Wordsworth. Nature supplies ethics through individual conscience (Rousseau).

Modernism and the Discourse of Scientific Buddhism

•  Anagarika Dharmapala
• o World Parliament of Religions, 1893
• o Ceylon nationalist, against British colonization
• o Buddhism in accord with and surpassing science, placing Buddhism at the forefront of the “evolution” of religion
•  Henry Steel Olcott
• o American, first American to become a Buddhist
• o Theosophist (occult science, spiritualism, perennialism—Romantic)
• o Buddhist Catechism (1881), harmonized Buddhism with science—Olcott’s own rather spiritualist conception of science
• o “true”/”essential” Buddhism vs. corrupt, degraded, common Buddhism
•  Paul Carus (101)
• o “Religion of Science.” Only one truth, represented by religion and science. Eventually there will evolve, through natural selection, a religion that has shed all incompatibilities with science. In this process Buddhism is the forerunner.
• o The Gospel of Buddhism
• o Supernatural occurrences in scriptures are meant to be taken symbolically.
•  Victorian crisis of faith, especially regarding science. Anomie and nihilism; need to resacralize the scientific world.
•  Universalism: as a response to encounter with world religions making truth claims….Theosophy: “There is no religion higher than Truth.” (their motto, p.109) Pernnialism. Individual religious traditions were said to be partial and incomplete expressions of a hidden, transcendent Truth. “Commitment to a notion of religious truth that transcends any historical religion was a crucial theme in the western interpretation of nonwestern traditions.” (109)
•  Playing on Romantic notions of the ancient East, Dharmapala present “Buddhism as the true antecedent to the most impressive of modern western accomplishments—the rise of science.” “Dharmapala presented Buddhism as having been quintessentially modern and rational even in ancient times.” (112) Dharmapala eventual promoted Buddhism over and against the Christianity of the colonizers. Highly political. Against universalism—Buddhism is the best!
•  “Indigenous modernity” (112)
•  “The early development of the discourse of scientific Buddhism emerged out of two intertwining crises in different cultural contexts: The Victorian crisis of faith… and the crisis of colonialism and western hegemony in Asia.” (113)
•  There remains a fissure between the indigenous approach and the universalist.
•  “The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that if there are Buddhist doctrines that are found definitively to contradict established scientific conclusions, then these doctrines must be abandoned.” (116) “He has declared some aspects of traditional Buddhist cosmology to be mistaken….” “If the dharma itself is subject to scientific epistemic authority, this would seem to signal a profound change in the structure of Buddhist claims to authority.” However, rather than jettison unfavorable doctrines, modernists tend to ignore or reinterpret them. (116) E.g., rebirth becomes psychological.
•  “How to decide what is to be understood as literal and what is to be reinterpreted as myth, symbol, or allegory”? (116)

Chapter 5: Buddhist Romanticism

•  Nature, art, creativity, spontaneity: From D.T. Suzuki. The idea that “Buddhism—and Zen in particular-- . . . that Zen has to do with spontaneity, and that this spontaneity is the font of creativity, art, and the emancipatory transcendence of stifling cultural norms.” (119) Such ideas come through modern interpretations of Zen and then are applied to all of Buddhism. While in Asia the unconventional behaviors of masters in the classical Zen literature was interpreted against a backdrop of traditional Buddhism, in the West they were interpreted according to language derived from Romanticism. (119)
•  The Mirror and the Lamp (Meyer Abrams) (119)
• o Expressive (rather than reflective) theory of art
• o Creation now understood to have a spiritual dimension
• o German Romantics (e.g., Schelling): Art as “an emanation of the absolute,” above even philosophy. (120)
•  Romantic elevation of genius, originality and spontaneity. Inspiration. Transpersonal. Epiphany, sudden revelations as a source art. (121)
•  Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats
•  Implicit critique of the instrumental, industrial, and mechanical (“It requires an Other of industrial-capitalistic values . . . . “ (121-22)).
•  D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) – The most influential figure in the development of Buddhist Modernism. “Zen Romanticism”
• o Influenced Huxley, Blyth, Goddard, Fromm, Jung and Merton (122)
• o Studied under Sōen Shaku and served as translator at the World Parliament of Religions
• o Chief concern of Romanticism and Transcendentalism was nature and its relation to humanity. To resacralize nature in the aftermath of the mechanization of the cosmos.
• o Kōan transcends the limitations of logical thinking and therefore reconciles the split between man and nature.
• o “pure being”
• o “takes Zen literature out of its social, ritual and ethical context and reframes it in terms of a language derived from German Romantic Idealism, English Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism. His vocabulary is of pure subjectivity . . . . “ (125)
• o unity with nature as the highest spiritual goal (125)
• o expressivist: “A Zen master expresses unique transcendent utterances from the depths of nondual being.” (125)
• o places Zen within the dialectic tension between rationalism and Romanticism, allying it with Romanticism but implicitly claiming to supersede it. (126)
• o conceptual versus direct apprehension of reality
•  orientalist, east-west duality, now the East in the ascendant
• o incidentally, valorization of the warrior ethic; support for Japanese militarism and nationalism (129)
• o Suzuki’s and the modern Buddhist conception of art are framed in terms of Romantic distinction beween contrived and spontaneous, intellectual and intuitive. (129-130)
• o “anticonceptualism and Rousseauian-Zen primitivism in relation to the ‘unconscious.’” (130) (Romantic: artist as priest/shaman)
•  amalgamates the Buddhist “unborn” (emptiness) with psychoanalytic unconscious and Romanticist nature.” (131)
• o recast emptiness in Western psychological and Romantic terms
•  ālaya-vijñana as “reservoir of infinite possibilities.” (131), source of all things, source of spontaneity and creativity
• o To summarize, this idea of creativity asserts . . . that nature is a unified, living source [sic?] that is the source and sustainer of existence . . . . Human consciousness is a manifestation of this larger, all-encompassing life, but the various forms of intellection, desire . . . cut it off from this larger life. The way of access to the absolute is inward . . . the unconscious. This is the source of creativity . . . . Creativity overflows naturally from the depths of being when the ratiocinating  mind gets out of the way. Finally, Suzuki insists that Zen provides a way of directly accessing these creative depths in ways yet unrealized by the West.” (131)
• o Decontextualized Zen literature to present it in a framework of Western, modern ideas.
• o “However spontaneous Zen masters may appear in Zen kōan literature, they did not thematize spontaneity or make it an object of explicit discource” as D.T. Suzuki did. (133)
• o rustic ethos, wabi, compared to Thoreau’s Walden
• o “His typical method of incorporating Western sources was to appropriate certain basic Western categories—like the absolute of German Romanticism, the unconscious of psychoanalysis, and creativity—while arguing that Zen embraces but supersedes them.” (133)
• o The idea that Zen is wholly unmediated by intellect and personal perspective is highly problematic (134)
• o Other (non-D.T. Suzuki) bridges between Zen and Romanticism
•  Anagarika Govinda
•  Nonreprentational/abstract
•  Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1914)
•  Schopenhauer, music’s nonreferential quality is what makes it the highest form of art. (136)
•  Sangharakshita (born Dennis Longwood, 1925)
•  The function of Buddhism and art is the same: experience of egolessness. 
•  The Religion of Art.
•  That true art is conducive to morality, which nevertheless might transcend mainstream moral codes (138)
•  “Romantic interpretation of Buddhist art, emphasizing the experience of interior depths, spontaneity, and individual originality, was something new to Buddhism—the result of placing selected Buddhist themes and cultural products into a distinctly modern context and transposing them to harmonize with the melodies of Romanticism.” (139)
•  In the East, Buddhist images function “primarily iconically and ritually . . . . considered as embodiments of Buddhas—serving as focal points for devotion and ritual.” (139) [Not “art” at all in the Romantic/expressivist sense.]
•  [P.146 last paragraph, p. 152 last paragraph]
•  [p.176 paragraph 2] Thich Nhat Hanh’s reformualation of karma and rebirth 
•  dispersion of karmic responsibility into the social system
•  dispersion of the individual at death into the whole cosmos
•  This view is T.N.H.’s own innovation, rooted in science and Transcendentalism.
•  Is it Buddhist? P.177

Meditaiton and Modernity

•  The vast majority of Asian Buddhists have practiced dharma through ethics, ritual and service to sangha, not through meditation. (183) 
•  Karma, merit
•  Lay meditation central to reform movements globally
•  Vispassana movement, Satipatthāna Sutta as central text (186)
•  Privatization, deinstitutionalization and detraditionalization of meditation
•  “The Subjective Turn” (Taylor, Sources of Self)
• o interiority, modernity placed a new emphasis on subjectivity (188)
• o Romantic, psychological, and rationalist modalities
• o The result of confrontation with diversity and pluralism
• o 18^th century notion of inner moral sense (e.g., Rousseau) (190)
• o culture and even personality itself seen as “endlessly revisable” (Bellah)(190)
• o p.191 paragraph 4

Meditation and Psychoanalysis

•  “conditioning” and “deconditioning”
•  “de-repressing”
•  Western: the “assertion that this inner self [Busshō, Buddha nature] comes forth as a result of the deconditioning of the mind . . . . “ (197)
•  Buddhist texts deal with karmic, not social or personal, conditioning.

Reflexivity

•  Augustine introduced the idea of making one’s own experience an object of reflection. (200)
•  Descartes’ cogito, the disengaged observer

Meditation as Science

•  Neglects the traditional purposes and functions in social, ethical, institutional and cosmological contexts (209). Ritual, social and even magical functions.
•  Buddhists have conceived of meditation not as a method of self-discovery but a tool for reversing the causal processes of birth and death to bring about a complete cessation of suffering. (209)
• o Good karma -> better rebirths
• o Merit
• o Supernatural powers, e.g., for miraculous healings and telling the future
•  Tied to a social system
•  In Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, meditation is inseparable from, and sometimes subordinate to, ritual and devotional elements. In Sōtō Zen, ritual re-creation of the awakening of the Buddha (Faure)
•  Not really publically verifiable. How adjudicate between Christian and Hindu claims that there exists a soul and the Buddhist claims there is no soul?
•  Operates within the constraints of tradition and authority
•  Can it “spiritualize” science, or merely get co-opted?
•  Meditation has been detraditionalized to the point where it now may become and open-ended tool for self-inquiry, etc., removing it from its Buddhist context altogether. [Public domain, as it were.]

Mindfulness, Literature, and Affirmation of Daily Life

•  Modern literature’s valorization of everyday life (218)
•  Resacralizing the world without resort to the supernatural
•  “Early Buddhistic monastic ethos . . . is not one of encouraging deeper engagement, participation, and connectedness with the work.” (218)
•  “Application of mindfulness to finding more appreciative and skillful approaches to work, family, and all the hectic activities of life is a phenomenon of the current age.” (218) [What about Dōgen’s Tenzokyōku?]

Modernity’s Affirmation of Ordinary Life

•  production. Family, work, and reproduction as loci for the good life. (219)
•  The Reformation, then secularized by the Enlightenment
• o God intended for us to be happy on Earth
•  Romantic bid to resacralize ordinary life
• o Tennyson’s “Flower in a Crannied Wall”
• o C.f. rationalist instrumentalization of things
•  Phenomenology
•  Heidegger

Literary Epiphanies

•  Self-reflexive inward turn, concern with consciousness itself
•  Attention to the details of ordinary life in the modern novel. (222)
•  Woolf, “look within,” and “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day . . . . “ (222)
•  (Coleridge, genius as the ability to place things “in a new light.” (223))
•  Joyce, especially Ulysses
• o Epiphany as “sudden illumination of the whatness of a thing.” (224)
•  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, eruption of memory
•  “dialectic interweaving of the prosaic and the profound” (225)
•  But, in tension—in Buddhism—with suspicion of objects as the cause of entanglements, suffering. Impermanence: Don’t cling. Intertwining of affirmation and negation. (228) Affirmed, but disentangled from the cravings and aversions, instrumental relationship to the “I.”
•  Hesse, especially Siddhartha (1922)
• o Hesse’s Siddhartha is not the Buddha, but the Buddha re-conceived for the 20^th Century. (231) Self-reliant, antiauthoritarian, skeptical of rites, etc. Listening to his “inner voice,” critical of bourgeoisie “well-upholstered hell,” anticlerical. He expresses a mistrust of words. Experience over doctrine. Attention to things. 
• o Affirmation of things, all things good. –Foreign to early Buddhist context. 
• o Romantic and Neo-Vedantic, perennialist. 
•  Interweavings of the prosaic and the profound, Buddhist and Western
• o Mahasatipatthana Sutta (DN 22) and Anapanasati Sutta (MN 118) : The core of the vipassana movement, most commonly cited, almost identical to each other.
•  Breaking everything into constituent parts
•  Not for purpose of appreciation, rather for detachment (233)
•  “there is no hint here of the loving attentiveness, the openness and communion with all things . . . in modern dharma literature.” (23)
•  things of the world are deemed deceptive, useless, conducive to suffering. 
• o Mahayana : more positive. Passions identified with awakening. (234) Hua-yen, all-pervasive Busshō. Any thing, inn its suchness, can reveal the highest truth (paramārtha-sātya). In tathagathagarbha thought, even mundane things can provoke realization.
• o Zen sources
•  Literature (eg flax, shit-stick, cypress in the garden, etc.) (234)
•  Monastic practice ritualized everyday activity
•  Practice-realization, mutual identity of nirvana and samsara
•  Not spontaneity, but intensive formalization
• o D.T. Suzuki was the most influential source of reinterpretation along literary lines.
• o The language they used by Watts and Suzuki to describe sacralization of everyday life is foreign to canonical texts but nearly identical to that used by 20^th century novelists.
•  Miracles -> natural, everyday. Relic veneration is deleted.
•  “Rhetoric of experience” (Sharf) – experience is primary.
•  Recovery of objects from the forces of commodification, instrumentalization.

From Modern to Postmodern?

•  “Like a creole dialect, its [Olcott’s Buddhism] lexicon was Buddhist, but its grammar was largely Protestant.” (241)
•  Democratization, Feminization, and (Increased) Hybridity
• o Buddhists on the ground, institutionally addressing these issues (242)
•  Baker scandal led to increased democratization (242)
•  Women – Sakyadita Internationl
• o Social engagement
• o Female teachers, male students
• o Combinations, eg Robert Kennedy and his and Maezumi’s line of dually ordained Zen Catholics
• o Complete detraditionalization, e.g., Tony Packer (246)
•  “post-Zen” : secular meditation and inquiry
•  idea that Zen is more an inner process or experience than a historical institution or tradition comes from D.T. Suzuki.
•  Re-traditionalization
• o Tibetan
• o Theravadin
•  Bhikkhu Bodhi’s critique of the use of the Kalama Sutta (248)
•  Thanissaro Bhikkhu against B. Romanticism: “Romancing the Buddha” (Tricycle, 2002)
•  Heterogeneity, pluralism. Variegated continua of modernism: From Buddhism/Zen/meditation as technique and “iterations of Buddhism fully accommodated to the consumerist, materialist, capitalist culture . . .” (253) to engaged Buddhism, requiring personal sacrifice for others.
•  Questions of authenticity/inauthenticity. Polemical and normative. Legitimacy and cultural capital.
•  G. Samuel on two orientations in Tibetan B’ism: bodhi (awakening) and pragmatic (spells for protection, etc.) (258)
•  Will B’ism critique and augment the cultures and societies it interacts with, or merely be co-opted by them?
•  “Global folk Buddhism” (263) – postmodern lay Buddhism, unsophisticated, syncretic, niche-market, self-identity—may threaten local Buddhisms.
•  Monastics and politically-engaged Buddhists may be able to create a viable response.