Religion- Reflection Paper 4

Religion and Culture

Introduction: The Problem of Enculturation

One of the major challenges for the countenance and growth of a religion is its ability to spread from its place of origin to new locations. Such success depends immensely on the ability of the religion’s specific set of ideas and practices to be assimilated into any new cultural setting’s worldview, values, and customs. From the outset, Buddhism was a missionary religion, interested in spreading beyond its Indian homeland. Interestingly, while it began in India, Buddhism is nearly extinct there today. It is largely found now throughout East and Southeast Asia—in places like China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. Indeed, the spread of the Buddhist religion to these new lands occurred both rapidly and with very little local conflict. The reasons for Buddhism’s success in these new places are many, but the most important was its ability to accommodate itself to the cultural world of India’s eastern neighbors.

Western cultures are decidedly different from those of the East, and the religions traditionally practiced in the West are decidedly different as well. While certain Eastern religious practices and ideas have been well received in the West—for example meditation and notions like karma—there are many features of Western cultural and social life that present obstacles to the reception of Buddhism as traditionally formulated and practiced. The ideals, norms, and values of American culture seem especially inimical to a person’s ability to embrace and emulate the teachings of Buddhism. But is this true? How has the encounter between Buddhism and the West unfolded? Has there been any level of compatibility at all?

Early Contacts

Although Buddhism spread throughout Asia, it remained virtually unknown in the West until modern times. Alexander the Great’s military campaign in Asia in the 4th century BCE took him as far as the river Indus, in present-day Pakistan. Alexander crossed the Indus in 326 BCE but then turned back westward and died in Babylon not long after. The heir to the eastern part of Alexander’s empire, Seleucus Nikator, soon found himself in conflict with the Mauryan dynasty in India. Eventually, in 303 BCE, a peace treaty was agreed, and a Greek ambassador by the name of Megasthenes visited the court of Chandaragupta Maurya at the Mauryan capital, Pataliputta. Following these initial contacts, tales of the holy men of India, known to the Greeks as gymnosophists (“naked philosophers”), began to circulate in the Hellenic world. Detailed information about Indian religion, however, was sparse, and for the most part the talk was of marvels such as men who walked with their heads under one arm. Buddhism, therefore, remained virtually unknown to the classic world.

In the 13th century, Marco Polo travelled throughout Central Asia to China, and his journey brought him into contact with the Mahayana form of Buddhism. Of the Buddha he wrote: “But it is certain, had he been baptized a Christian, he would have been a great saint alongside Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Around the same time, the tale of Barlaam and Josephaat became one of the most popular stories of the Middle Ages: although its medieval readers would not have know, the tale is based on a life of the Buddha composed in India around a thousand years earlier. Josephaat is a corruption of the word bodhisattva, meaning “buddha to be”.

It was not until the Portuguese discovered a sea route to India in 1948 that the possibility for sustained contact between East and West arose. The residents of the prosperous empires of Asia, however, had little interest in Europeans or the remote and sparsely populated continent from which they came. For their part, the first European visitors to Asia were more intent on finding gold or making converts to Christianity than in studying “heathen” religions. Although the Jesuits who encountered Buddhism in China and Japan from the 16th century were intrigued by it, it was not until the 19th century that serious interest in Buddhism developed and detailed knowledge of its teachings became available. Knowledge of Buddhism has come through three main channels: the labor of Western scholars; the work of philosophers, intellectuals, writers, and artists; and the arrival of Asian immigrants who have brought various forms of Buddhism with them to Europe and America.

Academic Study

One of the first Europeans to study Buddhist texts was Ippolito Desideri, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to Lhasa in 1716. He studied Tibetan texts and debated Buddhist and Christian doctrine with Tibetan scholars. Further academic interest in Buddhism developed during the colonial period, as European officials—many of them proficient amateur scholars—were posted to different parts of Asia. A large number of Mahayana Sanskrit manuscripts were collected in Nepal by the British civil servant B. H. Hodgson. Another Englishman who made an outstanding contribution to the study of Theravada Buddhism was T. W. Rhys Davids. He became interested in Buddhism during his residence in Sri Lanka and went on to found the Pali Text Society in 1881. The Society remains to this day the most important outlet for the publication of texts and translations of Pali Buddhist literature.

Professional scholars from many countries played an important role in the transmission of Buddhism to the West. In 1844 the Frenchman Eugene Burnouf published his Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism and followed this seven years later with a translation of the Lotus Sutra. Interest in Buddhism in Germany was stimulated by the publication of Herman Oldenberg’s The Buddha, His Life, His Doctrine, His Community in 1881. Close to the end of the century the American Henry Clarke Warren published his Buddhism in Tanslations (1896), an anthology of Buddhist texts that has remained popular to the present day.

The first Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in Chicago in 1893, an event designed to bring representatives of the different world faiths together to explore the common ground they shared. The Buddhist representatives included Anagarika Dharmapala, a Sri Lankan who made a great impression in his speeches and public meetings. He made two further visits within the next ten years and founded an American branch of the Maha Bodhi Society, the first Buddhist organization in the West. Shortly after the turn of the century attention broadened from south Asian Buddhism to include the study of Mahayana Buddhism through Tibetan and Chinese sources. The Belgian scholars Louis de La Vallee Poussin and Etienne Lamotte made an enormous contribution in this field. Mention must also be made of D. T. Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist who promoted awareness of Zen Buddhism through his lectures and influential books.

Philosophy, Culture, and the Arts

The second way Buddhism has entered the Western world is through philosophy, culture, and the arts. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the first major Western thinker to take an interest in Buddhism. Due to the absence of reliable sources, Schopenhauer had only an imperfect knowledge of Buddhism, and saw it as confirming his own somewhat pessimistic philosophy. Of all the world religions, Buddhism seemed to him the most rational and ethically evolved, and the frequent references to Buddhism in his writings brought it to the attention of Western intellectuals in the latter part of the 19th century.

In England, Edwin Arnold published his famous poem “The Light of Asia” in 1879. The poem describes the life and teachings of the Buddha in a melodramatic style that made it very popular with Victorian audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Arnold was a Christian who saw much in common in the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha. He visited the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in 1885 and campaigned for funds to restore it from its dilapidated condition. Around this time interest in the supernatural among the Victorians was at its height, and in 1875 Colonel Henry Olcott and Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, which was devoted to uncovering the esoteric truth believed to lie at the heart of all religions. Attention was focused mainly on the religions of the East, and Buddhism in particular became a popular subject of study and discussion in salons and drawing rooms.

The German novelist Herman Hesse often alluded to Buddhist themes in his writings, notably in his 1922 novel Siddhartha. In the post-war years, Jack Kerouac’s novels The Dharma Bums and On the Road were popular with the Beat generation and provided inspiration for the countercultures of subsequent decades. The eclectic thinker and philosopher Alan Watts wrote a number of books on Zen that attracted a popular readership. But perhaps more than any other single work, Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has ensured that this school of Buddhism is widely known in the West. The cinema, too, has played its part in infusing Buddhist ideas into Western culture. Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, Scorsese’s Kundun, Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet, and other films illustrate the extent to which Buddhism is becoming a part of Western culture.

Buddhist Immigration

The third channel for the introduction of Buddhism to the West has been immigration. This is a phenomenon that has affected the United States and Europe in different ways. The majority of Buddhist immigration has been to the United States and began as early as the 1860s when Chinese laborers arrived to work on the railroads and in the gold mines. Immigrants from both China and Japan settled in Hawaii before it was formally annexed by the United States in 1898. Recent decades have seen an influx of immigrants from Indo-China in the wake of the Vietnam War, and perhaps half a million Buddhists from Southeast Asia have settled in the United States. The tendency has been for immigrant communities to establish their own local temples as a means of preserving their distinctive cultural identity rather than for proselytizing purposes. Only after the first or second generation does a pattern of interaction with the host community develop such that individuals from different cultural backgrounds meet as Buddhists rather than as members of a particular ethnic group.

All the major forms of Buddhism are now represented in the West, but statistics on the rate of growth of Buddhism are difficult to come by, and there are wide variations in the figures quoted. In his pioneering study American Buddhism, Charles Prebish estimated the number of Buddhists in the United States in 1979 as something in the order of a few hundred thousand. Less than ten years later, in 1987, the American Buddhist Congress, a body founded in the same year with forty-five affiliate groups, put the figure at 3-5 million, and more recent estimates put the number around 6 million. No census of Buddhist groups and organizations in the United States has been undertaken, but Prebish estimates there are now about a thousand such groups. Converts to Buddhism in both Europe and the United States come predominantly from the white middle class.

The Popularity of Buddhism

Why has Buddhism proved so popular in the West? The reasons for this are complex, and have as much to do with the cultural history of the West as with the attractions of Buddhism. Various Western “readings” of Buddhism have been popular from time to time, although often these tell us more about changing fashions in the West than they do about Buddhism. One of the most popular Western interpretations of Buddhism is as a rational philosophy, and developments in the West have created a climate that is favorable to Buddhism when seen in this light. The dominant cultural influences in the West since the Enlightenment in the 18th century have been science and secular liberalism. Buddhism qua rational philosophy seems compatible with both of these, at least to a greater extent than has been the case with orthodox Western religion. Scientific discoveries, and theories such as evolution, have challenged many traditional Christian teachings, and the long rearguard action fought by established religion in defense of revealed “truths” has made it seem dogmatic, irrational, and backward looking. The absence of an anthropomorphic concept of deity is another feature that makes Buddhism more acceptable to the modern mind. By contrast, there seem few Buddhist doctrines that are in direct conflict with science, and proponents of Buddhist modernism have offered allegorical interpretations of any which are. The Buddhist worldview is less parochial than the universe of traditional Christianity and, if anything, seems to anticipate the findings of modern cosmology rather than be in conflict with them. Recent discoveries in quantum physics, furthermore, suggest that science is slowly coming to a view of reality not unlike that described in Buddhist philosophy.

Even belief in reincarnation—perhaps the most difficult Buddhist concept for Westerners to accept—has, as least to some, received empirical support in studies such as those by the American psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. Belief in reincarnation is widespread in many cultures, and in the post-Christian West the idea is once again becoming part of popular culture. One of the implications of reincarnation is that individuals can transmigrate through different species, for example when a human being is reborn as an animal or vice versa. This provides a new perspective on the relationship between humans and the rest of creation, one very much in tune with contemporary ecology. In the traditional Christian view, man is the caretaker or custodian of the natural world, answerable to God for the discharge of his duty, but otherwise free to exercise dominion over the natural order. Many ecologists see this belief as having encouraged the over-exploitation of nature and having fostered an attitude of indifference to the well being of other species. The Christian teaching that only man has an immortal soul, and there is no place in heaven for animals, seems “speciesiest” and out of keeping with the holistic tenor of much contemporary thought. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism draws no hard and fast line between different forms of life. Although it recognizes that human life has a special value, it acknowledges that all living creatures are entitled to respect in their own right, not simply because of the utility they may possess for human beings.

Buddhism also seems in harmony with the other dominant contemporary Western ideology, namely secular liberalism. Buddhism is undogmatic, even to the extent of instructing its followers not to accept its teachings uncritically but always to test them in the light of their own experience. Although it asks that its followers take certain basic teachings on trust in the initial stages, and adopt a positive and open-minded attitude, Buddhism is more concerned with the development of understanding than the acceptance of creedal formulas. The fact that Buddhism imposes few confessional, ritual, or other requirements on its followers makes it easy to live as a Buddhist in a pluralistic milieu and minimizes the likelihood of conflict with secular values. Perhaps this aspect of Buddhism has contributed to its popularity in the United States, where church and state are constitutionally separate.

Buddhism is also perceived as liberal and progressive in the field of ethics. Its moral teachings are not expressed as commandments in the imperative form “Thou shalt not” but as rational principles that if followed lead to the good and happiness of oneself and others. The Buddhist toleration of alternative viewpoints contrasts with some of the darker episodes in the history of Western religion, where persecution and torture have been employed in order to stamp out heresy. Westerners who object to the dogmatic moralizing tone of established religion often find Buddhism a congenial alternative within which to purse their religious goals. Meditation also has a strong appeal, and offers practical techniques for dealing with stress and other psychosomatic problems.

The fact that Buddhism can be presented as in harmony with influential contemporary ideologies has undoubtedly aided its spread in the West. Key influences on the development of Buddhism in America in particularly have been its notions of individualism, autonomy, and self-reliance. Such notions continue to strongly shape the way Buddhism is approached within a society originally founded on such values.

A New Buddhism for the West?

Areas of potential conflict between Buddhism and Western thought still remain, and many differences have been papered over rather than squarely faced by modern interpreters. What seems called for is a “Buddhist Enlightenment,” that is to say, a systematic updating of the intellectual foundations of the religion so as to allow a clear and consistent set of teachings on modern issues to emerge. In recent decades, a broadly based movement known as “socially engaged Buddhism” has begun the attempt to address questions of a social, political, and moral nature. Based around the teaching of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the movement seeks ways to apply the ancient teachings to the challenges of modern life. This is no easy task, since to a large extent Buddhism is a pre-modern phenomenon and has little experience of the problems that life in the West presents. The success with which Buddhism is able to reinvent itself for the West will determine the extent to which it becomes a mainstream religious force.

The dilemma Buddhism faces is not unique, and contemporary developments in other religions provide an interesting parallel. It would not be unprecedented if the tensions within Buddhism led to a split between conservative and progressive factions similar to the division between the orthodox and liberal wings of Judaism. Perhaps history will repeat itself, and the arrival of Buddhism in the West will provoke a modern version of the “Great Schism,” with one group dedicated to the development of a distinctive Western form of Buddhism. As Christian Humphreys, the eminent British scholar of Buddhism, has written: “Why should there not be in time a Western Buddhism, a Nava-yana or “new vehicle,” not deliberately formed as such but a natural growth from the same roots of Buddhism as all others; that is, the record of the Buddha’s enlightenment? There is no reason why it should not grow happily alongside, and even blend with, the best of Western science, psychology, and social science, and thus affect the ever-changing field of Western thought. It will not be Theravada or Zen. Just what it will be we do not know, nor does it matter at the present time. The Dharma as such is immortal, but its forms must ever change to serve the ever-changing human need.”

The historian Arnold Toynbee described the encounter between Buddhism and the West as “one of the greatest collisions of the twenty-first century.” To this confluence of cultures Buddhism brings a sophisticated psychology, techniques of meditation, a profound metaphysics, and a universally admired code of ethics. The West brings a skeptical empiricism, a pragmatic science and technology, and a commitment to democracy and individual liberty. If the history of the spread of Buddhism to other cultures teaches any lessons, it is that a genuinely new and distinctive form of Buddhism will be born from this encounter.