Modernist interpretations of Buddhism: clarifying or reductive?

Does eliminating ontological and metaphysical baggage sacrifice too much?

Unsettling faceless deity I saw painted at Norbulingka Monastery, Bylakuppe.

My Ama-la is Tibetan and a devout Tibetan Buddhist. All but one of my six Tibetan uncles are or were monks. I spent a year-and-a-half of my childhood living in a Tibetan settlement in Karnataka, South India. All my life, I’ve been raised as a Tibetan Buddhist, and as an adult I deliberately practice it. But as I grow older and occasionaly more self-aware, I’m realising my interpretation of Tibetan (and broader) Buddhism contains an implicit yet salient Modernist streak.
These Modernist interpretations can definitely be attractive, particularly for their rational emphasis. Yet they also risk being individualistic, isolating the individual from Buddhism’s rich cosmology of sentient beings and also from the important cultural flavours of whichever Buddhist tradition they hail from. The risk is being a Buddhist in a vacuum, so to speak. Buddhism has at its heart wisdom and compassion; Modernist interpretations can aid the former, but often not the latter.

Tibetan Buddhism is very heterogenous, with some parts more austere and others more colourful. On one hand, it has extremely sophisticated metaphysical frameworks and meditative practices inherited from the Madhyamika school of Northern India; on the other hand, it has a dizzying cosmology bursting with different realms and types of being, inherited from Hinduism and indigenous pre-Buddhist Tibetan religions, that are scattered across ridiculous scales of space and time (a single kalpa, the Hindu and Buddhist unit of time, lasts just over 16million years) [1]. Approximately, these different austere and colourful aspects of Tibetan Buddhism can be mapped onto a continuum, with each practitioner’s interpretation falling somewhere between the poles.

Interpretations of Tibetan (and broader) Buddhism which fall towards the more austere poles can be termed Modernist, as posited by David McMahan in his 2008 book, The Making of Buddhist Modernism [2]. McMahan identifies three central Modernist streaks: Western monotheism; rationalism and scientific naturalism; and Romantic expressivism. I understand the last as emphasising and legitimising the individual’s subjective inner world as a source of valid spiritual experience, as contrasted to the Enlightenment’s extra-human rationalism (but don’t quote me on that lol). Such Modernist interpretations simultaneously de-emphasise elaborate cosmology, ritual and ceremony, and indigenous/folk beliefs.

McMahan argues that, since the 19th century, interpretations of Buddhism are increasingly influenced by these streaks. The effect of this is that “elements of Buddhism that many now consider central to the tradition—meditation, internal experience, individual authority—are so constructed because of the gravitational pull of modernity” [3]. Of course, there’s conceptual difficulties in disentangling Modernism from the many Buddhist traditions (e.g. Zen and the Forest Traditions) that emphasised these elements centuries before Modernism existed. But still, McMahan’s argument does accurately describe a shift in at least Western interpretations of Buddhism. And also to an extent mine.

For example, when it comes to interpreting samsara and the realms of rebirth, many practitioners adopt a realist approach: they believe that the 6 realms actually exist in space-time as ours does, and so do the beings that inhabit them. This is probably near-universal among my grandparents’ generation of Tibetans born and raised in Tibet. (Of course, there’s an interesting class stratification in that nomads like them likely only subscribe to realist interpretations while educated classes may also subscribe to other more conceptual interpretations).

I’ve instead always adopted a cognitive interpretation of samsara: the 6 realms and their beings don’t exist in space-time, but each realm and its beings should rather be understood as metaphorical for a state of mental affliction (e.g. the pretna (hungry ghost) realm as symbolising greed/attachment), and samsara itself as the complete set of mental afflictions.

I’d say my interpretation fulfils McMahan’s Modernist criteria: its atheism is even more Modernist than Western monotheism, it’s scientifically naturalistic by not making ontological commitments to other worlds, and the relating of each realm to my own unique mental phenomena relates to Romantic expressivism’s focus on the subjective inner world.

Avoiding any ontological commitments to other realms is surely an advantage of my interpretation and Modernist interpretations in general. But if we commit to the psychological metaphor, it gets harder and harder to retain a sense of these afflictions as we splinter deeper and deeper into the subdivisions of samsara and the metaphorical beings inhabiting it. Conceptually, this psychological interpretation is still coherent: each realm and being is a metaphor for afflictions I can in theory experience and should urgently avoid. But as beings and realms grow more and more distant from the human realm, the identification with them becomes harder. Their distance makes them colourless.

There’s a greater disadvantage of my Modernist interpretation. If my motivation to escape samsara is to have a compassionate basis, as all schools of Buddhism exhort it must, this compassion is for myself or, at most, other humans and animals (i.e. the only beings I interact with). By seeing beings in other realms as merely metaphorical vessels for my own experiences, I thereby limit my compassion. Wouldn’t believing that these other realms and beings actually exist and are also suffering dramatically increase the scale of my compassion and motivation? Wouldn’t such belief also reinforce my gratitude for this rare, precious human life and opportunity to escape samsara? Wouldn’t it make me feel less alone to believe that I am but one of countless beings all driven by the same mental and emotional afflictions? Wouldn’t it increase my reverence for the Buddha’s teachings that they may be the path out of this maze?

Such an ontological commitment is also much more congruent with the rest of Buddhist teachings, in which many schools describe events as unfolding on such dramatic timescales as kalpas. Some Buddhist sutras (including the Diamond and Lotus Sutras [4]) predict dark ages of spiritual degeneration whose duration is quantified in kalpas. The Buddha Maitreya is foretold to appear at a distant time to rescue sentient beings from this dark age, and his teachings foretold to last 360,000 years [5]. Sufficient negative karma causes beings to be reborn in naraka, the different hell realms, where they stay for incomprehensibly long kalpas.

Nowhere, perhaps, are Modernist interpretations of Buddhism more salient than meditation. While historically the majority of Buddhists have not practiced meditation or centrally featured it in their practice, it is at the core of many, if not all, schools. Since the hippie trail of the ‘60’s, influential Western and non-Western Buddhist teachers like Joseph Goldstein and Chögyam Trungpa have taught meditation to Western audiences such that it requires minimal doctrinal commitment. Secular meditation has particularly proliferated online through self-help apps like Headspace. Get this: Headspace had an estimated revenue of $135mn in 2013; following its merger with mental healthcare platform Ginger, its net worth is now $3bn [6].

In Modernist fashion, these New-Age meditation practices represent meditation as a means for unlocking creative impulses, accessing the unconscious, and recognising wonder in everyday moments: they’re internally-oriented. This internal orientation broadly aligns with Theravadan, Forest School, and Zen meditative traditions. But it clashes most starkly with the externally-oriented elements of the meditative traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism (although the latter certainly have internally-oriented elements). All Mahayana Buddhist traditions have as their goal the liberation of all sentient beings from samsara, and their meditative traditions rigorously include meditating to generate compassion (for example, in Tönglen meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the object of meditation is the suffering of sentient beings). In Tibetan Buddhism, the practitioner has as the object of meditation their guru whom they imagine to embody Bodhisattvas’ enlightened qualities, and also the bhavachakra (the visual representation of samsara as a wheel).

I certainly believe that secular meditation is beneficial, and meditation definitely isn’t even a uniquely Buddhist practice. But these benefits are likely to be largely cognitive, refining one’s attention perhaps, but not expanding their compassion. It is only through externally-oriented meditation that this latter benefit can arise. Also in meditation, it seems, Modernist interpretations of Buddhism are again counterproductive to the generation of compassion that is indispensable to Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism.

There’s also much in Buddhist philosophy of mind that could be construed as Modernist, specifically in the interesting parallels between the doctrine of anatta (no-self) and Freudian and Jungian psychology. Briefly, anatta posits that our naïve belief in and seeming experience of an enduring and unique self is illusory. This false self is a conceptual and phenomenological construct that exists wholly relatively and dependently upon ceaselessly fluctuating mental and sensory perception (the five skandhas that compose the mind).
Freudian and Jungian models of the self as strongly influenced by unconscious, more primitive drives have in common with anatta the thesis that the “self” to a significant extent supervenes upon deeper mental and emotional currents. Further, Buddhist and psychoanalytical traditions both characterise these currents as debased, dangerous, and to be tamed.

I suppose the critical difference is that Freud maintained that we should understand these unconscious drives and guard against their influence, while Buddhism believes that mental afflictions (the Three Poisons of ignorance, greed/attachment, and aversion), and thereby clinging to the self, can be entirely overcome. Here, we see what I think is the deepest difference between Modernist psychology and Buddhist psychology: the former sees spiritual progression as achieved through understanding, valorising, and identifying with the self, whereas the latter sees it as achieved through stopping our preoccupation with the self entirely.

Modernist interpretations definitely shouldn’t be applied to the cultural practices of Buddhist peoples, and rob them of much of their meaning. Culturally, Tibetan cultural practices are inseparable from Tibetan Buddhism. In sang offerings, smoke is burnt as offerings for all sentient beings; prayer wheels are spun to accumulate merit; as a meditative technique, practitioners often imagine their guru to have the qualities of a Buddha; walking kora (circumambulating around a stupa) represents the turning of the wheel of Samsara and accumulates meritorious karma; on Losar, Tibetan New Year, a burning torch is carried throughout the house to expel malignant spirits. These practices have inherent cultural value even if their spiritual aspects are minimised, but from a Tibetan’s perspective, understanding and performing them with their spiritual function in mind reveals their full importance.

Modernist perspectives on Buddhism can eliminate much ontological baggage while retaining much of the sophistication of Buddhist theory (particularly Buddhist psychology). But at the risk of isolating the individual from the other beings in samsara and thereby limiting their compassionate motivation to escape samsara for the benefit of others, and neglecting the important spiritual dimension to Buddhist people’s cultural practices. These risks also hold true for meditation: I meditate lots and it’s benefitted me greatly. Bare equinamity. But my benefit is for others’ benefit, not just mine. Besides, in our current environmental apocalypse, maybe it’s high time we remember beings in other realms. To be a Tibetan Buddhist is to inherit an inextricable intertwinement of spirituality and culture - some of which I freely admit is superstitious and potentially distracting from core Buddhist teachings.
Still, I’d rather be part of a living, embodied tradition than a Buddhist in a vacuum.

[1] Epstein, Ronald B.(2002). Buddhist Text Translation Society's Buddhism A to Z p. 204. Buddhist Text Translation Society

[2] McMahan, David L. (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford University Press.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Nattier 1991, pp. 35-37.

[5] Bangkok and Lumbini: The Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation and The Lumbini International Research Institute. pp. 122 and 232.

[6] Heater, Brian (2021-08-25). "Headspace and Ginger are merging to form Headspace Health". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-03-10.