The Making of Meditation

I’ve published a pice at Palladium on the history of Buddhist Modernism and the long process of meditation’s evolution into a mainstream cultural phenomenon:

https://palladiummag.com/2022/05/28/the-making-of-west-coast-buddhism/

I’d encourage you to check it out, and below are some extra thoughts. I will be writing more about this subject in coming weeks.

In the year 1700, and in the year 900, and likely in the year 200 BC, the vast majority of Buddhists thought that enlightenment was a. an incredible attainment of life’s purpose, supernatural in its import and significantly above the conditions of everyday life and b. extremely difficult to obtain, taking countless lifetimes of good karma, with only the last lives involving any sort of meditation. When the post-Christian spiritual needs of the West encountered this, both of these principles needed to be changed. The West would never accept rebirth, and also was suspicious of accepting celibacy or monastic discipline, so in order to adapt Buddhism to its needs b. needed to be changed - enlightenment was actually relatively easy it turns out. As a consequence, a. needed to be changed as well, adapted to much more modest goals attainable in one lifetime. And because of the West’s epistemic requirements, Buddhist modernizers had to say that this was true Buddhism as propagated by the Buddha himself.

I am not a Buddhist, but I think this century-long sleight of hand is hiding a number of extremely important and unexplored possibilities:

If Buddhism is true, one needs to take seriously what the innumerable scholars and monks of the past thought, and if enlightenment is in fact very hard, what are we losing by lowering our goals so much. They thought it was important to become a Boddhisattva, should we not take this same task seriously?

If meditation is in fact a great secular method of personal spiritual discovery, why do contemporary practices stick relatively closely to the methods invented within the Buddhist tradition? Shakyamuni was trying to make a method to escape rebirth, and if there is no rebirth presumably other methods should be devised instead.

If meditation among all the religious practices became mainstream because of highly contingent factors of modernity, what other religious practices can and should be transformed? Is the lie of ancient authenticity necessary to propagate these, or can they be more results-focused?

If Buddhism has substantially changed with major Buddhist leaders in Asia arguing that the Western form of Buddhism is and always was the single authentic Buddhism, what are we losing from the forgotten past? Much of the Buddhist world, the Medieval spiritual landscape of India, Southeast, East, and Central Asia has been hopelessly lost for centuries already, and the last extant embers are slowly going dim. There was great beauty and wisdom in this world. They would understand the impermanence that has made their oblivion.