QUESTION from Gerry Trione:
Bhante, As you probably know, there are about 700 million Buddhists around the world, most of whom are in Asia. There are an estimated 3-4 million in the US, but most of whom are Asian, leaving only about 600,000 “westerner” Buddhists; far less than 1% of the population. I know from personal experience that Buddhism is essentially unknown or misunderstood with Americans. Moreover, the prospect of US as a fertile ground for religious Buddhism is becoming more tenuous as young people are taught in school and social media that there is no “god” and anyone who follows a religion is a loser. The result of turning away from religion is the loss of moral and ethical guidelines on how to live a wholesome life. This is why we have such a high rate of drug and alcohol use, and psychological problems. Over 60 million people in the US have psychological problems, and over 50 million have drug addictions. And, its getting worse.
The question is: Why is Buddhism, the proven best means to end mental suffering, so hard for young people to grasp?
ANSWER from BC
Gerry, Thanks for this important question. I agree with you: the modern world needs Buddhism, because Buddhism is almost the opposite of what ails modern culture: its hyper-individualism, its consumerism, its commercialism, its secularism, and so. But exactly this this is what makes Buddhism difficult to grasp for modern people. Buddhism is not an easy-answer guide to life, except in some of its regional, primarily devotional “folk” manifestations, which are simply going to seem strange to westerners.
Partly as a way to popularize Buddhism, many modern teachers westernize or pare down Buddhism. I daresay that much of what is taught as Buddhism by western teachers is not of Asian origin at all, but is a continuation of currents of western thought that can be traced through the early Protestant Reformation, through Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, psychoanalysis, and probably through the beatnik and hippy countercultures. Buddhism is being significantly co-opted by modern culture, rendering it unable to squarely oppose those aspects of modernism that are most vexing. David McMahan’s book, the Making of Buddhist Modernism, offers a fascinating discussion of this issue.
Of course, modern people are always going to see Buddhism through a modern lens. The challenge is to do this without distorting the Buddha’s original intent. East Asians certainly do not conceptualize Buddhism the way Indians did, yet the managed to preserve the functionality of early Buddhism well. Much of my own efforts center around presenting “Early Buddhist for Modern Buddhists” (which I’ve made the name of this web site) without distorting the intention of the earliest sources.
I don’t have a clear answer on how best to promote Buddhism in the west. I’m doing my best. The commercial culture seems to overrun everything. The number of monks in Thailand, for instance, has fallen by 50% in 20 years, apparently because of the growing influence of modernity. Taiwan, on the other hand, continues to sustain very strong Buddhist and Taoist traditions in spite of its modernity. I’d like to know how they do it. I doubt that we will manage a sweeping Buddhist movement, say, in the USA. What we might accomplish is small communities here and there that are dedicated to living sanely according to the Dhammic principles, much as the artifacts of civilization were preserved in the monasteries of the Middle Ages.
MORE DISCUSSION from Gerry
The answer is the primary message of Buddhism, to end suffering, is not being communicated to the masses. It is obscured and eclipsed by a larger focus on the more mystical concepts of rebirth, merit, realms, devas, and the supernatural. The elegance of Buddhism from my perspective, having studied psychology in undergrad, is the close resemblance to psychology of the 4 Noble Truths. Namely, suffering, or “psychic irritants” exist; we know the causes (Three Poisons); Suffering can be cured; and, the cure is known (8 Fold Path, Precepts, etc.). This is classical psychology with “psychoanalysis” and “Psychotherapy”.
What young people ask themselves is: “What’s in it for me?”. The answer is “Happiness”; the end of suffering. But, young people I know don’t think they’re “suffering”. They think that anger, hate, resentment, jealousy, envy, worry, fear, cravings, addiction, anxiety, and depression is “normal”!!! In short, Buddhism needs to be repackaged to appeal to these younger people in a form which is Simple, Relevant, and Compelling.
RESPONSE by BC
I agree with your most of your points, and along with you am particularly alarmed at what young people experience as life.
You are right: Buddhism, at least the early Buddhism taught by the Buddha, is psychological through and through. I am a retired cognitive scientist and I am simply in awe the the Buddha’s understanding of the human mind. I’m discovering that early Dhamma matches up with modern cognitive research well. However, I don’t agree Dhamma bears a close relationship to psychotherapy (although a lot of psychotherapists are Buddhists). The goals are different. Freud described psychotherapy as curing psychological abnormalities that cause individual suffering, and added something like, “so that sufferers can return the common level of suffering that we all share.” Buddhism is concerned with curing the common level of suffering that we all share. But even that goal is incidental to its main goal: to improve and eventually perfect the human character in its dual aspects of virtue and wisdom. I think of the suffering of young people in modern society, and of almost everyone else, not so much as an abnormality of individual psychology, as of the break-down of the society in they live.
As for the “larger focus on the more mystical concepts of rebirth, merit, realms, devas, and the supernatural,” many teachers explicitly exclude such teachings, particularly the secularists. As for preserving the integrity of early Dhamma, I’ve concluded that devas, realms and much of the supernatural (like acquiring the ability to jump up and touch the sun) are dispensable, but fun. Rebirth and merit are critically important. Merit (or the fruits of kamma) is simply the effects of wholesome practice on our character, and can be largely explained cognitively. Rebirth gives us an important way of framing our long-term practice. It’s not necessary to believe that it is actually true as described, only that we accept it as a working assumption. We do this all the time anyway: money is not true, it is a social construct that everyone accepts as a working assumption, and thereby serves an important social function.
Please REPLY if you would like to continue this conversation on a multifaceted topic that perhaps all readers have a stake in. I would like to encourage such discussions in order to revive this web site, to which I have given insufficient attention in the last years. Submit a question
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