The Coming of Secular Buddhism

Secular Buddhism is coalescing today in response to two main factors. First, it rejects the incoherence of Buddhist modernism, a protean formation that accommodates elements as far afield as ancestral Buddhism and psychotherapies claiming the Buddhist brand. Second, it absorbs the cultural influence of modern secularity in the West. Historically understood, secularity has constituted a centuries-long religious development, not a victory of "science" over "religion." Today's secularity marks a further stage in the cultural decline of "enchanted" truth-claims and the intellectual eclipse of metaphysics, especially under the aegis of phenomenology. In Buddhism as in Christianity, secularity brings forth a new humanistic approach to ethical-spiritual life and creative this-worldly practices. The coming of secular Buddhism: a synoptic view Naïveté is now unavailable to anyone, believer or unbeliever alike. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 21 eventeen years ago I started teaching Buddhist meditation (mainly what was then called vipassana) in a large lay-based dharma centre cum monastic hermitage outside Sydney, one linked to the Theravadin monastic network. What I taught applied hallowed formulas and techniques, and raised no Theravadin hackles. Everyone concerned belonged to the broad church of Buddhist modernism, even if tensions were already high around those aspects of the Theravada untouched by modernity—the 1 "Theravada" and "vipassana" are often mistakenly treated as synonymous. The first of these terms (which literally means "the teaching of the elders") refers to the dominant, monastic-centred school of Buddhism in south-east Asia, and is thus sometimes also referred to as "southern Buddhism." Along with the Mahayana and the Vajrayana, the Theravada constitutes one of the three great divisions of traditional Asian Buddhism. "Vipassana" (literally "seeing deeply") is a meditation practice that began inside the Theravada in modern times. In the West, however, this practice has been successfully promoted such that it has for some time flourished as a sui generis "movement," often at considerable remove from its Theravadin doctrinal and institutional origins: see Fronsdal 1998. In more secular circles, "insight" now tends to replace the term "vipassana" when referring to meditation practice. While these terms are often used interchangeably, vipassana usually connotes reliance on techniques or formulas (exemplified by the Mah si and Goenka approaches), and "insight meditation" often connotes free-form "non-formulaic" approaches to meditation. I adopt this contrast and these terms in