Anyone trying to make sense of contemporary western Buddhism would do well to read The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David McMahan (Oxford University Press, 2008). McMahan, associate professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, provides a clear and readable story about how “modern” Buddhism came to be the way it is.

I very much appreciate that McMahan has tossed out the common conceit that “modernity” is exclusively the creation of the West, and that Buddhism will be “modernized” by making it more palatable to cultural westerners.

McMahan illustrates that in Buddhism, traditionalism/modernism, and Asian/Western, do not neatly fit into simple dichotomies or fall along a clearly defined continuum. There are several “modernisms” emerging in Buddhism, he says. And while this is a global phenomenon, Asian teachers have been the principal “modernizers.”

The notion that “European Americans have always been the bold innovators at the forefront of adapting the dharma to the times and Asians always a force for maintaining moribund tradition” is wrong, McMahan says. “In fact, Asian Buddhists have usually been the pivotal figures in the reformation and revitalization of Buddhism in terms coherent with  modernity.”

“Pure” Buddhism?

However, it’s certainly true that Buddhism in the West has been shaped by western influence. Early in the book, McMahan addresses the “Orientalists” who were among the first westerners to pay attention to Buddhism as anything other than Asian idolatry. The Orientalists’ reading of the Pali texts made the historical Buddha out to be a remarkably modern fellow whose ideas harmonized well with their post-Enlightenment (in the European sense) perspective.

In other words, they projected their own idealized views onto him. McMahan writes,

“Orientalist scholars located ‘true Buddhism’ in the texts of the ancient past and delimited it to carefully selected teachings, excluding any consideration of living Buddhists, except reformer who themselves were modernizing their tradition in dialogue with western modernity. … sympathetic Orientalists presented the Buddha as a protoscientific naturalist in his own time.”

Western scholars persisted in painting “original” Buddhism as a pure, naturalist philosophy that got buried under centuries of Asian superstition and spiritism. You can see a variation of this same perspective today in the work of Stephen Batchelor as well as in Buddhist naturalist ideas currently flitting around in academia.

Other kinds of “demythologizing” and “detraditionalizing” are emerging that are “not simply a western invention,” McMahan says. Among these are efforts to find deeper, “existential” meaning in texts that have been understood more literally in the past. An example of this would be the Mount Meru cosmology, which for the most part went from being believed in literally to being interpreted allegorically. McMahan used the example of the Wheel of Life, which modernizing Asian teachers such as Chogyam Trungpa saw as illustrating states of mind.

The Romantic Transcendentalists

McMahan writes that Buddhism in the West carries a big dose of influence from 18th century European Romantics and 19th century American Transcendentalists. Romantic theologians promoted the idea that religion is more about individual intuition and feeling than about institutions and dogma — a radical idea at the time. Among other things, the Transcendentalists idealized a kind of mystical, cosmic spirituality over the dogmas and strictures of organized religion.

So, yes, the Romantics and Transcendentalists probably were the original “I’m spiritual but not religious” crew.

If you grew up in the Americas or Europe in the 20th century and received the standard western education, you got big doses of the Romantics and Transcendentalists — William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so on. Even if you didn’t study these guys directly, you were taught by people who did study them and passed on their perspectives. If you are a child of the cultural West, you’ve got Romantic and Transcendentalist ideas virtually stamped into your DNA, whether you are aware of it or not.

McMahon tells us that a lot of the westerners who first took an interest in and wrote about Buddhism were five-alarm Romantic-Transcendentalists. One was Dwight Goddard (1861-1939), for example, who wrote several books that are still in print and which introduced Zen to Jack Korouac.

Romantic-Transcendentalist themes were “crucial in the first western interpretations of Buddhism” and were carried through the 1950s “Beat” era, the 1960s counterculture, and still strongly influence Buddhism in the West today. McMahon provides many examples of this.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; just because something isn’t “Asian” doesn’t necessarily mean it is incompatible with the dharma. However, the Romantic-Transcendentalist influence at this point is so seamlessly woven into western Buddhism that most westerners don’t realize it didn’t come from the Buddha.

The West in the East

It’s also the case that western perspectives made their way to Buddhists in Asia, particularly those parts of Asia that were European colonies for a time.

For example, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) of British Ceylon (now Sr Lanka) was educated in British Christian academies.  Dharmapala was one of the first Asians to travel West and teach Buddhism to non-ethnic-Asian westerners. Dharmapala’s approach to dharma has been called “Protestant” Buddhism.

Dharmapala deliberately re-tooled Buddhism to appeal to modernists who were seeking a spiritual tradition that was pro-science and anti-supernatural, a view of Buddhism that is still widely held in the West today.

I thought McMahan’s later chapters, on where Buddhism may be going in the future, were weaker than the earlier chapters. My suspicions are that as western Buddhism matures it is likely to become more comfortable with “traditional” Asian rituals and other long-established practices, not less so, for example. And in some cases McMahan’s grasp of doctrine was a little off. But on the whole it’s a great resource, providing a solid overview of a complex issue.

[This is an article I wrote for the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]