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Have Westerners created a new and viable form of Buddhism, or has something been

lost in translation? Berkeley professor ROBERT SHARF argues that with our emphasis

on individual experience and meditation, we risk cutting ourselves off from the benefits

of a greater tradition. Photographs by Christine Alicino

religion losing our

Robert Sharfs interest in Buddhism began in theearly 1970s, when, as a seeker in sandals barely outof his teens, he hopped from one meditation retreatto the next, first in India and Burma, then back inNorth America. It was shortly after a three-monthVipassana meditation retreat in Bucksport, Maine, in1975 that Sharf began to wonder whether the single-minded emphasis on meditation characteristic ofmuch of Western Buddhism was in some way mis-guided. Over time, doubt and confusion gave way to adesire to better understand Buddhisms historicalbackground, which in turn led him to pursue a careerin Buddhist scholarship. Today Sharf is the D. H. ChenDistinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. His area of expert-ise is East Asian Buddhism, most especially theBuddhism of medieval China. He is also an ordainedpriest in the Hosso school of Japanese Buddhism.

Sharf is also known for his cogent critique of whatscholars call Buddhist modernism, a relatively recentmovement that selectively places those elements that

are consistent with modern sensibilities at the core ofthe tradition and dismisses all else. Sharfs critique ofBuddhist modernism stems from a belief that we can-not reduce Buddhism to a simple set of propositionsand practices without in some way distorting our senseof its wholeness and complexity. For Sharf, understand-ing a religious tradition demands not only familiaritywith contemporary practice but also a willingness to

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What is Buddhist modernism? Lets start with an earlierterm scholars used for much the same thing: ProtestantBuddhism. The Princeton anthropologist GananathObeyesekere coined this term in 1970 to refer to devel-opments, beginning in the late nineteenth century, inAsian Buddhist countries that were influenced by andsimilar to Protestant theological ideas floating around atthe time. Earlier in the century, Protestant thinkers,confronting the crisis of faith brought on by the rise ofscience, had developed new ways of thinking about theirtradition that were more compatible with the scientific-rational worldview. So they claimed, for example, thattrue Christianity has little to do with rituals or insti-tutions or even doctrine. True Christianity, they said, isa matter of the heart: the personal experience of thedivine, a private relationship between an individual andGod. Institutions like the Church or an emphasis on rit-ual or doctrine can stand in the way of this immediate,incontestable relationship with the divine. So religionwas construed as a matter of a personal spiritual experi-ence that need not clash with reason.r science.

What was it about this view of religion that appealedto Buddhists in Asia? By the late nineteenth century,much of Asia was also coming to terms with the rise ofthe worldview of the modern West. In Buddhist Asiaespecially Sri Lanka, Japan, and the parts of SoutheastAsia most affected by colonialism, urbanization, indus-trialization, and other modernizing influencesBuddhist leaders adopted similar strategies for bringingtheir traditions into the modern world. Many influen-tial Buddhist teachers had received Western-style edu-cations, some in missionary schools, and they wererethinking Buddhism from the ground up. They, too,had to respond to the criticism that religion was just

blind faith and superstition, that the priesthood wasself-serving and corrupt, that religious teachings wereultimately incompatible with science and rationality.Obeyesekere used the term Protestant Buddhism torefer to the new Buddhist movements that were spring-ing up around this time. But some scholars now feelthat the term Protestant Buddhism is easily misun-derstoodit sounds a bit derogatory, I guessso theyprefer the more neutral term Buddhist modernism.

Buddhist modernism was a global movement, a sortof cultural fusion in which the interests of AsianBuddhists and Western Buddhist enthusiasts converged.For the Asians, the critiques of religion that originated inthe West resonated with their own needs as they strug-gled with cultural upheavals in their homelands. ForWesterners, Buddhism seemed to provide an attractivespiritual alternative to their own seemingly moribundreligious traditions. The irony, of course, is that theBuddhism to which these Westerners were drawn wasone already transformed by its contact with the West.

There are two aspects of Buddhist modernism youmention that I am especially interested in hearingyou address: Buddhisms purported compatibilitywith science and the privileging of individual spiritu-ality over what many consider to be the outer trap-pings of religion. These are foundational assump-tions to many Western Buddhists, yet it is evidentfrom your writings that you regard them as veryselective readings of the tradition. Lets start withthe first, the claim that Buddhism is consistent withthe Western rational-scientific worldview. This haslong been one of its big draws, and it has certainlygotten a lot of play in this magazine. Indeed, it is notuncommon to hear Buddhism spoken of as a science

enter into dialogue with what is historically past andculturally foreign. To participate in such a dialogue weneed knowledge of the context in which the tradition isembedded and an ability to see past the presupposi-tions of our own time and place. Clearing the ground,as it were, for this dialogue with tradition is the job ofcritical scholarly practice in religious life.

Throughout the following interview, there is an ironyat play. Without the bridges of understanding and thefoundations of practice that Buddhist modernists likeD. T. Suzuki, Anagarika Dharmapala, and others estab-

lished, Buddhism would be for Westerners opaque andunapproachably foreign. Even as we regard them witha critical eye, we stand on their broad shoulders.

Maybe this is just how Buddhism works. Maybe this isjust why it works. Certainly, in these pluralistic times ofcompeting worldviews and claims to religious truth, wehave much to learn from Buddhisms long tradition ofintegrating self-critique with a rich and vital religioustradition. Perhaps we might say that today to approachreligion critically is simply to practice in good faith.

Andrew Cooper

of the mind. The Buddhist canon is so vast that you canalways find passages here and there to support whateverreading of the tradition you prefer. For over two thousandyears, influential Buddhist teachers read selectively topromote and justify their own understanding ofBuddhism, and it is no different with those who want toshow that Buddhism is compatible with science. Youknow, as a young man, D. T. Suzuki [18701966]whowas by far the most influential interpreter of ZenBuddhism for the West and the preeminent Buddhistmodernistspent many years in LaSalle, Illinois, wherehe assisted the publisher Paul Carus, the author of TheGospel of Buddha. [See Judith Snodgrasss review of thenew edition online at tricycle.com.] Carus was interestedin a grand synthesis of science and religion; he called hisphilosophy the Religion of Science and published manybooks on it. His enthusiasm for Buddhism stemmedfrom his conviction that the Buddha was the first prophetof this Religion of Science. In his youth, Suzuki greatlyadmired Carus, and his translation of Caruss Gospel ofBuddha became a leading Buddhist textbook in Japaneven the clergy were studying it! So heres a case in whicha Western and non-Buddhist reading of Buddhism cameto influence its Asian expression in a way that appealed tolater Westerners. In other words, part of Buddhismsappeal in the West was that the Buddhism we were see-ing had already been cast in a Western mold.

Buddhists, like Christians, have had little choice butto approach their tradition selectively. Zen Buddhists,say, give preference to certain texts and commentaries,and they do this very differently from the way TheravadaBuddhists or Pure Land Buddhists do. My concern isnot with the selectivity of those who read Buddhismas a rationalist and scientific religionit is perfectlyunderstandable given the world in which we live. It isreally not a question of misreading. It is a question ofwhat gets lost in the process.

Can you give me an example of what gets lost? Well,let me back up a moment. In order to make Buddhismcompatible with science, Buddhist modernism, itseems to me, accepts a Cartesian dualistic understand-ing of the world. In other words, you draw a metaphys-ical line through the world: theres the immaterial,spiritual world of mind on the one hand, which is theproper domain of religion, and theres the physical ormaterial world on the other, a world governed bymechanistic laws, which is the domain of science. Once

you accept this picture of the world, religion is com-patible with science only insofar as it is relegated to therealm of inner experience. Religion, understood thisway, has no purchase in the empirical world. Ritual hasvalue only indirectlyas a way to bring about psycho-logical change. Look at how suspicious many WesternBuddhists are of religious ritual. And when we down-play ritual, we risk weakening our bonds to communi-ty and tradition. Thats a pretty major loss.

I suspect that most Buddhist teachers throughouthistory would have found this Cartesian view of theworld pretty weird. In discarding everything thatdoesnt fit with our modern view, we compromise thetraditions capacity to critique this modern view.Buddhism developed in a very different historical andcultural context from our own. Traditional Buddhistepistemology, for example, simply does not accept theCartesian notion of an insurmountable gap betweenmind and matter. Most Buddhist philosophies holdthat mind and object arise interdependently, so thereis no easy way to separate ones understanding of theworld from the world itself.

What sort of critique of the scientific view mightBuddhism otherwise offer? The naturalistic stancethe idea that there is an independent insentient worldout there governed by scientific laws and impersonalprocessesis ultimately a human construct, a power-ful and effective human construct, but a constructnonetheless. This is not to deny the power of science,but it does call into question the way we approach sci-entific knowledge. Of course, there are many philoso-phers, scientists, and historians of science who havemade a similar point. But Buddhism has its owninsights and perspectives to offer. In other words,when we engage seriously with the Buddhist traditionwe learn other ways of construing the world, other sto-ries we can tell about the way things are, and these canbe cogent, coherent, and compelling in their own way.This is not to argue for a naive acceptance of Buddhistepistemology and cosmology. But we wont see whatBuddhism has to offer if, at the outset, we twist it outof shape to make it conform to contemporary norms.

The second pointthat what Buddhism is reallyabout is the individuals spiritual experience and notreligious institutions, beliefs, doctrines, or ritualsis an assumption so deeply ingrained in Buddhist

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practice in the West that I think many would questionwhether it is, on Buddhist grounds, open to critiqueat all. I certainly dont think that personal experience,meditation, spirituality, and the like are unimportantor that they have no place in Buddhism. The Buddha,after all, attained enlightenment while meditatingunder the Bodhi tree. My concern is with howBuddhist modernism has isolated meditation from thecontext of the whole of Buddhist religious life. Somuch of what was once considered integral to the tra-dition has been abandoned in this rush to celebratemeditation or mindfulness or personal transformationor mystical experience as the sine qua non ofBuddhism. Again, its really not a question of right orwrong. It is a question of what gets lost.

As I mentioned, the Buddhist modernists wereinfluenced by Protestant thinkers who construed reli-gion as a matter of inner experience. To translateBuddhist experience into terms Westerners couldgrasp, D. T. Suzuki borrowed from a number ofWestern sources, including the philosopher WilliamJames. Suzuki was fascinated by Jamess notion of reli-gious experience as a kind of pure, direct experiencethat is unmediated by ones cultural or religious for-mation. Suzuki and other modernists argued thatsatorithe sudden experience of an enlightenedstatewas the unmediated experience to which Jamesreferred, and that this experience was not only theessence of Buddhism but the essence of all religion. Byinsisting that some specific, repeatable, ineffable expe-rience is at the very core of the Buddhist tradition,they end up essentializing Buddhism.

How does this ideathat Buddhism points to anessential, experiential truth beyond Buddhismbecome a problem? I think there are several problems.For one thing, many Buddhist texts and teachers arguethat if Buddhism is about anything, its about critiquingessences! There is also a kind of arrogance in claiming that

Buddhism is not so much a religion as it is the path to thetruth behind all religions. In other words, when Suzukiand other contemporary Buddhist teachers argue that allreligions emerge from and point toward a single truth,they also imply that Buddhism, properly understood, isthe most direct expression of that truth. I have been pres-ent at any number of Buddhist-Christian dialogues inwhich Buddhist teachers lecture respected Christian lead-ers about the ultimate meaning or essence of Christianity,which strikes me as arrogant, to say the least.

Anyway, this emphasis on a single determinative expe-rience has been very influential in Buddhisms develop-ment in the West. For example, the Japanese Zen masterHakuun Yasutani [18851973] was a teacher to some ofthe most significant teachers in the West, includingPhilip Kapleau Roshi, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, RobertAitken Roshi, and Eido Shimano Roshi. Yasutani wasfamous for his overriding emphasis on kensho, whichmeans much the same thing as satori. In Japan he was amarginal figure, pretty much ignored by Soto andRinzai masters. But in the West, largely because of thework of his disciples, his approach to Zen and hisemphasis on kensho became pivotal. Similarly, if youpractice Vipassana (insight) meditation in America,chances are good that you are using techniques estab-lished by Mahasi Sayadaw or U Ba Khin, two twentieth-century Burmese meditation teachers. Yet these twoteachers were controversial within the Theravada worldprecisely because of the emphasis they placed on therapid attainment of experiential states, especially sotapatti,or stream entry. Sotapatti, like kensho or satori, wasunderstood as a sudden, determinative, and radicallytransformative experiencea glimpse of nirvana.

Unfortunately, these experiences look clearer in the-ory than they do in real life, where meditation mastersspend no small amount of time arguing over whatconstitutes such experiences, who really has had them,who is genuinely qualified to judge such things, whosemethod leads to the authentic experience, and whose

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leads to some ersatz version, and so forth. It is signifi-cant that Yasutani Roshi, Mahasi Sayadaw, and U BaKhin were all criticized by many of their peers foroffering up a quick fix version of Buddhism.

But these controversies are not really the point. Ithink its one thing to view meditation as a seriousreligious discipline that can help overcome cravingand attachment. This approach is perfectly consistentwith many Buddhist teachings. But that is quite dif-ferent from viewing meditation as the be-all and end-all of Buddhism, and it is also different from seeingmeditation in utilitarian termsas a means to bringabout an experience, such as kensho or sotapatti, thatwill instantly transform the whole of ones existence.

Buddhism, like life, isnt that simple. I think manyAmerican teachers and practitioners have begun toappreciate this, yet old habits die hard.

But to get back to your point, what gets lost whenprimacy is given to individual spiritual experience?The sangha gets lost! The community gets lost.Buddhism has what it calls its Three Treasures: theBuddha, the Dharma, or his teaching, and the Sangha,or the religious community. Throughout history, eachof these has been interpreted in various ways, but theidea that one of them might not be that importantitwould never fly. But if you view Buddhism as a matterof inner experience, you downplay its corporate dimen-sion, those traditional resources that serve to deepenand extend the bonds of community and tradition.

Today, you often hear people describe themselves asspiritual but not religious. What they mean, Ithink, is that they care deeply about their inner spiri-tual and psychological lives, but they are not particu-larly interested in an affiliation with a religious tradi-tion or institution. Buddhist modernism provides aperspective that not only facilitates this sort of appro-priation of Buddhism but makes it desirable.

I think this deep suspicion of religious institutions isunderstandable but also misguided. The organized rule-bound and tradition-bound institution of the sangha

provides a framework that, at least ideally, helps to effaceegocentrism. The sangha literally embodies the Buddhisttradition; it transcends the self-concerns of any individ-ual, especially the concerns that arise from placing ourinner life at the center of the universe. So we must askwhether Buddhism, when practiced without the ties ofcommunity and tradition, instead of mitigating our ten-dency toward narcissism, actually feeds it.

Historically, the authority of Buddhist teachers wasconferred and mediated by the institution of the sangha,specifically the ordained community, which worked on amore or less strict system of seniority. Of course, individ-uals often specialized in a particular domainscripturalexegesis, liturgical practice, meditation, and so forth

and some would be recognized for their particular areas ofmastery. But the general idea was that before you couldclaim to represent the dharma, you had to thoroughlyimbibe and participate in the life of the institution towhich the dharma had been entrusted. But if institutionsdont matter, if basic knowledge and understanding ofscripture dont matter, and if Buddhism is reduced to aninner experience, however this might be construed, thenauthority becomes a matter of personal charisma. Lackingthe support and the checks and balances that are part of astrong community life, the authority and prominence ofany particular teacher, whether by choice or necessity, isbased largely on his or her skill as an entrepreneur. Inshort, teachers are forced to market, however tacitly, theirown enlightenment. And this is precisely the situationwith so many teachers in America. Living as we do in amarket economy, I think this sort of entrepreneurialmodel demands scrutiny, at the very least.

The religious historian Elaine Pagels has spokenof how religious practitioners adopt certainpractices and beliefs selectively and reinterprettexts in what she calls a process of creativemisreading. Granted, this might be done uncon-sciously, even perniciously, but might it not alsobe a necessary strategy for adapting a tradition,in this case Buddhism, to the contingencies of

If Buddhism is reduced to an inner experience, then authority becomes a matter of personal charisma.

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time and place? Yes, I think thats a very validpoint. And Buddhist history supports it.

When Buddhism arrived in China in the first and sec-ond centuries of the common era, the early ChineseBuddhists translated the scriptures using terms that werefamiliar to them, often using Daoist language for Sanskritterms that had no Chinese equivalent. One of my favoriteexamples is the Sanskrit term tathata, or suchness, aword that refers to the natural empty state of thingsthe way things really are. The Chinese translated tathatawith the cosmological term benwu, which means originalnon-being, and this gave the Buddhist concept a notice-ably Daoist twist. The use of Daoist terminology madeIndian Buddhist texts approachable and meaningful tomembers of the Chinese literary elite. It allowed them tomake connections between Buddhism and their ownindigenous ways of thinking. This was one reasonBuddhism caught on so well.

I think there is a parallel in the way Buddhism is rep-resented to a Western audience. Buddhist ideas are putinto terms that are familiar and meaningful to our mod-ern sensibility. Today the language of choice for render-ing Buddhist ideas is the language of psychotherapy.And this ends up reinforcing, whether intentionally ornot, the notion that Buddhism is basically a means ofpsychological transformation and that Buddhism iscompatible with modern science. This is how we end upwith the simplistic notion that Buddhism is a scienceof happiness. But as in China, this may be an unavoid-able stage in the transmission of Buddhism.

In China, the translation process evolved over thecourse of centuries. The Chinese continued to refinetheir translations of Buddhist texts, and with more reli-able translations and commentaries came a deeperengagement with Indian Buddhist thought and prac-tice. It took several centuries before the Chinese couldfully appreciate the breadth and subtleties ofBuddhism. This is not to say that they didnt continueto transform the Indian tradition and make it theirown, because they certainly did. But the work of trans-formation went hand in hand with gaining a sophisti-cated understanding of Buddhisms Indian heritage.

Maybe the lesson from history is that it will take along timeperhaps centuriesfor the West to engagewith the Buddhist tradition at a deeper level. Such anengagement will require that we see past the confinesof our own historical and cultural situation and gain agreater appreciation of the depth and complexity of the

Buddhist heritage. Certainly one impediment to this isthe idea that the only thing that matters is meditationand that everything else is just excess baggage.

Before you referred to Buddhism as a critique of allessences, including the idea that there is someessence in Buddhism that is transmitted over time.So, then, what is Buddhism? One way of looking atBuddhism is as a conversation, and this conversation hasbeen going on now for over two thousand yearsa longtime. Participation in this conversation has always beenpredicated on having a foundation in various aspects ofthe traditionits literature, its philosophy, its rituals,its discipline, and so on. It is a conversation about whatit is to be a human being: why we suffer, how we canresolve our suffering, what works, what doesnt, and soforth. These are big issues, and whichever one youchoose to look at, you are not going to find a singleBuddhist position. There have always been differentpositions, and these would be debated and argued. Butall parties to the debate were presumed to share a com-mon religious culturea more or less shared world oftexts, ideas, practiceswithout which there could beno real conversation.

This is not to say that there cant be value in reduc-ing Buddhism to a relatively simple set of ideas. It canhelp make Buddhism accessible to those who are not ina position to engage the complexities of the tradition,especially the monastic tradition. This was the strategyof the single practice movementsNichiren, JodoShinshu, and to some extent Soto Zenin medievalJapan. But when you do this, you run the risk of end-ing up rather narrow and sectarian, because if youvegot the essence, and its not the same as the essence theguy down the street haswell, you dont really havemuch to talk about, do you?

In time North American Buddhists may see the valuein entering more fully into the Buddhist conversation.But that means acquiring the necessary skills and expe-rience. You dont just jump in and get answers rightaway. Rather, you are confronted with many answersthat generate new sets of questions and perspectives.But it is important, I think, that we keep the conversa-tion going here. It opens one up to dramatically differ-ent ways of understanding the world and our place in it.Through our participation we help shape the conversa-tion, and the conversation, in turn, shapes us. To aban-don it would be to lose something precious.