Secular Buddhism

Secular Buddhism, also called agnostic Buddhism and naturalistic Buddhism, is a modern, western movement within Buddhism that leans toward an "exclusive humanism" that rejects "superhuman agencies and supernatural processes" and religious transcendence. It developed as a response to traditional Buddhism, and to the modernised versions of Buddhism which were popularized in the west, but contained traditional elements deemed incompatible with western scientific rationalism and egalitarian humanistic values.

Secular Buddhism is inspired by Age of Enlightenment's understanding of skepticism, humanist values, and of what constitutes "full human flourishing". It emphasizes the natural order, rather than the escape from samsara, as the primary source of morality. This shift also affects its perspective on personal and social development, with Ambedkar's interpretation of Buddhism considered a branch of engaged Buddhism.

Definition and origins

Secular Buddhism is a movement within contemporary western Buddhism that developed out of Buddhist modernism, rejecting "supernatural, paranormal, or mystical beliefs." According to Winton Higgins, it "depart[s] from two aspects of ancestral Buddhism which often pose as Buddhism-as-such: "enchanted" truth claims, including a conception of super-human transcendence; and monasticism — particularly putative monastic metahistorical authority, and the renunciatory monastic norm for practice inscribed even in the laicised forms of Buddhist modernism."

Secular

Secular here means the questioning of implicit and "pre-ontological" assumptions and frames of reference, such as one's culture and its stage of development.

Higgins refers to Charles Taylor's description of the development of the secularisation of the Christian faith. According to Taylor, before the Reformation Christians were born in an "Ancient Regime" of self-evident truth-claims and institutions. The Reformation changed this fabric, questioning "superstitions" and practices, developing a self-examination which fore-shadowed the development of interiority and individuation, and rejecting the authority of a priestly class. Secularity, thus, is not the triumph of science but a change within religious frameworks, with changed views on God and humanity. According to Taylor, the period of 1800-1960 is a period of 'mobilisation of religious institutions', with a growing number of denominations and an individuation of conscience and societal commitment. The 1960s drastically changed the cultural and religious landscape, "sacrali[zing] individual authenticity [...] at the expense of communal integration." Spiritual seekers were offered a plethora of religious alternatives from which to choose, with the consequence that "no particular option could credibly hold itself out as the one true faith or way, or the "true" reading of the sacred texts."

The seeding of Buddhism in the West has contributed to this expansion and individualisation of religiosity. Higgins notes that Buddhism has been established in the West both in its premodern form, and as modernized lay communities similar to the 'mobilisation type', with "reformed teaching and practices," both avoiding two issues which according to Higgins are inevitable in the "age of authenticity": "the status of the monastic norm in Buddhist practice; and the incompatibility of the renunciatory conception of the good life on the one hand, and the native Western eudaimonic one of developing our manifold human capacities ("full human flourishing" in Taylor's phrase) on the other."

Buddhist modernism

Buddhist modernism arose in response to western colonial missionary activism, mixing "ancestral Buddhism and modern discursive practices," but "harbour[ing] incongruities at the levels of practice, doctrine and institutions, ones which have obstructed the dharma's deeper acculturation in the new host societies." It originated in Sri Lanka in the 19th century, with Buddhist leaders modernising Buddhism along 'Protestant lines', making meditation practice and canonical texts available for a lay audience while maintaining traditional institutions and folk practices. This "form of resistance" soon spread to Japan, Burma and Thailand, and other Asian Buddhist countries. It challenged Christianity on its perceived incompatibility with scientific rationalism, presenting itself as a "scientific religion," and also appeared to be compatible with the western Romantic reaction against rationalism. It is this modernised Buddhism which has gained traction in the west since the 1960s, while maintaining "a mosaic of disparate canons, doctrines, local social practices, institutions, beliefs and folkways."

Buddhist modernism inherits the "discourses of modernity," which are foundational to the modern western way of life, namely Protestantism, scientific rationalism, and Romanticism, which together "established two thematic emphases: a world-affirming stance that valorised the good life cultivated in this earthly existence instead of pining for otherworldly planes of blissful abiding, and a shift towards interiority and individual introspection." But Buddhist modernism also inherits "ancestral Buddhism in all its canonical, commentarial, institutional and folkloric diversity," with its 'enchanted canons', the belief in rebirth, and "commentarial displacement," the replacement of the canonical teachings with commentarial traditions, which "vary markedly from the canon."

Two persistent 'naivitees' of Buddhist modernism are the respect for "tradition" as an unchanging source of 'truth', and the respect for monastic institutions, with their unquestioned power-structures and their alliance with the prevalent political, social and moral order, training monastic elites to fit into this order with the overt rationale of attaining "purity." This is exemplified in Theravada Buddhism, which gave an exclusive monastic status to male monks. Higgins also mentions a third issue, namely transcendence versus immanence as the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice.

The secular response

According to Higgins, secular Buddhism is a response to the traditional elements of Buddhist modernism which obstruct a further acceptance in the west, and

leans towards what Taylor (2007: 18) calls an "exclusive humanism," that is, a discourse and set of practices in aid of full human flourishing, one that disavows superhuman agencies and supernatural processes, and thus soteriological exits from the human condition. It seeks a renewal of the Buddha's tradition, first by retrieving the Buddha's teachings free of later commentarial spin, and second by developing affinities between it and fertile social practices and intellectual developments in the host societies.

The establishment and growth of Buddhist centers from the 1960s onwards came with a growing awareness of the incongruencies and traditional elements of Buddhist modernism, and lead to a demythologisation, detraditionalisation, and psychologicalisation of Buddhism.

Detraditionalisation

Secular Buddhism rejects power structures legitimated by the metaphysics of orthodox Buddhist belief.

Secular Buddhism attempts to return to the teachings of the Buddha, taking into account the cultural and historical context of those teachings. This contextualisation is in line with contextual historical approaches, which view discourses as responses to historical contexts, and not as the expression of timeless truths. In this, secular Buddhism avoids a fundamentalistic approach of "what the Buddha really meant," but interprets and applies the texts in and to present-day contexts.

Criticism of formulaic meditation practice

Higgins criticizes insight meditation practice as technical and formulaic, which "actually deflects and short-circuits the inward probe, as so much of actual meditative experience (including the arising of thought) falls outside the template, to be rejected as "not meditation."" They add that its inclusion in cognitive behavioral therapy "leaves the intricacies of the patients' lives and experience — their subjectivity — unexamined, and "is a form of conditioning that aims at mental hygiene" which "merely suppresses symptoms," and states that both fail as a vehicle of "modern interiority."

Magid and Siff question notions of spiritual progress based on standardized prescriptions for meditation practice, as well as the idea that Buddhist practice is essentially concerned with gaining proficiency in a set of meditative techniques endorsed by the authority of a traditional school or teacher.

Transcendence versus immanence

Higgins mentions the "transcendence-versus-immanence conundrum" as another issue in the rethinking of traditional and modernised Buddhism:

can full human flourishing be pursued within the human condition—entirely within "the immanent frame" — or must it ultimately seek to transcend it? Crudely put, does the Buddha's teaching point to a (steep) stairway to heaven, or to full human flourishing here on terra firma?

Higgins refers to Martha Nussbaums Homer's spirit (1990), in which she argues against "as incoherent [...] the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity," an aspiration which Higgins also discerns in traditional Theravada, and contrasts with "internal transcendence," "'a bewildered human grace' that comes from cultivating 'fine-tuned attention and responsiveness to human life'." Writing in 2012, Higgins misses in secular Buddhism elaborations on the ultimate aim of dharma practice, but discerns a similar stance of immanence in the writings of Stephen Batchelor.

Higgins further argues that to "fully accept the human condition is to confront our finitude, which potentially constitutes the central strength of secular Buddhism," referring to classical Greek mythology and philosophy, which "locate the dignity of the mature human spirit in confronting finitude, in exercising agency in the face of all its aspects as they unpredictably and implacably impact upon a human life." This is reminiscent of Heidegger, who pleaded for a "'being-toward-death', as part of his larger theory of embodied and embedded human agency under the rubric Dasein (being-there)."

Phenomenology and embodied experience

Higgins argues that secular Buddhism has a strong affinity with phenomenology. Nanavira Thera and Stephen Batchelor were both informed by Heidegger' Sein und Zeit, providing a "conceptually rich post-metaphysical meeting point for ancient and modern thought and practice, far from the noisy arenas wherein gladiatorial truth-claims do endless battle." According to Higgins, "phenomenology returns us to a strong sense of our embodiment previously lost to religious systems (Christian and Buddhist) that have "excarnated" us, in Taylor's felicitous term," complementing the earliest Buddhist teachings which "emphasise the immediacy of embodied conscious experience in the awakening process."

Prominent proponents

Theravada tradition and the Vipassana movement

Ñāṇavīra Thera

Ñāṇavīra Thera (Harold Edward Musson, 1920–1965) was an English Theravāda Buddhist monk, ordained in 1950 in Sri Lanka. He is known as the author of Notes on Dhamma, which were later published by Path Press together with his letters in one volume titled Clearing the Path. His works influenced Stephen Batchelor, who recognised a like-minded spirit in him.

Nanavira's interpretation of dependent origination was the main pillar of his approach to the early canon and posed a challenge to the orthodox Theravāda tradition's application of this doctrine over three successive lifetimes. In his opinion, a practice based on dependent origination need only be applied to sufferings associated with one's present existence, rather than relief from repeated births, aging, sickness, and death.

Nanavira is identified as an "existential Buddhist" for recommending the works of Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger to those unfamiliar with how the Buddha's teachings relate to modern thought. However, he qualifies this advice by clarifying that, while the existential philosophers find questions about existence unanswerable, the Buddha's teachings provide an answer.

S. N. Goenka

According to David L. McMahan, S. N. Goenka (1924–2013), an influential teacher of Buddhist Vipassana meditation, can be regarded as a token of a secularized Buddhism moving beyond the confines of the Theravada tradition. Goenka, born in Burma and a student of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, taught that his practice was not a sectarian doctrine, but “something from which people of every background can benefit: an art of living.” This essentially treats Buddhism as an applied philosophy, rather than a religion, or relies on Buddhist philosophy without dogmatism. While recent scholarship has shown that such framings of Buddhist tradition were in large part rhetorical, and that teachers such as Goenka retained their traditional religious commitments in enacting their teachings and disseminating their meditation practices, such rhetorical reframing had a powerful impact on how Buddhism was repackaged in the context of the emergent globalities of the latter part of the twentieth century.

Jack Kornfield

The Insight Meditation movement in the United States was founded on modernist secular values. One pioneer in the movement is Jack Kornfield, a former Theravadin monk, who founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts along with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. According to Kornfield, from the IMS's beginning in 1976, the center wanted to present Buddhist meditation "without the complications of rituals, robes, chanting and the whole religious tradition." However, this trait alone does not in itself indicate that he or others like him prioritize a secular or naturalistic form of Buddhism.

Gil Fronsdal

Gil Fronsdal, a former Zen Buddhist, later schooled by senior Theravāda meditation teachers in Burma, and guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, is another prominent figure in the Vipassana movement, although he prefers calling his teachings “Naturalistic Buddhism.” According to Fronsdal, "natural Buddhism" questions Buddhist cosmology, including the existence of pure lands and hells.

While Fronsdal acknowledges his beliefs align with secular Buddhism, he considers “secular” a term that stands in opposition to “religious” and “spiritual.” Since he believes Buddhism is a religion and that his practice is “deeply religious,” he prefers “naturalistic” instead. Another nuance of Fronsdal's position is that, unlike Stephen Batchelor's (discussed below), he does not find it necessary to confront the supernatural roots of the tradition, but simply sees no need to include them in the Buddhism he practices. According to Bhikkhu Bodhi, this method avoids polemics, drastic attempts at scriptural revision, and representing itself as the future of Buddhism. In Bodhi's opinion, it might also be more appropriately categorized as an orientation other than secular Buddhism.

Nevertheless, Fronsdal's teachings bear a family resemblance to Batchelor's. While Fronsdal prefers the term "Naturalistic Buddhism," his commitment to a rational and evidence-based understanding of the Dharma, excluding supernatural elements, places his practice within the broader spectrum of secular Buddhist thought. The insights he extracts from the Pali Canon (mostly the entirety of The Book of Eights) are free of rebirth, karmic operations over multiple lifetimes, heaven, hells, devas, psychic powers, or any other idea falling “outside the natural laws known to science.” As for describing his practice as “deeply religious,” he clarifies that “religious” refers to a sense of appreciation for the world that is so special, so deep, and so total, it feels sacred.

John Kabat-Zinn

John Kabat-Zinn is one of the most influential persons in the adaptation and popularization of Buddhist meditation, to the extent that secularized mindfulness has been almost completely divorced from Buddhist terminology, metaphysics, and soteriology. Kabat-Zinn's secularisation of mindfullness began at a retreat 1979, when he thought

... how to take the heart of something as meaningful, as sacred if you will, as Buddha-dharma and bring it into the world in a way that doesn’t dilute, profane or distort it, but at the same time is not locked into a culturally and tradition-bound framework that would make it absolutely impenetrable to the vast majority of people, who are nevertheless suffering and might find it extraordinarily useful and liberative.

He subsequently developed the Mindfulness-based stress reduction program, an eight-week course which started to draw wider attention in the 1990s, with the publication of his 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living, and the development of Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy by Zindel Segal, John Teasdale, and Mark Williams.

Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor is a leading proponent of secular Buddhism. Batchelor was a Buddhist monk ordained in the more traditional forms of Buddhism. From his experience as a monk practicing Tibetan Buddhism and later Zen, he felt the need for a more secular and agnostic approach. Unlike the various kinds of Buddhist modernism, which tend to be modifications of traditional schools of Buddhist thought and practice in the light of the discourses of modernity, Batchelor's secular Buddhism is founded on a reconfiguration of core elements of the dharma itself.

In Buddhism Without Beliefs (1998) he describes Siddhārtha Gautama as a historic person rather than an idealized religious icon, and scrutinizes typical Buddhist doctrines dealing with the concept of an afterlife.

In Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (2010) he further articulates his approach to the Buddha's teaching, seeking to recover the original teachings of Siddhattha Gautama, the historical Buddha, yet without claiming to disclose "what the Buddha really meant." Rather, he interprets the early canonical teachings in a way that draws out their meaning in the Buddha's own historical context (the culture of the Gangetic plains in the fifth century BCE) while demonstrating their value and relevance to people living in our own time. Both aspects of this interpretation are literally "secular" in that they evoke the Latin root word saeculum – a particular age or generation. In Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Batchelor argues that the Buddha did not teach rebirth and karma.

In After Buddhism (2015), Batchelor contrasts Secular Buddhism with groups that retain an ambivalent relationship with the inherited dogmas and hierarchies of the Buddhist tradition, such as the Soka Gakkai, Shambhala, and assorted mindfulness-meditation centers. As he explains, “although there may be a reduced public display of overt religiosity in their centers and a deliberate effort by teachers to present the dharma in terms of its psychological and social benefits, little effort has been made to critically reexamine the underlying worldview of Buddhism, in which are still embedded the cosmology and metaphysics of ancient India.” According to Batchelor, for these movements to be considered participants in secular Buddhism, they must confront and rearticulate the traditional doctrines of karma, rebirth, heavens, hells, and supernormal powers. Batchelor promotes a skeptical philosophical interpretation of Buddhism akin to the Hellenistic philosophical tradition of Pyrrhonism. Batchelor suspects that Pyrrho learned some Buddhism while Pyrrho was in India as part of Alexander the Great's conquest and that Pyrrhonism may reflect the skepticism of Early Buddhism before Buddhism fell into dogmatism.

Bhim Rao Ambedkar's Dalit Buddhism

Although the emergence of Secular Buddhism as a distinct movement is placed in the last decade of the 20th century, the earlier works of Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891–1956) align with secular Buddhism, and have been retrospectively recognized by some as a significant precursor and included within its scope. Ambedkar established in 1956 Navayana Buddhism, a highly secularized teaching derived from the Pāli Canon that is focused on ethical and social implications, deliberately removed from the metaphysical claims that underpinned the caste system he opposed.

A secular interpretation of the Lotus Sūtra

In an article published by the Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies in 2024, John R. Tate introduces a secular interpretation of the Lotus Sūtra as an alternative to a literal reading of the Lotus Sūtra’s abundance of cosmic imagery. To replace Nichiren's phrase of "Mystic Law," Tate proposes a phrase that emphasizes the benevolent aspects of existence, namely "the conditional emergence of benevolence as gifted by time, process, and potential." Tate refers to Tominaga Nakamoto, who already in 1738 argued that the "true core" of the Lotus Sutra and all Buddhist texts was a “common principle” of good.

Tate argues that this reinterpretation accords with traditional Mahāyāna doctrine and contemporary socio-philosophical principles and can function as a replacement for faith in a transcendent understanding of the text's long-venerated core. He recommends a set of prayers which "recognize the conditional nature of existence, but their primary focus is on the morality introduced here and on shaping one’s life in its likeness." Tate asserts this reinterpretation of the Lotus Sūtra and corresponding practice represents an alternative, non-dogmatic form of Secular Buddhism.

Responses

Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition, edited by Richard K. Payne, contains articles that critically assess the impact of secularization on the Buddhist tradition. Payne places Secular Buddhism in a socio-historical category that pairs it in opposition to traditional Buddhism. According to Payne, Secular Buddhism is typically understood as modern and progressive, whereas traditional Buddhism recalls a bygone era.

While Payne's compilation is a published resource for evaluating Buddhist secularization, detractors assert it misrepresents those advocating for Secular Buddhism. Of note, also, Payne's review appeared three years before the publication of Tate's Lotus-based version and did not include an assessment of Bhim Rao Ambedkar's socially-engaged Secular Buddhism.

See also

• Adevism
• Buddhism in the Americas
• Buddhism in the West
• Buddhist modernism
• Buddhist paths to liberation
• Criticism of Buddhism
• Index of Buddhism-related articles
• Religious views on truth
• Schools of Buddhism
• Secular spirituality
• Shambhala Buddhism
• Similarities between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism
• Spiritual but not religious
• Spiritual naturalism

Sources

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• Batchelor, Stephen (1998). Buddhism Without Beliefs. Penguin.
• Batchelor, Stephen (2010). Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. New York: Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 978-0-385-52706-4.
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• Yoshizawa, Katsuhiro (1 May 2009), The Religious Art of Zen Master Hakuin, Catapult, ISBN 978-1-58243-986-0

Further reading

• Batchelor, Stephen (1998), Buddhism without Beliefs, Riverhead Books, ISBN 1-57322-656-4
• Batchelor, Stephen (2015), After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300205183
• Harris, Sam (2014), Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1451636017
• Higgins, Winton (2021), Revamp: Writings on Secular Buddhism, Tuwhiri, ISBN 9780473571399
• Payne, Richard (2021), Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition, Shambhala Publications, ISBN 9781611808896
• Stuart, Daniel M. (2020), S.N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight, Shambhala Publications, ISBN 9781611808186
• Ward, Tim (1995), What the Buddha Never Taught, Celestial Arts, ISBN 0-89087-687-8
• Wright, Robert (2017), Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 9781439195468

External links

• Secular Buddhism in Tricycle's Buddhism for Beginners series
• Introduction to Secular Buddhism in SBT Community's Free Wisdom Library
• The Secular Buddhism Podcast by Noah Rasheta