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Opening Forum of Buddhist Summer School,
2003
Over 30,000 people have attended the
Buddhist Summer School since its inception in 1984, which
indicates a growing interest in Buddhism in Australia. It
is this growing interest that these teachers address here.
Do we get rid of the cultural accretions and try to 'Americanise'
or 'Australianise' Buddhism? A growing number of books have
been written on this topic in recent times.
Geoff Dawson:
It is very important that Buddhism is able to adapt to the
specific cultures that adopt it. Therefore, instead of talking
about 'western' Buddhism, I would rather talk about Australian
Buddhism or American Buddhism or Irish Buddhism et cetera.
As America is the dominant culture in the world at the moment,
there is a tendency to think that everything that is western
is American. However, there are cultural differences within
western nations as well.
Historically, as Buddhism has gone from one
culture to another it has integrated and adapted to each one
of them. My understanding is that Buddhism has not been an
aggressive spiritual tradition that has tried to dominate
cultures with a missionary zeal. Rather, it has integrated
and adapted to each culture. In a metaphorical sense, the
Dharma is like water. It is something that is clear and transparent
and thirst quenching, but its essence is that it goes into
different cultural containers and takes on the shape of that
container.
Some of the obvious and valuable things about
our own culture will shape the form of Buddhism in this culture.
They are doing it already. For instance, our democratic background
and history is already shaping the nature of the different
types of Dharma groups and schools that are developing in
Australia. Another important thing to shape Buddhism in Australia
and America and other western countries is the equality of
women and men in the practice. This has come with the rise
of feminism in the 20th century. You often find about fifty
per cent men and fifty per cent women in western Dharma centres.
Women are continuing to take a more equal role in leadership,
with many women teachers beginning to emerge. That is perhaps
different to some of the traditional cultures in Asia, where
women have taken a more subservient position. The Zen tradition,
to which I belong, has recently come from Japan where it was
associated with the samurai class and consequently tends to
have a slightly militaristic character to it. Some people
refer to Zen training as a 'spiritual boot-camp,' because
it can still retain that militaristic flavour. This is an
example of a cultural accretion that we do not necessarily
have to retain in the western Zen Buddhist context.
Venerable Tejadhammo
Bhikku: A man called Robert Knox, in about 1690, wrote
the earliest written account of Buddhism in the English language.
He was shipwrecked off the coast of Madras and spent close
to twenty years living there, sometimes as a kind of slave
and sometimes relatively free, at the whim of the Buddhist
king of Kandy. He eventually escaped, with the help of the
Dutch, and returned to England. He wrote an account of his
time, in which he says many things that are a distortion of
Buddhism and some things that are factual. Things like:
The religion of the country is idolatry.
There are many gods and devils which they worship… These
people do firmly believe in the resurrection of the body and
the immortality of the soul and some future state... They
hold that in the other worlds those that are good men, though
they be poor and mean in this world, yet there they shall
become high eminent and that the wicked shall be turned into
beasts…
A couple of years ago, someone that I knew went to Sri Lanka
with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk. He did this against
advice, and within a matter of weeks, I had a telephone call
saying, 'These people don't know the first thing about Buddhism!'
It seems to me that this second person represents
one extreme and Robert Knox represents the other. Robert Knox
lived in Sri Lanka, among the Sri Lankans, for a very long
time but actually understood very little. The other person
lived among the Sri Lankans for about a fortnight and thought
he understood everything, because he thought he knew what
Buddhism was. Both people brought their European vision to
their understanding of Buddhism.
The idea of 'western' Buddhism is somewhat
dangerous. In my own view, it is too early to think that we
can develop western Buddhism. It seems to me that western
people have a very strong tendency to acquire, or to take
over things. In Thailand, there is an expression for western
people that says, 'they go shopping with their eyes.' In other
words, everything that they look at, they want to own, they
want to possess. I once heard a lady say to her husband when
they saw some small children swimming in the Chao Phraya River,
'Oh, they're so cute, I want one!' That was not very far away
from the truth.
There is also a very strong imperialistic
tendency in the west to take things over. I can see this in
Australia, for example, in relation to the question of Aborigine
religion, where a lot of people are appropriating - which
is not very far away from stealing - spiritual ideas from
the Aborigines of this country. Some westerners do the same
thing with Buddhism - it is a sort of rape and pillage approach.
I think that we need to be very careful of that kind of thing.
We need to take things slowly and to very clearly acknowledge
where we received our teaching of the Dhamma. We have to recognise
that the Dhamma comes out of lived experience, not just from
academic understanding or study.
Venerable Traleg
Rinpoche: I have a moderately conservative view on
this topic. Buddhism does need to adapt and does need to change
as it travels to different western countries, and does need
to be appropriated in the cultural context of its host country
but, as Tejadhammo pointed out, I think we have to do this
with a degree of carefulness and attention. We are not yet
in a position to decide what parts of Buddhism are relevant
to the west and what parts are not. In many ways, it is quite
presumptuous, at least from my point of view, to do that because
western people have only begun to take an interest in Buddhism.
It is not like people in the west have been Buddhists for
a couple of generations. When I came to Australia in 1980
there were very few Buddhists and very few books on Buddhism.
People had no idea what Buddhism was about. Of course, things
have changed a great deal since then, but western people are
still very new to Buddhism. Buddhism has a lot to offer the
west and it is important for it to take root here in a way
that is enriching for western cultures. However, to do that
needs time.
I really do not think that we can start pruning
and taking a very harsh approach toward removing things about
Buddhism that we do not think is relevant at the moment in
this modern or post-modern world. That approach would be like
taking off all the flesh and leaving only the bare skeleton.
I do not think that everything about the modern world is necessarily
good, either. There is a lot about the modern, western world
that needs to change and become enriched through appropriating
various things from traditions such as Buddhism. The west
is in a very fortunate position to be able to do that.
I tend to think of the assimilation of Buddhism
into western culture as new orthodoxy. Traditional Buddhism,
as practised in traditional societies, is the orthodox version,
while modern Buddhists who want to 'demythologise' Buddhism
- borrowing this term and practice from Christian theology
and biblical criticism and so forth - is the new orthodoxy.
There are people, like myself, who think that Buddhism does
need to change. Buddhism is not resistant to change; in fact,
Buddhism is constantly talking about change and impermanence.
The issue here, then, is not whether Buddhism should change,
but how it is to be changed.
When anything changes, something of its past
has to be present in what it is changed into. If we try to
make Buddhism completely western, there would be very little
Buddhism remaining. It would become mainly just the prevalent,
secular, western way of thinking. The secular influence on
the western spiritual landscape has been going on for a long
time. There are now many Christians and others who are dissatisfied
with this trend. As a consequence, there is a growing movement
amongst people who are trying to reclaim spirituality.
We should not always try to make religion
- whether Buddhism or Christianity - palatable to people;
mixing it with popular, secular ideas and re-packaging it,
saying things like, 'Yes, you can be a Buddhist, you don't
have to believe in rebirth.' 'You can be a Buddhist and not
believe in karma.' From my point of view, this is very dangerous.
Before we decide how we are going to appropriate Buddhism
into western culture, we have to understand what these Buddhist
concepts are talking about. Just because something does not
sit very well with the western secular perspective on life
does not mean that, as a practising Buddhist in the west,
these concepts do not have any relevance.
I think there can be something like a new
orthodoxy in Buddhism; a Buddhism that retains many of the
features of the old traditional forms while being fully aware
of the modern, secular, philosophical, literary, feminist
and gender issues. Buddhism can thereby retain a lot of its
traditional aspects and still be very relevant to the modern
west. For example, with an issue such as feminism, it is not
only one-way traffic. It is not only feminism that has something
to teach traditional Buddhism, there might also be something
that feminism can learn from traditional Buddhism. I do not
see why the dialogue should always go in one direction only.
As Buddhists, we have to learn about democracy. I do not really
believe that democracy is such a novel and unusual idea for
a Buddhist to understand anyway. Nor is the idea that there
should be a feminine voice within Buddhism.
Westerners - just like the people in the
east - bring their own presuppositions into any kind of discourse,
so every time gender and women's experiences are mentioned,
people automatically throw themselves into that discussion
from the perspective of their own cultural and religious backgrounds.
However, Buddhist women's experiences and western women's
experiences have also been very different. We have multiple
feminine voices and it is a very complex issue. It is not
like traditional Buddhism has only one view about women's
experiences; something like a monolithic, unequivocal voice.
There are multiple voices.
If western people want to practise Buddhism and be Buddhists,
it has to be some form of new orthodoxy Buddhism - a Buddhism
which is totally familiar with the modern world yet, at the
same time, not completely divorced from its traditional roots.
If these traditional roots are lost, Buddhism will become
something that has been completely turned upside-down, until
it sounds like just another version of some western, new-age,
philosophy. This is not really Buddhism, but a new religion
altogether, something that simply has certain elements or
features of Buddhism. It is not just in the west that we have
this phenomenon. Even in Japan, there are many new religions
that also have some elements of Buddhism, but mostly what
is being practised is not Buddhism at all.
Venerable Pannyavaro:
The notion of 'western Buddhism' is absolutely not relevant
in the sense that the core insights can be neither east nor
west. The Dhamma is, in the absolute sense, not even Buddhism.
However, if we look at the presentation of Buddhism as it
moves from east to west, I would say that the notion of 'western'
Buddhism is quite relevant, because Buddhism needs to adapt.
It is essentially about a cultural adaptation and the repackaging
of the Dhamma - some modifications of the forms rather than
the actual essence.
For me, an indicator that Buddhism has become
indigenous in the west, a measure that this movement from
Asia to the western countries has occurred, would be when
we have Caucasian images of the Buddha in our iconography.
Each country that the Buddha has travelled through - China,
Korea, Japan, Tibet and so on - all have their unique appearance
reflected in their Buddhist imagery. So, when Buddhist imagery
in the west begins to reflect western appearances, we will
know that Buddhism has truly arrived.
Acharya Sam Bercholz:
I would like to begin by saying how grateful I am to those
very brave teachers who left their homes for various reasons,
from India, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Sri
Lanka, et cetera, and went to the barbarian lands of Australia,
England, the United States, Canada, Germany, Switzerland,
Italy, et cetera. It is a very brave thing to do. Some of
them went because their teachers sent them. Some of them went
totally by happenstance to have surgery or for economic reasons.
Some went because they had a vision.
Every one of them was brave enough to actually teach Dharma,
to speak the truth, to share their heart, and slowly there
has been some acknowledgement that the teachings of Buddha
have something to do with people, not just so-called 'Asians.'
There is something very wonderful about that. That transmission
is the human transmission. It is from heart-to-heart, from
mind-to-mind. It had nothing to do with money - except in
maybe a few cases. This is the way that Buddhism has been
transferred from India into various other cultures, from the
time of the Buddha until now.
I do not know about all aspects of Buddhism,
but if you take the Tibetan example, we have something that
we call 'Tibetan Buddhism.' However, there is no Tibetan Buddhism,
there is only Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Every Tibetan Buddhist
acknowledges and pays homage to his or her Indian forebears.
There is no nationalism that says, 'India is bad and Indian
Buddhists are bad and we have to be different.' The lineages
all acknowledge the men and women who came before them. The
transmission is one that takes place from one human being
to the next, and there is no sense of cutting off one's teachers.
What has happened with so-called 'western'
Buddhism is that there are many grateful people and then there
are grateful people who forgot that they are grateful. They
never would have heard the word 'Buddhism,' the word 'Dharma,'
the 'Four Noble Truths' et cetera, if it was not for the unbroken
lineages that have taken place from mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart.
There would be no western Buddhism, there would be no Chinese
Buddhism, there would be no Sri Lankan Buddhism, if the Buddha
had not been kind and his sons and daughters had not been
kind. That is the nature of the transmission of Buddhism.
No matter what country we are in, it comes to that.
I agree with Traleg Rinpoche that there is
a problem of 'too soon-ness' about wanting to make adjustments
to the Buddhist teachings. We do not even know what to adjust,
we have not heard the whole thing yet, we have only heard
a small bit of it and have only practised even a smaller amount.
In that sense, I find this issue preposterous. I live in America,
and America as we know, is a preposterous place! Not unlike
Australia! There are many people with many opinions. Buddhism
came into western countries with a vengeance, so to speak,
of popularity amongst the 'boomer' generation of people. These
are people who really think that they know it all, people
like us. Not all of us; some of us are a little older and
some of us are a little younger. There is this phenomenon
of people of a certain generation, however, who incorporated
the ideas of Buddhism into their lives and then - just like
they knew best in the 1960s - they know best in the 1990s
and in this new century, about how to really get things right.
We have a cultural problem, a western problem there.
Part of the problem with gratefulness also
has to do with a part of the mind that wants to absolutely
materialise everything. We want everything to be palatable
and real. We want to be able to touch it, describe it and
see it exactly. It is hard for us to have faith in something
that has been seen and experienced but which is immaterial
- such as Buddha's realisation or the realisation of the millions
of people who have actually attained enlightenment throughout
history. We have a problem with this because of our scientific
minds; we have this notion that we need to be able to 'prove'
everything. This approach actually creates a huge problem.
In America, there is a movement to diminish
the role of the teacher. Teachers have barely existed in our
culture, but we already think that it is time to diminish
their role. As Rinpoche pointed out, barely a generation has
passed and we already think that the teachers need to be put
in their places. 'Diminish' is a funny word. The dictionary
definition means, 'make into zero' - make it so small that
it ceases to exist. However, Buddhism is a wonderful thing.
It needs teachers; it needs the transmission from heart-to-heart,
from mind-to-mind. It would be very difficult to understand
Buddhism without that; it is not impossible, but almost impossible,
without it.
Another phenomenon in America - I don't know
if it exists here in Australia - is this idea of the collective
wisdom of the Sangha; that this collective wisdom will itself
become the teacher. However, our collective wisdom has not
done much, I tell you, and I do not believe that it will ever
do anything. This idea is totally, one hundred per cent, preposterous.
Democracy may or may not work as a political process, but
as a spiritual process, it is impossible. There is no chance
at all, because you always end up with the likes of George
Bush! That is democracy. We could have the same thing in Buddhism,
but that would not be Buddhism.
Question:
Rinpoche implied that 'westernisation'
means secularisation, and that contemporary western culture
is so thoroughly secular that a westernised Buddhism would
somehow have to deal with secularisation in the west. However,
is Christian spirituality not still alive in western culture
and is not this precisely Christian heritage part of the west
and also interacting with Buddhism?
Venerable Traleg
Rinpoche: I emphasised the secular west rather than
the Christian west because the people who have written books
about westernising Buddhism have always appealed to the secular
ideas, not to the Christian ideas. That is why you have books
like Naked Buddhism, Buddhism Without Belief et cetera. The
idea that these books propound is that the essence of Buddhism
is to be here, in the now, to practise awareness and that
if you are aware and do your daily meditation, that is all
you need to do. You do not have to believe in rebirth, you
do not have to believe in karma, you do not have to believe
in any of the Buddhist philosophical or theological concepts.
Instead, you can strip Buddhism away, right down to the bare
minimum and that is where you will find the essence of Buddhism.
If you do that, you will have attained the essence of Theravada,
the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, the essence of Zen Buddhism.
You do not even have to say that you follow Theravada or Zen
or Tibetan Buddhism. You are following Buddhism, which is
what Buddha practised; and as such, you are following the
true path.
I have problems with this, because Buddhism
ceases to be a spiritual practice with that approach. Buddhism
is a spiritual practice and any spiritual practice has lineage
and a sense of tradition. Whether we like it or not, the doctrinal
side of any religious tradition, its rituals and so on, are
very important. In many ways, we could say that now that rituals,
formalities and ceremonies have very little role in modern
life, we have become impoverished. It can be argued very persuasively
that we need some of these things in our lives to make our
lives richer.
When there is no ceremony or ritual, everything in life is
made ordinary; nothing is special. Nothing that we do is marked
with a sense of significance or meaning. I think that things
like chanting, prayers, playing sacred music, doing spiritual
dance are also very important in terms of one's spiritual
growth and one's spiritual practice. I do not think that simply
being in the 'here and now' and practising awareness is really
sufficient for us to transform and change.
When Buddhism talks about 'awareness' and
'being in the now,' it is very important to understand that
from a Buddhist perspective. In order to understand that perspective,
we have to understand something about the Buddhist teachings.
We can only do this from reading Buddhist texts that were
authored by Buddhist masters and so on. Our spiritual practices
and meditative experiences have to be put in a context in
order for us to understand or make sense of them. Simply sitting
on a cushion and being aware will not be that informative
unless we make some kind of effort to understand why we are
sitting there and why we are practising awareness.
As the Buddha himself said, the correct view
(samma ditthi in Pali) is of the utmost importance. If we
do not have the correct view, we cannot proceed. This is emphasised
again and again. That emphasis has diminished in the west
in recent years, because the correct view is automatically
assumed to encourage dogmatism, opinionatedness and so forth.
However, it does not necessarily have to do that. According
to the Buddha, if we have the correct view we will have wisdom
and if we do not have correct view we will not have wisdom.
We can try to practise awareness and mindfulness and try to
be in the present, but we will not develop wisdom.
Venerable Pannyavaro:
In the Theravada Vipassana tradition in the west, you
find intensive practice situations where lay meditators are
focused on this correct view by seeing the three marks of
existence. That happens without any elaboration, ceremony,
ritual or mythology. This kind of 'pure awareness,' is not
just an abstract casual kind of thing, but is based on the
Mahasatipatthana-sutta.
Following a lineage is the most important thing to consider.
We should not just follow someone who stands up and says,
'I am a teacher.' We have to ask whether this person has a
connection with a master. What is happening in Buddhism now,
as far as the Theravada, westernised, meditation tradition
is concerned, is this pure meditation practice in an intensive
retreat setting, without any prayers, without any devotion,
without any ritual, without any ceremony, but all the while
working with a teacher of a lineage. This approach is directed
at the core teachings on the experiential level.
Venerable Tejadhammo:
I still think that it is far too early to come to any kind
of conclusion about the success of this type of approach.
In my experience, I have found that many westerners have,
in fact, become obsessed with Vipassana practice, which is
not what Vipassana practice is about. I agree that there is
also a need for other things, for something that is more whole
and more complete. I would hate to think that the Buddhadharma
was reduced to this kind of singular approach.
Geoff Dawson:
I think that this discussion could become polarised in terms
of 'belief versus experience.' Speaking personally, I would
not have got involved in Zen Buddhism and practised for twenty-five
years, if I did not have some kind of faith that what I was
reading about provided a method to get out of the mess that
I felt I was in. However, if I did not have the experience
of doing meditation practice and practising the precepts and
actually experiencing that for myself, it would be just blind
faith. I think the two inform and feed off one another. Before
he died, the Buddha said, 'Be a light unto yourself. Don't
just believe something because I tell you. Find out for yourself.
Here is the practice; here are the tools. Do it, experience
it. If you do this, you may get the same kind of results as
what I am telling you, but do not just blindly believe me.'
That is in the true spirit of Buddhism as well, not just to
believe, but also to enquire and be willing to question.
Venerable Traleg
Rinpoche: This kind of discussion is very important.
There would be no point in having a forum if everybody said
the same thing. There would be no discussion, then. From my
point of view, there is absolutely no way that anyone can
do any kind of spiritual practice without some belief. Just
as you cannot do anything in everyday life without believing
in things, such as that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.
There are so many things in life that are based on trust and
faith, in terms of human interactions, in terms of our contracts,
when we buy and sell something, when we get married, when
we form relationships et cetera. Everything that we do is
filtered through conceptual schemas; there is nothing that
we can do that is completely free of those.
People who emphasise this notion of 'Buddhism
without belief' are displaying an attitude that is obviously
based on a form of scepticism. I am a sceptic myself, because
I am sceptical of that kind of system! Even believing that
the form of Buddhism that we should have in the west must
be free of rituals, prayers and philosophies, while focusing
instead on awareness, mindfulness and Vipassana meditation,
is based on some kind of belief system. As human beings we
cannot do without believing in things. When we stop believing,
we will stop living. That is what I believe, but that is just
my view.
To me, approaching one's spiritual
practice in a fully-informed manner, is far more satisfying
than having this 'anathema to book-learning,' as it is called.
In all forms of Buddhist tradition, learning is emphasised.
If we have learning, we can engage in a full dialogue with
western ideas, both secular and religious. In that way, one's
own worldview will be far richer and more profound than it
will ever be by simply trying to divest oneself of all belief
systems. We should not forget the importance of love and compassion
in Buddhism also. We can only have love and compassion if
we believe in certain things. If we suspend all beliefs, we
have to suspend our belief in other people and the value of
love and compassion and wisdom and so forth as well.
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