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 embraces skepticism, humanist values, a "full human flourishing," and/or a morality embedded in the natural order. It values 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 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
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 Taylors 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 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 on the other."
Buddhist modernism
Buddhist modernism arose in response to western colonial missionary activism, mixing "ancestral Buddhism and modern discursive practices," but "harbour 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, andThe 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 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:Higgins refers to Martha Nussbaums Homer's spirit, 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."