Buddhism had its origin in the teachings of an individual who came to be called the “awakened one,” the Buddha. His name was Gotama, and he was a member of the Shakya clan. Gotama lived in what is now the northeast region of India, near today’s Nepal border. After his death, his followers carried his teachings throughout the Indian subcontinent and then to other parts of Asia. As Buddhism spread and encountered various non-Buddhist cultures in South, East, and North Asia, the beliefs and practices of Buddhist practitioners were profoundly shaped by the encounter. For example, in China, Buddhism was deeply impacted by Daoism and Confucianism.
Similarly, as Buddhism gained influence in western countries, western values and cultures shaped Buddhist beliefs and practices, even in traditional lineages. One important influence is secularization, which has developed since before the Renaissance. Secularity is often seen as anti-religious, but this is only one meaning. Here, secularity means focusing on life in this saeculum—the time we live in, with its challenges and opportunities. Contemporary secularity involves doubting “enchanted” truth claims, especially about supernatural phenomena or beings.
Other influences that have shaped Buddhism in the West are individualism, scientific rationalism, Christianity, and psychology. All these influences have been affected by capitalism, which shapes how we see ourselves and our values. The current neoliberal form of capitalism reinforces individualism, discourages cooperation and mutual aid, and strengthens greed and hatred. It also makes it harder to cultivate compassion and care.
These factors have played a crucial role in the development of secular Buddhism in the West. Secular Buddhists have connections to various lineages, including Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. However, secular Buddhism mainly grew from modernizing trends in Theravāda Buddhism. This school is now common in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Burma. In response to Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, some Theravāda leaders shared monastic meditation and teaching with lay people in modernized forms. This movement laid the foundation for what David McMahan calls Buddhist modernism.
After studying with Theravāda teachers in India, Thailand, and Myanmar in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jack Kornfeld, Christina Feldman, Sharon Salzberg, Christopher Titmuss, Joseph Goldstein, and others brought these teachings to the English-speaking world. They sought to make the dharma more relevant and downplayed monastic hierarchy, patriarchy, and ritual. Instead, they favored a lay-oriented, psychologically informed approach, which became known as insight meditation.
However, while rejecting some aspects of traditional Buddhism, insight meditation has preserved many conventional teachings, such as the notion of nirvana as a permanent status and transcendence of the human condition, as well as a teacher’s charismatic authority based on dharma transmission and spiritual pedigree, or lineage.
Parallel developments occurred in the take-up of Japanese Zen Buddhism in the west.
The dharma takes root
Secular Buddhism is an approach to Buddhism that extracts from Gotama’s teachings those that provide us with valuable insights about how to reduce suffering and live ethically and meaningfully in our contemporary world. In this sense, secular Buddhism represents the attempt to continue the process of rooting the dharma in modern Western culture, where the earlier non-monastic insight movement, a form of Buddhist modernism, left off.
Stephen Batchelor has been vitally important in the development of a secular Buddhist trend. Beginning with his groundbreaking work, Buddhism Without Beliefs, he has sought to retrieve the teachings of Gotama, the historical Buddha, while bypassing their later religious appropriation and scraping away the cultural accretions of traditional forms of Buddhism.
At the same time, Batchelor and other secular Buddhists have explored how Gotama’s teachings resonate with important schools of Western philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to modern and post-metaphysical schools such as phenomenology, existentialism, and American pragmatism. This exploration has produced an approach to secular Buddhism that also queries orthodox interpretations of the teachings, not least those that wed them to metaphysical truth claims.
Finally, this approach to secular Buddhism emphasizes the need to move beyond monastic models of the community of spiritual practitioners, called the sangha. Secular Buddhists advocate for fully egalitarian, inclusive, and democratic sanghas, where there is little or no distinction between teachers and other practitioners.
Secular Buddhist communities and websites have proliferated in the last twenty years, primarily (but not exclusively) in English-speaking parts of the world.
To take a deeper dive into the history of secular Buddhism, read Winton Higgins’ 2012 article, The Coming of Secular Buddhism: A Syntopic View.
