GoKawiilDigital Archaeology/Statue in the Green Dragon Temple (Soryu-ji) in Marin County, California
This article by Ethan Edwards was originally published on Palladium Magazine on May 28, 2022. It was featured in PALLADIUM 15: State Religion. To receive our future print editions, subscribe today.
Legend has it that during his own lifetime, the Buddha prophesied the end of the path to enlightenment. The Candragarbha-sutra gives us his words: “In the final 200 years, even monks will not practice in accordance with the True Dharma. They will seek worldly profit and fame; their compassion will be meager, and they will not live according to the precepts…at that time, the True Dharma will disappear. And even the letters of the scriptures will become invisible.”
If your only exposure to Buddhism is how it’s practiced in America, you’d have good reason to think the prophecy has already been fulfilled. Each morning, millions of Americans meditate, and Buddhist scriptures are available in every bookstore. But monks are few, and it’s rare that they follow the full rigor of monastic discipline. Many meditators do not claim to follow the True Dharma, and it’s not uncommon that they haven’t heard of it at all. The mindfulness movement has become an incredible source of profit and fame.
Buddhism had to gradually adapt and be adapted to become a part of the modern Western religious landscape. It’s a process that began as soon as Europeans systematically studied it in the nineteenth century. Meditation practices were stripped of their traditional context and given new purpose while still retaining the allure of their oriental origins. Books portraying Buddhism as the religion of modernity excited people’s interest, and accessible retreat-based meditation programs were meant to keep it. This transformation, a collaboration between Western countercultural figures and Eastern religious reformers, tells a story of how a modern religion is shaped and the contours of its future.
Religious Modernities
Over the millennia, Buddhism had largely divided itself into three overarching sects: the Theravada concentrated in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the Mahayana in East Asia, and the Vajrayana in Tibet and Mongolia. The practices are filled with rituals, folk customs, superstition, literal beliefs in rebirth, karma, and gods, divisions between priests and laity, chanted texts in dead languages, and except for certain monks, no meditation.
When modern Europeans first encountered Buddhism, it resembled nothing so much as popular myths about the “superstitious” dark ages. In the eighteenth century, French-Walloon engraver Bernard Picart referred to the Dalai Lama as the “Supreme Pontiff of all Tartarian idolaters” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau classified the religions of Japan and Tibet with Roman Catholicism as the “the religion of the priest…so clearly bad that it is a waste of time to prove it as such.” To these observers, Christendom had left behind folk piety and the rule of monks, but Buddhism was still trapped in this more primitive mode. The encounter and the biases behind it would shape not just the colonizers, but the colonized Buddhist world as well.
In much of the Buddhist world, the sudden changes brought by colonialism caused a sudden crisis for the clergy. In Burma and Sri Lanka, royal sponsorship of Theravada Buddhism was replaced with a supposedly neutral British colonial government and Christian missionaries. Removed from their traditional role, Buddhist institutions had to reground their religious authority. In both countries, a new generation of monks became the leaders of this renewal.
The Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw became something close to a celebrity through his writing and speaking. He sought to stall Buddhism’s decline by inspiring the lay people to moral practice and better knowledge of the dharma, even teaching them the recently revived technique of Vipassana breath meditation. In Sri Lanka, the monk Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera became a notable debater, eschewing Pali for Sinhalese. In an event that would become consequential for Buddhism as a whole, he faced a Protestant reverend and a local catechist in a public contest that became known as the Panadura debate. Its topics spanned from the nature of God to the immortality of the soul. Drawing on traditional Buddhist traditions of rhetoric and using plain language in his responses, Gunananda Thera won the day, to the acclaim of the largely Buddhist audience.
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