Beginners on the Buddhist path are immediately confronted with a multiplicity of traditions each claiming to be the authentic teaching of the Buddha. They are also confronted with a multiplicity of opinions about which aspects of the Buddhist path remain vital and which conflict so much with modernity that we can no longer authentically practice them.
In sorting through these claims and opinions we have to come to terms with two different questions concerning authenticity. The first is the question of whether a path is authentically Buddhist—a genuine part of the current of thought originating with the life and teachings of the historical Buddha and remaining, in important senses, faithful to it. The second is whether we can practice it wholeheartedly without inner division, false consciousness, or pretense. We want our practice to be consonant with both our present understanding of ourselves and the world and with our aspirations to transcend our present capabilities and understandings in ways that lead to higher levels of well-being. The first question is about faithfulness to a tradition; the second about faithfulness to current and future visions of ourselves. Unfortunately, what it means to be faithful is rarely simple or straightforward; neither traditions nor selves are static entities—they continually evolve and are subject to reinterpretation. In addition, there are dialectical tensions between the two aspects of authenticity—being true to a tradition and oneself—and they are not always in harmony.
Is this the Buddhism of our ancestors? is a perennial question. Each Buddhist school lays claim to its authenticity, often playing fast and loose with history to prove its point. But every successful Buddhist movement, in its efforts to claim or restore an idealized past, inevitably ends by creating a new Buddhism for its time and place. These Buddhisms can’t help but reflect the consciousness of the historical era in which they are “rediscovered.” If, by some miracle, they resisted the influences of their time, they’d be of no value to their practitioners, who, prisoners of their own time, are incapable of authentically inhabiting another one. This is a function of the second type of authenticity—one’s ability to fully inhabit and embody a practice.
The effort to rediscover the “real” Buddhism is also a recurring theme in Buddhist history. Buddhism is in a perpetual state of being lost and found, but each rediscovery is not a mere restoration of something old but a reinvention that is relevant to its place and time. Some contemporary Buddhist thinkers, for example, believe they can resurrect a pre-Theravada Buddha who never believed in rebirth. But why re-create a Buddha who is just like us—why not leave him a representative of his own time and place, just as we are of ours? If we can acknowledge that Plato was mistaken on some matters but still appreciate his central importance to Western philosophy, why can’t we do the same when it comes to the Buddha?
Theravada Buddhists sometimes claim their tradition represents the most authentic form of Buddhism. But Theravada did not exist during the Buddha’s lifetime, and multiple pre-Theravada Buddhist schools evolved in the centuries following the Buddha’s death. Theravada is believed to have emerged from one of these schools in Sri Lanka between 200 and 100 BCE and evolved in relative isolation from later developments on the Indian subcontinent and in Central Asia.
Theravada views many of those later mainland developments as corruptions of the Buddha’s authentic teachings. This reflects, in part, the assumption that only the founding teacher gets to define a tradition and that later interpreters and elaborators should be viewed with suspicion. This makes sense if the founding teacher is omniscient and infallible, and if the canonical record of his teachings is accurate and complete. But what if one views the Buddha as an extraordinarily wise teacher but still a fallible human being? Then the argument doesn’t work. It would be like arguing that authentic Western philosophy ended with Plato, and we shouldn’t bother with Aristotle, Spinoza, Hume, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, or that authentic Confucianism ended with the Analects, and we should ignore Mencius, Xunzi, and Zhu Xi. Why freeze a tradition in amber when it is just getting under way?
The claim that Theravada meditative practices are identical to the original Buddha’s also doesn’t withstand analysis. A good deal of current Theravada teaching is derived from Asian Buddhist modernist movements, and modern Vipassana differs from forms of meditation that immediately preceded it. The point is that Theravada is a living tradition, and every teacher introduces innovations in how it’s taught and practiced. This is how it should be.
Religious traditions need continual liberation from ideas and practices that have become ossified, obsolete, rote, or counterproductive.
The claim Theravada Buddhists can make is that the Pali canon contains some of the earliest written distillations of the orally transmitted teachings of the Buddha. However, not all of the thousands of suttas in the Pali canon were composed during or shortly after the Buddha’s lifetime. Some suttas read as if they might be accurately reported discourses of the Buddha, but others seem more like literary inventions. And we suspect some were composed contemporaneously with—and a few even later than—the earliest Mahayana sutras.
As new sutras made their appearance in India and China from 100 BCE on, Mahayanists felt the need to justify their authenticity as buddhavacana, or “the word of the Buddha,” and tried many gambits to establish their authenticity and provenance. None of these Mahayana maneuvers sound convincing to modern ears, and scholars generally accept that the Mahayana sutras are not the actual words of the historical Buddha in the same way at least some Pali suttas probably are.
However, the question of whether the historical Buddha actually spoke the words in any given sutra may not be what’s most important. It seems more important that innovations be consistent with the overall intentions of the Buddhist project—that they help people make better sense of their practice. Innovations such as Madhyamaka’s emptiness, Yogacara’s storehouse consciousness, Tathagatagarbha’s buddhanature, the Huayan imagery of Indra’s net, or the Lotus Sutra’s skillful means can solve problems in Buddhist theory or introduce new possibilities for Buddhist practice. It is up to each practitioner to decide whether these innovations are improvements on earlier understandings or impediments to practice and awakening.
As the Buddhist tradition was transmitted via the Silk Road to Central Asia and China, northward to Tibet, and eastward to Korea and Japan, it underwent centuries of transformation, picking up elements of Daoism, Confucianism, and other local indigenous beliefs. As Buddhism moved West, it was influenced by romanticism, transcendentalism, existentialism, phenomenology, the European Enlightenment, psychoanalytic and humanistic psychology, the Judeo-Christian tradition and neuroscience. In response, there has been a recurrent wish in Asian and Western Buddhist circles for a return to a purer form of Buddhism—the way it was before it became corrupted by foreign influences—whether the influences were of competing Indian views or indigenous influences in the newer cultures to which it spread.
But this return to a purer form of Buddhism is a myth. The Buddha did not invent the dharma ex nihilo. He was attempting to find a middle way between the competing religious and philosophical beliefs that existed during his lifetime. In other words, he was influenced by the indigenous religious and philosophical beliefs of the culture in which he was raised.
The Buddha’s endorsement of rebirth or the existence of various mythological beings may reflect the influence of pre-existent cultural beliefs rather than being essential to the Buddha’s unique spiritual revelation—with the caveat that his unique spiritual revelation could have occurred only within the constraints of the symbols and understandings available to him. From this point of view, there is no pure Buddhism—only influences upon influences all the way down. As Thich Nhat Hanh wryly observed, Buddhism is made entirely of non-Buddhist elements.
While the idea of a return to a pure Buddhism may be a myth, myths often contain important psychological insights. Religious traditions need continual liberation from ideas and practices that have become ossified, obsolete, rote, or counterproductive. What speaks to one culture—or a generation within a culture—may not speak to all cultures and times. In The Blue-Cliff Record, a monk asks Zen Master Zhaozhou, “You often say, ‘The Way is not difficult, only don’t pick and choose.’ Hasn’t that become a cliche?” The question of whether a teaching or practice is alive or dead is open to unceasing inquiry.
Is the Zen we practice today the same Zen practiced by the ancient Tang dynasty Chan masters? Buddhist scholars tell us that Song dynasty Chan was qualitatively different from Tang dynasty Chan. The Tang dynasty masters were more traditional in their teaching styles than we probably imagine, but in their retellings, the Song dynasty intelligentsia transformed them into the dramatic, mythological figures we recognize today with their fly whisks, blows, and shouts. While the Tang dynasty masters studied the Mahayana sutras, Song dynasty Chan produced its own prodigious literature—the Platform Sutra, the Jingde Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, the Sandokai, the Xinxin Ming, the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, the Recorded Sayings of Linji, the Blue-Cliff Record, the Gateless Gate, and the Book of Serenity—which would become the primary literature for latter-day Zen students.
It’s not entirely clear what type of meditation the earliest Chan masters practiced, as they left no meditation manuals behind. On the other hand, many of today’s Zen practices—whether silent illumination or koan practice—were clearly described only around the 11th century. While there are lines of continuity over the past fifteen hundred years, there is also a process of change, development, and, at times, discontinuity.
Mixed continuity and discontinuity are also part of the story of Japanese Zen. Eihei Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, left Japan to go to China to find “the real Zen.” He was dissatisfied with 13th-century Japanese Zen and went in search of something more authentic. He met his teacher in China, became enlightened, and brought his understanding back to Japan. His religious and literary masterpiece, the Shobogenzo, is an essential text for Zen practitioners today. Dogen’s search for the real Zen is another example of the perennial search for a real Buddhism that no longer exists but must be rediscovered.
Four hundred years after Dogen, his work was largely forgotten. Koan study devolved into receiving written, approved solutions from one’s teacher drawn from koan verses, esoteric mantras, and Daoist doctrine. There were pockets of awareness about the fallen state of Japanese Zen: Shido Mu’nan (1603–1676) criticized the priests of his day as “the worst sort of evil there is, thieves who get by without having to work.” Confucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan (1609–1691) thought Zen teachers were prepared to “flatter any daimyo (feudal warlord), millionaire, or rascal” and proclaim him enlightened. Dokuan Genko (1630–1698) said, “Those nowadays who claim to be dharma heirs are merely receiving paper Zen.” Mangen Shiban (1703) thought authentic Zen had ceased to exist after the first six generations of Japanese teachers. Menzan Zuiho (1768) observed contemporary monks “neither uphold the precepts, practice meditation, nor cultivate wisdom.”
Dogen’s writings didn’t resume their central place in Soto Zen until the Tokugawa era (1603–1868). Scholars revived his works as part of a back-to-basics movement based on fukko, or “return to the old.” But this was not so much a return to original Dogen Zen—many of the old ways had, in fact, been lost forever—as a reimagination and reconstruction with Dogen’s texts as their guiding inspiration.
But today’s Japanese Zen isn’t Tokugawa Zen. It’s Tokugawa Zen as reimagined through the prism of the Meiji Restoration. During the Meiji Era (1868–1889), the new government initiated a policy of separating Buddhism from Shinto and then eradicating it: Nearly eighteen thousand temples were closed, and more than sixty thousand monks and nuns were forcibly laicized. To survive, Japanese Buddhism had to redefine itself in response to government persecution, rising Japanese nationalism, and the encroachment of Western science and religion. The New Buddhism (Shin Bukkyō) movement was a part of that response, reformulating Buddhism with an eye toward the West, and its members (including D. T. Suzuki) significantly impacted how Zen came to be understood in the West. In the more than a century that has subsequently passed, transformation and change have continued unabated.
This story of change, innovation, and reinvention is not unique to Zen: One could tell a similar story about Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Buddhism is constantly dying and then reborn again, the same but different. This is the one way the doctrine of rebirth turns out to be literally true.
Which path constitutes a genuine movement of the “true” self in its unfolding and actualization, and which is mere playacting and posturing?
One final Zen story. It’s the tale of Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler, the current abbot of Green Gulch Farm, drawn from his book Two Shores of Zen, his searingly honest portrayal of his experiences in American and Japanese Zen settings. Rutschman-Byler begins his narrative questioning the authenticity of American Zen. He is disdainful of noncelibate monastics, the democratic weakening of monastic hierarchies, comfortable monasteries with heated rooms and gourmet meals, and Zen teachers who act as spiritual friends rather than inspiring devotion as enlightened beings. Like Dogen going to China, he goes to Japan seeking a more authentic Zen experience.
What he discovers in Japan are twin aspects of Japanese Zen in decline. On the one hand, he finds a moribund family-temple funeral Buddhism focused on rituals for the dead. On the other hand, he engages in an austere, demanding practice with a master who—while possessing the earmarks of an enlightened being—is aging, infirm, and without dharma heirs. Whatever tradition he represents is dying with him. His temple is populated with Japanese students who sneak off from the monastery in the middle of the night and Western students struggling to fulfill an ascetic ideal that’s no longer possible for them. Rutschman-Byler struggles with the austerities and politics of monastic life and the unruly resistance of his human nature—cravings for sex, romance, carbohydrates, and an end to the bitter winter cold. In doing so, he devotes himself to a practice that threatens to undermine his sanity and harden his heart. He returns home chastened but reconciled to an imperfect
American Zen:
I have tried, and failed, to force myself to think that [Japanese-style] monastic practice is better than … meaningful, everyday worldly practice. Have I lost anything in that? Yes. Have I gained something?— indeed, my whole life, just as it is, reclaimed and renewed as precisely the territory of unsurpassed enlightenment.
Sometimes being more authentic to a tradition ends up being less true to oneself.
Authenticity to oneself emerges as a significant theme in the writings of Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, eventually becoming so central to modern life that contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor calls our era “The Age of Authenticity.” This search for authenticity is an inevitable aspect of modernity: We feel adrift amidst competing traditions that have lost their compelling authority and competing visions of ourselves that call out for embodiment and enactment.
Which path constitutes a genuine movement of the “true” self in its unfolding and actualization, and which is mere playacting and posturing? Is there a “true self” to develop and express, or is “emptiness” and “formlessness” our true home? If nothing is genuinely “authentic,” how are we to fashion ourselves? What are the goalposts and guidelines? What do we even mean by “authentic”? We Western convert Buddhists find ourselves in an awkward position. We’re postmoderns par excellence—doubters, questioners, and searchers—rejecting our birth religion and setting ourselves adrift. We want to ground ourselves in something authentic but are incapable of the kind of faith in a new religion we could not give to our old.
Buddhism is uniquely suited to these postmodern sensibilities. The doctrine of emptiness fits hand-in-glove with the process-relational aspects of postmodernism—the understanding that at the bottom, there is no bottom: no unchanging essence that stands behind us or anything else. It’s process and flux all the way down, and the bits and pieces we borrow to create ourselves are not “ours” but borrowed from our culture, memes afloat in the hive mind. The question is, which borrowings and adoptions carry value—liberate and positively actualize potentials—and what criteria should we adopt to evaluate our progress? Modern Western Buddhism reinforces and develops several criteria—presence, awareness, immediacy, wholeheartedness, integrity, openness, and interconnection—that resonate with Western romanticism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and existentialism and weds them to a humanist ethics of empathy, mutual understanding, compassion, fairness, justice, and liberation.
Is this modern Western Buddhism an authentic Buddhism? It’s not your grandfather’s Buddhism. It’s not Theravada. It’s not Bodhidharma Chan or Dogen Zen. But Western Buddhism is authentic in another sense: It’s authentic in that we can completely get behind it. It’s a platform on which we can authentically practice without pretense or cutting off or eliding what we sense deeply and irrevocably in our bones.
Will it take us to the other shore? Do we still believe in that other shore—a final destination that is permanent, wholly transcendent, and beyond all suffering? What our modern Western Buddhism can do is move us continually forward beyond ourselves, breaking the chains of habit, prejudice, and character, opening us to deeper levels of interconnectedness, opening our hearts, lessening our clinging and egocentricity, developing our equanimity and acceptance, and enabling the continual questioning that makes our never-ending journey an adventure worth living. It’s not another shore exactly, but it’s a process we can authentically devote ourselves to.
Modern Western Buddhism isn’t the final version of Buddhism; it’s just ours. The next historical era will require something new—something drawing different water from the Buddhist well and blending it with insights specific to its time and place. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “philosophy can never revert to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.” Every great philosopher changes the world so that we can never quite see things the same way again. We can’t live as if Hume, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche never existed—whether we’ve read and understood them or not, our culture has been changed by them, and we’ve been changed along with it. In the future, some new philosophers will think new thoughts, invent new metaphors, address new problems, and change the ways our descendants will understand and practice the dharma. As a conversation twenty-five hundred years old on awakening and liberation, the well of Buddhism is deep—it will always have something valuable to contribute. And, once again, it will be reborn, the same but different.
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