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During fieldwork in Ladakh in July–August 2018, three authors from Asian studies, anthropology, and religious studies backgrounds researched “multiple Buddhisms” in Ladakh, India. Two case studies are presented: a Buddhist monastery festival by the Drikung Kagyü Tibetan Buddhist sect, and a Theravada monastic complex, called Mahabodhi International Meditation Center (MIMC). Through the transnational contexts of both of these case studies, we argue that Buddhist leaders adapt their teachings to appeal to specific audiences with the underlying goal of preserving the tradition. The Buddhist monastery festival engages with both the scientific and the magical or mystical elements of Buddhism for two very different European audiences. At MIMC, a secular spirituality mixes with Buddhism for international tourists on a meditation retreat. Finally, at MIMC, Thai Buddhist monks learn how to fight the decline of Buddhism through missionizing Theravada Buddhism in this land dominated by Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. Paying attention to this multiplicity—to “multiple Buddhisms”—we argue, makes space for the complicated, ambiguous, and at times contradictory manner in which Buddhism is positioned in regards to secularism and secularity.

Engaged Buddhism emerged in Asia in the 20th century as Buddhists responded to the challenges of colonialism, modernity, and secularization. It is often dated to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s challenge to caste discrimination in India in the 1950s and the antiwar activism of Vietnamese Buddhist monastic Thich Nhat Hanh, although recent scholarship has pointed to the influence of Chinese Buddhist reforms occurring in the 1930s. Hanh coined the term “engaged Buddhism” to describe social and political activism based in Buddhist principles in the 1960s. The terms “engaged Buddhism” and “socially engaged Buddhism” were taken up by loosely connected Buddhists in Asia and the West who adapted Buddhism to a range of nonviolent social activist projects such as peacemaking, human rights, environmental protection, rural development, combatting ethnic violence, and women’s rights. With globalization and technological advances, engaged Buddhist organizations and efforts have spread across the globe. Reflecting the culture shift from the modern to the postmodern, generational and demographic shifts within these communities are marked by increased attention to intersectionality and postcolonial thought. Engaged Buddhists see their social and political activities as extending Buddhism’s classical focus on individual suffering to the suffering generated by unjust structures and systems, and set collective as well as individual liberation as a soteriological goal. While there is a consensus in academic scholarship that engaged Buddhism is an expression of Buddhist modernism, recent debates have arisen around whether conservative, nationalist, and even ethnocentric modern forms of Buddhism can be considered as forms of engaged Buddhism.

This chapter illustrates connections between meditation and social change, distinguishing assimilative and radical currents recognizable in the adoption of meditation as a tool of social stability and social transformation, especially within a North American context. The assimilative approach rests on the assumption that individual meditation practice will naturally lead to social transformation. It underlies the incorporation of meditation into established public institutions such as schools, hospitals, and the political arena. The radical current shifts focus from individual practice to structural change and collective liberation and is most visible in progressive social activist communities, which have adopted meditation as a strategy of self-care and a creative tool of protest. Both radical and assimilative currents have roots in the modernization of Buddhism that began during colonialism, which has led to the de-contextualization of meditation from its traditional religious matrix and its re-contextualization in various new matrices including ones primarily geared toward social transformation and justice.

This introductory chapter begins with an overview of developments in American Buddhism. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to flesh out the distinctive characteristics shaping Buddhism in postmodernity. Through a geographical focus on North American meditation-based convert communities, particularly those deriving from Theravada and Zen Buddhism, the book draws attention to the specific ways in which Buddhist modernism is being transformed. It argues that contemporary developments in American Buddhist meditation-based convert lineages cannot be adequately explained within the category of Buddhist modernism. The postmodern questioning of modernity's dismissal of the traditional and its embrace of diversity, hybridity, and pluralism have resulted in an environment in which many different forms of religious belief and activity have flourished.

This chapter provides historical and theoretical contexts on the emergence of Buddhist modernism in Asia and its transmission to North America. It then offers a series of case studies that show both an interrogation of modernist features and the appearance of characteristics more associated with the postmodern, postcolonial, and postsecular within these communities. A common feature of American meditation-based Buddhism has been to extend and align with the Asian Buddhist modernist trope of distinguishing between essential and cultural Buddhism onto convert and Asian American immigrant communities. This has produced a hierarchical racialized split, which has received scant and insufficient attention in scholarship on American Buddhism.

This chapter suggests that to understand recent patterns and turns in American meditation-based convert Buddhism, one has to go beyond theories of modernity and explore what has come after it—as indicated by sociocultural signifiers such as postmodern, postcolonial, and postsecular. As the case studies have shown, new developments often explicitly and implicitly assert pressure on modernist characteristics and cannot be fully explained within the parameters of Buddhist modernism. The chapter then reviews a number of frameworks that either change the category of Buddhist modernism slightly or introduce a new analytical paradigm, and considers how well these alternatives attend to and account for emerging trends identified in this book.

The Buddhist Geeks project is an online Buddhist media platform launched in 2007 by two self-identified millennials who wanted to combine their passion for Buddhism with their “geeky skills.” It quickly gained a wide audience for its pioneering explorations into the convergence of Buddhism, technology, and global culture. Through an analysis of the Buddhist Geeks project and a consideration of its replacement, Meditate.io., this chapter explores the impact of technology and digital culture on American convert Buddhism. It draws on discourse analysis, formal interviews with some of the main players of the Buddhist Geeks project, informal interaction with multiple Buddhist Geeks participants, and participant observation at three annual Buddhist Geeks conferences from 2012 to 2015.

Certain patterns have developed around meditation and enlightenment, or awakening, as many prefer to call it, in the American Insight network. Network here is defined as a loose affiliation of individuals and communities that prioritize Vipassana meditation as their central practice and trace their immediate Buddhist roots to Burmese and Thai Theravadin lineages. One current network emphasizes a more relational and integrative orientation toward meditation and draws significantly on psychotherapeutic discourse. The other stresses a more systematic and goal-oriented approach to awakening and relies heavily on traditional Buddhist canonical and commentarial literature. This chapter traces these currents, across both first- and second-generation convert teachers, highlighting the orientation toward meditation, the preferred style of practice, the gendering of meditation, the understanding of enlightenment, and the strategies of legitimation advanced within each before reflecting on their significance for the unfolding of Buddhist modernism in the United States.

The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. This fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period that the book identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. The author observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism such as ethics and community that were discarded in the modernization process. Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.

Through a focus on the Zen sex scandals, this chapter redirects attention to practice communities to provide a more nuanced consideration of intersections between American Buddhism and psychotherapy. The scandals provide a useful focus for a number of reasons. First, they reveal under what particular conditions psychotherapy has been incorporated into certain Zen communities. Second, they show which psychotherapeutic discourses have become dominant and the specific ways they have been adopted. Third, they illustrate how the introduction of psychotherapy has been legitimated within a wider Buddhist hermeneutic, which has produced new Buddhist discourses, practices, authorities, organizational structures, and even soteriological models.

This chapter examines some of the main features of diversity and inclusion work through a case study of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (DC) (IMCW). It considers the main pragmatic and hermeneutic strategies by which diversity and inclusion initiatives are legitimated within Buddhist thought and practices at IMCW as well as the opposition such work has faced from many of its overwhelmingly white, middle-class and upper-middle-class members. Then, it considers how the work at IMCW reflects shifts around racial diversity and white privilege in the wider Insight community. The chapter concludes by exploring the significance of racial justice and diversity work in terms of the status and unfolding of Buddhist modernism in the United States.

This chapter examines the ambivalent relationship between American Buddhist convert communities and the mindfulness movement, and tracks some of the major patterns around mindfulness that have emerged from within those communities. It argues that the mindfulness movement should be located in the lineage of scientific rationalism, one of the three main discourses of modern Buddhism, and is clearly traceable from U Ba Khin's modernist reframing of mindfulness as a nonsectarian practice to Kabat-Zinn's scientific universal iteration. Indeed, Buddhist scholars such as McMahan, Wilson, Sharf, and Braun are united in seeing secular mindfulness as an extension and expression of Buddhist modernism. Buddhist critiques of mindfulness, however, show considerable opposition to core modernist components: universalism, individualism, an emphasis on the experiential, and the scientific-rational lineage.

The boomers represent an influential iteration of Buddhist modernism in the West. How, then, should the NextGen of teachers be positioned and understood in relationship to them? This chapter attempts to answer this question by exploring the experience of Gen X teachers. Drawing primarily on thirty-three interviews with Gen X teachers, it identifies what they see as the main characteristics and concerns of their generation. It considers how they locate themselves in relationship to the boomer generation as well as Asian Buddhism and how they are simultaneously continuing and countering the modernization process. Rather than present their perspectives as facts, the chapter offers them as “ideal types” that indicate the main directions Buddhist modernism is headed in a shifting American cultural landscape.

The March 2016 cover of the Lion's Roar featured seven teachers of color and seven white teachers, seven females and seven males, gathered together under the title “The New Face of Buddhism.” Given that this edition represented a significant step forward in promoting diversity and advocating for the sociopolitical deployment of American Buddhist practice, it is not surprising that one of the first responses to it was a critique. More surprising, however, was that this critique was directed at the magazine's continuation of rather than challenge to Buddhist modernism. This chapter considers “insider” critiques of meditation-based Buddhism, an emphasis on collective forms of practice, and an illumination and interrogation of the sociocultural contexts of American Buddhist lineages. It focuses on the appearance of these sensibilities across communities with strong online platforms as well as the lively Buddhist blogosphere.

Within the field of psychology of religion, depth psychology has been commonly adopted to interpret and often reduce mystical experience to psychodynamics. This paper takes a different approach by exploring how two contemporary American mystical teachers—Judith Blackstone’s Realization Process and Hameed Ali’s Diamond Approach—have respectively draw on the insights of depth psychology to aid in what they present as the embodiment of nondual realization. It focuses on two themes in particular: (i) the reframing of karmic obstructions such as vasanas, samskaras, and skandhas into the language of psychodynamic theory such as self-representations and object relations and (ii) the insertion of psychoanalytic narratives of individuation and relationality into nondual ontologies.

Through an ethnographic study of the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC) in Oakland, California, this paper examines recent attempts to diversify meditation-based convert American Buddhism. Celebrated as the ‘one of the most diverse Buddhist sanghas in the world’, EBMC opened its doors in January 2007 with the goal of offering a more diverse alternative to the predominantly white, middle-class populated American Buddhist groups in the Bay Area. The EBMC is rooted in a ‘gift economy’ and offers weekly meditation groups for People of Color, LGBTQI populations, and people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. While the EBMC houses separate identity-based groups, it is its attention to the multiple axes of difference—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability— what I identify as ‘dharma diversity’—that mark it as unique. In conclusion, I suggest that EBMC's diversity culture might indicate the emergence of a new postmodern stage in the assimilation of Buddhism in America.

This paper examines recent innovations in the American vipassana or insight community, specifically a current I identify as ‘West Coast Vipassana’ that has revisioned the Theravadin Buddhist goal of liberation, from a transcendental condition that demands a renunciation of the world, to an ‘embodied enlightenment’ that affirms everyday householder life as a site for awakening. I draw on Jeffrey J. Kripal's tantric transmission thesis to advance an essentially tantric hermeneutic of West Coast Vipassana. I argue that while West Coast Vipassana is originally based in Theravada Buddhism, an Asian renouncer tradition that sharply differentiates between the immanent and transcendent, it has taken a markedly tantric turn in America. I also note, however, that it considerably differs from traditional Buddhist tantric traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism or esoteric Japanese Buddhism in being distinctively modern and American.

Drawing on my own fieldwork experiences with the transnational Integral Yoga community, this essay offers some reflections on two possible approaches to bridging insider-outsider perspectives in the study of new religious movements. First, I consider Gerald Larson's suggestion of a “relationship of mutual reciprocity” between researcher and religious community. Second, I discuss the value of a participatory approach that attempts to integrate engaged participation with critical distance in the study of religion. I use my collaborative experience co-authoring an academic article on Sri Aurobindo and the contemporary yoga scene with an Integral Yoga practitioner to argue that while Larson's reciprocal enterprise risks either sacrificing critical concerns to apologetic agendas, or polarizing the insider as apologetic and the outsider as reductive, a participatory approach proposes a way to put insider-outsider perspectives into a more creative relation.

This article examines how multiple axes of difference — race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality — operate in the religious/spiritual lives of western convert LGBTQI Buddhists. Through an ethnographic study of a diverse LGBTQI Buddhist group in Oakland, California, it will reflect on emerging differences between western convert Buddhist LGBTQI practitioners. In particular, it examines how distinct populations of LGBTQI practitioners utilize the non-essentialist philosophy of Buddhism, showing how it can operate both conservatively as a way to reinforce heteronormativity and subversively as a way to challenge heteronormativity.

A debate over the integration of depth psychology and nondual, particularly Asian, spiritualities has recently engaged academic, therapeutic and spiritual communities. While some evaluations celebrate contemporary Western psychospiritual integrations as psychologically sophisticated forms of modern religiosity, other accounts reject them as psychological dilutions of traditional mysticism. Drawing on fieldwork and discourse analysis, this paper aims to further this discussion by providing a detailed treatment of the issues at stake through analysis of one such tradition, A. H. Almaas’s Diamond Approach. The Diamond Approach provides a useful study of contempo-rary American psychospirituality on two counts. First, it reconciles American concerns with individual development with Asian mystical goals of self-transcendence through an incorporation of Asian and Western religious and secular models of subjectivity. Second, it utilizes psycho-analytic theory—ranging from Freudian to intersubjectivist perspectives—to elaborate on pre-modern, particularly nondual Asian, mysticism.

In this paper, I trace the debate over narcissism in deinstitutionalized and heavily psychologized spiritualities. First, I summarize how Sigmund Freud’s discussion with Romain Rolland about the “oceanic feeling” established the classical psychoanalytic view of mysticism as a regression to primary narcissism. Second, I review how Heinz Kohut’s radical reconceptualization of narcissism has played a seminal role in socio-cultural interpretations of modern psychologized spirituality. Third, I explore how a contemporary psychospiritual tradition, A.H. Almaas’s Diamond Approach, details the relationship between narcissism and mysticism. Finally, I reflect on the benefits of a dialogical approach between psychoanalysis and spirituality arguing that the types of integrative psychospirituality envisioned by Romain and developed more fully by Almaas have the potential to facilitate the mature transformation of narcissism.

Drawing on discourse analysis and ethnography, this paper will critically examine the effects of generational differences emerging in North American Buddhism through an analysis of the Buddhist Geeks network. Buddhist Geeks is an online Buddhist media company and community that launched in 2007. It consists of a weekly audio podcast and a digital magazine component and since 2011, has hosted an annual conference. I will discuss the main characteristics and concerns of the Buddhist Geeks community and explore how it can be situated both in relationship to traditional Buddhism and Buddhist modernism. In conclusion, I reflect on whether Buddhist Geeks signals the emergence of a new, distinctly postmodern stage in the wider assimilation of Buddhism in America.