Buddhism and Human Flourishing: A Modern Western Perspective

By Seth Zuihō Segall

The Buddha and Aristotle offer competing visions of the best possible life to which human beings can aspire. In this volume, Seth Zuihō Segall compares Theravāda and Mahāyāna accounts of enlightenment with Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian accounts of eudaimonia, and proposes a syncretic model of eudaimonic enlightenment that, given prevalent Western beliefs about well-being and human flourishing, provides a credible new end-goal for modern Western Buddhist practice. He then demonstrates how this proposed synthesis is already deeply reflected in contemporary Western Buddhist rhetoric. Segall re-evaluates traditional Buddhist teachings on desire, attachment, aversion, nirvāṇa, and selfhood from the eudaimonic enlightenment perspective, and explores the perspective’s ethical and metaphysical implications. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030370275

Seth Zuihō Segall

Seth Zuihō Segall, PhD, is a Zen priest and retired clinical psychologist. Dr. Segall has been a practicing Buddhist for twenty-five years. His blog, The Existential Buddhist (www.existentialbuddhist.com), provides insights on Buddhist philosophy, practice, ethics, history, art, and social engagement.

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© The Author(s) 2020

S. Z. SegallBuddhism and Human Flourishinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37027-5_1

1. The Changing Nature of Buddhism

Seth Zuihō Segall¹  

(1)

White Plains, NY, USA

Seth Zuihō Segall

Introduction

In its broadest sense, this book is about the tension between Buddhist and Western conceptions of what it means to live the best possible kind of life one can aspire to. It’s a book about what aspects of traditional Buddhist teachings are possible for us, as modern Westerners, to truly accept and make good use of, and what aspects conflict so deeply with our cultural heritage that genuine belief becomes impossible. By genuine belief, I mean the kind of belief we feel deeply in our bones in the same way we believe gravity will keep us rooted to the ground and that we will not, someday, wake up to find ourselves floating mysteriously in midair. Lastly, this is a book about how Buddhism is changing in the course of its transmission to the West, and how it will continue to evolve if it’s to remain relevant to how we—as modern people—understand and construct our lives.

As such, this is a deeply personal book based on my experience as a long-term Buddhist practitioner, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, a clinical psychologist interested in Asian and Western philosophy, and a person living within a specific cultural, historical, and socio-economic context. Over the years, I have found Buddhist practice to be extraordinarily beneficial. It has helped strengthen and enrich my capacities to be intimately present, to be at home in my body, to accept life’s circumstances with equanimity, and to focus on the well-being of others. At the same time, I am aware of Buddhist teachings I’ve had to modify, alter, or simply disregard in order for Buddhism to make sense for me. I am also aware of the ways that many contemporary Western Buddhist teachers often alter, ignore, selectively emphasize, or unwittingly misunderstand traditional Buddhist teachings, and how their modifications and elisions echo my own difficulties with making modern sense of the tradition. The things I find a need to alter—and which these teachers seem to have made parallel conscious or unconscious compromises on—are not random but conform to a pattern. That pattern—why it occurs and why it ought to occur—is the subject of this book.

All of us inescapably dwell in and are confined to a specific culture and time—the one we were reared in and the one we presently inhabit—the way fish dwell in and are confined to the sea. Even the most ardent iconoclast struggles against a comparatively small component of his or her cultural inheritance, the vast majority of which operates at the level of tacit assumption and common sense. The way we think about selfhood, identity, gender, family, community, morality, justice, progress, truth, beauty, time, space, cosmology, and divinity is bound together and deeply intertwined with other shared basic assumptions of our culture forming our zeitgeist, or common ecosystem of meanings.

When one finds oneself dissatisfied with aspects of one’s own time and culture and seeks answers for it in the practices and beliefs of another time and culture, some of the borrowed practices and beliefs fit easily into the meaning ecosystem of one’s root culture, some are misunderstood through the prism of available memes in one’s root culture, and some irreconcilably clash. The product of one time and culture cannot be completely assimilated as is by the dweller in another time and culture. It must be—to some extent—reshaped and reconfigured to make sense if one is to believe it genuinely and completely. In the act of assimilating borrowed practices and beliefs and making them one’s own, something is gained and something lost. What emerges from that process has one foot in its culture of origin and one foot in its adopted one. It is both a continuation of the culture borrowed from and a betrayal of it.¹ It also—if it takes hold—colonizes its adopted culture like a virus invades a host, subtly shifting older meanings and understandings as its adopting culture accommodates to and reorganizes around it.

Many Buddhist accommodations to Western culture have already taken place, but the fact that they are accommodations often goes unacknowledged. They’re often clothed in the fiction that they’re, in fact, the Buddha’s original teachings, and their inconsistencies with other older-strata Buddhist teachings may go uncommented on as if they didn’t exist.

There’s nothing new about the pretense that novel teachings are original teachings. As we shall see, this pretense has been employed and re-employed throughout history whenever Buddhism has journeyed to a new shore or made contact with competing religions and philosophies. Many of the suggestions I will make in this book about how to best modify traditional Buddhist teachings have already been made by others. Some are already commonly held tenets in many contemporary Western Zen, Vajrayāna, and Vipassanā communities. My intention is to integrate these modified teachings within a single meaningful framework that I hope will prove helpful to practitioners—beginners and old hands alike.

As an aside, my critique is specifically directed at Buddhist concepts as found in classic Pāli, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts, as regularly encountered in Western English-language Dharma talks, and as generally understood within Western convert Buddhist communities. It is not directed at the ways traditional Buddhist practice—lay and clerical—is instantiated by non-convert Buddhists in diverse Asian cultures.

Western Buddhist practitioners who value the authenticity of their practice above all else—that is, the degree to which their practice conforms to the Buddha’s original teachings—are often disconcerted to discover how little we know about the historical Buddha, how much our understanding of the earliest strands of Buddhist teachings is a matter of conjecture and guesswork, and how much of what often passes for the historical Buddha’s authentic teachings is the result of a lengthy historical process of revision and reinvention. It’s sometimes best not to think of Buddhism as being a single coherent tradition, but to think of it as two-and-a-half millennia-long conversation about what it means to live the best kind of existence, one that has many different tributaries, branches, and side-streams.

Buddhism is not alone in having undergone this kind of historical transformation. Religions thrive, wither, or die according to their ability to address the existential concerns of particular times and places, and to harmoniously coexist within the wider ecosystem of a culture’s deeply held beliefs. As they evolve, traditionalists strive to maintain ideas and practices that have lost their resonance, while innovators strive to reconfigure them to meet the needs of the moment. Religions that survive over millennia manage to skillfully thread the needle between these extremes.

History provides us with many examples of once vibrant religions that are now, for all practical purposes, extinct. Very few people, if any, continue to worship the Greek, Roman, Norse, or Egyptian gods. The tales of these gods, demigods, fates, and furies retain an enduring cultural value in their roles as metaphors, but not as objects of worship and belief. The idea that human-like deities control nature from atop Mount Olympus, or that a horse-drawn chariot draws the sun across the sky, or that three Norns weave our fates is too inconsistent with our other beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality for us to take them seriously as literal truth.

The religions that survive have undergone continuous revision over long periods of time. Judaism, for example, evolved from henotheism² to monotheism, and from a priestly religion of animal sacrifice to a rabbinical religion of prayer, repentance, charity, and adherence to a set of commandments. Today, competing visions of what it means to be Jewish are transmitted by a multiplicity of Hassidic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular voices.

The evolving, pleomorphic, multi-vocal nature of both historical and contemporary Judaism is typical of all religions. The histories of Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism demonstrate a similar course of evolution and multiple forms of contemporary expression. In just the last two centuries, for example, American Christianity has, in an extraordinary burst of creativity, witnessed the birth of new forms of worship and belief, including Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholic Workers, Pentecostalism, fundamentalism, revivalism, and liberation theology. These new movements are the collective results of many individuals responding to the spirit of their times.

The history of Chán in China and Zen in Japan reveals a similar course of endless revision, reinvention, and reinterpretation. Alan Cole³ has documented the Chinese Song dynasty (960–1157 CE) reinvention and mythologization of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) Chán masters; Jiang Wu⁴ has documented the reinvention of the Huángbò lineage within the Línjì school of Chinese Chán in the mid-seventeenth century; Peter Haskell⁵ and David Riggs⁶ have documented the Japanese resurrection and reinvention of Dōgen-style Zen during the Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868 CE), and Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler⁷ has documented the radical transformation of Japanese Zen in the Meiji era (1868–1912 CE). The Zen we practice now is not the timeless practice of our ancestors, but something continuously modified over the centuries.

It’s also of historical interest to note that the Buddhism that came to America in the twentieth century was a Buddhism already transformed through contact with the West. As David McMahan notes:

[O]ne of the major ways in which Buddhism around the world has modernized is through its re-articulation in the languages of science and secular thought. This began during the colonial period in Asia, in the nineteenth century, when Buddhists who were either colonized, as in Ceylon and Burma, or concerned about the economic and military hegemony of the West, as in China and Japan, began reinterpreting and representing Buddhism as a system of thought and ethics more attuned to the emerging scientific worldview than the religion of the colonizers.⁸

In other words, nineteenth-century Asian Buddhist modernists constructed rational versions of Buddhism that were in better accord with Western secular and scientific trends as a response to Western colonialism, imperialism, and proselytizing. These modernized forms of Buddhism were then transmitted to the West in the twentieth century, where Westerners continued the process of reform and reinterpretation. This applies not only to the radical Japanese revision of Zen in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, but also to the rise of the modern Vipassanā movement in Southeast Asia⁹ and to the influence of the American Theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott on the Sinhalese Buddhist revival.¹⁰

Buddhism and Western Modernism

The great challenge for us as Western practitioners is how to make Buddhist practice our own—how to make it something we can fully endorse without inner division or pretense, and without cutting off or eliding what we, as modern people, sense deeply and irrevocably in our bones. The modern Western ecosystem of meanings presents several significant barriers to the unmodified assimilation of traditional Buddhist teachings. Chief among these are Western beliefs concerning life after death, Western scientific naturalism and materialism, and the Aristotelian ideal of human flourishing—Westerners’ implicit understanding of what it means to live the best possible kind of life a human being can aspire to.

Western Beliefs Regarding Life After Death

The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth has a central place in Buddhist teachings concerning nirvāṇa , dependent origination, karma, and ethics. Westerners, however, have other ideas about what happens after death—ideas inherited from the Judeo-Christian and European Enlightenment traditions as well as from what might be termed folk spiritualism. These ideas include (1) the Judeo-Christian belief in heaven and hell, (2) the naturalist belief that consciousness ceases upon death, and (3) less articulated folk beliefs about ghosts, rejoining one’s deceased loved ones, and communication and assistance from beyond the grave.

While there are Western adherents of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, and various New Age-associated spiritual systems who profess a belief in reincarnation, their beliefs are only rarely accompanied by a genuine sense of existential urgency about ending future transmigrations. Many view reincarnation as a beneficial educative process in which we are rewarded or punished for our karma in lifetime after lifetime until we learn the lessons life is trying to teach us. This formulation differs from the Buddhist conception of rebirth in two ways. First, it assumes a single continuous personality that transmigrates from incarnation to incarnation. Second, it assumes a beneficial educational purpose to the process. Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches rebirth¹¹ rather than reincarnation, viewing the endless round of rebirths—what it terms saṃsāra—as a senseless, purposeless wandering, and therefore a source of suffering.

Modern Westerners who are interested in Buddhism typically deal with the dissonance between their preexisting beliefs concerning the afterlife and traditional Buddhist teachings by choosing to understand rebirth as a metaphor for how our current thoughts and actions condition our future thoughts and actions. According to the metaphoric interpretation of rebirth, we’re reborn anew in each and every moment, our past and current thoughts and actions determining who we become in the next moment.

While some Buddhist traditionalists argue that you can’t be a genuine Buddhist if you don’t believe in literal rebirth, this doesn’t deter modernists from interpreting rebirth metaphorically while still identifying as Buddhists. I suspect that most Western convert Buddhists already belong to the modernist camp in this regard, and that the traditionalist argument is a futile one. Please note that my argument is not that rebirth is untrue, but only that most Westerners don’t find it compelling due to their preexisting prior beliefs.

The clash between the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth and preexisting cultural beliefs about life after death is not a new problem for Buddhism. When Buddhism was transmitted from India to East Asia it encountered preexisting Chinese, Korean, and Japanese beliefs and practices regarding ancestor veneration and ghosts. Many East Asian Buddhists resolve this conflict by engaging in what, to us in the West, seems like a kind of Orwellian doublethink. While they profess a belief in rebirth, they simultaneously venerate their ancestors as if their ancestors continued to exist on some otherworldly plane.

East Asians tend to regard Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto not so much as religions the way we tend to think about them in the West, but as aspects of their cultural heritage. To engage in ancestor veneration is to engage in what East Asians have engaged in since time immemorial. It’s what makes you Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, rather than what makes you Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, or Shinto. In understanding this, it may be helpful to think of what Christmas has become for many atheists and agnostics in America—not so much a Christian holiday, as a national holiday involving time off from work, gift giving, family gatherings, Santa Claus, and ornamental trees. For such people, the holiday doesn’t so much mark a celebration of the birth of the Son of God, as a time of peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

Western Beliefs Regarding Naturalism and Materialism

Western ontological naturalism and materialism also serve as significant obstacles to the intact transmission of traditional Buddhist ideas to the West. Naturalism is the belief that everything arises from natural (as opposed to supernatural) causes. Materialism is the belief that nothing exists except the material world.

Western science could manage quite well without committing to an ontological materialism—the belief that the physical world is all that there is. Science could, for example, restrict itself to statements about regularities and relationships in the observable, quantifiable, and intersubjectively verifiable world without making proclamations about things that are neither observable nor measurable. Science requires a methodological materialism, science concerns itself with what’s intersubjectively observable, rather than an ontological materialism, material reality is all that there is. Nevertheless, the practical success of methodological materialism has led many Westerners—including many Western scientists—to take the validity of ontological materialism for granted. This continues to be the case even though ontological materialism makes it very difficult to understand the role of consciousness, intention, and choice in the natural world. It’s interesting to note that while ontological materialism is incompatible with a belief in the Divine, half of American scientists believe in a higher power and a third specifically believe in an Abrahamic notion of God.¹² Somehow they manage to square their faith in science with their belief that there is more to the world than what is observable.

Buddhism contains a number of beliefs that lie outside the range of propositions that are scientifically testable. The belief in rebirth is one of them, since it assumes that non-material karmic patterns can be transmitted to a newly developing embryo. The belief in spiritual realms such as Pure Lands, Buddha Fields, Buddhist heavens and hells, bardo realms, and formless meditative realms is another. So are beliefs in cosmological buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the supernatural beings who dwell in different realms of rebirth such as hungry ghosts, devas, and brahmās. So is the belief that it’s possible for mental activity to occur without a physical basis, for example, the persistence of consciousness in the bardo realms between death and rebirth. So is the doctrine that nirvāṇa is beyond the reach of cause and effect.

Buddhist modernists often deal with these conflicts by treating these Buddhist beliefs as either (1) superstitions best discarded or (2) metaphors which, like the Greek and Roman myths, can be useful even when untrue. One variant of (2) is the belief that while not ultimately real, cosmological buddhas and bodhisattvas have a phenomenological reality as archetypal energies that can be harnessed to spur spiritual development or wellness. This is not unlike the belief that one does not have to believe in God in order to believe in the efficacy of prayer. The act of praying itself can mobilize psychological energies that restore hope and promote resilience and recovery from illness and disaster.

A fairly widespread belief that Buddhism is a scientific religion persists despite the fact that many traditional Buddhist beliefs are scientifically untestable, incompatible with science’s commitment to naturalism, or inconsistent with many scientists’ philosophical commitment to some form of ontological materialism. This belief originated in the efforts of nineteenth-century Asian Buddhist modernists to present Buddhism to the West as a religion that was more compatible with science than the Western Abrahamic faiths.¹³ The fact that Buddhism lacked a belief in (1) an all-powerful, omniscient God who was (2) the creator of the universe, who (3) miraculously intervened in the natural order, and (4) who was the administrator of justice on earth and in the afterlife lent credibility to that assertion.

The belief that Buddhism is compatible with science also gains credibility from the Dalai Lama’s statement that, If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.¹⁴ The Dalai Lama regularly holds dialogues with Western scientists at his Mind and Life Institutes, and partly as a consequence, there has been an explosion of interest in psychological, neuropsychological, and medical research involving Buddhist meditation. This research also lends credibility to the belief that Buddhism is scientific.¹⁵

Proponents of the belief that Buddhism is scientific often cite the ancient Buddhist text called the Kālāma Sutta in support of their argument. In the Kālāma Sutta, the Buddha emphasizes the essential testability of his teachings in a way that makes Buddhism seem like an empirical enterprise. The Kālāma villagers had been approached by a variety of itinerant teachers who taught opposing doctrines. The Buddha told them they were right to be confused by these conflicting assertions, but gave them a formula for sorting claims out:

Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, The monk is our teacher. Kalamas, when you yourselves know: These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness, enter on and abide in them.¹⁶

To Western ears, accustomed to the never-ending skirmishes between religion and science from the time of Galileo onward, these words serve to differentiate Buddhism from the Abrahamic faiths, making it seem like an empirical religion. The fact is, however, that this is only one sutta among many thousands, a great many of which do assert supernatural beliefs (although Buddhism doesn’t believe in a creator God, it does believe in a multiplicity of supernatural entities) and to stress this sutta out of context gives an erroneous impression of Buddhism as a whole.

One consequence of the widespread belief that Buddhism is scientific is that one continues to hear statements like the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness is concordant with quantum mechanics or that the Buddhist doctrine of no-self is concordant with findings in neuropsychology. While there are some intriguing parallels between some Buddhist doctrines and some modern scientific findings, we should remain cognizant that there are also fundamental incompatibilities between many traditional Buddhist teachings and the doctrines of naturalism and ontological materialism.

Is a deeper reconciliation between science and Buddhism possible? Philosopher Owen Flanagan¹⁷ has explored a naturalized version of Buddhism—one with all the supernatural bits removed—to discover whether it would remain interesting and deep as a philosophy of well-being. He believes it does, and his work has significantly influenced those who identify as Secular Buddhists (see Chap. 4) as well as psychologists and neuropsychologists interested in researching ideas generated from Buddhist insights. It has also drawn criticism from traditionalist Buddhists who worry a naturalized Buddhism is too thin to be as deeply transformative as they believe Buddhism ought to