On Buddhism, Beethoven, Babies, and Bathwater

The perennial debate over the "westernization" of Buddhism often breaks down into an argument over innovation versus tradition. And it seems to me western Buddhists are divided into two camps.

One camp thinks cultural adaptation of Buddhist forms and rituals will happen gradually, as they always have, and that western Buddhism will find its own distinctive style at its own pace without anything having to be decided by committees. Rushing this process before we fully appreciate the traditional forms could cause us to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

The other camp argues that many of the traditional forms and practices are more of a barrier than a help for western Buddhists. What's important is the dharma, not which bell to strike when. Further, clinging to specific sutras or rituals denies the truth of impermanence -- everything is always changing.

For the most part I align with the first group, but anything can be taken to extremes. I have seen Zen monastics become dharma drill sergeants obsessed with boot-camp style enforcement of correct form. And yeah, it's obnoxious. I also have talked to Zen students who say they have walked away from certain teachers and communities that had become too hierarchical and rigid. I think the marine boot camp approach to Zen is the exception rather than the rule in the West, but it does happen.

On the other hand, I've bumped into lots of people eager for Extreme Makeover Buddhism who are too new and inexperienced to fully appreciate what it is they are making over. I think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a genuine concern.

I've said this before, but I can't emphasize it enough -- you never know, going forward, what's going to open the door for you someday.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say that the part of practice they really hated at first was the very thing that pried them open to dharma and triggered their first experience of realization.

It's too tempting to "update" whatever parts of practice make us uncomfortable. The practice should flush us out of our comfort zones now and then, or it's not doing its job.

A lot of Buddhism is about balance, equanimity, and finding the center. In Japanese Zen there is a tradition of "crazy cloud" Zen masters famous for being generally outrageous and breaking rules. But it was pointed out to me once that these masters were operating within a highly hierarchical and traditionalist culture. In that culture, a master's outrageous behavior amounted to a counterweight to bring practice into balance.

In a culture that greatly values individual expression over social conventions, however, it might be argued that the needed counterweight is tradition, not "doing it our way."

I bring this up partly in response to a post by Kyle the Reformed Buddhist on what he calls "Buddhist fundamentalism."  He writes,

It doesn't matter so much what words we use, or how colorful or poetic they are, as long as they point to the same immutable truths of self, suffering and impermanence, we will all inevitably arrive at the same liberating realization, and find some shelter from the storm of samsara.

If we out of hand dismiss all new ways of expressing these truths, we will remain stagnant as a practice, and our growth to those who view Buddhism as a foreign or complicated religion will continue to be greatly stunted. This stagnation was not what the Buddha intended, and ultimately does a great disservice to anyone seeking a better understanding of our true nature.

I agree with this, but with an asterisk. I think it's equally valid to say, If we out of hand dismiss all old ways of expressing these truths, we risk creating a practice that is too familiar, too comfortable, and too soft to wake us up. And  having to "westernize" everything before we can accept is at "ours" is not exactly the path to dropping body and mind, either. It's another kind of clinging.

I can only speak of Zen because my personal experience with Buddhism is entirely within the Zen tradition, but within the U.S. some Zen centers are more "traditional" than others. Kyle's experiences may be within sanghas at the more rigidly traditional end of the spectrum, and I agree that anything can become stagnant. However, without specific examples of what he considers "fundamentalist" I cannot agree or disagree further.

I also want to point out one of the comments, which said,

I mean, if Mozart or JS Bach were suddenly in today's times, would they shun the new technology and methods we now have, in favour of what they knew and used before? I doubt it.

I was already thinking of Mozart before I read this, but from the opposite direction.

There's a saying in the arts that you have to know the rules before you can break them. Put another way, just about all of the great innovators first mastered the old styles before they created new ones. Pablo Picasso received his formal training in drawing and oil painting from his father, a traditionalist who taught his son to meticulously copy the  old masters. Postmodernist composer Philip Glass says he first trained in the harmony and counterpoint of Schubert, Mozart, and Bach before moving on to post punk and new wave.

In a way, you can trace lineages of composers. Wagner studied and borrowed from Beethoven; Beethoven studied and borrowed from Mozart; Mozart studied and borrowed from Handel; and Handel studied and borrowed from just about every composer in Europe, living and dead, but that's another story. The point is that the work of each of these composers is very distinctive from that of the others. Through them we go from the Baroque era through the Classical era to the Romantic era, representing different styles of music.

The moral is that innovation will happen from one generation to the next unless you go to extreme lengths to stop it. But you can't genuinely innovate something until you are thoroughly familiar with what you are innovating. Otherwise, you're just substituting.

So I suggest we err on the side of caution when handling babies in bathwater. I also think we need to get to a place where we are no longer bothered by what's "eastern" and what's "western" before we can proceed to Extreme Makeover Buddhism. And western Zen, at least, isn't quite there yet.

*****

One other asterisk -- I object to the practice of conflating all traditionalism or conservatism in religion with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, IMO, is a particular social pathology that manifests as religion.  In  The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong documents that fundamentalism arises as a backlash to liberalism and modernity.

It is important to recognize that these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at once time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out. The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning and even satanic to a fundamentalist. [Armstrong, The Battle for God (Ballantine, 2000), p. 368]

On the other hand, insisting on remaining within and preserving traditions may or may not be misguided, but by itself it's not "fundamentalist."