Cultural Factors Shaping Buddha’s Message

Every culture through which Buddhism radiated its wisdom shaped the enlightened one's message to the mentality of its populace, and by doing so, offered novel and fresh opportunities for Buddha dharma to shine through.  In the present cross fertilization of East and West, contemporary Western culture and the ancient tradition of Buddhism are shining a light on each other's blind spot. Something very unique in the history of spirituality is being born.

​This was an article published in Levenkunst journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server.        

Every culture through which Buddhism radiated its wisdom shaped the enlightened one's message to the mentality of its populace, and by doing so, offered novel and fresh opportunities for Buddha dharma to shine through.  In the present cross fertilization of East and West, contemporary Western culture and the ancient tradition of Buddhism are shining a light on each other's blind spot. Something very unique in the history of spirituality is being born.

As Buddhism is being transplanted in soil thousands of years and miles removed from its source, it creates an intriguing paradox.  On the one hand, the practice of  meditation opens us up to direct experience of our mind which transcends history and culture.  On the other hand,  personal experience cannot be divorced from the culturally specific forms through which it radiates. These forms must be honored or else personal experience loses its social and cultural context.

Before the Buddha uttered the first word of his teaching there was already a sacred culture in sixth century BCE India that was in existence for a thousand years.  For Indians living at that time, the world was already sacred, and the body was regarded as a temple that housed the transcendental dimension of spirit.  Ordinary people experienced the sacred as an imminent presence in the world around them as well as within themselves.  Humans, animals, plants, insects and rocks all shared the same divine life, which necessitated compassionate relationship with all of life.

In ancient India, and many of the traditional Asian countries in which Buddhism found a home, space was not experienced as empty, but replete with gods and goddesses. Time was not a linear progression marked by material progress, but felt to be cyclical much like the four seasons.  Geographical place was not just the neutral backdrop upon which to construct a city or civilization, but "place" was experienced as a unique configuration of mountains, streams, lakes and forests, and included the pattern of the winds and the particular animals that habituated a specific landscape. Place had a distinctive character with its own special vibration.      

As we listen, study and practice the ancient teachings of the Buddha, we might, from time to time, reflect upon how different we are from the early practitioners of Buddhism, and how radically different our culture is from the various Asian cultures within which Buddhism took root.    

Beginning in the 20th century the teachings of the Buddha have been mingling with the unique mentality and idiosyncrasies of our Western culture, with both our psychological sophistication and our materialistic orientation, our rugged individualism and our Promethean restlessness. Something very interesting is coming out of this brew.  We should be aware of what our cultural history has transmitted to us, for it has shaped our view of the world and how we relate with our spiritual path.     

We live in a culture that has been highly shaped by the god-centered theistic traditions of Judaism and Christianity.  Many of us are left with a hangover of sin and guilt, and doubt about our intrinsic goodness. The teaching that all sentient beings possess Buddha nature is both hopeful, but also extremely challenging for Westerners to embrace.  In the theistic traditions, as taught institutionally, God is situated in a transcendent abode, and we humans are rooted materially here on earth.  At best, we can dialogue with the deity through prayer and establish a relationship, but we never can be as God, that is, enlightened.      

By contrast, Buddha was not a god, but a spiritually awakened human being who revealed a body of methods for how we may realize that our essential nature is no different from his. This presents a radically different paradigm, as we struggle to align ourselves with our fundamental goodness and luminous awakened nature.  

​In contrast with the Buddhist message, which affirms the preciousness of our human birth and our original enlightened nature, there are psychological and socioeconomic forces working in exact opposition. Several developments in our cultural history have dramatically shaped our view of ourselves, displacing us from cosmic significance and eventually led to a mood of nihilistic doubt about our fundamental goodness.   

In the 19th century Darwin and his theory of natural selection proclaimed that we were an evolutionary link in a biological chain and not God's noble creation.  Sigmund Freud shocked the Western world with his pronouncement of an unconscious mind that shaped our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Human reason was now precariously poised on the surface of the primordial Id, which itself was a bull pen of sexual and aggressive instincts.  We were no longer masters of our own house, nor did the universe seem to revolve around us.  Karl Marx furthered our sense of displacement and disenchantment with his revelation that class struggle and the quest for power and control, are the underlying determinants of consciousness and history.  

Darwin, Freud and Marx contributed to the pervasive belief that our human awareness is shaped by unconscious, instinctual and socio-economic forces, and led to significant doubt about an inner dimension that transcended our social conditioning and our unnecessary suffering.  Each of their perspectives assumes an independently existing world that must be investigated by human reason. The implication is that there is no intrinsic meaning or purpose in nature or life itself.  We are left in a state of separation, in a world that has been stripped of the sacred.

Due to the capitalistic paradigm and its view of the economic marketplace as primary, every aspect of our lives has become quantified and monetized.  Our human relationships have been radically shaped by capitalism's right arm of advertising. The whole industry of advertising focuses entirely on image or surface appeal in order to elicit desire, rather than depth of feeling. We have been conditioned to be more interested in tantalizing things than in depth of experience.    

Advertising and the digital information revolution have created super samsara, as they cultivate obsessive desire for things that we don't truly need, consumer goods and services that don't touch our soul and which eventually leave us empty.  The unanticipated effect of this socio-cultural paradigm has been to radically shape our sense of time and space, so that contemporary people have profound intolerance of silence and stillness, and are all too eager to fill in what feels like a deficient emptiness. 

We bring this accelerated, distraction-oriented mentality into our relationship with the Buddha's dharma and our practice of meditation.  We are, more often than not, seeking a more gratifying or entertaining moment, then the one we are currently experiencing, whether that be during meditation practice, or when listening to a dharma talk.

Yet, the very same social system that I've been critiquing may also shine a light in certain areas of the ancient tradition of Buddhism, making explicit what has been only implicit in its doctrines.  Our emphasis on the primacy of the individual lends a personal face to the more universal Buddha nature.  We, in the West, will have to reconcile the paradox of the Buddhist no-self doctrine with our fierce belief in the individual personality.   
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With the advantage of Western psychology's understanding of psycho-social development, its insight into repression and the creation of a shadow personality, we now understand that "unfinished business" must first be worked through and integrated within the personality before it can be disowned in meditation. Any suppressed psychic material gets channeled to the non conscious areas of the mind from where it is projected onto otherwise neutral situations.  This is a major cause of our neurotic behaviors and our interpersonal conflicts.  

Meditation could be misused to avoid or deny painful areas of ourselves, and could further suppress what needs dialogue and understanding.  The potential danger of the teaching on egolessness for Westerners, especially women, is the tendency to sacrifice their own inner voice and their identities by merging with their significant others and their families.
For those who have been socially or politically marginalized in our society or traumatized for various reasons, their inner voices have been squelched for too long.  They need emotional support and permission to first find their voice by permitting their thoughts and feelings so that they can be heard, understood and their issues and problems finally resolved. Only then can disidentification be a useful method.  
    
Also those with poorly formed ego "structures" due to various developmental arrests, could bypass the need for processing "unfinished business" in favor of the egoless state.  This would amount to a regression to a pre-egoic state and get completely confused with a genuinely transpersonal state of development.  

Buddhism in the West is being challenged by women's greater participation and assumption of teaching and administrative roles within various Buddhist communities. Historically, this may be the most radical influence in the transplantation of Buddha's dharma in Western soil. The feminist perspective emphasizes interconnectedness, the importance of body, nature and intimate relationships.  It’s critique of Buddhism and religions in general, is that they have been historically male centric, emphasizing autonomy, independence and achievement, while the more feminine qualities of connection, relationship and communion have been devalued.  

Such feminine qualities are a necessary counter-force to help balance the more prevalent androcentric qualities in all organizations, secular and spiritual.  After all, it was Prometheus, a very masculine hero, who, in the name of freedom, declared his independence from nature, and valorized the primacy of the individual ego, but dissociated himself from the feminine. 

The resurgence of the feminine can be seen in the positive revisioning of the body, feelings, imagination and intuition. The feminist perspective emphasizes embodied experience rather than detached observation, and feeling to help balance cognitive understanding. Women place greater emphasis on embodiment and nature, healing and wholeness, as opposed to the more male tendency towards emotional detachment, transcendence and spiritual attainment. Women's spirituality places greater emphasis on emotional bonding and communication, which could potentially heal the dissociation between men and women, and culture and nature.     

​The feminist emphasis on “all-inclusiveness" honors the naming of all dimensions of human experience, giving permission for multiple narratives to have a place. This lends value and meaning to that which is named.  The strategic failure to name particular aspects of human experience, denies reality to what is not named, which is often the experiences of women and those who have been socially marginalized. The all-inclusive perspective is a critique of all monological systems of thought that favor abstraction and absolute principles over multiplicity, multidimensionality and complexity. Interestingly, the principle of all inclusiveness suggests that there's no underlying solid, separate and continuous self, a view which echoes the anatman or no-self doctrine of Buddhism. 
    
Lastly, the feminist emphasis on embodiment and nature, highlights the need to rediscover feminine faces for the sacred. This challenges Buddhist practitioners and communities to explore the interrelationship between our bodies and the body of mother nature.  Discovering new forms of engagement and integration between ecology and the Buddhist sense of the sacred is of great importance in rendering Buddhism’s message relevant to the immediate global crisis facing our planet. 

Within the ecological movement, we in the West are developing wider, more inclusive images of personal identity that include nonhuman life on our planet. We may be arriving at a novel understanding and expression of the Buddhist notion of egolessness or no-self, as we cultivate an ecological self,  a more permeable sense of self that experiences our body as inseparable from the body of nature, the world, and eventually the cosmos. 


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