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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/26/national/26BELI.html?tntemail0The Roots of

Today's BuddhismBy PETER STEINFELSAlthough the historic Buddha, Prince

Siddhartha Gautama, is said to have lived approximately 2,500 years ago,

Buddhism is often viewed as the most modern of world religions.Nontheistic,

nondogmatic, nonviolent, emphasizing individual practice rather than

institutional membership or obligations, the Buddhism expounded by, say, the

Dalai Lama fits nicely with a modern, largely Western world view based on

science and respect for the individual. Maybe that explains why it seems to

attract so many physicists and psychotherapists.Is this modernity surprising?

Not really, because this Buddhism is itself a modern creation, a

late-19th-century development deeply influenced by Western ideas even while

emerging as a counterweight to Western colonial domination.That, at any rate,

is the intriguing point made by Donald S. Lopez Jr., a leading scholar of

Buddhism, in his introduction to "A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings

from East and West," just published by Beacon Press and excerpted in the fall

issue of the Buddhist review Tricycle.Professor Lopez, who teaches Buddhist and

Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan, describes how a handful of

cosmopolitan Buddhist intellectuals from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Thailand,

Burma (now Myanmar), China and Japan created this modern Buddhism. They were

aided, curiously enough, by an American, Col. Henry Steel Olcott.In 1875,

Olcott co-founded, with Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophical Society for the

study and propagation of an esoteric religious knowledge drawing on

spiritualism, Eastern religions and 19th-century science. Five years later,

Olcott and Blavatsky went to Ceylon where he embraced Buddhism and was soon

founding a Young Men's Buddhist Association, publishing the first "Buddhist

Catechism," trying to unite all the different forms of Asian Buddhism arounda

common denominator of beliefs and encouraging the leaders andintellectuals who

would reshape Buddhism for their time.Naturally, this new Buddhism presented

itself as a return to the authentic teachings of the Buddha. The Buddhism of

the Buddha's experience of enlightenment was seen, Professor Lopez writes, as

"most compatible with the ideals of the European Enlightenment, ideals such as

reason, empiricism, science, universalism, individualism, tolerance, freedom,

and the rejectionof religious orthodoxy - precisely those notions that have

appealed so much to Western converts."In effect, this modern Buddhism distanced

itself from the actual Buddhism surrounding it. It rejected many ritual

elements, Professor Lopez writes, implicitly conceding the charges of Western

officials and missionaries that Buddhist populations were ridden by

superstition and burdened by exploitative monastic establishments: "The time

was ripe to remove the encrustations of the past centuries and return to the

essence of Buddhism."That essence was to be found in Buddhist texts and

philosophy, not in the daily round of "monks who chanted sutras, performed

rituals for the dead and maintained monastic properties."The pervasive Buddhist

practice of venerating images and relics of theBuddha, which Christian

missionaries had considered idolatry, wasde-emphasized. Traditional lines

dividing monks and lay people were blurred.Important roles were restored to

women. The fundamental Buddhist concern to bring an end to suffering now

encompassed support for social justice, economic modernization and freedom from

colonialism.Central to modern Buddhism was meditation, an emphasis, Professor

Lopez says, that "marked one of the most extreme departures of modern Buddhism

from previous forms," which had made meditation only one of many spiritual

activities and not necessarily the highest, even within monastic

institutions.Meditation now became a practice recommended for everyone - and

also"allowed modern Buddhism generally to dismiss the rituals of consecration,

purification, expiation and exorcism so common throughout Asia as extraneous

elements that had crept into the tradition," he writes.The emergence of modern

Buddhism, as Professor Lopez describes it, played out a little differently in

each Buddhist land. It did not touch Tibetan Buddhism, for example, until the

Dalai Lama left Tibet and interacted with a Western audience.Professor Lopez

also notes that this idea of periodically reforming Buddhism from inevitable

decline by returning to its roots was found within the tradition itself. But a

Westerner reading this history cannot help but think of another religious

response to modernization, the Protestant Reformation, with its claim to

restore a pure primitive Christianity, its emphasis on equality rather than

hierarchy and its rejection of sacrament and ritual infavor of individual piety

and introspection.Protestant as well as Enlightenment ideals were of course very

much part of the Western modernity that these Asian Buddhist thinkers were

coming to terms with. After all, the British arrived in India, where Buddhism

had begun and once flourished, centuries after it had died out there. So they

found "Buddhist texts, artifacts and stupas," Professor Lopez said in a phone

conversation, "but no Buddhists."Thus Buddhism, he said, was a screen on which

Europeans could project many of their own notions: the British in India, for

example, sometimes calling the Buddha the "Luther of India" because he had

supposedly challenged the Vedic priesthood and its rituals just as Luther had

the Catholic priesthood and its sacramentalism.Not only did British ideas of

Buddhism reflect Victorian anti-Catholicism,he said; sometimes they carried a

whiff of anti-Semitism, too: Buddhism could be admired because, unlike Judaism,

Christianity and Islam, it had no Semitic origins.Professor Lopez, it should be

emphasized, is not questioning theauthenticity of this modern Buddhism; he

wants to give its creators, who have often been dismissed by scholars, their

due.Of course, his account does give the lie to the idea that the Buddhism the

West - and even some of the East - now knows is the one true Buddhism, rather

than one of the many Buddhisms that have evolved as an ancient teaching has

interacted over two millennia with different cultures.But that idea should be

disturbing only to those who believe that great religious traditions can remain

immutable and untouched by history.

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