Creating West Coast Buddhism (2024)

Creating West Coast Buddhism

In the 1960s, Buddhism found a new spiritual homeland in California. It was the last step in a transformation that began generations before.

This article by Ethan Edwards was originally published on Palladium Magazine on May 28, 2022. It was featured in PALLADIUM 15: State Religion. To receive our future print editions, subscribe today.

Legend has it that during his own lifetime, the Buddha prophesied the end of the path to enlightenment. The *Candragarbha-sutra *gives us his words: “In the final 200 years, even monks will not practice in accordance with the True Dharma. They will seek worldly profit and fame; their compassion will be meager, and they will not live according to the precepts…at that time, the True Dharma will disappear. And even the letters of the scriptures will become invisible.”

If your only exposure to Buddhism is how it’s practiced in America, you’d have good reason to think the prophecy has already been fulfilled. Each morning, millions of Americans meditate, and Buddhist scriptures are available in every bookstore. But monks are few, and it’s rare that they follow the full rigor of monastic discipline. Many meditators do not claim to follow the True Dharma, and it’s not uncommon that they haven’t heard of it at all. The mindfulness movement has become an incredible source of profit and fame.

Buddhism had to gradually adapt and be adapted to become a part of the modern Western religious landscape. It’s a process that began as soon as Europeans systematically studied it in the nineteenth century. Meditation practices were stripped of their traditional context and given new purpose while still retaining the allure of their oriental origins. Books portraying Buddhism as the religion of modernity excited people’s interest, and accessible retreat-based meditation programs were meant to keep it. This transformation, a collaboration between Western countercultural figures and Eastern religious reformers, tells a story of how a modern religion is shaped and the contours of its future.

Religious Modernities

Over the millennia, Buddhism had largely divided itself into three overarching sects: the Theravada concentrated in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the Mahayana in East Asia, and the Vajrayana in Tibet and Mongolia. The practices are filled with rituals, folk customs, superstition, literal beliefs in rebirth, karma, and gods, divisions between priests and laity, chanted texts in dead languages, and except for certain monks, no meditation.

When modern Europeans first encountered Buddhism, it resembled nothing so much as popular myths about the “superstitious” dark ages. In the eighteenth century, French-Walloon engraver Bernard Picart referred to the Dalai Lama as the “Supreme Pontiff of all Tartarian idolaters” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau classified the religions of Japan and Tibet with Roman Catholicism as the “the religion of the priest…so clearly bad that it is a waste of time to prove it as such.” To these observers, Christendom had left behind folk piety and the rule of monks, but Buddhism was still trapped in this more primitive mode. The encounter and the biases behind it would shape not just the colonizers, but the colonized Buddhist world as well.

In much of the Buddhist world, the sudden changes brought by colonialism caused a sudden crisis for the clergy. In Burma and Sri Lanka, royal sponsorship of Theravada Buddhism was replaced with a supposedly neutral British colonial government and Christian missionaries. Removed from their traditional role, Buddhist institutions had to reground their religious authority. In both countries, a new generation of monks became the leaders of this renewal.

The Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw became something close to a celebrity through his writing and speaking. He sought to stall Buddhism’s decline by inspiring the lay people to moral practice and better knowledge of the dharma, even teaching them the recently revived technique of Vipassana breath meditation. In Sri Lanka, the monk Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera became a notable debater, eschewing Pali for Sinhalese. In an event that would become consequential for Buddhism as a whole, he faced a Protestant reverend and a local catechist in a public contest that became known as the Panadura debate. Its topics spanned from the nature of God to the immortality of the soul. Drawing on traditional Buddhist traditions of rhetoric and using plain language in his responses, Gunananda Thera won the day, to the acclaim of the largely Buddhist audience.

Japan, meanwhile, had remained independent but turned much more harshly against its Buddhist traditions. The new Imperial government of the Meiji restoration encouraged mob violence against monasteries and gradually forced monks to marry and eat meat. While many Japanese monks accepted their demoted role, certain Zen intellectuals like Soyen Shaku began to engage with Western ideas and attempted to make a modern Buddhism that would be compatible with the country’s project of renewal.

In Thailand, likewise never colonized, King Mongkut sought to modernize his country defensively. He took a reformist approach to Buddhism rather than an adversarial one, both reaffirming monastic orthodoxy and rejecting certain “superstitious” beliefs, such as the three-world cosmology and the beloved Jataka stories.

Confronted by imperialism and cultural modernity alike, Buddhism had begun to adapt itself. These projects were already changing the religious landscapes of their own countries. But soon, they received unexpected help from the Westerners themselves.

At the same time Buddhist traditions were evolving, traditional Christianity faced increasing competition for satisfying the spiritual desires of the changing West. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation had moved both branches of Western Christianity from medieval, localized saint cults and pilgrimages to a more centralized, systematic, and confessional religion. The 1700s, in turn, had seen the rise of liberal, freethinking societies—including classic secret societies like the Freemasons—informed by the Enlightenment.

But in the 1800s, a more eclectic and occult form of spirituality had begun to ascend across Europe and America. Interest in alternative spiritualities rose, with thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and orientalist scholars like Eugène Burnouf popularizing Eastern religions. Initially, Europeans had been repulsed by Buddhism; now they were curious about its potential for spiritual renewal.

The moment lined up with a convergence between science and the new occultist philosophies. Various groups tried to apply the scientific worldview to the supernatural. One such group, the Spiritualists, applied empirical methods to interactions with ghosts and spirits, and devotees sought hidden powers that could connect them with the dead. Later in the century, the Theosophists led by Helena Blavatsky believed that Aryan masters hidden in Tibet held the ancient wisdom of humanity, and that this true religion was imperfectly realized in the religions of the East. Theosophists from Europe and America would later become instrumental in popularizing Buddhism and other Asian religious traditions among Western disciples and enthusiasts.

Blavatsky and another Theosophist, Henry Steel Olcott, heard about the famous debate victory of Gunananda Thera in Sri Lanka through written accounts, and became convinced that Buddhism had some of the answers they were looking for. Olcott traveled to Sri Lanka in 1880 and quickly joined the monks in the process of reformulating Buddhist doctrine to accord with the needs of modern man. The monks were more than happy to receive this help, and Olcott is today honored in Sri Lanka as one of the great heroes of Buddhism’s national revival.

Olcott, the son of a Protestant minister, reformulated Sri Lankan Buddhism to fit with the Theosophist project. Between the abstracted