Here’s a provocative and exceedingly wide-ranging interview of the eminent scholar Donald S. Lopez Jr. by the renowned economist and public intellectual Tyler Cowan:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/donald-s-lopez-jr/
For anyone unfamiliar with Professor Lopez, he’s one of the most brilliant (and iconoclastic) minds in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies. I especially recommend his books “The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography” and “The Scientific Buddha: His Short & Happy Life.”
Professor Cowan meanwhile is famous for being very well-prepared for interviews - as evidenced by his casual mention of having read ALL of Dr. Lopez’s books.
The discussion as I said is very wide-ranging but I especially wanted to draw attention to this exchange about the reasons for Buddhism diminishing in the world:
”On Buddhism’s diminishing
COWEN: Now, if I look at the historical record, am I right to fear that Buddhism . . . disappearing is too strong a word, but it used to be prominent in Java. Now it’s quite gone. It used to be prominent in what we would call India or a lot of South Asia. Certainly, in India, it’s quite gone. There was a Pew study that came out, I think, in March this year. In Japan, Buddhism is plummeting. Korea — Buddhism is less popular. China — it’s much harder to say, but it’s not obvious that Buddhism has a bright future there. Is that just the trend?
LOPEZ: There’s also Tibet, right, which you didn’t mention.
COWEN: Right. China. Yes.
LOPEZ: Right. Yes. Buddhism as a monastic tradition, which really, from the point of view of Buddhism, Buddhism exists in the world as long as the monks are around. They talk about a time in the future when the yellow robe of the monks will turn white. White robes are the clothes of lay people. The Buddhists predict their own decline and disappearance. From the view of Buddhism, it’s happening a little quicker than they predicted in the earlier text. We do see Buddhism as a monastic institution — which is really what it sees as its own heart — as disappearing.
COWEN: Do you think there’s something about Buddhist doctrine that’s somehow not sufficiently well-suited for religious competition? Or it’s a historical accident? Or it’s just the Buddhist doctrine is correct?
LOPEZ: You mean, why it’s disappearing?
COWEN: Why it’s disappearing or diminishing.
LOPEZ: It’s diminishing primarily for political reasons, I think. The Buddhists have not been able to adapt in ways that have been consistent with the governments that support them. Of course, the word that we translate as monk — in Sanskrit, bhikshu, means beggar. That is, Buddhist monks and nuns beg for their food. They may not touch money. They may not till the soil.
Buddhism has always, always relied on patronage, and that patronage was primarily that of kings. Kings are mostly gone now, so who are the patrons of Buddhism now? That entire monarchy system has largely disappeared, except in Thailand where, notably, Buddhism is very strong. So, it’s really the decline of monarchies that has been the primary reason for the decline of Buddhism, at least on the monastic level.
COWEN: But is there something in the doctrine that makes it harder to attach to, say, autocracies, which are common around the world? Or do you think it’s just an accident?
LOPEZ: I think it’s mostly an accident. Buddhist monks have done quite well with kings. The idea is that Buddhist monks keep their vows, and by doing that, kingdoms are saved from famine, they’re saved from disease, they’re saved from foreign invasion. That hasn’t worked, so that patronage has disappeared, and because of that, the support for the monastic institution has declined sharply.”
Elsewhere in the interview Professor Lopez talks about Thailand as being not only the richest Buddhist country but the only one still under royal patronage.
As a lay practitioner in the U.S. what I’m seeing is a small handful of monastic communities mostly supported by Southeast Asian immigrant communities, along with much larger Western convert Buddhist communities (e.g. Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Center), where almost all of the teachers are lay people living mostly or entirely on dāna, which is of course an unprecedented experiment (and one that I know some monastics don’t necessarily approve of).
The modern equivalent of royal patronage seems to be wealthy benefactors (often from the tech world) who discover the benefits of of Dhamma practice donating substantial sums to such centers. But as Dr. Lopez makes clear elsewhere in the interview, there is no substitute for studying and practicing the original texts under the guidance of monastics, regardless of which stream of Buddhism one chooses.
I hope you find some worthwhile things if you choose to listen to the interview. There’s a transcript as well which I frankly found more useful.