Provocative "Tricycle" article on "The New Tradition of Early Buddhism"

The Watercooler
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Hi @Danamitra & others, thanks so much for an engaging convo. The thing I am emphasizing about the practice of renunciation, in response to Ven. Sujato’s question, is around meaningful material renunciation in a culture where there are few options for social movement for most people. You’re right that it’s a common misperception that renunciation is synonymous with the monastic vocation, and maybe I implied that a bit in my response above. So I want to flesh it out a little bit here.

I like that you’re emphasizing renunciation as seclusion from a certain kind of abusive relationship, particularly in relation to an unhealthy culture. What I’m thinking about here is what that seclusion actually looks like in practice. In American culture, a lot of people are trapped, economically, and don’t have a lot of room to disengage with the abusive system. Renunciation while still remaining a layperson demands that I have some wiggle room in my household economy to stop participating in some aspects of culture that I find harmful. What are those, exactly?

Most practitioners I know try to do this disengagement—renouncing unwholesome media, or buying only used clothes, etc. But unless one is free from substantial obligations like parenting, debt, or elder care, these renunciations don’t change one’s day to day lifestyle that much. I think a lot of folks project a kind of hedonistic delusion on American convert practitioners, implying that because American culture generally is one of excess and waste, folks are indulging in lives of excess individually.

I actually think Buddhism has been a wholesome influence on American culture in this way (and/or it’s converts self-select and were already drawn toward material simplicity). In every Buddhist community I know, both convert and heritage (and those classifications aren’t definitive), I don’t see a lot of excessive indulgence. And as I implied above, most people I know are working to middle class, with a lot of obligations, and not much room to maneuver toward simpler lifestyles. So any time we suggest that radical disengagement with an abusive system is morally superior, we marginalize people who are prevented from radical disengagement by their very real obligations, and I think that’s most people. To actually help people leave abusive relationships, they need safe places to go.

That should be monasteries, traditionally, but a huge lack here in American Buddhism is the presence of monasticism even as an option for most people. In the suttas, we see rich people either renouncing wealth and going forth, or becoming lay supporters. What do poor people do? They go forth, or take refuge and keep doing their obligations (and we don’t hear much about them, because the suttas favor the stories of monastics and wealthy laypeople). But I don’t know of any guidance for the poor layperson around renunciation except monasticism. So what happens when it’s not easy to go forth?

I suggest that the absence of a viable “monastic option” in a culture is one of the places modern Buddhism is failing to help American culture (or is being prevented by conditions from doing more). I think one of the most profound things that Buddhism has that can help us adapt and respond is the radically communal lifestyle of the monastic saṅgha. It’s a safe house from the abusive relationship. But if it’s not visible or viable in a culture, it can’t perform this function. One of the side-effects, then, of the globalized lay Buddhist meditation movements of the 20th century is the marginalization of the monastic vocation from the awareness of practitioners.

Once monasticism isn’t available as a refuge from poverty or the middle-class grind, renunciation for lay followers becomes just a psychological orientation: “letting go of anxiety about imperfection,” as a common quote puts it. In my youth I did a lot of disengagement from the abusive system, and it served me well, but I could only do that from within the rare privileged position of the lay Dharma bum—no money, no obligations, good health, good education, and lots of free time.

To loop this back to the OP around @Bernat’s excellent article, this (renunciation and vocation) is a place where there certainly is cognitive dissonance between lay people drawing on the EBTs for inspiration but not practicing in line with them. I don’t think we’ve reckoned as a lineage yet on the deeper implications of the intensive lay practitioner as a life path, and how it plays out in terms of the survival of the monastic saṅgha or lay people’s liberation journey itself.

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Hi Sean,

I agree. I started by turning up at our local Thai monastery, seeing happy people, and sticking around. Having a long-term relationship with both monastic and lay practitioners there has been extremely valuable to me. It’s important role modelling, and it’s essential to know that monastics are just people, with strengths, weaknesses, senses of humour, and so on…

My New Zealand lay friends who have not had much contact with monastics have an uncomfortable relationship to the whole idea. On the one hand, they are enthusiastic about a small number of famous monastics (Bhikkhu Analayo being the latest), but they don’t have any inclination to seek out someone local, and tend to be quite negative about the whole idea of renunciation, perhaps because they have not seen a variety of quite normal, happy monastics that they can relate to.

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Well this thread has morphed into a really rich and wide-ranging discussion of important topics that are both tangentially-related to Bernat’s original article and perhaps deserving of new threads of their own.

I’m really appreciating the discussion of renunciation in particular. I would love to see a discussion of what model(s) for serious, dedicated lay practice and lay teachers might or might not past muster with the many monastics who frequent these forums.

Like Sean I hold monastics in the highest regard, but I also have so much appreciation for and gratitude to lay teachers who have strong sīla and live lives of great simplicity in order to put Dhamma practice and service first. Aside from Sean himself I think about teachers like Shaila Catherine, Joseph Goldstein, Gil Fronsdal and Larry Rosenburg, just to name a few off the top of my head, who model renunciation and dedication to practice in a way that is if anything more inspiring to me personally because as a fellow lay practitioner they keep me from using the “well they’re monks so of course their practice is stronger” excuse. And they have immediate, first-hand knowledge of how to apply the Dhamma to challenges like earning a living, sex and family relationships that aren’t live issues anymore for monastics.

There’s no model for how to survive financially in, say, California while meditating 2-5 hours a day, studying the suttas, teaching and going on long retreat oneself whenever possible while trying to fund the whole thing from dāna - yet I can think of any number of teachers who are trying to do just that, and without a trust fund or wealthy benefactors I don’t see how it works.

I’m also under the impression that Ajahn Brahm and perhaps other monastics take a dim view of laypeople accepting dāna altogether, since by definition their sīla can’t compare with those who keep the full range of monastic precepts. But such objections, it seems to me, don’t fully take into account the system of dāna support for monastics in Asian culture, in which laypeople “make merit” by providing the means for others to practice full-time, while hoping that their good kamma paves the way for their own Dhamma practice in a future lifetime. That’s not only delaying one’s own practice but also fundamentally a transactional approach to dāna (not to say that it isn’t intermingled with much authentic generosity and letting go). So it would seem that there are no pure or perfect models.

Sean says:

“One of the side-effects, then, of the globalized lay Buddhist meditation movements of the 20th century is the marginalization of the monastic vocation from the awareness of practitioners.”

So what he’s talking about is, in Erik Braun’s phrase, the “meditation en masse” movements started by Ledi Sayadaw and spread worldwide by Mahasi Sayadaw, U Ba Khin and their heirs. The whole idea of the 9 day intensive “boot camp” meditation retreat as well as dry insight practices and even the idea that laypeople (and monastics for that matter, if we’re being honest) ought to actually do some meditation started with them. And so did the focus on having a better life here-and-now rather than practicing to put and end to rebirth by reaching nibbana. A typical Goenka 9 day retreat is every bit as secular as an IMS one or an MBSR course.

Now the founders of Insight Meditation Society did their best to bring that already highly-secularized Burmese model back to the West in a still-drier way that didn’t compromise when it came to intensity of meditation practice. But is that “marginalization” of the monastic model or usurpation of its most salient and liberating practices by lay practitioners?

I’m thinking here of Bhante Dhammika’s (in)famous book “Broken Buddha” in which he says (I’m paraphrasing from memory) that the fact that there wasn’t a meditation manual of any note written between the Visduddhimagga in the 5th century and Mahasi’s “Manual of Insight” in the 21st tells you all you need to know about the level of actual meditation practice in the Theravāda tradition. Braun’s “The Birth of Insight” makes it abundantly clear that it was the threat of the extinction of Buddhism due to colonial forces that motivated Ledi Sayadaw to figure out a way to get Burmese monastics and laypeople to meditate, and that without it the monks might well have continued to spend their time elsewhere as they had for centuries.

Fast-forward to today and we have a tiny number of monastics, a large and vibrant Western insight meditation community whose teachers effectively compete with monastics for dāna and teaching authority in the public’s mind, and no clear path to sustaining either monastics or dedicated lay teachers.

In that context time spent splitting hairs about Theravāda vs. Early Buddhist rebranding kind of seems…unwise?

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What exactly do you mean by “highly-secularized Burmese model”?

Take Mahasi Sayadaw, he often ended his discourses with the wish that the people in the audience would attain Nibbana soon. I would say, one of the key characteristics of the Mahasi sasana is the stern focus on entering the stream. Mahasi Sayadaw also did not offer 9 day courses. If you had a week, your practiced a week. If you had a year, you practiced a year and teachings were offered according to personal progress - including jhana practices. He starts his Manual of Insight with: “May virtuous people who practice as instructed in this book attain path, fruition, and nibbāna in this very life. Thus have I composed this manual on the practice of insight meditation.”

Mahasi Sayadaw did not play around. What is your understanding of secularized in this context?

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Thanks for your thoughtful comments Florian.

I certainly had Goenka-ji in mind more than Mahasi Sayadaw when I used the term “secularized” but I still think the characterization applies , albeit to a much lesser degree than either Goenka’s or the approaches of many of the post popular Western insight meditation teachers.

David Chapman has a useful summary of some of the key history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Theravadā meditation revivalists (see link below). Regarding Mahasi Sayadaw he says:

"Mahasi made several innovations. The most important was skipping samatha and the development of the jhanas (concentration states) and going directly to vipassana. He thought that samatha would take care of itself, if you practice vipassana correctly. The jhanas are not ends in themselves, so bypassing samatha is a practical shortcut.

Mahasi taught that one should aim directly for sotapatti, a first taste of nirvana. Experiencing sotapatti guarantees you cannot be reborn other than as a human or in heaven, and no more than seven more times. He said that sotapatti could reached by newcomers in a month.

Mahasi aimed his teaching particularly at lay people, rather than monks. He imported from the West the “meditation center” idea (not a traditional Asian institution). He eliminated ritual and minimized textual study."

Theravada Reinvents Meditation

So yes: single-minded focus on stream entry - but using techniques inspired by the Visuddhimagga that were created in response to the pressures of colonialism. It’s a pressure-cooker approach to meditation that clearly has been of great value to many people - while also being quite far removed from sutta-based approaches to practice.

Ven. Sujato goes into all of this in great detail in his book “A History of Mindfulness.”

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Hi Kevin,

this I feel is getting too off-topic, so I keep it short. It seems, Chapman does not know what he is talking about. Regarding Mahasi Sayadaw and jhana I put a few quotes together here and here.

If you are a lay person with no previous meditation practice and limited time, yes, you usually skip samatha. But that’s only half the story.

His meditation teacher the Mula Mingun Sayadaw first established a meditation center in 1918. And there is a distinction to be made between meditation monks, who only spend time meditating, and “normal” students in the Mahasi sasana. Besides their meditation center they have a school that teaches textual study of “Mahasi thought”, suttas, commentaries and so on. Mahasi himself was not only the chief questioner at the sixth council, but also one of the main editors of the tipitaka and commentaries.

And I would argue, that a single-minded focus on stream-entry is the opposite of secularized, isn’t it?

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Thanks for pointing these things out, Florian. Perhaps another source of confusion is that if people just read introductory instructions distilled from Sayadaw Mahasi and other Burmese teachers, all they see is meditation instructions. However, it is important to remember that these instructions were for people who are already familiar with the Dhamma, so there is a lot of background information that is “taken as read”. And even if you examine the introduction to the most basic instructions from Mahasi Sayadaw (e.g. Practical Insight Meditation), it is far from secular:

The old masters of Buddhist tradition suggest that you entrust yourself to the Enlightened One, the Buddha, during the training period, for you may be alarmed if it happens that your own state of mind produces unwholesome or frightening visions during contemplation. Also place yourself under the guidance of your meditation instructor, for then, he can talk to you frankly about your work in contemplation and give you the guidance he thinks necessary. These are the advantages of placing trust in the Enlightened One, the Buddha, and practising under the guidance of your instructor. The aim of this practice and its greatest benefit is release from greed, hatred and delusion, which are the roots of all evil and suffering. …

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Interesting conversations unfolding in this thread.

I resonate a lot with @SeanOakes reflections summarised in his last remark:

I couldn’t agree more. I think there’s a few of us feeling this way, but not enough proactivity around this. What should a lay practitioner do if they want a level of dedication resembling that of monks? Many would be happy to join a sort of secular monastery, a lay Buddhist community, I would — but there are very few, and starting one must be very hard work and a financial challenge. Some practitioners spend time jumping from monastery to monastery or join a retreat center as resident staff for a year or two.

As a collateral benefit from the pandemic, I spent three months at Amaravati, UK. With the monastery closed to the general public (and therefore much quieter than usual) and their amazing library, it was absolutely wonderful. The only reason I didn’t stay longer is that in the end doing the work of a lay resident plus continuing to work on my thesis full time was a bit much. But that was an exceptional situation. Other than that, the closest thing I know to what I was describing above is a young vajrayana community I’m friends with and where I have spent short periods several times, but that tradition has a strong history of serious lay yogin(i)s and a place for that status in between monasticism and laity.

Any knowledge on places like what I’m describing is very welcome - I’m aware there’s a related thread in the forum.

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When I read @KevinK’s use of “secularized,” I wonder if the word “laicized” might be more useful, and respond to some of the points you’re making here. What Ledi Sayadaw and the Vipassanā Movement did, including later teachers like Mahasi and U Ba Khin, and continuing with contemporary ones like U Tejaniya, is craft a form of liberation-oriented (rather than merit-oriented) lay practice. These monks don’t spend a lot of time encouraging lay people to ordain, and they’re known for their meditation teaching rather than their developing of a thriving monastic saṅgha, though many of them did lead monasteries. Thus the birth of the “meditation center.”

So the birth of the modern lay movement is initiated by Burmese monastics trying to preserve serious Dharma practice (and not just meditation, but also study) in the face of colonialism. It’s an interesting contrast to the Thai Forest system, which wasn’t primarily oriented around resisting colonial destruction (though it had to resist capitalist destruction, which is a similar demon), and which retained an emphasis on monasticism.

@KevinK, I think it can be profitably read both ways. One of the things that’s most revealing in this conversation is the way that usurpation of liberating practices from monastics by laypeople is unfolding in the direction of the “life-affirming” approach @Bernat describes, even though through an EBT lens that would be a contradiction. In hindsight, we might see that this was a likely fruit of the lay meditation movement—despite the efforts of Mahasi and others to embed the meditation teachings in right view, it’s entirely possible for people to go deep in meditation without their fundamental worldview changing. Maybe that’s a useful gloss of “secular”: rejecting right view as described in the suttas, but still finding benefit in practices descended from them.

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Hi Sean,

The observation about this being a likely fruit is interesting, but I’m not so clear that this is the result when embedded in a Buddhist culture. There is a core group of Thai people (almost all female) at my local Monastery who do serious meditation practice, but whose practice is strongly grounded in sila and merit.

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I find the discussion interesting but it also reveals an ‘idealism’ in the sense that we often seem to assume that we have a choice between a life-affirming and a life-reluctant approach. What we see in the suttas is a spiritual landscape where life-reluctance was basically the dominant spiritual discourse of the professionals. They just debated the ‘how’. In comparison, the immigrating Brahmins seem to be naive in pursuing an immortal existence as a deity or in brahmaloka.

Today the dominant discourse is life-affirming. Life-reluctuance is so far out there that it’s enormously difficult to ‘explain’ it to people - it comes off as weird or depressing. The dominant discourse is a challenge even for the inspired monastic.

We can lament that contemporary lay practitioners don’t live up to the spirit of the suttas, but I think this is inevitable, and that the bigger question is: what are the conditions for even remotely approximating the natural spiritual environment in which the fundamental tenets of Buddhism were crafted. In other words: how can we today develop a worldview in which karma, rebirth, and liberation are the natural background in which our thoughts and practices are embedded? I think this is very difficult to achieve and requires isolated communities who emancipate their internal and external discourse from the insinuations of the public realm.

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Good one. Yes, I do mean wholesomeness in a modern American context—I was speaking about contemporary progressive culture there. But sex for laypeople has always been kusala when undertaken ethically within the appropriate cultural bounds—we wouldn’t have parents and children as the east and spouses as the west (DN31) if sex for laypeople were categorically unwholesome, and we wouldn’t have the variant of the 3rd precept for householders, kāmesu micchācāra, which only prohibits sexual misconduct, not sex itself. But you’re absolutely right that the suttas are pretty sex-negative overall. This changing is very much part of the world-affirming turn Bernat is writing about.

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This is a good observation. I see the same at the Asian monasteries where I’ve practiced, like Chammyay Yeiktha in Burma, where there was a strong lay contingent, mostly women, similarly grounded. So I should be clear that I’m talking about this in the context of European-lineage worldviews. What if it turns out that although the Burmese Sayadaws who initiated the lay meditation movement included view in their transmission, and their 1st generation students (like the founders of IMS) tried to transmit it, but that view wasn’t able to survive two generations in diaspora. So now we have a generation of lay teachers whose deep worldview is more shaped by European scientific humanism than Buddhism. I think we see this throughout the movement in the West now.

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My scattered thoughts on this subject, in note form:

  • I’ve been dabbling a bit in Vajrayana/Dzogchen lately, despite my initial reluctance due to all the scandals I’ve heard about it (not to mention my love for more EBT stuff). Well, I must admit that they’ve really got their sales pitch down, especially for laypeople and women. Also, they seem more willing to include a lot of magical/mystical elements (like deity devotion) than most Buddhists I’ve seen in the west….it’s just much more interesting and colorful than what you are going to get at an Insight center. So I dunno, maybe Tibetan really is here to stay as the dominant stream of Buddhism in the USA. I don’t think I would have come to that conclusion a year or two ago.
  • When I first started getting into the Nikayas, I was surprised by how different the Buddha’s teachings for lay people were compared to what he said to monks. He doesn’t really seem to encourage austerity at all, but rather spending wisely on pleasure, family, and charity. SN 3.19 in particular stood out for me. Even Anagamis like Citta were often business people, even if they were celibate. And I don’t recall reading anything about lay people going on long retreats… am I missing something, here?
  • As for Goenka — while I’m not much of a fan personally, I must admit that they do a great job at attracting young people. Surely they’ve got a future.
  • Zen and non-Goenka insight (like Spirit Rock stuff) seem very Boomery and are aging out.
  • I don’t see how belief in karma and rebirth are necessarily conducive to renunciation. There are lots of spiritual/New Age types who are fine being reincarnated over and over again to gain new experiences (or to help Consciousness “know itself,” or whatever) and don’t seem especially bothered by the idea of spending another Aeon or two (or three, or four….) exploring the cosmos again and again. I believed in reincarnation before I read any EBTs, and had no good sense of any sort of “end goal” or “escape from samsara.”
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Indeed, Nothing teaches you more about yourself, and the Dhamma then spend time in a cremation ground.

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I would go a step further and say that it’s not so much that they “don’t have a lot of room” than they don’t know how. The Four Noble Truths, kamma and the gratification, danger and escape make it possible to find the desire and way to disengage.

What I said above. I think the Buddha would have been less concerned with merely acting eco-conscious than renouncing for the right reasons and intention.

And I think the teaching of a Buddhism without kamma has a lot to do with people not just indulging, but not seeing any problem with indulging.

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I hear that position, respect it, and disagree. What I’m pushing here is that disengagement is not actually materially possible for many. It’s not a matter of knowing the teachings, nor of individual interest in doing so. Many sincere practitioners have both, but also have the kinds of responsibilities that give little wiggle room for simplifying. There’s just not that much to give up without impinging on someone else you’re responsible for.

I want to keep emphasizing that substantial material renunciation traditionally is for monastics, and that the material guidelines for laypeople emphasize frugality and generosity but not renunciation persay. This is why the conversation above turned into reflections on the often unclear guidelines for liberation-oriented laypeople, which is a category of practitioner not emphasized in the early texts. Many of the responses to this thread, like yours, seem to me to diminish the real functional difference between laypeople and monastics in terms of renunciation practice.

A classical South Asian solution to the problem, of course, is Kṛṣṇa’s suggestion in the Bhagavad Gītā: renunciation is psychological, not material (which was in part a political move to diminish the power of the ascetic communities in favor of lay-centered devotional sects). “Renunciation of the fruits of one’s actions” and being satisfied with both success and failure is proposed there as a way to attain the fruits of renunciation and still fulfill one’s social role as a wealthy layperson (and I’m saying it that way because this conversation then and now implies a focus on wealthy people and I think that matters). In the Buddhist texts, an exemplar of this is Vimalakirti, but in the PC most of the celebrated laypeople, like Visākhā and Anāthapiṇḍika, are there as donors, not liberated lay-renunciate practitioners.

I don’t want to project that people should be practicing in a way that’s not really possible for them. That feels like it too easily edges into superiority conceit.

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Well, it seems that @Bernat has written a follow-up of the original article:

On resolving the neo-early Buddhist contradiction - Secular Buddhist Network

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This feels like a relevant sutta :slight_smile:

[an9.41] “Sir, Ānanda, we are laypeople who enjoy sensual pleasures. We like sensual pleasures, we love them and take joy in them. But renunciation seems like an abyss. I have heard that in this teaching and training there are very young mendicants whose minds are eager for renunciation; they’re confident, settled, and decided about it. They see it as peaceful. Renunciation is the dividing line between the multitude and the mendicants in this teaching and training.”
[…]
“That’s so true, Ānanda! That’s so true! Before my awakening—when I was still unawakened but intent on awakening—I too thought, ‘Renunciation is good! Seclusion is good!’ But my mind wasn’t eager for renunciation; it wasn’t confident, settled, and decided about it. I didn’t see it as peaceful…
[…]
Then my mind was eager for renunciation; it was confident, settled, and decided about it. I saw it as peaceful. And so, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskillful qualities, I entered and remained in the first absorption, which has the rapture and bliss born of seclusion, while placing the mind and keeping it connected. While I was in that meditation, perceptions and attentions accompanied by sensual pleasures beset me, and that was an affliction for me. Suppose a happy person were to experience pain; that would be an affliction for them. In the same way, when perceptions and attentions accompanied by sensual pleasures beset me, that was an affliction for me.

My takeaway from these excerpts from an9.41 is that something like “renunciation is good [for me]” is not going to be emotionally true for most people. It seems even the Buddha(-to be) struggled with the dissonance between the idea of renunciation and the gut feeling that ‘renunciation is good for me’ before having experienced jhana states (assuming they are profound, transcendental states of non-sensual bliss).

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This article makes some good points, but I’m a little confused by this:

Mahāyāna has Buddha-nature: because things are conditioned, they contain the possibility of transformation—but then they’re not inherently dukkha, they’re just empty. In contrast, as a child of the Vipassanā movement, neo-early Buddhism is quite suspicious of pleasantness of any kind, though this seems to be changing, and has yet to fully replace the lived religion aspects of Theravāda that Buddhist modernism ‘sanitised’.

Ummm, no, they are still “dukkha.” Anything that changes is still dukkha, even if it changes into something “pleasant.” Dukkha isn’t just “unpleasantness”….this is a common misconception.

Or am I misunderstanding the author’s point here?

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