ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 32, 2025
Positive and Problematic Aspects of Modernistic Engaged Buddhism in Light of the History of Buddhist Adaptation to Cultures
John Makransky
Boston College
This article briefly reviews the history of Buddhist adaptation to cultures, focusing on two key goals that Buddhist traditions have maintained over that history: the primary goal of supramundane nirvāṇa and enlightenment and the secondary goal of applying Buddhist powers of knowledge and practice to meet mundane needs of people and societies. It discusses two kinds of constructive reflection Buddhists have employed in support of those two goals in pre-modern and modern times. In light of that history, it then offers its own critical-constructive reflections, first on positive contributions of modernistic engaged Buddhism, then on a problematic tendency in it to succumb to modern assumptions (about ultimate human values and primary causes and kinds of suffering) in ways that reduce its ability to offer important alternatives to them. Regarding the latter, it notes that the priority of the primary and secondary Buddhist goals have become unconsciously reversed in some quarters of modern engaged Buddhism, how this reversal rests on modern assumptions that contradict core Buddhist teachings, behavioral signs of this reversal, and deleterious effects that follow from it.
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ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 32, 2025
Esoteric Buddhism in China: Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949. By Wei Wu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024, xiv + 312 pages, ISBN 9780231200691 (paperback), $35.00; ISBN 9780231200684 (hardcover); ISBN 9780231553742 (e-book).
Reviewed by Eben Yonnetti
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ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 32, 2025
Buddhism and Nonviolence in the Contemporary World
Jay L. Garfield
Smith College
Harvard Divinity School
University of Melbourne
Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies
This essay is not a disinterested analysis of Buddhist doctrine, but an unapologetic exposition of the implications of that doctrine for ethics and political action in the contemporary world. To understand a Buddhist analysis of nonviolence in a way relevant to our contemporary life, it is first important to understand how violence manifests in the contemporary world. Second, we must develop a recognizably Buddhist analysis of that violence and its causes. Third, we must examine how a Buddhist ethical framework determines our responsibilities as agents in the context of that violence and a path to its eradication. Read article
ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 32, 2025
The Attention Economy and the Right to Attention: Some Lessons from Theravāda and Mahāyāna Thought
Mark Fortney
Dalhousie University
Much of the work in the rapidly growing field of computer ethics relies on the concepts and theories of Western philosophy. With this article my aim is to help stimulate conversations that draw on a wider range of ethical perspectives. I build on recent work on the sense in which the regular operations of the attention economy might violate our right to attention, and I do so through looking to a range of Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhist texts. As I argue, these texts should inspire us to realize that we have more than just the right to direct our attention as we will and the right to be free from distraction. This is because there is a third right to attention that the recent literature overlooks, namely the right to strengthen our ordinarily weak capacity to control our attention. Read article
ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 32, 2025
Engaged Buddhism in Finland—Too Cautious to Take Action
Mitra Härkönen and Johannes Cairns
University of Helsinki
Socially engaged Buddhism emerged in the 1960s with the participation of Buddhists in Asia and the West alike in the anti-war movement and war relief efforts. The movement rapidly expanded to encompass numerous social and environmental concerns and projects. Although many theoretical studies discuss doctrinal aspects concerning the relationship of Buddhism to social action, very few empirical studies have been conducted investigating how Buddhists relate to social action and which doctrinal aspects they emphasize in actual practice. Here, we address this knowledge gap by examining the stances of Finnish Buddhists on social engagement. The study respondents represent a wide set of Buddhist traditions and groups in Finland. We identify several attitudes—positive, positively indifferent, reserved, and critical—among the respondents. Intriguingly, even those with a positive or positively indifferent attitude frequently display high caution in taking social action, preferring to keep it as an individual affair outside of the activities of the Buddhist group. The cautionary stance is related to Buddhist teachings such as impartiality, a meditation practice-focused approach to Buddhism, and financial and personnel resource constraints of Finnish Buddhist groups. We also suggest the stance could be partly explained by social and geopolitical factors. We argue that because Buddhist teachings relate to social engagement in an ambiguous fashion, individual and social factors can outweigh their influence among Buddhists.
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ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 32, 2025
Theravāda Buddhism, Finite Fine-grainedness, and the Repugnant Conclusion
Calvin Baker
Princeton University
According to Finite Fine-grainedness (roughly), there is a finite sequence of intuitively small differences between any two welfare levels. The assumption of Finite Fine-grainedness is essential to Gustaf Arrhenius’s favored sixth impossibility theorem in population axiology and plays an important role in the spectrum argument for the (Negative) Repugnant Conclusion. I argue that Theravāda Buddhists will deny Finite Fine-grainedness and consider the space that doing so opens up—and fails to open up—in population axiology. I conclude with a lesson for population axiology that generalizes beyond the Buddhist context: to plausibly deny Finite Fine-grainedness, we must locate a welfare good—such as the good of awakening (bodhi)—with some rather esoteric axiological properties. Read article
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