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.