Volume 32, 2025

Is There a Traditionalist Buddhist Social Engagement? FPMT and the Study of Engaged Buddhism

Donna Lynn Brown
University of Manitoba

This article builds on a previous article in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics by the same author, “Beyond Queen and King: Democratizing ‘Engaged Buddhism.’” That article argued that the limits that pioneering scholars of engagement placed around “engaged Buddhism” in the 1990s, out of which grew a rough consensus in Buddhist Studies concerning its nature, should be expanded so that scholarship on engagement includes more Buddhists and social endeavors. The article also noted that one group left out of scholarship was engaged traditionalist Buddhists. It added that much scholarly work on engagement focused on certain now-familiar twentieth-century movements, seldom adding new data. The current article contributes to filling these gaps. Proposing updated definitions of traditional Buddhism and Buddhist social engagement, it offers a brief review of literature on traditionalists’ engagement and then presents new data on the engagement of the traditionalist transnational network Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). Analyzing these data, it then describes FPMT’s pattern of social engagement as potentially suited to being called “traditionalist.”

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