Goldstein - One dharma: the emerging western buddhism

ONE
Dharma

THE EMERGING WESTERN BUDDHISM

Joseph Goldstein

Dedicated to all my teachers

Those who gave me many years of guidance
And those who offered transforming moments of inspiration

In gratitude for the great blessings of the Dharma

Lord Buddha Shakyamuni, Guru Rinpoche,
Anagarika Sri Munindra, Sri S. N. Goenka,
Mrs. Nani Bala Barua (Dipa Ma), Joshu Sasaki Roshi,
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw,
the Venerable Sayadaw U Pandita,
His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa,
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche,
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche,
and Tsoknyi Rinpoche

B UDDHISM HAS EVOLVED DIFFERENTLY IN DIFFERENT TIMES and places and yet the essential Dharma remains the same. The Buddhas prime concern was that all beings should find peace and freedom from suffering. His advice that we should try to help each other if we can and at least avoid doing one another harm remains relevant everywhere, reaching across the boundaries of nationality, language, religion and culture.

At the heart of the Buddhas teaching lies the idea that the potential for awakening and perfection is present in every human being and that it is a matter of personal effort to realise that potential. The Buddha proclaimed that each individual is a master of his or her own destiny, highlighting the ability that each person holds to achieve enlightenment. In fulfilling this aim what we need is compassion and concern for others and not self-centredness. Whether you are a Buddhist or not, these are qualities that are worth cultivating.

In recent decades improved travel and communications facilities have made our world smaller. This has at the same time made it possible for many people in the West to become more aware of Buddhism. As a result we have seen a flowering of Buddhist traditions in new lands that has not only enabled students to discover different modes of practice, but also allowed Buddhist teachers themselves to get to know one another and share their experiences. As a young man in Tibet I myself had only very vague ideas of how the Dharma was practised elsewhere. In my long years as a refugee I have been fortunate to meet many other Buddhists. This has helped me greatly to improve my understanding of their traditions, while deepening my appreciation of other religious faiths too. I have found that extending our understanding of each others spiritual practices and traditions can be an enriching experience, because to do so increases our opportunities for mutual respect. Often we encounter things in another tradition that helps us better appreciate something in our own.

Joseph Goldstein has been a Dharma student and teacher for much of his adult life and is a founding member of the Insight Meditation Society. He is an example of a new kind of Buddhist that we find in the West these days. Rather than holding tightly to a single tradition, he has studied with an array of teachers, integrating aspects of several Buddhist lineages into his practice. There are historical precedents for such an approach. Buddhism has often been reinvigorated when a new synthesis has been created from existing traditions. Buddhist training, wherever it has evolved, consists of certain fundamental elements such as the practices of mindfulness, loving-kindness, compassion, nonattachment and wisdom. These common themes are what Joseph has focused on here in this aptly entitled book, One Dharma.

T HE D ALAI L AMA
M ARCH 6, 2002

Sometime in the early 1970s, two Buddhist masters met in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of them, Kalu Rinpoche, was a renowned Tibetan meditation master who had spent many years in solitary retreat in the remote mountain caves of Tibet. The other was Seung Sahn, a Korean Zen master who had recently come to the United States and was supporting himself by working in a Providence, Rhode Island, Laundromat, slowly planting the seeds of Zen in the minds of those coming to wash their clothes. At this now famous meeting of enlightened minds, Seung Sahn held up an orange and, in classic Zen dharma combat fashion, demanded, What is this?

Kalu Rinpoche just looked at him, wonderingly.

Again Master Seung Sahn asked, What is this?

Finally, Rinpoche turned to his translator and asked, Dont they have oranges in Korea?

We are living in remarkable times. A genuine Western Buddhism is now taking birth. Its defining characteristic is neither an elaborate philosophical system nor an attachment to any particular sectarian viewpoint. Rather, it is a simple pragmatism that harkens back to the Buddha himself, who pointedly questioned the established tenets of ancient Indian thought. It is an allegiance to a very simple question: What works? What works to free the mind from suffering? What works to engender a heart of compassion? What works to awaken?

In the West, our open, diverse society acts like a magnet for different spiritual traditions, and over the past few decades many people have been turning to the wisdom of the East in search of practical and tested methods of spiritual inquiry. Because Buddhist practices rely on wise investigation rather than belief and dogma, they resonate strongly with the scientific and psychological paradigms that inform our culture.

What makes this time unique in the development of Buddhism is not only that East is meeting West, but also that isolated Asian traditions are now meeting for the first time in centuries, and they are doing so here in the West. Emerging from the fertile interaction of these ancient teachings is what we can now begin to call Western Buddhism.

Not bound by Asian cultural constraints and strengthened by a society that encourages investigation, we are willing to take what is useful and beneficial from different traditions and add it to our own practice experience. These diverse methods of cultivating wisdom and compassion enhance one another and, at the same time, challenge our familiar ways of understanding. Teachings are being tested by other points of view, not in schools of abstract philosophy, but in our own lives and meditation practices. Many of us are learning and practicing several of these different disciplines simultaneously. It is not unusual for people to list as their different teachers Tibetan Rinpoches, Burmese Sayadaws, Korean, Japanese, or Chinese Zen masters, Thai Ajahns, and Western teachers of all the various schools.

This abundance and variety of teachings in one place has not happened since the great Indian Buddhist University at Nalanda, which flourished from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. According to documented reports of travelers in those times, there were over two thousand teachers and more than ten thousand monks from all over the Buddhist world who practiced and studied there side by side. Today, although we are not all gathered on one campus, the ease of travel and communication has created a similar wealth of available teachings.

But as old traditions meet in new ways, pressing questions arise. Is the melting-pot approach simply creating a big mess in which essential teachings of a tradition are lost? Or is something new emerging that will revitalize dharma practice for us all? Will it be possible to preserve the integrity of each of these distinct cultures of awakening, even as we nurture the enrichment that comes from their contact with each other? How much of our spiritual practice and discipline is embedded in cultural overlays from the East that are neither relevant nor helpful in our Western society? And do we sometimes water downor leave behindthe essence of the teachings simply because they take us out of our Western physical or psychological comfort zone? How much can we pare away or alter before we start missing the point of it all?