Wilber - Integral Buddhism: and the future of spirituality

T HE FOLLOWING IS A very short, very introductoryalmost outline summaryof a newly released but much larger and more detailed book (The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great TraditionsMore Inclusive, More Comprehensive, More Complete). But we felt it was a good idea, for several reasons, to release this version at this time, with its basic arguments and core ideas. One is that it was advisable to have a simplified and easily conveyed version of the books main thesis out and available, so important is the general idea itself. That idea is, basically, that now is absolutely the time that the worlds core religions should get serious about updating their fundamental dogmas and dharmas and gospelsthat it has been over a thousand years, at least, since virtually all of them added significant ideas and practices to their main teachingsteachings that themselves, virtually without exception, were originally created when men and women literally believed that the earth was flat; that slavery was considered the normal state of nature; that women and other minorities were considered second-class citizens, if citizens at all; that evolution had not yet been discovered, nor most of the modern sciences (and thus the principle source of serious knowledge was considered to be mythic revelation, not scientific experiment); and that the multicultural nature of so much knowledge was completely unheard of. My thesis is that the core ideas of the Great Traditions can literally and seriously be retained, but re-interpreted and included in a much more Inclusive Framework (often called an Integral Framework) that adds to those core doctrines the many new discoveries about spiritual experience, spiritual intelligence, and spiritual development that have been discovered during those thousand years. The result is a spiritual framework that transcends and includes the central teachings of the Traditions, including the old but also adding a significant amount of new material that is fully compatible with the old, but that, in essence, brings it up to date in the modern and postmodern world.

Such updating of Integral approaches to the Great Traditions has already begun in many of them, including Christianity (see, for example, Paul Smiths Integral Christianity; Tom Thresher, Reverent Irreverence; Bruce Sanguin, The Emerging Church; Gary Simmonss work at Unity Church; and the work of Chris Dierkes, Rollie Stanich, Father Thomas Keating, and numerous others), Hinduism (Dustin DiPerna, who has also done significant Integral work on many of the other Great Traditions), Islam (Amir Ahmad Nasr, My Islam), Judaism (Marc Gafnis Radical Kabbalah), as well as Buddhism (Jun Po Roshi, the dharma heir to Eido Roshi; Jun Pos main student, Doshin; Diane Musho Hamilton; Patrick Sweeney, a lineage heir to Chgyam Trungpa; and Traleg Rinpoche), and in work such as The Coming Interspiritual Age (Kurt Johnson and David Ord), to name a few. The excitement caused by such updating has been considerable, particularly considering that it can be done, indeed, while retaining the core teachings of the original Traditionincluding ways to rather seamlessly integrate the religious tradition with modern science. This overall approach is achieved by noticing several fundamental items about how spiritual experience and spiritual intelligence are created in the first place, items that were already demonstrably present in the original Teachings, and thus items that can be expanded and updated while not violating the essentials of the original Teachings themselves in the least.

As noted, several teachers have been doing the same thing with Buddhism for several years now, and so it seemed appropriate to summarize the essentials of that new, Integral approach to Buddhism (as an example of how any Great Tradition, in general, can be Integrally updated and informed). As I point out in the beginning chapter of this presentation, Buddhism itselfunlike virtually every other Great Traditionhas always been open to the continuing unfolding and expansion of its own teachings, as evidenced in its own notion of the Three (or Four) Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma (Truth), which is a major teaching in Buddhism itself. The idea is that Buddhadharma (Buddhist Truth) has itself already undergone three (or four) major evolutionary Turnings in its own Teachings, according to Buddhism itself. The First Turning began with the original, historical Gautama Buddha himself, and is preserved to this day in teachings such as the Theravada. The Second Turning was introduced by the genius Nagarjuna, around 200 CE , with his revolutionary notion of shunyata, or the radical Emptiness or unqualifiability of ultimate Reality (which could be said neither to be, nor not to be, nor both, nor neitherthe idea being to clear the mind of any and all concepts about Reality so that Reality in itself could be directly experienced), a notion that became the foundation of virtually every Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) and Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle) teaching henceforth. The Third Turning occurred with the half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, and is generally called the Yogachara school, sometimes referred to as the Mind-Only school (which agreed with Nagarjuna that ultimate Reality was Emptiness, but so was ultimate Mind). This teaching became a central foundation of the great Tantra and Vajrayana (Diamond Path) teachings, which particularly flourished in such places as the extraordinary Nalanda University in India from the 8th to the 11th century CE , and continued unabated in Tibetan Buddhist schoolsand, indeed, many Buddhists consider Tantra and Vajrayana to be a Fourth Turning of the Wheel. (If we do so, which makes sense to me, then what I am actually talking about would be a Fifth Turning, so please keep that in mind. But whether we acknowledge these Turnings or not doesnt affect the main points of this book, which is what a genuinely inclusive, comprehensive spirituality would begin to look likethis is our main issue.) But with regard to the Turnings, those who acknowledged them maintained that each of them tended to transcend and include the previous ones, all of them agreeing with many of the Buddhas original points, and then adding new teachings of their own.