Engaged Buddhism

Abstract

Engaged Buddhism emerged in Asia in the 20th century as Buddhists responded to the challenges of colonialism, modernity, and secularization. It is often dated to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s challenge to caste discrimination in India in the 1950s and the antiwar activism of Vietnamese Buddhist monastic Thich Nhat Hanh, although recent scholarship has pointed to the influence of Chinese Buddhist reforms occurring in the 1930s. Hanh coined the term “engaged Buddhism” to describe social and political activism based in Buddhist principles in the 1960s. The terms “engaged Buddhism” and “socially engaged Buddhism” were taken up by loosely connected Buddhists in Asia and the West who adapted Buddhism to a range of nonviolent social activist projects such as peacemaking, human rights, environmental protection, rural development, combatting ethnic violence, and women’s rights. With globalization and technological advances, engaged Buddhist organizations and efforts have spread across the globe. Reflecting the culture shift from the modern to the postmodern, generational and demographic shifts within these communities are marked by increased attention to intersectionality and postcolonial thought. Engaged Buddhists see their social and political activities as extending Buddhism’s classical focus on individual suffering to the suffering generated by unjust structures and systems, and set collective as well as individual liberation as a soteriological goal. While there is a consensus in academic scholarship that engaged Buddhism is an expression of Buddhist modernism, recent debates have arisen around whether conservative, nationalist, and even ethnocentric modern forms of Buddhism can be considered as forms of engaged Buddhism.

Coming to Terms with “Engaged Buddhism”: Periodizing, Provincializing, and Politicizing the Concept

“…See McLaughlin on the "shared textual space" of Anglophone Buddhism wherein "academics and religious people knowingly and unknowingly reinforce each other's assumptions" (2019: 2). Gleig (2021) observes that "crossover between the study and practice of engaged Buddhism has undoubtedly contributed to an overwhelmingly positive portrayal of it," suggesting the limits of Academic Engaged Buddhists being overly identified with the object they seek to represent. 15 Consider Queen's defensive response to Yarnall's critique in his introduction to Action Dharma, declaring "[we] know better than to feel superior to [our] subjects," only to insist on narrative control, doubling down on an Anglophone-hybrid origin for "modern Engaged Buddhism" in late 19 th c. colonial Sri Lanka (2003: 22-25).…”

“…20 Practitioner identification with the "Engaged Buddhist" label takes place in an English-language discursive politics where both a) religious identities are presumed to be bounded, exclusive, and reflective of authentic inner belief and morality, and b) Western Buddhist, spiritual-but-not-religious, and Religious Left discourses encourage their participants to dispense with, play with, or minimize the importance of labels. At the same time, core ideas and commitments presumed to be shared exclusively among self-identified Engaged Buddhists (reverence for Nhat Hanh and Buddhist traditions; recognition of interdependence of the personal and the political; careful study of Buddhist text and practice in light of 18 On these points I have found special academic focus on the "traditionism" or "modernity" of Engaged Buddhism (Yarnall 2000;Deitrick 2003;Queen 2003;Temprano 2013;Henry 2013;Gleig 2021) somewhat unhelpful, merely serving to underscore a default presumption that the passive, reactionary East and active, progressive West are pre-existing, mutually oppositional categories to be skillfully hybridized. As a premodernist, I appreciated the "traditionist" voices in this debate pointing out that even according to normative Buddhist models, monastic social "disengagement" was underwritten by compulsory lay sponsorship and the maintenance of dharmic imperial rule.…”

“…Similarly, the degree to which politically "Alt-Right" reactionary Western Buddhists (see Gleig and Artinger 2021) instinctively organize against "Engaged Buddhism" seems to reveal its continued salience in the Anglosphere. Still, I am unaware how the Gen-X and Millennial Western Buddhist activists profiled in Gleig's (2021) encyclopedia article, who work to address structural racism, confront anthropogenic climate change, and critique the secular mindfulness movement, identify with "Engaged Buddhism" as self-description or a body of texts. The opening anecdote of Gleig's article stitches Sivaraksa, Macy, and millennial activists together as participants in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship's 2014 national meeting in Oakland, CA; it is certainly within scholarly prerogative to identify them all as sharing in the same Engaged Buddhism, but it would be interesting to collect participants' accounts of their identifications with one another.…”

Mindfulness in the Context of Engaged Buddhism: A Case for Engaged Mindfulness

“…At this time, he founded the Order of Interbeing (Tiep Hien), the agenda of which he would come to define in fourteen guidelines based on the extension of Buddhist practice for individual suffering to include the world at large. Hanh set "collective as well as individual liberation as a soteriological goal" (Gleig 2021). Although engaged Buddhism primarily began as a reaction to social injustice and war, it later grew to include a broader set of aims related to "peace and non-violence, human rights, just and equitable development, liberation from oppressive government, social and economic justice, prison reform, access to education and health care, environmental protection and sustainability, and gender and racial equality" (Edelglass 2009, p. 420).…”

Are Leaders Responsible for Meaningful Work? Perspectives from Buddhist-Enacted Leaders and Buddhist Ethics

“…Given that the notion of meaningfulness is contextually and culturally bounded (Boova et al, 2019;Geertz, 1973;Mead, 1934), we examine the perspectives of, and approaches to, meaningful work of leaders who practise "engaged Buddhism" in their leadership behavior in Vietnam, a communist nation that is in economic and social transition (The Economist, 2020). Engaged Buddhism emerged in Asia in the twentieth century to describe how Buddhists responded to the challenges of colonialism, modernity and secularism, often ascribed to the Vietnamese Buddhist monastic Thich Nhat Hanh in his anti-war activism (Gleig, 2021).…”