David L. McMahan

This is very much a college textbook. It is broad but not deep. It is very non-committal and full of nuance. It is very informative. I am a Euro-American convert, from forty-some years ago. This book pretty well summarizes my religious life, in outline form. I don't think I learned much from it, but found it did a very nice job of organizing the bits and pieces into a coherent framework. A total newcomer to Buddhism would probably find this a bit too much. But it could be very nicely eye-opening for someone who has done a bit of wading but who has little perspective on the bigger picture.

One topic where I found the lack of depth a bit too limiting... with sacred vision... well, it would be grand to get a survey of sacred vision across Buddhist schools. My understanding is that sacred vision is built on emptiness. With emptiness, we understand that, however we conceptualize a situation, there is always more to the story. McMahon does a good enough job outlining that. But he doesn't seem to situated sacred vision as built on that understanding of the flexibility of story making. The point of sacred vision, of seeing the world as a pure land, is not to cling to that story inflexibly as some kind of evasion of emptiness, but to work with that story as a kind of tactical counter-story, as a kind of yoga of stories, a dance of stories, an acrobatics of stories.

McMahan captures very nicely the core issue... Buddhism has to accommodate modernity enough to be able to address modern people and modern issue. But this accommodation must not go so far that Buddhism no longer has any distance from which it can offer any fresh perspective on those issues. A challenge for many traditions!… (more)

Review Found online at https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=24528

Reviewed by Eyal Aviv
Published on H-Buddhism (January, 2011)
Commissioned by Jin Y. Park (American University)
In his Making of Buddhist Modernism, David
L. McMahan presents a sophisticated narrative
for the emergence of “Buddhist Modernism,” a
term borrowed from Heinz Bechert.[1] Drawing
on an impressive set of sources, McMahan skill‐
fully convinces his readers that Buddhist mod‐
ernism is a distinct development in Buddhist his‐
tory, and that much of what is understood simply
as Buddhism is in fact a result of developments of
the last two centuries. While Buddhism in the
modern period has been in the center of scholarly
attention in the recent decade, McMahan’s book is
praiseworthy and unique in its undertaking to
theorize the field of Buddhist modernism from a
macro rather than a micro perspective. It is obvi‐
ous that any attempt to map such a diversified
phenomenon as Buddhist modernism is risky and
bound to leave some aspects un- or under-treated.
However, not only is McMahan aware of these po‐
tential pitfalls (e.g., pp. 6, 14, 20-22), but he also
gives a well-balanced narrative with rich exam‐
ples that he weaves into a coherent and approach‐
able account.
The book is divided into four parts, starting
with introductory chapters, which introduce the
readers to the scope of Buddhist modernism, its
main contours, most salient dynamics, and major
figures and their historical and cultural back‐
ground. McMahan then moves to a discussion of
key issues, such as the discourse of scientific Bud‐
dhism, Buddhist romanticism, and the appropria‐
tion of the doctrine of interdependence to modern
needs. Next he treats the arguably most salient
feature of Buddhist modernism, the meditation
movement. Finally, McMahan concludes the book
with a discussion on the possible future shape of
what he calls “postmodern Buddhism.”
In his introductory chapters (chapters 1 to 3),
McMahan outlines the makeup of Buddhist mod‐
ernism, its scope, and main players. McMahan de‐
fines Buddhist modernism not as “all Buddhism
that happens to exist in the modern era but,
rather, forms of Buddhism that have emerged out
of an engagement with the dominant cultural and
intellectual forces of modernity” (p. 6). To define
these forces, McMahan relies on Charles Taylor’s
Sources of the Self (1989) in order to find “some
vessels in which the philosophical, religious and
social facets of [modernity’s] maelstrom can be
contained” (p. 10). These vessels of modernity, on
which he deliberates with greater details in subse‐
quent chapters, are Western monotheism, ratio‐
nalism and scientific naturalism, and romantic
expressivism. The result is “Buddhist mod‐
ernism,” a global Buddhist phenomenon that,
among others, focuses on meditation, social en‐
gagement, internalization, and emphasis of equal‐
ity and universality while deemphasizing ritual,
mythology, and hierarchy.
McMahan samples different Buddhist tradi‐
tions from the East and the West in his investiga‐
tion of Buddhist modernism, but his departure
point and major prism is North American Bud‐
dhism. There are several reasons for this choice.
First, “English has become the lingua franca of
Buddhist Modernism” (p. 21). Second, many of the
most influential Buddhist teachers are working in
North America. Third, McMahan argues that
America serves as a laboratory for adaptations
and innovations and for a reconception of “Bud‐
dhism in modern terms” (p. 22). This does not
mean that McMahan intends his book to be a
study of American Buddhism, but rather to indi‐
cate that his examination of this global phenome‐
non is done “from a particular shore” (p. 22).
McMahan identifies three characteristics that
separate traditional Buddhism and Buddhist mod‐
ernism: De-traditionalization (a shift from the ex‐
ternal transcendent to the internal self), de‐
mythologization (a term borrowed from Bechert),
and psychologization. McMahan shows that the
dialogue between tradition and modernity is al‐
ways multidimensional and the adaptation to
modernity is done through a complex process of
“decontextualization and recontextualization,” in
which Buddhist traditions are conceived through
new “networks of meaning, value and power” (p.
62). Chapters 4 to 6 elaborate on key themes in the
emergence of Buddhist modernism and the way
they are constructed through the interchange be‐
tween traditions and the “vessels” of modern dis‐
course, especially those of scientific rationalism
and romantic expressivism. In both cases, McMa‐
han shows how Buddhists both accepted and, at
the same time, challenged the characteristics of
modernity and emphasized what sets Buddhism
apart.
Chapter 4 is dedicated to the discourse of sci‐
entific Buddhism, a timely topic, and one of the
modern frameworks through which modern Bud‐
dhism was configured.[2] McMahan identifies two
“different but overlapping agendas, spurred by
two crises of legitimacy in disparate cultural con‐
text” (p. 90). He examines the first one, colonial‐
ism, through the career of Anagarika Dharma‐
pala. The second is the “Victorian crisis of faith,”
examined through the careers of Henry Steel Ol‐
cott and Paul Carus. McMahan shows how the dis‐
course of science was used by Dharmapala as a
rhetorical device against the colonial political and
cultural aspirations and against Christian prosely‐
tization in his native Sri Lanka. Olcott’s and
Carus’s careers are set as examples, among others,
of the universalist trend of modern Euro-Ameri‐
can thinkers, who sought an underlying unity to
the variety of world religions. These two crises
are interlinked as Olcott and Dharmapala cooper‐
ated despite their later fallout due to differences
in motives and approaches.
In chapter 5, McMahan presents an excellent
study of the close ties between Buddhist mod‐
ernism and romanticism. It is difficult for the
reader to get a clear sense of the complexity of the
romantic movement from this chapter. Neverthe‐
less, McMahan’s attention to such themes as the
role of art, creativity, the spiritual meaning of “na‐
ture,” and spontaneity demonstrates how Bud‐
dhism and romantic ideas were linked. This link‐
age was epitomized during the 50s, 60s, and 70s
counterculture movement in Europe and America
and their selective adoption of Buddhism. These
“hybridic” characteristics (a term he borrows
H-Net Reviews
2
from Homi Bhabha [p. 20]) were synthesized into
such products as Americanized Zen, especially by
D. T. Suzuki (other Buddhists he explores are
Sangharakshita and Anagarika Govinda), and en‐
abled Zen to become a cultural influence beyond
the boundaries of Buddhism. McMahan demon‐
strates that a connection between Suzuki and the
romantic movement is very plausible, but I was
hoping to see more evidence that his ideas were
indeed influenced by and did not merely echo the
works of the romantics. After all, the role of na‐
ture, spontaneity, and the spiritual meaning of art
have been a part of the East Asian cultural her‐
itage as well. Still, this “hybrid” of Zen spiritual‐
ism and romanticism had a clear and everlasting
impact on Western culture and Buddhist mod‐
ernism. Finally, McMahan dwells on the contem‐
porary significance and legacy of “Romantic Bud‐
dhism,” among new (age) spiritualities, environ‐
mentalists (e.g., Gary Snyder, a beat generation
writer and a follower of Suzuki and Zen), and
popular entertainment. The Buddhist-romantic
hybrid continues to inspire a generation of con‐
temporary artists (a list of which can be found on
page 144).
In chapter 6, we see how romantic and ratio‐
nalist strands within Buddhism contributed to a
particular development in the influential doctrine
of “interdependence” (Skt pratītyasamutpāda and
Palipaticcasamuppāda). McMahan shows that in
what he calls an “age of inter” the Buddhist con‐
cept of interdependence is timely and alluring.
McMahan is right to point out that the Buddhist
concept of pratītyasamutpāda is better translated
as “Dependent Co-arising” and that even within
the Buddhist tradition this term came to be under‐
stood in complex and varied ways. Moreover, in
the Pali sources dependent co-arising, or interde‐
pendence, was one of the causes of suffering and
not the solution at the end of the path of realiza‐
tion. “Indeed it is through reversal of this chain of
interdependent causation--not the identification
with it--that the Buddha is said to have become
awakened” (p. 154). Still, this term came to be un‐
derstood today as an underlying connection be‐
tween all sentient beings in a web of dependent
relationships. This connection became for many
prominent contemporary Buddhists the sine qua
non of the tradition. As McMahan correctly points
out, this world-affirming perspective is rooted
more in Mahāyāna Buddhist texts and such
thinkers as Nagārjuna and among Huáyán
philosophers. Indeed, it was in the Huáyán school
that pratītyasamutpāda “has become the stan‐
dard symbol for interdependence in its contempo‐
rary sense” (p. 158). This is precisely why a little
more extensive treatment of Húayán would have
helped to see the evolution of the concept from
the suttas stage to its contemporary usage.
McMahan also mentions the slippery slope of
concluding that Buddhist modernist’s interpreta‐
tion of pratītyasamutpāda as interdependence is
“inauthentic” and wrong. To do this is to lead to
an interpretation of Buddhist texts and tradition
as having “a static, essentialized meaning” (p.
179). He advises historians of religion to remem‐
ber that texts and traditions are never static enti‐
ties but rather are always part of a dynamic
process that adapts itself to the social, cultural, re‐
ligious, and political needs of a particular time
and place. While McMahan presents this argu‐
ment in the context of interdependence, it is clear
that this advice extends to the rest of the book as
well.
In chapters 7 and 8, McMahan dwells on the
meditation movement. In the seventh chapter,
McMahan provides the cultural and philosophical
context behind this “subjective turn” (a term he
borrows from Taylor) and applies other, previous‐
ly discussed, theoretical concepts to describe one
of Buddhism’s most salient features in the West. It
is in this chapter that we see the convergence of
Western romantic and rationalist views alongside
Asian teachers’ hybrid usage of meditation to
adapt Buddhism to the age of Western dominance
in Asia. This sort of trend, which has been gaining
momentum in recent years, is exemplified by
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3
such things as an invitation to participate in a
Jewish Vipassanā meditation retreat, which I per‐
sonally came across a few years back. McMahan
sees it as a part of the disassociation of meditation
from the “wider ethical, social and cosmological
context of Buddhism.” McMahan aptly concludes,
“paradoxically, while meditation is often consid‐
ered the heart of Buddhism, it is also deemed the
element most detachable from the tradition itself”
(p. 185). This disassociation could not have hap‐
pened without the processes he repeatedly high‐
lights throughout the book (such as privatization,
deinstitutionalization, and detraditionalization).
In chapter 8, McMahan narrows his discus‐
sion of meditation into the so-called mindfulness
practices and shows how these emerged from a
“world-affirming” modernist view. McMahan re‐
lies on a wealth of evidence from Western litera‐
ture to detail how this world-affirming mentality
is deeply rooted in the Western mind-set. By re‐
viewing the romantic notion of epiphany, (intro‐
duced on pages 121-122), he is able to draw atten‐
tion to parallels between observations of every‐
day life and self-reflexivity in the writings of Ian
McEwan as well as in Virginia Woolf and in James
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) that have shared character‐
istics with mindfulness practice. McMahan’s dis‐
cussion of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) is
an important part of this chapter, as the novel
provided formative ideas to many Westerners re‐
garding Buddhism. McMahan shows again that
even a book that flirts with Buddhism (the protag‐
onist name is identical to that of the Buddha) is
closer to the spirit of romanticism than it is to In‐
dian Buddhism.
In his final chapter, McMahan turns his ex‐
amination toward the future, to the emergence of
what he calls, rather amorphously, “postmodern”
Buddhism. It is in this chapter that I found that
McMahan’s main analytical notion of “Buddhist
Modernism” is losing its “global” perspective.
Throughout the book he convincingly shows how
Buddhist modernism is not merely Western Bud‐
dhism, but in this chapter the boundaries be‐
tween the two terms are much less clear. The ma‐
jority of the examples he gives and discusses in
this chapter concern the West. In light of this fact
one wonders whether it is possible for democrati‐
zation, feminization, or post-traditionalism to take
hold in other parts of the Buddhist world. More‐
over, the tensions that McMahan outlines, such as
those between privatized and socially engaged
Buddhists or detraditionalized and retraditional‐
ized Buddhism, also makes one wonder whether
Buddhist modernism is still adequate as a coher‐
ent category. In addition, I also hoped to read
more about the way Buddhism can “challenge,
critique, augment and offer alternatives” to the
modern West (p. 260). This project deserves seri‐
ous treatment, as for example in Richard Med‐
sen’s Democracy’s Dharma (2007).
It is clear that McMahan is writing for both
scholars and students. In reaching out to both au‐
diences, some sections read too much like a text‐
book whereas others have the sort of details that
beginning students may find overwhelming. How‐
ever, overall, McMahan has done an excellent job
in navigating such a terrain. I can testify that
many of my students, especially those with little
background in Buddhism, found the book very
useful and illuminating.
The amount of background research and the
wide range of examples from different Buddhist
traditions are impressive. The breadth of writings
from leading Buddhist modernists in the East and
the West, and the philosophical, literary, and theo‐
retical background this book provides make it a
rich source of material that should be a part of
the library of any serious scholar of Buddhism in
the modern period, as well as for the delight of
the growing body of Buddhist enthusiasts, who
find “Buddhism” interesting (when, in fact, what
they often really enjoy is exactly what McMahan
calls “Buddhist Modernism”).
Notes
H-Net Reviews
4

1]. See Heinz Bechert, Buddhismus, Staat und
Geselchaft in den Ländern des Theravada Bud‐
dhismus, vol. 1 (Berlin: Alfred Metzner, 1966), vol.
2 (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1967), and vol. 3
(Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1973). See also
Heinz Bechert, “Buddhist Revival in East and
West,” in The World of Buddhism, ed. Heinz
Bechert and Richard Gombrich (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1991), 273-285.
[2]. See, for example, Allan Wallace, Bud‐
dhism and Science (New York: Columbia Universi‐
ty Press, 2003); David McMahan, “Modernity and
the Discourse of Scientific Buddhism,” Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004):
897-933; and Donald Lopez, Buddhism and Sci‐
ence: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: Univer‐
sity of Chicago Press, 2010). McMahan provides a
fuller list on page 90.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at
https://networks.h-net.org/h-buddhism
Citation: Eyal Aviv. Review of McMahan, David L. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. H-Buddhism, H-
Net Reviews. January, 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24528
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