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Cited by 661Indian and Buddhist StudiesStudy and Philosophy of ReligionReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices

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The Making of Buddhist Modernism

McMahan, David L.·2009
DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183276.001.0001
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Abstract

This book elucidates the complex cross-cultural genealogy of themes, ideas, and practices crucial to the creation of a new hybrid form of Buddhism that has emerged within the last 150 years. Buddhism modernism is not just Buddhism that happens to exist in the modern world but a distinct form of Buddhism constituted by cross-fertilization with western ideas and practices. Using primarily examples that have shaped western articulations of Buddhism, the book shows how modern representations of Buddhism have not only changed the way the tradition is understood, but have also generated new forms of demythologized, detraditionalized, and deinstitutionalized Buddhism. The book creates a lineage of Buddhist modernism that includes liberal borrowing from scientific vocabulary in reformulations of Buddhist concepts of causality, interdependence, and meditation. It also draws upon Romantic and Transcendentalist conceptions of cosmology, creativity, spontaneity, and the interior depths of the human being. Additionally, Buddhist modernism reconfigures Buddhism as a kind of psychology or interior science, drawing both upon analytic psychology and current trends in neurobiology. In its novel approaches to meditation and mindfulness, as well as political activism, it draws heavily from western individualism, distinctively modern modes of world-affirmation, liberal political sensibilities, and modernist literary sources. The book also examines this uniquely modern Buddhism as it moves into postmodern iterations and enters the currents of global communication, media, and commerce.

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Authors
McMahan, D. L.
Affiliations
Franklin & Marshall College (US)
Corresponding author
McMahan, David L.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Published
2009-01-01
DOI
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183276.001.0001
OpenAlex
W250278877
Cited by
661
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 24 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 48 · 2023: 53 · 2022: 57 · 2021: 75 · 2020: 53 · 2019: 40 · 2018: 37 · 2017: 49 · 2016: 37 · 2015: 31 · 2014: 41 · 2013: 20 · 2012: 17
FWCI
85.49
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Indian and Buddhist Studies
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Study and Philosophy of Religion
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Keywords
Buddhist modernism, Western Buddhism, Buddhism and science, causality, interdependence, meditation, Romanticism, transcendentalism, cosmology, Jungian psychology, neurobiology, mindfulness, political activism, individualism, global communication

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