Before recent times, most Buddhists, and even most Buddhist monks, did not meditate. Yet today, many consider sitting meditation to be the essence of Buddhist practice. How does the Buddhism one encounters in the religious marketplace today differ from what was taught by its ancient Indian founder?

According to Dr. David McMahan, author of The Making of Buddhist Modernism, both Asian and Western Buddhists have significantly adapted its teachings in modern times, incorporating several themes from modern Western cultures, including Transcendentalism, Scientific Rationalism, Perennialism, and Romanticism.

In this wide-ranging discussion we discuss Dr. McMahan’s evolving understanding of and experience of Buddhism, the different sorts of Buddhist sutras, how competition with Christianity has shaped Buddhist modernism, the appeal of spirituality without a personal god, Buddhism as both spiritual and scientific, rebirth, samsara, mindfulness meditation, the Buddha as “just a man,” worship of the Buddha and other beings, the issue of whether or not these new ideas constitute authentic Buddhism, the political implications of Buddhist modernism, and the future of Buddhism in the U.S.

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• Dr. McMahan’s home page
• David L. McMahan. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• McMahan, David L. and Erik Braun, eds. Meditation, Buddhism, and Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• David L. McMahan, ed. Buddhism in the Modern World. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
• David L. McMahan. Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahayana Buddhism. New York and London: RoutlegeCurzon, 2002.
• Aldous Huxley
• Huston Smith
• The Pali Canon
• Mahayana Buddhism
• Major Mahayana Sutras
• The Lotus Sutra
• Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study
• Pew on Buddhists in the USA
• D.T. Suzuki
• Paul Carus
• Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight Meditation: Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Interview at The Secular Buddhist podcast.)
• Ledi Sayadaw
• The Mystical Arts of Tibet
• upaya
• Avalokiteshvara (Guan Yin) movie
• three bodies of the Buddha (trikaya)
• Dale Tuggy: “Why I am not a Buddhist“
• This episode’s thinking music is our mashup of “The Renaissance Man” by Little Glass Men and this recording of Buddhist monks at Osaka Shitennoji Temple in Japan.