I’m a big fan of the Ven. Master Yin-Shun’s Humanistic Buddhism movement, but I think this is somewhat different than humanism in the narrow sense (which is what I meant in my previous comment). It seems to me that the tendency toward reductionism in Western Buddhism tends to justify itself in terms of “modernism” and “rationalism”, which means it tends to use the language of secular humanism (a good example of this might be Stephen Batchelor’s book, Buddhism without Beliefs). Having said that, I do consider myself a humanist in a broad sense.

I think you’re doing a lot to elucidate Buddhism (both the Japanese traditions and the broader Dharma as a whole) just by keeping this website, which I keep searching through because there’s so much fascinating stuff here! ^^

Great post and great comments. Thank you so much. And yes, I quite agree. Western pruning of real living Asian Buddhism runs the danger of killing off the very heart of the religion. Who gains?

Namu Amitabul,

Marcus

I’m all for a humanistic approach to Buddhism, since even Ven. Master Yin-Shun advocates it, but not to where we prune the life out of Buddhism and its traditions and culture. Those traditions enrich us if only we’d take the time to appreciate them.

As a younger man, I read a couple Zen books and thought I knew it all. I was one of those who decried its traditions as outmoded or unsuitable for a Western audience, but through my wife who’s Japanese, I got to appreciate them a lot more, and realized how little we understand Buddhism here in the West. There’s a lot of good stuff there that we’ve either ignored or just haven’t discovered yet. More work needs to be done to bring this all to light, and Westerners need to keep an open mind.

Cheers!

Generally I think Westerners who try to “prune” Buddhism would describe themselves as secular humanists, and they like Buddhism insofar as it resembles secular humanism. Anything that strikes them as “non-secular” or “non-humanistic” (i.e. otherworldly beings, devotional practices, even core aspects of the tradition like karma), they want to get rid of or replace. This leads me to wonder why they bother with Buddhism at all, if they only want it to conform to a worldview they already hold.