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American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity
This illuminating account of contemporary American Buddhism shows the remarkable ways the tradition has changed over the past generation
The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. In this fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape, Ann Gleig illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period she identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. She observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism, such as ethics and community, that were discarded in the modernization process.
Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.
The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. In this fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape, Ann Gleig illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period she identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. She observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism, such as ethics and community, that were discarded in the modernization process.
Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.
376 pages, Hardcover
Published February 26, 2019
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209 people want to read
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June 8, 2019
Let’s cut to the chase: Ann Gleig, who is an associate professor of religion at the University of Central Florida, has written a splendid book that is an instant classic. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity is a “must read” book for anyone interested in understanding what has been happening in the world of American “convert” Buddhism over the past decade and where it is headed. The book is comprehensive in fairly covering the myriad trends, countertrends, and controversies that have roiled the convert Buddhist community in recent years—especially in the American Zen, Insight Meditation, mindfulness, Secular Buddhist, and on-line Buddhist communities. Gleig sees these trends as part of the larger narrative of the transition of Western culture from modernism to postmodernism, post-secularism, post-colonialism, and digital literacy. She sees “boomer generation” Buddhist modernism as subject to a variety of critiques from millennials and Gen Xers, Asian heritage Buddhists, people of color. and queer and transgendered people. She also sees Buddhist modernism as subject to critiques from those who think it has modernized too far and those who think it hasn’t modernized enough. Finally, there are the hot button issues of sexual scandals in Buddhist communities and the controversies over whether mindfulness is being commodified, taught outside of an ethical context, or being used as a handmaiden to economic interests.
Gleig covers all of these issues with both scholarly thoroughness and a degree of personal acquaintance with many of the institutions and actors she writes about. Her participant-observer stance, writing from both inside and outside of the phenomena she describes, gives the book a genuine vitality. I am also happy to say that she really knows how to write—the book is a pleasure to read all the way through.
That having been said, is there anything that bothered me about the book? Of course there is. Gleig is writing from a specific point of view as a member of Generation X, as a political progressive, and as an LGBTQ feminist. I, on the other hand, am reading her book from the point of view as an aging, Ashkenazi, cisgender, straight, boomer Buddhist modernist who is politically liberal in the older sense of the word rather than progressive in the newer sense. This means that she reads almost all these critiques as positive steps to cheer about, whereas I belong to the generation on their receiving end. While they may be merited, it’s hard for me to be unabashedly happy about them.
I still subscribe to the old-time liberal belief in inclusiveness, rather than the newer identity politics of anti-racism, call out culture, and intersectionality. Some of the progressive critique of liberalism is well-taken if it is seen as calling for a recognition and celebration of differences rather than a color-blind attempt to ignore them, or is calling for lighter-skinned people to recognize the pervasive ways in which our culture has systematically disadvantaged and oppressed people of color, or an interrogation of how lighter skin carries advantages whether one wishes it to or not. We all can benefit from questioning the degree to which we are complicit in a culture that harms others, but there are ways in which I give these newer trends only one or two cheers rather than three.
I recently attended a large progressive Buddhist event which broke up into smaller groups where I was asked to state “what would make me feel safe” in the group and what pronoun I would prefer to be called by. I recognized the good intentions behind this, but experienced it as excessive and alienating. I felt like a dinosaur in the midst of this new progressive culture. Perhaps I was.
Gleig covers all of these issues with both scholarly thoroughness and a degree of personal acquaintance with many of the institutions and actors she writes about. Her participant-observer stance, writing from both inside and outside of the phenomena she describes, gives the book a genuine vitality. I am also happy to say that she really knows how to write—the book is a pleasure to read all the way through.
That having been said, is there anything that bothered me about the book? Of course there is. Gleig is writing from a specific point of view as a member of Generation X, as a political progressive, and as an LGBTQ feminist. I, on the other hand, am reading her book from the point of view as an aging, Ashkenazi, cisgender, straight, boomer Buddhist modernist who is politically liberal in the older sense of the word rather than progressive in the newer sense. This means that she reads almost all these critiques as positive steps to cheer about, whereas I belong to the generation on their receiving end. While they may be merited, it’s hard for me to be unabashedly happy about them.
I still subscribe to the old-time liberal belief in inclusiveness, rather than the newer identity politics of anti-racism, call out culture, and intersectionality. Some of the progressive critique of liberalism is well-taken if it is seen as calling for a recognition and celebration of differences rather than a color-blind attempt to ignore them, or is calling for lighter-skinned people to recognize the pervasive ways in which our culture has systematically disadvantaged and oppressed people of color, or an interrogation of how lighter skin carries advantages whether one wishes it to or not. We all can benefit from questioning the degree to which we are complicit in a culture that harms others, but there are ways in which I give these newer trends only one or two cheers rather than three.
I recently attended a large progressive Buddhist event which broke up into smaller groups where I was asked to state “what would make me feel safe” in the group and what pronoun I would prefer to be called by. I recognized the good intentions behind this, but experienced it as excessive and alienating. I felt like a dinosaur in the midst of this new progressive culture. Perhaps I was.
October 11, 2019
Zen, Chan, Tibetan – all well-known names for the distinctive versions of Buddhism associated with three of the countries that have been home to the dharma for thousands of years, namely Japan, China, and Tibet. However, here in the United States, where its presence is more appropriately measured in decades rather than in millennia, Buddhism has earned the far less distinctive, almost bland, name of “Western Buddhism” – as if it is still too immature and too undeveloped to merit a more memorable name.
In her remarkable new book, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, scholar Ann Gleig makes a compelling case that Western Buddhism, as it currently exists in America, is anything but immature and undeveloped. On the contrary, in the relatively brief half century of its presence here, Buddhism has already passed through two important transformative stages – the first mostly completed, and the second well under way but still in process.
The first transformation has its origins not in Buddhism’s migration to the West, but rather in colonialism’s intrusion into the East. Gleig contends, convincingly, that the British and other European colonizers exerted a subtle but powerful influence on the traditional Buddhism being practiced in India, by virtue of their forceful introduction of Enlightenment values into the native culture. This colonial culture gave rise to the radically new idea of meditation as the pursuit of individual wellbeing, rather than an expression of community among individuals following shared traditions and rituals. It was this novel Enlightenment-based approach to mindfulness that was taught to the American students who arrived in India in the late 1960s to learn meditation from “traditional” masters. When these students returned to America in the 1970s to pass along what they had learned on their pilgrimages to the East, they were in fact spreading modern, not traditional, Buddhism.
While the modernism of Western Buddhism may have its infant roots in the post-colonial culture of the East, its growth and maturity are firmly rooted in contemporary America. Here, over the past four decades, Buddhism has attracted a mostly white, mostly well-educated, mostly well-to-do group of practitioners – overwhelmingly liberal in their political sympathies, devoted to European Enlightenment ideals of science and reason, and drawn to the psychotherapeutic benefits of mindfulness. Gleig refers to this meditation-centered, mostly secular, and highly psychologized version that has become the dominant form of Buddhist practice in America as “convert Buddhism”, underscoring the deep divide between it and the more traditional forms of Buddhism still practiced in the West by what she terms “the immigrant community” of mostly Asian-American, usually more religious, and generally less well-to-do practitioners.
This first transformative stage of Western Buddhism into its modernist form is now largely complete, but the split just described between “convert” and “immigrant” communities has laid the groundwork for a second, more dramatic transformation which is just getting started. It is this second wave of transformation that Gleig’s research has detected, and that defines the core thesis of American Dharma. Gleig proposes that the characteristics of “Buddhist modernism” – firmly established by the success of the convert communities in the first wave of transformation – are now, in response both to internal pressures building within the convert communities themselves and to external forces occurring in American culture, entering upon a state of radical transformation into what she designates as an emerging form of “postmodern Buddhism”.
In three key chapters in the first half of her book, Gleig examines three different manifestations of the impact of modernist American culture on convert Buddhism – the secular mindfulness movement, the sexual revolution and its attendant abuses, and the growing confluence of psychotherapy and meditation. Here she shows how this modernist form of American Buddhism, with its predominantly white culture and its primary focus on individual wellbeing, contains within itself the seeds of the diversity challenges – both racial and generational – that are opening the doors to a variety of postmodernist trends. Her detailed account of how one such community in the convert lineage has struggled valiantly, but ultimately in vain, to overcome the racial divide between its majority white membership and its minority persons-of-color group is heartbreaking to read.
In the second half of the book, Gleig switches focus away from the modernist communities and their leadership, and toward the voices and the projects of the emerging postmodernist influencers in the American Buddhist community. Once again, three key chapters explore in depth three significant developments – the emergence of a radically new emphasis on social and racial justice as a necessary component of Buddhist practice, the growing popularity of online communities and social media networks with younger practitioners, and the tensions brewing between the aging “boomer” generation of teachers and the much younger “Gen X” teachers getting ready to assume leadership roles as the boomers begin to retire.
As she documents each of these manifestations of postmodernist challenges to the existing modernist ideals, Gleig is careful to point out how these new developments should be seen as simultaneous continuations of, and corrections to, the established forms of convert Buddhism. Her message is that Buddhism in America is growing into postmodernity; it is not being overthrown and reborn into something radically new and unfamiliar. It’s an evolution, not a revolution.
And yet, a careful reading of American Dharma leaves one with a palpable sense that Western Buddhism is, at this particular moment in the United States, experiencing severe growing pains that make its future at best unpredictable, and at worst unsustainable. Especially in the latter half of the book, Gleig necessarily devotes a significantly larger portion of her narrative to the postmodernist developments – this is, after all, the story she has set herself to tell in support of her thesis. For readers whose practice has been grounded for many years in the modernist tradition, it’s easy to feel unsettled, as if we are being completely overlooked, or even worse, being altogether set aside – in the gloomy metaphor of one longtime Zen teacher and blogger, “like a dinosaur”.
But perhaps the better perspective for us “dinosaurs” to hold as we read this book is one of appreciation for Gleig’s in-depth reporting on the various post-modernist trends impacting contemporary Western Buddhism. By letting us more clearly “see things as they really are” – a hallmark of wisdom in the Buddhist teachings – American Dharma can help us to respond more skillfully to the changes that are all but certain to come.
In her remarkable new book, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, scholar Ann Gleig makes a compelling case that Western Buddhism, as it currently exists in America, is anything but immature and undeveloped. On the contrary, in the relatively brief half century of its presence here, Buddhism has already passed through two important transformative stages – the first mostly completed, and the second well under way but still in process.
The first transformation has its origins not in Buddhism’s migration to the West, but rather in colonialism’s intrusion into the East. Gleig contends, convincingly, that the British and other European colonizers exerted a subtle but powerful influence on the traditional Buddhism being practiced in India, by virtue of their forceful introduction of Enlightenment values into the native culture. This colonial culture gave rise to the radically new idea of meditation as the pursuit of individual wellbeing, rather than an expression of community among individuals following shared traditions and rituals. It was this novel Enlightenment-based approach to mindfulness that was taught to the American students who arrived in India in the late 1960s to learn meditation from “traditional” masters. When these students returned to America in the 1970s to pass along what they had learned on their pilgrimages to the East, they were in fact spreading modern, not traditional, Buddhism.
While the modernism of Western Buddhism may have its infant roots in the post-colonial culture of the East, its growth and maturity are firmly rooted in contemporary America. Here, over the past four decades, Buddhism has attracted a mostly white, mostly well-educated, mostly well-to-do group of practitioners – overwhelmingly liberal in their political sympathies, devoted to European Enlightenment ideals of science and reason, and drawn to the psychotherapeutic benefits of mindfulness. Gleig refers to this meditation-centered, mostly secular, and highly psychologized version that has become the dominant form of Buddhist practice in America as “convert Buddhism”, underscoring the deep divide between it and the more traditional forms of Buddhism still practiced in the West by what she terms “the immigrant community” of mostly Asian-American, usually more religious, and generally less well-to-do practitioners.
This first transformative stage of Western Buddhism into its modernist form is now largely complete, but the split just described between “convert” and “immigrant” communities has laid the groundwork for a second, more dramatic transformation which is just getting started. It is this second wave of transformation that Gleig’s research has detected, and that defines the core thesis of American Dharma. Gleig proposes that the characteristics of “Buddhist modernism” – firmly established by the success of the convert communities in the first wave of transformation – are now, in response both to internal pressures building within the convert communities themselves and to external forces occurring in American culture, entering upon a state of radical transformation into what she designates as an emerging form of “postmodern Buddhism”.
In three key chapters in the first half of her book, Gleig examines three different manifestations of the impact of modernist American culture on convert Buddhism – the secular mindfulness movement, the sexual revolution and its attendant abuses, and the growing confluence of psychotherapy and meditation. Here she shows how this modernist form of American Buddhism, with its predominantly white culture and its primary focus on individual wellbeing, contains within itself the seeds of the diversity challenges – both racial and generational – that are opening the doors to a variety of postmodernist trends. Her detailed account of how one such community in the convert lineage has struggled valiantly, but ultimately in vain, to overcome the racial divide between its majority white membership and its minority persons-of-color group is heartbreaking to read.
In the second half of the book, Gleig switches focus away from the modernist communities and their leadership, and toward the voices and the projects of the emerging postmodernist influencers in the American Buddhist community. Once again, three key chapters explore in depth three significant developments – the emergence of a radically new emphasis on social and racial justice as a necessary component of Buddhist practice, the growing popularity of online communities and social media networks with younger practitioners, and the tensions brewing between the aging “boomer” generation of teachers and the much younger “Gen X” teachers getting ready to assume leadership roles as the boomers begin to retire.
As she documents each of these manifestations of postmodernist challenges to the existing modernist ideals, Gleig is careful to point out how these new developments should be seen as simultaneous continuations of, and corrections to, the established forms of convert Buddhism. Her message is that Buddhism in America is growing into postmodernity; it is not being overthrown and reborn into something radically new and unfamiliar. It’s an evolution, not a revolution.
And yet, a careful reading of American Dharma leaves one with a palpable sense that Western Buddhism is, at this particular moment in the United States, experiencing severe growing pains that make its future at best unpredictable, and at worst unsustainable. Especially in the latter half of the book, Gleig necessarily devotes a significantly larger portion of her narrative to the postmodernist developments – this is, after all, the story she has set herself to tell in support of her thesis. For readers whose practice has been grounded for many years in the modernist tradition, it’s easy to feel unsettled, as if we are being completely overlooked, or even worse, being altogether set aside – in the gloomy metaphor of one longtime Zen teacher and blogger, “like a dinosaur”.
But perhaps the better perspective for us “dinosaurs” to hold as we read this book is one of appreciation for Gleig’s in-depth reporting on the various post-modernist trends impacting contemporary Western Buddhism. By letting us more clearly “see things as they really are” – a hallmark of wisdom in the Buddhist teachings – American Dharma can help us to respond more skillfully to the changes that are all but certain to come.
September 15, 2023
Дуже добра книга.
November 11, 2019
The first half of the book provides some quite valuable background on how the Dharma (Buddhist teachings) arrived in North America. Though, the second half gets a little too much into the weeds of trying to dissect all the different strands of practices and communities that have since emerged (and largely leaving out some very relevant ones, such as Dzogchen--one of its most respected Western teachers, B. Alan Wallace, is mentioned a few times, but without much context, and you won't find his name in the index).
It's a rather scholarly book, and as such it may be of good value to those studying Buddhism as a religion/philosophy (or the mindfulness movement as a modern/postmodern trend), but there seems to be some repetition creeping in highlighting current trends and challenges. In the end, I didn't get a good sense of where things may be heading in the author's opinion--perhaps that's intentional, but if so, it wasn't made very clear.
My feeling is that the book could have been probably a third shorter and more to the point (plus another round of editing might have caught howlers like "Manuel of Insight" [on page 126]). Overall, it's a bit of a mixed effort in my view.
It's a rather scholarly book, and as such it may be of good value to those studying Buddhism as a religion/philosophy (or the mindfulness movement as a modern/postmodern trend), but there seems to be some repetition creeping in highlighting current trends and challenges. In the end, I didn't get a good sense of where things may be heading in the author's opinion--perhaps that's intentional, but if so, it wasn't made very clear.
My feeling is that the book could have been probably a third shorter and more to the point (plus another round of editing might have caught howlers like "Manuel of Insight" [on page 126]). Overall, it's a bit of a mixed effort in my view.
March 27, 2022
I was hoping for more. For anyone who reads Tricycle and Buddhadharma regularly, as I do, there's not much here you don't already know (after the introduction anyway). More or less a survey of issues for younger contemporary Buddhists. Nothing wrong with that, but the analysis of crucial issues like the role of science and the evolving nature of sanghas is relatively thin. The introductory survey of the development of Buddhist modernism is useful, although I wish Gleig had pursued the issues beyond generalities. How you can overlook Richard Davison's work on mindfulness and trauma in this context is beyond me.
April 6, 2019
This book is fantastic and describes Buddhist modernism and postmodernism in a clear and enjoyable way!
July 10, 2021
Holy smokes this is a good book. Rarely do I find an academically-oriented book to be a page turner, but I couldn’t put this one down. Anne Gleig articulates and explores the vast array of issues contemporary Buddhism faces as it continues to be culturally interpreted by American practitioners. Highly recommended to all American Buddhists.
September 24, 2020
A remarkable and wide ranging study of the new forms of Buddhism emerging in the US.
Ann Gleig looks beyond Buddhism Modernism (that is, roughly, the process by which Buddhist philosophy and practice reconfigured itself to meet the challenges of modernism - science, psychology, industrialisation, the decline of religious metaphysics, rationalism, global connectivity, naturalism, etc) to the postmodern figures emerging on the horizon.
She follows groups like Buddhist Geeks, Brooklyn Zen Centre, Dharma Punx, and the Insight Meditation Society as they grapple with the shortcomings of Buddhist modernism (which has discarded much of Buddhism in its transition to the West), the challenges of structural oppression and sexual abuse scandals, and the potential of technology and more fluid approaches to meditation.
What makes this book so powerful is it’s accessible writing style, the huge breadth of subjects, and it’s deep engagement with scholars like Donald Lopez Jr, Erik Braun, David L. McMahan, Richard K. Payne and many more. Absolutely invaluable.
Ann Gleig looks beyond Buddhism Modernism (that is, roughly, the process by which Buddhist philosophy and practice reconfigured itself to meet the challenges of modernism - science, psychology, industrialisation, the decline of religious metaphysics, rationalism, global connectivity, naturalism, etc) to the postmodern figures emerging on the horizon.
She follows groups like Buddhist Geeks, Brooklyn Zen Centre, Dharma Punx, and the Insight Meditation Society as they grapple with the shortcomings of Buddhist modernism (which has discarded much of Buddhism in its transition to the West), the challenges of structural oppression and sexual abuse scandals, and the potential of technology and more fluid approaches to meditation.
What makes this book so powerful is it’s accessible writing style, the huge breadth of subjects, and it’s deep engagement with scholars like Donald Lopez Jr, Erik Braun, David L. McMahan, Richard K. Payne and many more. Absolutely invaluable.
March 9, 2024
This book was an intense and academic dive into the current state of American Buddhism with a particular bend towards a post-modern analysis. Buddhism in America is struggling with the same issues many other institutions have faced: aging leaders, racial diversity, a desire from new members for political engagement. American Dharma takes an anthropological view inside many American Buddhist communities and analyzes some key issues facing them and potential resolutions. This is the first "Buddhism Book" that has been less teaching, more analysis/cultural studies. In some ways, I felt like I'm too early into my Buddhism practice to see so deep inside the belly of the beast. In particular the guru sexual scandals section was disenchanting to read so early on. I wouldn't recommend this book for everyone, but it was well worth reading especially to learn more about other lineages.
December 14, 2019
Only 77 pages in so far. It's a comprehensive and playful read on the various dynamics historical and current at play with the ever transportable ~buddhism~.
I haven't read McMahan so it's a good catch-up that covers a lot of ground and perhaps pays too much attention to some of the sideshow acts. I'm hoping it breaks out into a strong vision rather than mere catalogue. The introduction says as much: to pick up on the end of a modernist and describe a way forward for post-colonial, post-secular and yes, post-modern interpretation of the tradition.
I'm enjoying it.
I haven't read McMahan so it's a good catch-up that covers a lot of ground and perhaps pays too much attention to some of the sideshow acts. I'm hoping it breaks out into a strong vision rather than mere catalogue. The introduction says as much: to pick up on the end of a modernist and describe a way forward for post-colonial, post-secular and yes, post-modern interpretation of the tradition.
I'm enjoying it.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews