Is Buddhist Enlightenment Evolving to Become More Communal?

One thesis in my recently published book, What Is Buddhist Enlightenment? (Oxford University Press, 2016), is that “enlightenment” in our time will become more communal, collective, and inter-subjectively shared than in any earlier epoch in the history of Buddhism. This point may seem entirely counter-intuitive given the strength of modern individualism in contrast to the strong communal sensibilities of earlier traditions. Reasons for asserting it and evidence in support of it are plentiful, however. The extraordinarily high level of global awareness that we now share with others all around the world, the undeniable economic and political interconnectedness that we all feel, the recent realization that we all share one planet and that the human-created ecological disaster we will all face together are unprecedented developments in human self-awareness. These realizations link us together more coherently than ever before possible in human history. The invention of “socialism” at the height of the emergence of modern individualism and capitalism, and the emergence from that invention of social democracies structured to make basic human services available to all citizens is yet another sign of our growing collective awareness.

Perhaps even more important is the moral recognition common to many people today that our past traditions of exclusion and otherness are incompatible with a deeper sense of our shared humanity. Increasingly we find discrimination on the bases of class, caste, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and a growing number of other differences to be morally unacceptable in ways that it hasn’t ever been in human history. And now that we recognize our shared ancestry in evolutionary terms, we can no longer avoid the conclusion that we’re all in this together. All of these substantial historical developments make the additional factor of global connectivity through our communication technologies look like a mere after thought.

When we look closely at what was occurring in the overall history of Indian religion at the time of the emergence of Buddhism we discover the extraordinary degree to which earlier collective traditions of religion in India were becoming radically individualized. Following this break-through period of the Upanisads and early Buddhist sutras, Brahmanical/Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities became the most highly individualized on the planet. The doctrine of karma, which governs the important moral sphere of culture, left no doubt in anyone’s mind that the drama of human life is ultimately individual. Each person’s actions were understood to create karmic paths having an affect on that individual’s subsequent life rather than on the family or larger community as had typically been true of earlier traditions there and elsewhere. Only faint hints of collective karma--the ancient and contemporary sense that the character of our society is shaped by our past communal acts--can be found in the entire history of Buddhism. In so individualized a spiritual tradition, the more ancient tribal and communal orientation had no significant foothold, even though it was clearly present in India in the early Vedas and pre-Vedic traditions, just as it was and continued to be in the other major Ur-religion—Judaism.

Reinforcing this individualist understanding of human life was the prevalence of meditation as the most highly revered spiritual practice in the Indian and Buddhist cultural worlds. Since meditation is what you do in the privatized depths of your own mind, and since the karma that it generates or disposes is individually understood, an extraordinarily wide divergence between the spiritual standing of high achieving sadhus and ordinary people would naturally arise as a widespread cultural assumption. Even the traces of collective understanding that emerged in the early Mahayana concern for compassion and the deferral of nirvana couldn’t reverse this overwhelming tendency to think of spiritual matters in strictly personal terms. The most exciting, most compelling religious and cultural developments at the time of the emergence of Buddhism were overwhelmingly individual in orientation and their historic contribution to human cultural evolution cannot be over estimated. In fact there are good reasons to suspect that this highly sophisticated individualism of Indian religion is precisely the reason that it appealed so strongly to modern Western converts. It fit perfectly with the individualized tendencies that already defined modernity in the West.

In consequence, and in some degree of irony, it may be that a greater sense of collectivity and community could be one contribution that contemporary Buddhists are in a good position to add to the evolution of Buddhism. In the wake of important developments such as modern historical consciousness and evolutionary theory, we understand more than any early sage could the extent to which the achievement of enlightenment in one person is just as much the achievement of a family, a community, a society, and a particular history. We understand that greatness never appears in a vacuum and that human excellence is always cultivated in conjunction with others rather than in spite of them. Enlightenment in our time includes the sense that societies establish the conditions for individual achievement and that all possibilities for personal accomplishment are shaped in advance by historical and social forces. The individual self has been effectively decentered in the philosophy of our time and this emerging understanding is already refashioning what we take “enlightenment” to be.

The extent to which both individual self-creation and the cultivation of community are already woven into the fabric of contemporary Western Buddhism as interrelated tasks is abundantly clear in the interaction between thriving traditions of meditation and the widespread activism of Buddhists on issues of environmental and social justice. Personal fulfillment and communal responsibility in our time cannot be as clearly separated as they have been in past cultures. We understand how focusing exclusively on our own individual states of enlightenment in fact reduces the scope of who we are. A quest for self-actualization that ignores one’s responsibility for the larger whole is seriously deficient. Focusing narrowly on the project of self-transformation robs us of a fundamental facet of enlightenment--the sympathies and openness that interpersonal connection and solidarity produce. Increasingly, our moment in cultural history encourages us to make a developmental move from seeking enlightenment as a personal benefit to seeking enlightenment as the shared maturation and flourishing of humanity.

All of these reasons press upon us the new requirement that we go beyond the modern individualistic understanding of ourselves and of human life. In this sense our task is to re-incorporate the ancient sense of collectivity that we can still see in older communal religions, a reverence for what is larger and greater than ourselves, but now enlarged far beyond the family and our own ethnic and religious group. As a consequence of these realizations, enlightenment will increasingly entail participation in collective work to create a global society of equal opportunity and shared responsibility.

One final point is important: that the community sensibility that we will cultivate in ourselves cannot be taken, as it was in traditional societies, to be in opposition to and in exclusion of individual uniqueness. Traditional communities, as we can see clearly in historical studies, required the suppression of individuality, an intentional, security-motivated demand for conformity. By contrast, enlightened collectivity will now need to incorporate the widest possible range of human diversity. This is our democratic vision of a global society that can encompass the radical pluralism of significantly different quests for enlightened self-creation without feeling the compulsive need to suppress otherness and difference. As Buddhist oppression of Hindus in Sri Lanka and Muslims in Myanmar shows, a wider tolerance for other conceptions of spiritual life and other human interests needs to be cultivated. This is our challenge, the emergence of an enlightenment that expands indefinitely to open the scope of what it means to be a human being and what it could mean among human beings to achieve some unique form of distinction or excellence.