I have mostly read the second chapter of The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David McMahan, which I mentioned a couple of days ago. I remain appreciative of McMahan's grasp of a very complex subject.
In the second chapter, McMahan illustrates that in Buddhism, traditionalism/modernism, and Asian/Western, do not neatly fit into simple dichotomies or fall along a clearly defined continuum. There are several "modernisms" emerging in Buddhism, he says. And while this is a global phenomenon, Asian teachers have been the principal "modernizers."
In this chapter McMahan addresses the "Orientalists" who were among the first westerners to pay attention to Buddhism as anything other than Asian idolatry. The Orientalists' reading of the Pali texts made the historical Buddha out to be a remarkably modern fellow whose ideas harmonized well with their post-Enlightenment (in the European sense) perspective. McMahan writes,
"Orientalist scholars located 'true Buddhism' in the texts of the ancient past and delimited it to carefully selected teachings, excluding any consideration of living Buddhists, except reformer who themselves were modernizing their tradition in dialogue with western modernity. ... sympathetic Orientalists presented the Buddha as a protoscientific naturalist in his own time."
Western scholars persisted in painting "original" Buddhism as a pure, naturalist philosophy that got buried under centuries of Asian superstition and spiritism. You can see a variation of this same perspective today in Stephen Batchelor as well as in Buddhist naturalist ideas currently flitting around in academia.
I believe that a large body of western practitioners have climbed out of the Orientalists' particular cultural/philosophical box, however. I believe -- hope, anyway -- that the old Orientalist perspective will have little influence on the eventual shape of what might be "western" Buddhism.
Other kinds of "demythologizing" and "detraditionalizing" are emerging that are "not simply a western invention,"�McMahan says. Among these are efforts to find deeper, "existential" meaning in texts that have been understood more literally in the past. An example of this would be the Mount Meru cosmology, which for the most part went from being believed in literally to being interpreted allegorically. McMahan used the example of the Wheel of Life, which modernizing Asian teachers such as Chogyam Trungpa saw as illustrating states of mind.
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