Chapter 4. New developments from 1990 to 2020¶

The preceding three chapters examined modern Buddhism through intellectual history (Buddhist modernism), geography (its transmission to the West), and disciplinary history (methods and advances in academic research). This chapter focuses on the thirty years from 1990 to around 2020. After the Cold War ended, with the rise of the internet and accelerating globalization, several developments in the Buddhist world merit attention and point to tensions still unfolding. Developments after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 are sufficiently distinct to constitute a phase of their own and are treated separately in the next chapter.

This chapter does not aim at completeness. It selects some of the clearest and most representative new threads of these thirty years and considers them within the historical framework established by the book.

1. China's large-scale Buddhist revival¶

Since the 1990s, mainland China has undergone a Buddhist revival of astonishing scale. This is probably the largest chapter in contemporary global Buddhist history, and the one least adequately understood by the outside world.

An outline of its scale. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the infrastructure of Chinese Buddhism had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. In the 1990s, rapid economic growth and a relative relaxation of religious policy allowed widespread reconstruction and restoration of monasteries. From the 2000s onward, Buddhism spread more rapidly among the urban middle classes. New "Buddhist cultural parks," usually containing large Buddha statues and commercialized facilities for worship, appeared across the country. Online Buddhist media reached hundreds of millions of users through videos of religious assemblies, monastic teachers' blogs, and Buddhist apps. Some estimates suggest that Buddhist believers in China today may number over 200 million under a broad definition that includes anyone who has worshipped the Buddha, purchased Buddhist religious objects, or donated to a monastery. The number of believers who have formally taken refuge, under a stricter definition, is much lower.

The divergence between Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan tantra. The Buddhist revival in mainland China has traditionally centered on Chinese Buddhism, particularly Pure Land and Chan. Since the 1990s, however, Tibetan Buddhism, especially tantric practice, has aroused particularly strong interest among educated urban Han Chinese, producing what is called the "Tibetan tantra craze." This trend has had several complex consequences. It created new connections between Tibetan teachers and Han Chinese students. The highly sensitive politics of Tibet complicates the character of these connections. This trend also produced large numbers of "false gurus" without lineage credentials and commercialized "transmissions of esoteric teachings," phenomena criticized by both the authorities and traditional religious circles.

The policy of Sinicizing religion. Around 2015, Chinese religious policy entered a new phase in which "the Sinicization of religion" became the official framework. This means bringing religious interpretation and practice into conformity with Chinese culture and core socialist values. In Buddhism, this has meant restrictions on religious influence from abroad, especially strict controls on Tibetan Buddhism's connections with the Dalai Lama's network; regulation of commercial operations at monasteries; and requirements for monastics' political loyalty. The long-term effects of this policy remain difficult to assess.¹

The scholarly revival of Chinese Buddhism. Meanwhile, scholars of Chinese Buddhism with modern academic training, some monastic and some lay, have been introducing modern historical criticism into the field. They have also been seeking an intellectual basis on which Chinese Buddhism can enter dialogue with global Buddhist scholarship. Master Yinshun's influence (see Chapter 12.1) continues to extend in this context.

2. Ambedkarite Buddhism, India's "New Buddhism"¶

India is Buddhism's birthplace, yet after the Islamic invasions and the Hindu revival, Buddhism almost disappeared from the subcontinent for nearly seven hundred years (see Chapter 8.6). One of the twentieth century's most striking reversals was the mass conversion movement led by B. R. Ambedkar (1891 to 1956).

Born a Dalit, a member of an "untouchable" community, Ambedkar received professional training leading to a doctorate in law and became one of the chief drafters of India's Constitution. He devoted his life to ending the Hindu caste system's discrimination against Dalits. Late in life, he concluded that Hinduism was institutionally incapable of accepting real equality. On 14 October 1956, Ambedkar embraced Buddhism and led a mass conversion at Nagpur. According to Zelliot, the associated ceremonies on 14–15 October drew hundreds of thousands of participants.² He died two months later.

Since the 1956 conversion movement, Ambedkarite Buddhism, also called Nav-Buddha or New Buddhism, has developed in India's Dalit communities, chiefly in Maharashtra. The movement contributed to the growth of India's Buddhist population. The nationwide Buddhist population reported in the Indian census, as cited by Queen, rose from about 181,000 in 1951 to about 3,250,000 in 1961. These figures are not a separate count of members of the Ambedkar movement. Ambedkar saw in Buddhism intellectual resources for overturning caste discrimination from within. In this reading, no-self rejects hierarchies based on birth. Dependent origination presents people as products of social conditions rather than occupants of divinely ordained positions. Equality is exemplified by the Buddha's acceptance of people from every social class. Ambedkar's interpretation is a highly politicized form of Buddhist modernism with a strong liberation-theology emphasis. This interpretation and the Western insight meditation movement, with its emphasis on inner cultivation, inhabit almost different worlds.²

The importance of Ambedkarite Buddhism has long been underestimated in discussions of global Buddhist history. It is one of contemporary Buddhism's fastest-growing communities, and its question of Buddhism as an instrument of political liberation has not been addressed in the same way by any other form of Buddhist modernism.

A qualification is necessary. Ambedkarite Buddhism is deeply controversial in Indian politics. Its identity as a religious, political, or social movement, its relationships with Dalit political parties, and its positions in debates over India's caste system are highly sensitive political issues, interpreted very differently by the various sides. This book is inclined to stay out of these disputes. At this level, they are fundamentally questions of contemporary Indian politics, rather than Buddhist philosophy or intellectual history, and fall outside its scope. Its focus remains on how Ambedkar drew a philosophy of liberation from Buddhist doctrinal resources and on that framework's place in intellectual history.

3. Engaged Buddhism, from individual liberation to social change¶

The concept of "Engaged Buddhism" was first proposed by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (Thích Nhất Hạnh, 1926 to 2022) during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. It means combining the Buddhist principles of compassion, mindfulness, and no-self with direct responses to social suffering. This involves both inward cultivation and outward action.

Thich Nhat Hanh was this tradition's most important spokesperson. He led humanitarian relief efforts during the Vietnam War and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. Later exiled in France, he founded Plum Village in the Dordogne Valley in southwestern France in 1982, developing a form of Engaged Buddhism centered on collective mindfulness practice. Plum Village became one of the West's most important centers of Engaged Buddhism, and his books, including The Miracle of Mindfulness and Reconciliation, influenced millions of readers. He died in Huế, Vietnam, in 2022 at the age of ninety-five.³

Engaged Buddhism addresses an extremely broad range of issues, including antiwar and peace activism, service to incarcerated people, abolition of the death penalty, environmental protection, and, most recently, LGBTQ+ rights. Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage has adopted a relatively open position on the last issue, something uncommon among Buddhist traditions.

Engaged Buddhism also faces an enduring philosophical tension. At the heart of the Buddhist tradition is liberation from suffering, whose roots, according to the early texts, lie in inward craving and ignorance rather than external social structures. Does making Buddhism socially engaged deepen our understanding of suffering, since social structures are also its conditions? Or does it force a tradition of inner cultivation into a role as social critic that it was never intended to assume? Different practitioners of Engaged Buddhism handle this tension differently; no shared answer has emerged.

4. Buddhism and science in an ongoing dialogue¶

In 1987, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the neuroscientist Francisco Varela (1946 to 2001) jointly initiated the Mind & Life Institute to establish systematic dialogue between Tibetan Buddhist practice traditions, particularly traditional knowledge of mind, and cognitive science and neuroscience. It is the most highly institutionalized of the efforts at dialogue between Buddhism and science.

Over the past thirty years, this dialogue has produced extensive research. Neuroscientists studying the brains of long-term meditators have found correlations between long-term meditation and brain plasticity; Richard Davidson's laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is one of the most important centers of this work. Philosophers such as Dan Zahavi and Evan Thompson have compared Buddhist theories of consciousness with European phenomenology. After coauthoring The Embodied Mind (1991) with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, the cognitive scientist Francisco Varela proposed the research framework of "neurophenomenology," later taken up by Thompson, to combine meditators' first-person phenomenological reports with third-person neuroscientific measurements.⁴

The achievements of this dialogue are real. There is now considerable empirical evidence for the effects of certain meditation practices on specific psychological and neural functions. Some of Buddhism's fine-grained descriptions of mind, such as the momentary character of mental events and the trainability of attention, have attracted serious consideration in cognitive science.

The criticisms are real as well. Public narratives about meditation benefiting the brain sometimes oversimplify the complexity of research findings. Does placing Buddhist practice within an empirical research framework already assume that Buddhism is a system of psychological training amenable to scientific testing? That would build in Buddhist modernism's premise instead of treating it as a hypothesis to be tested. This remains a contested methodological question.⁵

A thought experiment. Is liberation a brain state? Pursuing this dialogue to its limit brings us to an unavoidable philosophical question. Suppose that one day a precise neurotechnology could copy the brain state of an arahant or a buddha exactly onto another person's brain. Would that person attain the same fruit at that moment? If liberation is ultimately a brain state measurable from a third-person perspective, the answer would seem to be yes. This is precisely what the premise that Buddhism is a scientifically testable system of psychological training looks like when pushed to its limit. Yet no-self, one of early Buddhism's central teachings, deprives the question of its footing. The question conceals an unexamined subject, "this person." Described as it stands, the scenario involves one stream of consciousness being overwritten partway through. Another stream in a radically different state replaces it and now directs the same body. We must distinguish two senses of "cutting off." Cutting off the defilements means that a stream brings craving to an end through its own transformation. What happens here, however, is interruption. The earlier stream is intercepted and ceases with its craving wholly undiminished. The defilements remain, but the stream is cut off. The later stream is installed in a form already free of craving. Thus, at no point does either stream undergo the cutting off of defilements. One stream ends with craving, and another begins without it. There is no intervening event in which "someone cuts off craving." In the claim that "this person instantly attains the fruit," the "person" persisting throughout is an illusion produced by the sharing of a single body. Seen as it is, there is no common subject who was first bound and then liberated. The question is misconceived from the outset, rather than merely difficult to answer. More plainly, by early Buddhist criteria, overwriting a stream does not approach nirvāṇa but instead approaches annihilation. One stream is destroyed and another created, whereas nirvāṇa is explicitly neither annihilation nor the establishment of some other permanent entity (see Chapter 1.5).⁶ This thought experiment therefore does not pose an objection to Buddhism; instead, it shows the usefulness of no-self. A whole class of problems troubles contemporary physicalism and discussions of personal identity, including whether I remain the same self after teleportation, copying, or a brain replacement. Early Buddhism need not become entangled in these problems because it never presupposes the "I" being transported, copied, or questioned. What remains is a real question cleansed of the illusion of self. Liberation is a property of a causal stream, rather than a state possessed by a self. Must the cessation of craving arise through that stream's own transformation, through cultivation of the path and seeing the Dharma, rather than being directly installed by some external means? This question concerns only the causal stream, without referring to a self. It is also the level that the dialogue between Buddhism and science has yet to reach.

5. Women's ordination, advances and resistance¶

The question of bhikṣuṇī ordination (see Essay 9, Section 4) has seen several concrete historical developments since the 1990s.

Sri Lanka. In 1996, ten Sri Lankan women received full bhikṣuṇī ordination at Sarnath in India, with the participation of Sri Lankan bhikkhus and the Korean sangha. In 1998, bhikṣuṇī ordinations began to take place within Sri Lanka, and the numbers ordained gradually increased thereafter. The councils of elders of all three main fraternities withheld official recognition, although individual elders in each publicly expressed support. In June 2025, the Supreme Court ordered that national identity cards be issued recognizing their status as bhikṣuṇīs, marking the beginning of change at the governmental level.

Thailand. Thailand's religious authorities have consistently and explicitly opposed bhikṣuṇī ordination. The 1928 resolution of the official monastic body, Mahā Thera Samākhom, remains in force. In 2003, however, the scholar and monastic Chatsumarn Kabilsingh received full bhikṣuṇī ordination in Sri Lanka, becoming Dhammananda Bhikkhunī. She established a practice center in Thailand. Although the country's religious authorities do not recognize her legal status, her teaching activities continue in practice. The Thai situation remains an unstable gray area.

Myanmar. Traditionally, this has been the most conservative setting. Women renunciants in Myanmar are thilashin, "ten-precept nuns." They shave their heads, wear pink or orange robes, and observe ten precepts. Within the formal sangha system, however, they have never been granted an institutional standing equivalent to bhikṣuṇīs. Their status lies between laywomen and fully ordained nuns. Myanmar's State Saṅgha Mahā Nāyaka Committee has long taken an explicitly negative position toward any discussion of formally restoring bhikṣuṇī ordination.

In recent years, general attention to nuns' status in Myanmar has increased, while the position on bhikṣuṇī ordination remains unchanged. The highest body of monastic adjudication resolved that the bhikṣuṇī sangha must not be revived, closing discussion of the matter. The 2021 military coup made all institutional change in Myanmar highly uncertain, including religious affairs. At the time of writing, no change in the official position had been seen.⁷

Impetus from the West. Western women Buddhist practitioners and feminist scholars are important forces advancing international discussion of bhikṣuṇī ordination. Influential Pāli scholars such as Bhikkhu Bodhi have publicly supported its legal validity, creating a voice within Theravāda distinct from official positions. Bhikkhu Anālayo's comparative research on the Pāli Vinaya and related Sanskrit texts has provided scholarly support for the feasibility of bhikṣuṇī ordination.⁸

This overview of the revival of bhikṣuṇī ordination also includes developments in the 2020s. Since the beginning of the 2020s, substantive breakthroughs have included large-scale ordinations in Bhutan, the emergence of a Cambodian bhikṣuṇī sangha, and the formation of a generation of local preceptors in Sri Lanka. See Section 3 of the next chapter.

6. The radicalization of Buddhist nationalism¶

Essays 9 (Theravāda) and 11 (Tibetan Buddhism) have repeatedly touched on Buddhist nationalism. Since the 1990s, it has taken more radical and destructive forms in several regions.

Myanmar's 969 movement and the Rohingya crisis. As detailed in Chapter 9.5, the Buddhist nationalist movement represented by Ashin Wirathu has directed radical hate speech at Muslim minorities, especially the Rohingya, and has been linked to systematic violence against the Rohingya, which reached internationally recognized proportions of ethnic cleansing in 2017. This is the most serious twenty-first-century case of violence in Buddhism's name and has provoked extensive criticism internationally and within Buddhist communities.

Religious violence in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) intensified its activities around 2012, promoting anti-Muslim and anti-Christian sentiment and provoking several incidents of violence against religious minority communities. This also forms part of the background to the anti-Muslim riots following the 2019 Easter bombings.

The structural paradox of "Buddhist nationalism." As this book noted in Chapter 9.5, an evident internal contradiction exists between the Buddhist doctrines of compassion, no-self, and non-killing and Buddhist nationalist practices of hatred and violence toward outgroups. Nationalist movements selectively use Buddhist symbolic resources to clothe a form of identity politics in religion. This does not mean that Buddhism caused nationalism. Distinguishing Buddhist doctrinal positions from political movements acting under Buddhism's banner is a basic prerequisite for analyzing these phenomena. For further divisions within the sangha after Myanmar's 2021 military coup, see Section 2 of the next chapter.

6a. Another direction for Theravāda, transmission to non-Theravāda regions¶

Theravāda's expansion in the second half of the twentieth century is usually recorded only as a westward movement. In this account, meditation practices enter societies without a Buddhist tradition, shed their doctrinal framework, and eventually become secular mindfulness (see Chapter 2 of this essay). Around the 1990s, another direction became clearer, much smaller in scale but different in character. Theravāda monastic communities and meditation practices entered Chinese Buddhist regions, where Mahāyāna Buddhism had been established for over a thousand years. Taiwan is the most fully documented case of this movement.

The chronological outline. In 1968, the Chinese translation of What the Buddha Taught became the earliest translated work by a Theravāda master published in Taiwan. In the late 1980s, ethnic Chinese immigrants from Myanmar established Taiwan's first Theravāda practice center with permanent premises in Zhonghe, New Taipei. In 1988, Zhang Citian returned from the United States and founded the New Rain Society, beginning a line of local early Buddhist organizations. In 1995, S. N. Goenka first visited Taiwan to give a ten-day course attended by 220 students. In 1998, Myanmar's Pa-Auk Sayadaw made his first visit and led an intensive retreat lasting a month and a half, his first journey beyond Theravāda's traditional regions. After 2000, teachers in the Mahāsi lineage visited year after year. Participants call the period from the lifting of martial law in 1987 through 2007 the "source-seeking period," and the years from 2008 onward the "period of taking root." By their own account, the dividing point is the year when more local people began receiving Theravāda ordination and establishing independent centers, with new centers in both the Mahāsi and Pa-Auk lineages. During the preceding twenty years, however many teachers came from Myanmar, Thailand, or Sri Lanka, their teachings were largely hosted on the premises and through the arrangements of Chinese Buddhist monasteries and centers.

It encountered no blank slate. In the West, Theravāda faced societies without Buddhism and could therefore export techniques alone, leaving doctrine at home. In Chinese Buddhist regions, it faced an entire mature set of counterparts. These included established accounts of liberation, established monastic institutions, a fifteen-hundred-year tradition of scriptural translation, and a familiar Buddhist Chinese vocabulary. The friction thus occurred only in the details, rather than between belief and unbelief. Taiwan has seen debates over whether vegetarianism is a minimum requirement of monastic life, whether bhikkhus may accept money directly, and whether translations of Pāli texts should use the established terms of older Chinese translations or develop a new vocabulary (see Chapter 10.11, Section 7). The last question appears technical, but is actually the deepest. Use the old translations, and readers automatically bring fifteen hundred years of accumulated Chinese Buddhist usage. Coin new terms, and that accumulation is severed, at the cost of nobody recognizing the words.

Results and scale. After thirty years, six independent strands, and a few dozen practice centers, the participants' own assessment remains the same. Viewed solely from Taiwan's existing Chinese culture or Chinese Buddhism, Theravāda has had very little, almost no, influence on Taiwanese Buddhism or society, and remains a tradition from outside. This is an assessment by participants in a book privately printed within the religious community. This book takes its general direction, without using it quantitatively. Even with that qualification, it remains a counterexample to a familiar narrative. Buddhism's westward transmission is often told as a success story. In that account, a blank slate and a ready-made set of techniques produce a complete community in a few decades. Taiwan shows that entering a place already fully occupied by a Buddhist tradition is harder than entering a blank slate. Mainland China presents another situation. Dai regions of Yunnan already belong to the Theravāda world, while encounters with Theravāda in Han Chinese regions are subject to a different set of institutional conditions (see Chapter 10.11, Section 9). Encounters in Southeast Asian Chinese communities have their own historical conditions, too. Chinese residents have long lived alongside Theravāda societies. This book does not pursue them here.⁹

7. The rise of digital Buddhism¶

The internet's impact on Buddhism became apparent in the late 1990s and accelerated in the 2010s. YouTube, podcasts, public accounts, and apps have enabled Buddhist teachings from every tradition to circulate on an unprecedented scale. Someone in rural Brazil can listen online to a Burmese meditation teacher's insight instructions; someone in a Chinese city can receive daily teachings from masters at various Chinese Buddhist centers through public accounts. This breaks geographical barriers and some traditions' control over channels of transmission. Anyone can start a YouTube channel and call themselves a "meditation master."

Through 2020, this digitization still followed a pattern in which offline activity was primary and online activity supplementary. The internet provided channels of dissemination, while practice centers and retreats remained the physical centers of practitioners' lives. The COVID-19 pandemic reversed this pattern within a few months in 2020. Its consequences include online sanghas, a hybrid norm, and AI's entry into Buddhism. They belong to another phase, discussed in the next chapter.

8. Buddhism amid ecological and climate crises¶

From the 1990s onward, ecological protection and climate change gradually became some of the world's most urgent issues. Buddhist traditions began responding in different ways.

Tree ordination in Thailand. Thai forest monks developed a distinctive form of conservation. They held ordination ceremonies for large trees, symbolically making them bhikkhus and wrapping their trunks in orange robes. After the ceremony, cutting down such a tree becomes a demeritorious act, baap, in the local cultural setting, establishing a moral constraint around the forest. Darlington records that protection does not depend on robes alone. Village committees also manage and patrol the forest, and economic alternatives are provided. She acknowledges that their effectiveness remains to be observed. Ecologically engaged monks took up this issue in the late 1980s, and the practice spread from the 1990s onward, becoming a distinctive combination of Thailand's environmental movement and Buddhist tradition.¹⁰

Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects. Joanna Macy (born 1929) combined the Buddhist idea of dependent origination, understood as the interdependence of all phenomena, with systems theory and deep ecology to develop the Work That Reconnects. This approach to spiritual and psychological responses to ecological crisis has been used in dozens of countries worldwide.

The new urgency of the climate crisis. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate change has moved from a problem to be faced in the future to a disaster already happening. Buddhist organizations have increasingly issued shared declarations on climate change, including declarations from the World Fellowship of Buddhists and joint statements by major practice centers, bringing responses to the crisis within a framework of Buddhist moral responsibility. This trend continues to develop, with considerable differences in how deeply and in what ways the traditions participate.

The philosophical sources of "ecodharma." Ecological Buddhism generally bases its theory on dependent origination and compassion. Here dependent origination means that all that exists is interdependent, so no "self" exists in complete separation from others. Compassion is understood as ecological care for everything sentient and even insentient. Critics point out, however, that early Buddhism's ecological concern was limited. It primarily addressed the suffering of sentient beings, rather than the health of ecosystems as a whole. Reading modern ecological ethics directly into early Buddhist texts is a selective interpretation. This debate is a particular expression of Buddhist modernism's problems in the ecological sphere.

9. Enduring structural tensions (1990 to 2020)¶

Looking back from the 2020s, several structural tensions in the Buddhist world have become clearer and harder to avoid over the preceding thirty years.

The core concern with liberation versus the demand for social engagement. The Buddhist tradition's central goal is liberation from suffering, which in the scriptures primarily points toward inward transformation. Yet amid globalization, ecological crisis, and political violence, more and more practitioners feel that both inward transformation and outward action are indispensable. Different traditions and individuals offer different answers to how the two should be balanced.

Authority and democracy. Traditional systems of Buddhist transmission face unprecedented challenges in an age of globalization and digitization. These systems include guru and teacher-student relationships, Vinaya credentials, and Dharma succession. Anyone can call themselves a teacher online, build a community of followers, or offer meditation classes, while traditional means of recognizing credentials often cannot cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. The question of whose teachings count has become increasingly difficult to answer.

The depth of tradition versus the breadth of access. Lowering the barriers to practices such as mindfulness, insight, and loving-kindness meditation allows more people to encounter them. The cost is separation from their original context and a weakening of their central doctrinal framework. Finding ways to reach more people without losing depth is a common contemporary challenge across traditions.

Ethnic identity versus universal values. In China, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, the binding of Buddhism to ethnic or national identity has sometimes strengthened its social cohesion and sometimes turned it into an ideological instrument of exclusion and violence. This association has a long history (see Essays 9 to 11) and has become more acute in the present.

Closing remarks. From India before the Buddha, through the Buddhist schools, Mahāyāna, tantra, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, tathāgatagarbha, and the Theravāda, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions, to the changes unfolding today, the sheer length of this historical chain tells us something. Buddhism is an extraordinarily tenacious tradition, repeatedly adjusting its forms across political, cultural, and linguistic transformations. That does not guarantee that every particular form deserves preservation, or that it made the right choices at every historical moment. History is complex, and this book has tried to face that complexity honestly.

Further reading¶

• Ann Gleig. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. (New developments in American Buddhism since the 2010s, with a comprehensive analysis of digitization, gender, race, and other issues.)

References¶