Chapter 4: New Developments from 1990 to 2020¶

The preceding three chapters examined modern Buddhism from the perspectives of intellectual history—Buddhist modernism—geography—Buddhism's transmission to the West—and disciplinary history—the methods and advances of academic research. This chapter focuses on the three decades from 1990 to around 2020. After the end of the Cold War, amid the rise of the internet and accelerating globalization, several developments in the Buddhist world deserve attention and point toward tensions still unfolding. Developments after the COVID-19 pandemic are sufficiently distinct to constitute a stage of their own and are treated separately in the next chapter.

This chapter does not aim at completeness. It selects several of the clearest and most representative new currents in these three decades and places them within the historical framework established by the book.

I. The Large-Scale Buddhist Revival in China¶

Since the 1990s, mainland China has experienced a Buddhist revival of astonishing scale. It is probably the largest—and one of the least adequately understood outside China—chapters in contemporary global Buddhist history.

The outline of its scale. After the Cultural Revolution, the infrastructure of Chinese Buddhism had to be rebuilt almost from nothing. With rapid economic development and the relative relaxation of religious policy in the 1990s, monasteries were reconstructed and restored on a large scale. After the 2000s, Buddhism's popularity among the urban middle class accelerated, and newly built "Buddhist cultural parks," normally incorporating colossal buddha images and commercialized facilities for worship, appeared throughout the country. Online Buddhist media—videos of Dharma assemblies, monastic blogs, and Buddhist apps—reached hundreds of millions of users. Some estimates place the number of Buddhist adherents in China today, broadly defined to include people who have worshiped a buddha, purchased Buddhist devotional objects, or donated at a monastery, above two hundred million. The number of formally refuged adherents under a strict definition is far lower.

The divergence between Chinese and Tibetan esoteric traditions. The revival in mainland China has been grounded principally in Chinese Buddhism, especially Pure Land and Chan. Since the 1990s, however, Tibetan Buddhism, and tantric practice in particular, has generated especially intense interest among educated urban Han Chinese, producing a so-called "Tibetan esoteric Buddhism boom." The trend has had several complex consequences. On the one hand, it created new connections between Tibetan masters and Han Chinese students, although those connections are highly complex within Tibet's politically sensitive setting. On the other, it generated numerous commercialized "tantric transmissions" by "false masters" lacking lineage qualifications, a phenomenon criticized by both the authorities and traditional religious communities.

The policy of Sinicizing religion. Around 2015, Chinese religious policy entered a new phase. The "Sinicization of religion," meaning the conformity of religious interpretation and practice with Chinese culture and core socialist values, became the official framework. In Buddhism, this appears in restrictions on foreign religious influence, especially strict controls on links between Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama's system; regulation of commercial monastic operations; and demands for monastics' political loyalty. The long-term effects of the Sinicization policy remain difficult to assess.¹

The scholarly revival of Chinese Buddhism. At the same time, a group of Chinese Buddhist scholars with modern academic training, some ordained and some lay, have introduced modern historical-critical methods into the study of Chinese Buddhism while seeking an intellectual foundation from which Chinese Buddhism can enter dialogue with global Buddhist scholarship. Venerable Yinshun's influence, discussed in Chapter 12.1, continues to unfold in this setting.

II. Ambedkarite Buddhism: India's "New Buddhism"¶

India was Buddhism's birthplace, but Buddhism nearly disappeared from the subcontinent for almost seven hundred years after Islamic invasions and the Hindu revival, as Chapter 8.6 explained. One of the most striking reversals of the twentieth century was the mass conversion movement led by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956).

Ambedkar was born an "untouchable," or Dalit, received professional training to the level of a doctorate in law, and became one of the principal drafters of India's constitution. He devoted his life to ending discrimination against Dalits under the Hindu caste system. Late in life, he concluded that Hinduism was institutionally incapable of accepting true equality. On October 14, 1956, he led a mass conversion ceremony in Nagpur at which he and roughly six hundred thousand followers converted to Buddhism in a single day. He died two months later.

Today Ambedkarite Buddhism, also called Navayāna, has millions of followers in Indian Dalit communities, concentrated in Maharashtra. Ambedkar found in Buddhism intellectual resources for subverting caste discrimination from within: no-self rejected hierarchy based on birth; dependent origination understood persons as products of social conditions rather than occupants of divinely ordained stations; and equality found support in the Buddha's own admission of people from every class. Ambedkar's interpretation of Buddhism is a highly politicized form of Buddhist modernism with the character of liberation theology. It inhabits almost a different world from the Western insight movement's emphasis on inward cultivation.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 it raises the question of "Buddhism as an instrument of political liberation" in a way unmatched by any other form of Buddhist modernism.

It should be added that Ambedkarite Buddhism is deeply controversial in Indian politics. Its identity—whether it is a religious, political, or social movement—its relationship with different Dalit political parties, and its position in debates over India's caste system are all highly sensitive political questions interpreted very differently by different parties. This book tends not to intervene in these political controversies, because they are essentially questions of contemporary Indian politics rather than of Buddhist philosophy or intellectual history and lie outside its scope. The book remains concerned with how Ambedkar distilled a liberatory philosophical framework from Buddhist doctrinal resources and with that framework's place in intellectual history.

III. Engaged Buddhism: From Personal Liberation to Social Transformation¶

The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) first proposed the concept of Engaged Buddhism during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. It meant combining Buddhist principles of practice—compassion, mindfulness, and no-self—with direct responses to social suffering: practicing inwardly while acting outwardly.

Thich Nhat Hanh was the tradition's most important spokesperson. During the Vietnam War he led humanitarian relief and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. Afterward he lived in exile in France and founded Plum Village in the Dordogne, developing a form of Engaged Buddhism centered on collective mindfulness practice. Plum Village became one of the most important centers of Engaged Buddhism in the West, 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 a very broad range of issues: antiwar and peace movements, service to incarcerated people, abolition of the death penalty, environmental protection, and, most recently, LGBTQ+ rights. Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage adopted a comparatively open position on the last issue, which is unusual among Buddhist traditions.

Engaged Buddhism also confronts an enduring philosophical tension. The core of Buddhist tradition is liberation from suffering; in early scriptures, the sources of suffering primarily lie in inward craving and ignorance rather than external social structures. Does "engaging" Buddhism genuinely deepen its understanding of suffering, recognizing that social structures are also conditions of suffering? Or does it force a tradition of inward cultivation into a role of social criticism that it was never intended to bear? Different practitioners of Engaged Buddhism address the tension differently; no unified answer has emerged.

IV. Buddhism and Science: An Ongoing Dialogue¶

In 1987, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and neuroscientist Francisco Varela (1946–2001) jointly initiated the Mind & Life Institute, creating a systematic dialogue between Tibetan contemplative traditions, especially their traditional knowledge of mind, and cognitive science and neuroscience. It is the most highly institutionalized of all efforts at "dialogue between Buddhism and science."

Over the past three decades, the dialogue has produced extensive research. Neuroscientists studied the brains of long-term meditators, with Richard Davidson's laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison among the leading centers, and found correlations between sustained meditation and neural plasticity. Philosophers, including Dan Zahavi and Evan Thompson, compared Buddhist theories of consciousness with European phenomenology. Cognitive scientists—Francisco Varela himself and his collaborators Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch—proposed neurophenomenology, a research framework that combines meditators' first-person phenomenological reports with third-person neuroscientific measurements.⁴

The dialogue has achieved genuine results. Substantial empirical evidence now exists for the effects of certain forms of meditation on particular psychological and neural functions. Some fine-grained Buddhist descriptions of mind, such as the momentariness of mental events and the trainability of attention, have received serious consideration from cognitive scientists.

The criticisms are also real. Mind & Life research is sometimes charged with selectively validating findings favorable to Buddhism without giving unfavorable findings equal attention. The public narrative that "meditation benefits the brain" sometimes oversimplifies the complexity of the evidence. And does placing Buddhist practice within an empirical research framework structurally take a Buddhist-modernist presupposition—that Buddhism is a system of psychological training testable by science—as a premise rather than a hypothesis to be tested? This remains a methodological controversy.⁵

A thought experiment: is liberation a brain state? Pushing the dialogue to its limit produces an unavoidable philosophical problem. Suppose that one day a precise neural technology could replicate the brain state of an arhat or buddha exactly in another person's brain. Would that person attain the same fruition at that instant? If liberation is ultimately a brain state measurable in the third person, the answer would appear to be yes. This is what the premise that "Buddhism is a scientifically testable system of psychological training" looks like when taken to its limit. Yet a central doctrine of early Buddhism makes the question lose its footing: no-self. Hidden in the question is an unexamined subject, "this person." Describe the scenario just as it occurs: one stream of consciousness is overwritten midway and replaced by another, radically different state that thereafter directs the same body. Here we must distinguish two meanings of "cutting off." Cutting off the afflictions means that one stream stops craving through its own transformation. What occurs here is cutting off in the sense of interruption: the first stream is intercepted and ends with its craving wholly undiminished—the affliction remains, but the stream is cut—while the second stream is installed in a condition made to resemble the absence of craving. Thus, from beginning to end, the "cutting off of afflictions" belongs to neither stream. One stream ends bearing craving; another begins without craving. At no point does "someone cut off craving." The claim that "this person instantly attains fruition" imagines a person persisting throughout merely because the same body is used. Seen as it is, there is no common subject who was first bound and later liberated. The problem is not difficult to answer; it was wrongly asked from the beginning. More plainly, overwriting one stream does not approach nirvāṇa by early Buddhist criteria. It approaches annihilation: one stream is extinguished and another created, whereas nirvāṇa is explicitly neither annihilation nor the establishment of a separate permanent thing, as Chapter 1.5 explained.⁶ The thought experiment therefore does not challenge Buddhism; it instead reveals the use of no-self. A whole family of problems troubling contemporary physicalism and discussions of personal identity—whether the same self persists after teleportation, copying, or brain replacement—never binds early Buddhism, because it never presupposes the "self" being teleported, copied, or questioned. What remains is a real question cleansed of the illusion of self: liberation is not a state possessed by a self but a property of a causal stream. Must the cessation of craving be brought about by that stream's own transformation—cultivating the path and seeing the Dharma—rather than directly installed by external means? This question concerns no self, only a causal stream, and it is the layer the dialogue between Buddhism and science has not yet genuinely reached.

V. Women's Ordination: Advances and Resistance¶

The question of bhikṣuṇī ordination, discussed in Section IV of Part IX, achieved several concrete historical advances after the 1990s.

Sri Lanka. In 1996, Sri Lanka held a bhikṣuṇī ordination with the participation of Korean bhikṣuṇīs and Indian bhikṣus, after which the number of ordained women gradually increased. The Siam Nikāya still does not officially recognize them, but the two smaller orders, the Amarapura and Rāmañña Nikāyas, have been more open. The attitude of the Sri Lankan government is also changing slowly.

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

Myanmar. Traditionally, the situation has been the most conservative. Ordained women in Myanmar live as thilashin, or ten-precept nuns. They shave their heads, wear pink or orange robes, and observe ten precepts, but have never received an institutional status equal to bhikṣuṇīs within the formal Saṅgha. They stand between laywomen and fully ordained nuns. Myanmar's State Saṅgha Mahā Nāyaka Committee has long adopted an explicitly negative position toward any formal restoration of bhikṣuṇī ordination.

Since the early 2020s, however, discussion inside Myanmar over the status of thilashin has shown some signs of loosening. Some local Saṅgha organizations have begun discussing more formal ritual recognition, identifying thilashin as a distinct form of renunciant with an explicit religious identity separate from laypeople, even if not as fully ordained bhikṣuṇīs. The military coup of 2021 placed every institutional reform in Myanmar under extreme uncertainty, including religious affairs. At the time this book was written, these developments continued to evolve. No explicit official recognition existed, but the space for discussion had widened relative to the past.⁸

Western impetus. Women Buddhist practitioners and feminist scholars in the West have been important forces in bringing bhikṣuṇī ordination into international discussion. Influential Pali scholars such as Bhikkhu Bodhi publicly support the legal validity of bhikṣuṇī ordination, creating a voice within Theravāda distinct from official positions. Bhikkhu Anālayo's comparative research on the Pali Vinaya and related Sanskrit materials supplied academic support for the feasibility of ordination.

This was the situation before 2020. Since the 2020s the issue has achieved substantive breakthroughs—large-scale ordination in Bhutan, the emergence of a bhikṣuṇī Saṅgha in Cambodia, and the formation of a native generation of preceptors in Sri Lanka—discussed in Section III of the next chapter.

VI. The Radicalization of Buddhist Nationalism¶

Parts IX and XI repeatedly addressed Buddhist nationalism. Since the 1990s, the phenomenon has taken more radical and destructive forms in several regions.

Myanmar's 969 Movement and the Rohingya crisis. Chapter 9.5 discussed this in detail. A Buddhist nationalist movement represented by Ashin Wirathu directed radical hate speech against Muslim minorities, especially the Rohingya, and was connected with systematic violence against them, which reached a scale internationally recognized as ethnic cleansing in 2017. This is the twenty-first century's most serious case of "violence in the name of Buddhism" and has provoked extensive criticism from the international community and within Buddhist circles.

Religious violence in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's Bodu Bala Sena, or BBS, accelerated its activity around 2012, promoting anti-Muslim and anti-Christian sentiment and provoking several violent incidents against minority religious communities. Anti-Muslim riots after the 2019 Easter bombings also formed against this background.

The structural paradox of "Buddhist nationalism." Chapter 9.5 already noted the clear internal contradiction between Buddhist doctrine—compassion, no-self, and nonkilling—and Buddhist nationalist practice—hatred and violence against out-groups. Nationalist movements selectively use Buddhist symbolic resources to clothe identity politics in religious form. This does not mean that Buddhism caused nationalism. Distinguishing Buddhist doctrinal positions from political movements operating under Buddhist banners is a basic prerequisite for analyzing these phenomena. Section II of the next chapter examines the further division of the Saṅgha after Myanmar's 2021 military coup.

VII. The Rise of Digital Buddhism¶

The internet's influence on Buddhism became visible in the late 1990s and accelerated in the 2010s. YouTube, podcasts, public social-media accounts, and apps transmitted teachings from Buddhist traditions on an unprecedented scale. A person in rural Brazil could listen online to insight instructions from a Burmese meditation master. Someone in a Chinese city could receive daily talks from monastics at different Chinese Dharma centers through social media. This broke geographical restrictions and partly broke traditions' control over channels of transmission: anyone could create a YouTube channel and call themselves a "Zen master."

As of 2020, the digital process still followed a pattern of "primarily offline, secondarily online." The internet was a channel of communication; Dharma centers and meditation retreats remained the physical centers of practice. Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 reversed this pattern. Its consequences—online Saṅghas, a normal hybrid form, and the entrance of AI into Buddhism—belong to another stage, discussed in the next chapter.

VIII. Buddhism amid Ecological and Climate Crises¶

Beginning in the 1990s, environmental protection and climate change gradually became some of the world's most urgent issues. Buddhist traditions responded in different ways.

Ordaining trees in Thailand. Thai forest monks developed a distinctive act of conservation. They conducted ordination ceremonies for large trees, symbolically "ordaining" them as monks and wrapping their trunks in orange robes. Within the local cultural setting, cutting down such a tree became morally equivalent to killing a monk and therefore received informal but effective protection. Originating in the 1980s, the practice spread after the 1990s and became a distinctive combination of Thailand's environmental movement with Buddhist tradition.⁷

Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects. Joanna Macy (born 1929) combined Buddhist dependent origination—the interdependence of all phenomena—with systems theory and deep ecology to develop the Work That Reconnects. It is a spiritual and psychological method for responding to ecological crisis and has been used in dozens of countries worldwide.

The new urgency of climate crisis. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate change has shifted from a "problem for the future" into a "disaster already taking place." Growing numbers of Buddhist organizations, including the World Fellowship of Buddhists and joint statements by major Dharma centers, have issued common declarations on climate change and placed response to the crisis within a framework of Buddhist moral responsibility. The trend continues to develop, and traditions differ considerably in the depth and manner of their participation.

The philosophical sources of "Eco-Dharma." The theoretical foundation of ecological Buddhism normally invokes dependent origination—because all existents are interdependent, there is no "self" entirely separate from others—and compassion, extending ecological care to all sentient and even nonsentient existence. Critics, however, point out that early Buddhism's ecological concern was limited: it primarily addressed the suffering of sentient beings, not the health of ecosystems as wholes. Directly "reading" modern environmental ethics into early Buddhist literature is a selective interpretation. This discussion is a concrete ecological form of the problem of Buddhist modernism.

IX. Several Continuing Structural Tensions, 1990–2020¶

From the standpoint of the 2020s, several structural tensions in the Buddhist world have become increasingly clear and increasingly difficult to avoid over the past three decades.

The soteriological core versus the demand for social engagement. The central goal of Buddhist tradition is liberation from suffering, which the scriptures direct primarily toward inward transformation. Yet amid globalization, ecological crisis, and political violence, growing numbers of Buddhist practitioners find both inward transformation and outward action indispensable. Traditions and individuals offer different answers to the problem of balancing them.

Authority and democracy. Traditional systems of Buddhist transmission—master–disciple relationships, Vinaya authorization, and Dharma succession—face unprecedented challenges in the age of globalization and digitization. Anyone can call themselves a teacher online, create a community of followers, and teach meditation classes. Traditional mechanisms of authorization often cannot cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. "Whose teaching counts?" is becoming an increasingly difficult question.

The depth of tradition versus breadth of dissemination. Lowering the threshold for tools of practice such as mindfulness, insight, and loving-kindness meditation allows more people to encounter them. The cost is detachment from their original settings and weakening of their central doctrinal frameworks. Every tradition confronts the common contemporary challenge of finding a mode of transmission that reaches more people without losing depth.

National identity versus universal values. In China, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, the binding of Buddhism to national identity has sometimes strengthened social cohesion and sometimes become an ideological instrument of exclusion and violence. The alliance has a long history, discussed in Parts IX through XI, and has become more acute in the contemporary period.

Conclusion. From India before the Buddha through the schools, Mahāyāna, tantra, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, tathāgatagarbha, Southern, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhism, and into contemporary transformations still unfolding, the sheer length of this historical chain communicates something: Buddhism is an extraordinarily tenacious tradition, repeatedly adapting its forms across transformations of politics, culture, and language. This does not guarantee that every particular form deserves preservation, nor that it has made the correct choice at every historical moment. History is complex. This book has tried to confront that complexity honestly.

Further Reading¶

• Ann Gleig. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. (Synthetic analysis of new trends in American Buddhism since the 2010s, including digitization, gender, and race)

References¶