Chapter 5. Buddhism during and after the pandemic¶

For the Buddhist world, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was more than a public health crisis. It also accelerated trends that had slowly accumulated over the preceding thirty years. Digitization, decentralization, and the weakening of credentialing authority came to the fore within two or three years. The previous chapter covered developments from 1990 to 2020. This chapter examines several new threads since the pandemic. They include the normalization of online sanghas, the sangha amid Myanmar's coup, substantive breakthroughs in women's ordination, AI's entry into Buddhism, empirical tests of meditation experience and debates over psychedelics, new developments in several secular societies, and shifts in scholarly thinking.

The character of this chapter's historical sources needs to be stated at the outset. Most of its events are still unfolding, and its principal sources are news reports, institutional announcements, and preliminary academic research. Its judgments are more provisional than those in earlier chapters, and some accounts may need revision in a few years. The book was written in the mid-2020s; all references to the "current situation" take that as their temporal point of reference.

1. Online sanghas and a hybrid norm¶

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the vast majority of Buddhist centers worldwide suspended in-person activities. This forced the traditions to move teaching activities online in a very short time, through Zoom religious assemblies, online meditation retreats, and video Dharma talks. For some traditions, especially Western insight meditation, the move was relatively smooth. It was harder for traditions that place greater emphasis on physical settings and bodily presence together, such as Japanese Zen sesshin. After the pandemic's peak passed, many traditions retained some online activities, creating a new "hybrid" norm of physical practice centers plus online contact.

The hybrid norm brought forward several questions previously treated as theoretical. At the ritual level, ceremonies such as taking refuge, ordination, and empowerment depend on bodily presence. Can they be validly completed by video? Traditions give different answers. Some Tibetan teachers conducted online empowerments during the pandemic, immediately drawing challenges from traditionalists. Full ordination in Theravāda and Chinese Buddhism is generally considered impossible online. At the community level, does an "online sangha" whose members have never met retain the sangha's significance as an object of refuge? At the practical level, online retreats remove the protection of a closed setting and a teacher's direct observation, leaving participants themselves to manage the risks of prolonged intensive meditation. This is directly related to the question of meditation safety in Section 5.

None of these questions is wholly new doctrinally, but the pandemic turned them from marginal hypotheses into everyday questions that every tradition had to answer in practice. After the 1990s, digitization changed the circulation of teachings. After the pandemic, it began changing how the life of practice itself is organized.

2. The sangha amid a military coup in Myanmar¶

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar's military staged a coup and overthrew the elected government. For Buddhist history, the most noteworthy aspect of the following years is the contrast between the sangha's response and its role in the 2007 "Saffron Revolution." In 2007, monks led the protests, taking to the streets chanting the Mettā Sutta. After 2021, civilians of different ethnicities and occupations took to the streets, and monks were no longer the movement's public face. The common claim that "the sangha as a whole remained silent" needs correction, however. Leading monks did initially resist before falling silent. The military used the slogan of the "three sons," meaning soldiers, students, and sons of the Buddha, to keep monks from participating. It also continued the network of informants and surveillance of 175 monasteries established after 2007. Meanwhile, some young monks joined the resistance as individuals, calling themselves revolutionaries.¹

Behind the low profile lay a three-way division. First were nationalist monks allied with the military. Some senior monks publicly offered prayers for the regime, while individual extreme nationalist monks helped organize and legitimize pro-military militias; images of robes and rifles together circulated on social media. The military's decades of cultivating patronage networks proved effective after the coup. These networks provided senior monks with funding, land, and support for monastic education. Second was a limited number of "revolutionary" monks. They supported resistance within a framework of restoring dhamma, interpreted here as a just society; a few returned to lay life to fight. Third was the silent majority. This time, secular forces led the nationwide democratic movement, which also resorted to armed resistance. Both features made it difficult for most monks to intervene in traditional ways.

This division has two implications for history. First, it marks a substantial dissipation of the Myanmar sangha's political authority. In 2007, monks could still set the tone of a national movement as moral authorities. After 2021, that position fell vacant and was filled by secular young people, a substantial proportion of them young women. Second, it takes Buddhist nationalism into a new phase (see Section 6 of the previous chapter and Chapter 9.5). When a discourse of protecting the religion becomes deeply tied to a military regime that has lost majority public support, nationalist monks pay the price with the credibility of the entire sangha. The Myanmar case suggests that Buddhism's alliance with state power has institutional as well as ethical costs, and that the institutional costs are borne by the whole tradition.

3. Women's ordination, from debates over principle to established facts¶

Section 5 of the previous chapter recorded advances and resistance in women's ordination before 2020. The change in the 2020s can be put simply. Debate continues, but practice has moved ahead.

The most significant event took place in Bhutan. In June 2022, the Je Khenpo, the highest authority of Bhutan's national sangha, gave full bhikṣuṇī ordination to more than 140 women in Paro. The Tibetan term for a fully ordained nun is gelongma. This was the first large-scale bhikṣuṇī ordination in Tibetan-language Buddhism for centuries. Previously, Tibetan Buddhist women renunciants had long remained at the novice level, while decades of discussion about full ordination produced no result. In November 2025, the Je Khenpo conducted another ordination outside Thimphu, with 265 recipients, 137 from Bhutan and 128 from thirteen other countries. The second ordination was especially important. It showed that the 2022 event had opened an institutionalized route, rather than remaining an isolated gesture. The recipients from different countries also made Bhutan, in practice, a center transmitting Tibetan-language bhikṣuṇī ordination abroad.²

In Theravāda, changes have accumulated in more dispersed ways. The Sri Lankan bhikṣuṇī community that developed after the 1998 Bodhgayā ordination has produced a generation of senior local preceptors. Ordination no longer depends on outside assistance, and its scale continues to grow. Thailand's bhikṣuṇī community, despite official nonrecognition, has continued growing to several hundred members. Around 2023, as several Khmer women received full ordination in succession, a Cambodian Theravāda bhikṣuṇī sangha began to take shape. The American Theravāda elder nun Tathāloka calls this phase "the decade of the mahātherīs." The focus has shifted from whether ordination is legally possible to when and how already established sanghas will receive official recognition. The textual research of scholars such as Anālayo has largely answered the former question, as discussed in the previous chapter.³

This book regards the case as an excellent illustration of a recurring theme. Institutional recognition and established practice can remain disconnected for a long time, and when the disconnection lasts long enough, the mechanisms of recognition themselves begin to lose their ability to determine reality. The unresolved institutional knot described in Chapter 9.5 remains unresolved in legal principle. Yet practical developments in the 2020s have changed the question's character. What remains unsettled is no longer whether women can enter monastic life and receive ordination, but how long the sangha authorities of different countries will take to recognize what has already happened. The doctrinal and textual dimensions of the question of women are discussed in the next chapter.

4. AI and Buddhism, from a topic of discussion to infrastructure¶

The previous chapter described digital Buddhism before 2020. In the mid-2020s, the entry of artificial intelligence raised the stakes. AI was no longer merely a topic for Buddhist philosophy, raising questions about whether it has consciousness or counts as a sentient being. It began to form part of the infrastructure of Buddhist knowledge.

The change occurs on two levels. At the textual level, machine translation and cross-language search tools have begun changing the practice of Buddhist philology. Dharmamitra (MITRA) is a representative project, developed jointly by the Tsadra Foundation, Tohoku University in Japan, and the AI research laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. It provides machine translation from Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, and Classical Chinese into English, together with cross-language semantic search and parallel-passage comparison. Its initial translations cannot yet replace scholars, but it makes cross-traditional textual comparison, once requiring years of language training, something any researcher can begin. This is the greatest change in tools for Buddhist textual research since digitization. Attitudes toward AI within digital Buddhism, however, differ enormously. Among projects making digitized Buddhist texts openly available, SuttaCentral declares "By humans, for humans" and asks on its licensing page that its content not be used to create datasets for generative AI. Dharmamitra, by contrast, makes machine translation and semantic search its mission, treating the application of AI to Buddhist texts as its direction.⁴

At the teaching level, specialized Buddhist question-answering bots have begun to appear and gain institutional adoption. A Kyoto University team in Japan has developed BuddhaBot, trained on scriptural materials, since 2021. A later version was introduced by Bhutan's central monastic body for trials by up to 200 monks and nuns. Dedicated systems such as Norbu, developed within Malaysia's Buddhist community, also circulate in English-language Buddhist circles. Advocates offer a practical argument. In areas with few teachers, a question-answering system trained on selected material is better than no teacher. Critics raise two questions that should by now be familiar to readers of this book. Who certifies an AI "Dharma teacher"? Whose teaching do its answers count as? The same team subsequently made these two questions harder to avoid. After BuddhaBot in March 2021, it produced Buddhist AR in September 2022, the generative "BuddhaBot Plus" in July 2023, and dialogue AIs for Shinran and Vasubandhu in September 2023. In February 2026, BuddhaBot Plus was installed in a bipedal humanoid robot to create "BuddhaRoid," presented at a joint symposium of the University of Zurich and Kyoto University on February 5. The purposes stated in the developers' release extend beyond questions and answers. A humanoid robot could perform "some religious activities," including rites and teaching, address "questions people find difficult to raise with living monks," and help relieve staffing shortages in religious communities. What is delegated thus expands from answers to ritual and bodily presence. The release also lists ethical difficulties concerning the unclear sources of generative AI, personal information, and copyright. These difficulties and the two questions above are two sides of the same problem. How can a system unable to account for its sources assume a role whose credentials rest on transmission?⁵

These developments make the following analysis of bias more urgent, rather than obsolete.

Bias in training data. The complete training corpora of large language models are generally not public, making it difficult to give a uniform breakdown by language. In public large-scale web corpora such as Common Crawl and mC4, however, English has a clear advantage, while coverage of other languages is highly uneven. Chinese is a high-resource language, but its relative share differs across corpora and models and cannot simply be described as second only to English. This imbalance exists within languages as well as between them. Highly visible Buddhist discourse in English is no proportionate miniature of the world's Buddhist traditions. Since the twentieth century, Western popular Buddhism and convert Buddhism have been especially influenced by Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and insight meditation, followed by an even larger secular mindfulness movement. Meanwhile, traditions that circulate mainly in local languages and lack extensive English-language publications and online content have much lower visibility in English for their rites, doctrinal details, and internal differences. In these areas, large language models are more likely to rely on a few secondary summaries or analogies across traditions, and their answers especially need checking against specialist research and primary sources.⁶

More importantly, highly visible English-language Buddhist material is itself not neutral. The Buddhist modernism formed in the modern period often recasts traditional Buddhism as a system of thought and meditation with less mythology and ritual, more psychological emphasis, and compatibility with modern science. Certain historically specific forms of meditation are then further detached from monastic, ethical, and cosmological contexts and transformed into universal psychological techniques. If a language model learns extensively from this material, it can easily take the modernist restatement as the default background for explaining Buddhism, rather than clearly recognizing it as one interpretation formed under particular modern historical conditions.⁷

Reinforcement learning and default resistance to "antitraditional" arguments. Modern AI is usually fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The criteria by which human annotators judge its responses contain implicit value preferences. In discussions of Buddhism, this may produce a subtle effect. When users make claims consistent with mainstream Western modern Buddhist narratives, AI tends to affirm and elaborate on them. When they advance challenging, antitraditional arguments, or arguments grounded in earlier texts, AI may push back by endorsing tradition, even when those arguments have serious scholarly support. Examples include "the Four Noble Truths do not presuppose rebirth" and arguments about how early Buddhism treats divinity. Conversely, when the mainstream narrative itself departs from tradition, for example by equating mindfulness with Buddhist practice, AI often does not correct it unprompted.

In brief, AI sometimes reinforces mainstream biases while mounting an "automatic defense" against arguments that challenge them.

The risk of a personal echo chamber. One easily overlooked risk when discussing Buddhist teachings with AI is its skill at presenting the user's starting position as more persuasive and better grounded in history. A Pure Land practitioner discussing Pure Land theory receives detailed supporting material; a meditator discussing sudden awakening receives extensive favorable accounts; and a secularist arguing that the Buddha was actually an atheist usually receives supporting arguments as well. This adaptability makes AI an efficient doctrinal search engine, but also makes it prone to amplifying confirmation bias, unable to serve as a spiritual friend, a kalyāṇamitta, in the full sense.

A balanced assessment. Recognizing these problems does not mean AI has no value for Buddhist learning. It can rapidly retrieve the definitions and sources of particular terms, compare parallel texts across traditions, provide introductory explanations, and offer a reasonably reliable starting point when no one is available to ask. These functions are real and practically useful to researchers and practitioners alike. What requires attention is the structure of its biases. It is better at presenting mainstream modern English-language Buddhist views than at reliably handling less prominent traditions, fine distinctions, and scholarly disputes. Within your own framework, it tends to support rather than challenge you. At this stage, treating AI as an introductory assistant rather than the final judge is the more honest approach.⁸

Translation as interpretation returns in the age of AI. The next chapter shows how the same episode in the Lotus Sūtra can support divergent readings of whether women can attain Buddhahood. In the Chinese and Sanskrit passages examined there, the dragon king's daughter first assumes a male body; the disagreement lies in interpretation. When models produce translations in bulk, this problem reappears on a larger scale and becomes harder to see: countless small choices fix a particular interpretation, while users cannot see where the choices were made. Machine-translated Buddhist scriptures are likely to become the first layer of text through which the next generation encounters Buddhism, and that layer is permeated by the biases of the training material. In this book's view, this is not a reason to reject the tools. It calls on Buddhist scholars to audit today's "machine translation workshops" with the same seriousness they bring to the translation workshops of antiquity.

5. Meditation under examination, adverse effects and the psychedelic debate¶

In the 2020s, two lines of development have put pressure on "meditation experience" from opposite directions. One uses empirical methods to examine meditation's effects and risks, while the other attempts to trigger experiences resembling meditation through drugs.

The maturation of research on adverse effects. Section 4 of the previous chapter recorded the achievements and methodological criticisms of the dialogue between Buddhism and science. A new development in the 2020s is that meditation's negative effects have moved from anecdote to systematic research. A 2021 study by Willoughby Britton's team found that, when actively asked, more than half of participants in mindfulness-based interventions reported at least one meditation-related adverse reaction, and nearly forty percent reported negative effects on everyday functioning. Earlier studies had recorded only serious adverse events passively, with reporting rates below one percent. Cheetah House, the nonprofit with which Britton works, supports people experiencing meditation-related difficulties. Another landmark result came from the UK's MYRIAD project. This cluster-randomized trial, covering more than eighty secondary schools and over eight thousand adolescents, found that a universal school mindfulness curriculum did not improve students' mental health; the intervention group even performed slightly worse than controls on several secondary measures.⁹

The significance of these results needs to be understood precisely. They do not establish that meditation is harmful. They establish that it is a sufficiently powerful intervention to raise real questions of dose, indications, and contraindications, while the preceding twenty years of public narratives about mindfulness's benefits rested on research designs that systematically failed to ask about adverse effects. For this book, the case shows empirical tools correcting Buddhist modernism's narrative of meditation as risk-free psychological fitness. The narrative of scientific validation is ultimately constrained by more rigorous scientific testing. Traditional safeguards were stripped away in secular dissemination. These included graded practice, qualified teachers, the protective setting of retreat, and accumulated knowledge of meditation disorders. They are now being reinvented as "trauma-informed mindfulness" and "meditation safety guidelines."

A direct encounter with psychedelics. During the same period, the revival of psychedelic research, including clinical trials of substances such as psilocybin and MDMA for depression and post-traumatic stress, directly encountered Buddhist practice communities. The central issue is not new. The psychedelic culture of the 1960s was already an important point of entry for the first generation of Western Buddhist practitioners. Nor is public discussion the only new development. Named teachers in the insight tradition have begun incorporating psychedelics into their teaching, with Spring Washam the clearest example. Trained by Jack Kornfield and a member of Spirit Rock's Teachers Council, she spent a year studying with Shipibo healers in Peru in 2014. In 2015, she founded Lotus Vine Journeys, combining Buddhist meditation and ayahuasca ceremonies in retreats as complementary practices. She says these plant medicines can "rapidly accelerate the healing process, especially when combined with study and practice." Opponents, including monastic traditions and some secular teachers, invoke the fifth precept's principle of avoiding heedlessness. There is also a more technical concern. The Tibetan Lama Tsony offers one formulation of this concern. Seeking speed through drugs is like entering the fast lane, believing one will arrive sooner, while actually going nowhere and still having to start the journey from the beginning. The concern extends beyond psychedelics. Robert Sharf had already argued that treating meditation-induced states as the referents of discourse on the stages of the path is itself a modern Buddhist misplacement. In this book's view, the point can be made more sharply. Drugs induce a state, whereas cultivating the path requires an irreversible transformation of stage. Treating the former as the latter is a category error. This step is the book's own inference; each of the two accounts above goes only partway toward it. The fifth-precept argument is not one-sided, however. Advocates invoke it too. Washam describes ayahuasca as "the exact opposite of an intoxicant" and sees no conflict with the fifth precept. Another axis of debate, unrelated to that precept, concerns the relationship between Western Buddhist teachers and the Indigenous communities from which plant medicines come. In Colin H. Simonds's assessment, among advocates, Mike Crowley urges every Buddhist to take psychedelics at least once to examine their own tathāgatagarbha, detaching plant medicines from their Indigenous context for exclusively Buddhist purposes. Washam, having trained with Shipibo healers and acknowledged her sources and their authority, largely meets the ethical principles formulated by Indigenous scholars. In August 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a Complete Response Letter on the new drug application for MDMA-assisted therapy, finding the existing data insufficient for approval and requiring the sponsor to conduct an additional Phase 3 trial. This was a procedural setback rather than a rejection of efficacy. The clinical development process was delayed, while debate within practice communities continued unabated.¹⁰

This book regards adverse-effects research and the psychedelic debate as two sides of the same question. Contemporary Buddhism must explain its criteria for practice anew, beyond "experience." If meditation's value lies only in the experiences it induces, then experiences induced more efficiently, whether by drugs or technology, have an equal claim. If the criterion for practice lies in the lasting cessation of greed, hatred, and delusion, rather than experience itself, both meditation and drugs must face the same more demanding test. This returns us precisely to the question of early Buddhism's criteria (Essay 1, Chapter 5).

A thought experiment. Taking the drug question one step further produces a thought experiment that this book does not intend to answer, but considers worth putting before the reader. Assume the primacy of matter. Mental states then supervene on brain states, with no consciousness independent of a physical basis. Assume also that the fruits, from stream-entry to arahantship, are a kind of stable psychological transformation, as Buddhist modernism understands them. Together, these premises imply that attainment corresponds to identifiable types of brain structure and functional configuration. With sufficiently precise technology, it should therefore be possible in principle to bypass the entire sequence of hearing, reflection, and cultivation, directly alter the brain, and "manufacture" a liberated person. The effects of psychedelics are diffuse, whereas the hypothetical neurotechnology is targeted. This hypothesis has a basis in actual developments. Research teams have attempted to use neuromodulation, including focused ultrasound, to directly modify activity in brain networks associated with meditation. Preliminary research reports reduced self-reported Global Vigor and temporary changes in the sense of self and time. Mindfulness scores increased in both the active and sham groups; the between-group differences in changes in mindfulness and vigor were not statistically significant. The study does not claim to induce jhāna. This remains very far from manufacturing attainment, but lies along the same line of extension.¹¹

The thought experiment's value lies in the fork it exposes, with costs on both sides. Those who accept the inference turn liberation into an engineering problem, but must immediately answer whether a state produced in this way still counts as attainment. Buddhism's definition of attainment goes beyond describing a state. It includes properties of the path, specifically cutting off defilements through knowing and seeing things as they are. It also includes irreversibility. If someone is "liberated" without hearing, reflection, or cultivation, who has cut off their defilements? If the path belongs to the criterion itself, the concept of attainment contains a normative element that brain states cannot exhaust. Those who reject the inference must say which premise they reject. One option is to deny the primacy of matter. This is in fact the majority position within traditional Buddhism, since karma and rebirth already presuppose a continuity of consciousness that does not supervene on a single brain. The other is to accept physicalism while holding that attainment is inherently in part a normative concept, with "how it is achieved" internal to "what it is." Either choice brings the distinction between descriptive and normative components of liberation into the open, a distinction usually left implicit in traditional doctrinal analysis.

A frequently omitted observation at a higher level should be added about the first premise. The contemporary popularity of the primacy of matter generally rests on implicit trust in scientific method rather than the outcome of metaphysical argument. Yet scientific method has constitutive boundaries. It deals with public, observable, repeatable phenomena; third-person testability is its condition of admission. This boundary belongs to the definition of the method itself, rather than a temporary technical limitation. At root, it is still Hume's old question. How far are we entitled to go from observable regularities? First-person experience falls outside that condition of admission, including why red appears as this red, or why a painful feeling feels just this way. Such experiences are not public and cannot be observed without presupposing experience. Contemporary philosophy of mind calls this the "hard problem" of consciousness.¹² There is therefore a risk of circularity. First, scientific method is used to define what counts as real. On that basis, first-person phenomena are then ruled to be either reducible or unreal. That ruling is itself a methodological decision, rather than a scientific conclusion. The revisability of scientific theories is often taken as evidence that they approach truth ever more closely. This is true at the level of their objects, but needs qualification at the level of method. What is revisable is the theory within the method; the method's own boundary of admission does not move with changes of theory. Rejecting the primacy of matter therefore need not arise from religious dogma. It can reflect reasonable doubt about using third-person methods to adjudicate first-person reality. This doubt, of course, bears its own burden of argument. Physicalists can reply that over centuries, scientific method has continually brought areas once thought irreducible, such as life, heat, and psychological functions, within its scope, and that this sustained record of success is itself inductive evidence. More radical positions simply deny that the hard problem is a real problem. This book does not adjudicate here. The point is only that the primacy of matter is a philosophical position rather than a scientific discovery, so the thought experiment's first premise is contested from the start. Buddhism occupies a subtle position here. Its central claims about suffering, craving, and cessation are precisely first-person. This both makes it difficult to "validate" in a scientific age and gives it the possibility, as a systematic first-person inquiry, of addressing blind spots in scientific method. Questions about first-person inquiry's own validity, including the shaping of experiential reports by expectation and doctrine (see the beginning of this section and Volume 2), are equally real. The limitations on the two sides are not symmetrical, but both exist.

Return to the thought experiment itself. Its imagined route involves precise physical intervention altering the brain to achieve liberation directly. This has a certain unplanned convergence with Vajrayāna. Tantra's distinctive claim is precisely that the body is a technical interface for liberation. Working with winds, channels, and drops, and practicing inner heat, presupposes that body and mind have the same structure at their subtlest level, so altering the body's energetic structure can directly transform mind (see Essay 8, Chapter 4, and Essay 11). The argument for the possibility of buddhahood in this very body depends on this. As a formal structure of achieving liberation through physical intervention, tantra gave an affirmative answer a thousand years ago. Its "physical" domain, however, is a yogic physiology internal to its own worldview, and all its operations are embedded in a framework of empowerment, precepts, the guru, and view. The hypothetical neurotechnology amounts to stripping these operations from that framework and retaining intervention alone. Does this remain the same path? Is the framework a protective shell or a constitutive part? This book leaves these questions unanswered here, for the reader and for Volume 2's essay on esoteric practice.

6. Youth Buddhism and wartime Buddhism in two secular settings¶

Buddhism has not receded everywhere since the pandemic. Two previously neglected settings reveal its new place in secular society from opposite directions.

Youth Buddhism in South Korea. In the mid-2020s, Korean Buddhism experienced a marked resurgence of interest among younger generations. Emblematic scenes include the Seoul International Buddhism Expo's transformation from a trade fair into a youth cultural event. More than eighty percent of visitors in 2024 were in their twenties or thirties. A comedian turned DJ became a phenomenon by performing electronic-music religious assemblies at Buddhist events under the name "NewJeansNim," combining an idol group's name with an honorific for a monk. The Jogye Order organized temple social events for young people; one at Naksansa in August 2024 attracted over 1,500 applicants. Templestay programs form part of the trend as well. This wave is characterized by low commitment and strong aesthetics. Participants consume Buddhist spaces, a sense of ritual, and an atmosphere of "healing."¹³

How one evaluates the phenomenon depends on one's framework. From a traditional standpoint, Buddhism is being reduced to a lifestyle commodity. From the sociology of religion, against the overall aging of East Asian religions and accelerating temple closures in Japan, any rejuvenation is a rare signal in the opposite direction. Its international friction also deserves recording. NewJeansNim's performance in Malaysia was canceled after protests by local Buddhist organizations. The same performance that was a highlight of a Jogye Order-hosted Buddhist expo in Korea was condemned by Malaysian Buddhist organizations as an offense to the Dharma. Different Buddhist societies thus give substantively different answers to where Buddhism's boundaries lie.

Buddhists in the Russia–Ukraine war. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Buddhism entered accounts of a European war in a previously rare way. Russia's Buddhist population is concentrated in the republics of Kalmykia, Buryatia, and Tuva. Independent statistics put Tuva and Buryatia first and second nationally in deaths per ten thousand men of military age, showing a pronounced disparity with Moscow and St. Petersburg. These are figures by republic, however, not ethnicity. The same statistics note that a high-loss region need not mean its titular ethnic group suffered the heaviest losses. About sixty percent of young men in Buryatia are ethnic Russians, and regional disparities track poverty more closely. Kalmykia's supreme lama, Telo Tulku Rinpoche, left for Mongolia in autumn 2022 and publicly condemned the war that October, the first religious leader in Russia to do so. In January 2023, Russian authorities designated him a "foreign agent," and he promptly resigned his religious office. Some leaders of the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia, meanwhile, chose to support the state's position.¹⁴

The case matters beyond Russia. It is a European version of the tension between ethnic identity and universal values (Section 9 of the previous chapter), showing the costs of the two choices with unusual clarity. A Buddhist leader exiled for refusing to offer prayers for war stands at the opposite end of the same question from Myanmar's monks praying for the military regime (Section 2 of this chapter). When the state demands religious endorsement of violence, the sangha's answer leaves no middle ground.

7. Sangha and state, protest squares and diplomatic stages¶

During the same period, the relationship between Buddhism and the state has been rearranged in two other directions.

Sri Lanka, from nationalism to the protest square. Sri Lanka's economic collapse in 2022 triggered a nationwide protest movement, the Aragalaya, demanding the president's resignation. The monks' position deserves historians' attention. A decade earlier, the sangha had appeared through Buddhist nationalist organizations such as BBS (see Section 6 of the previous chapter). This time, some monks publicly supported the protests, taking to the streets alongside Catholic and Islamic clergy. Several of the most influential senior monks jointly called on the president to establish an interim government and demanded the government's resignation. This does not mean the end of Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism; nationalist monastic networks persist. It does show that the sangha's political energy need not flow toward exclusion. When state governance fails, the same traditional script of the sangha as the people's conscience can serve a completely different political direction.¹⁵

Turning Buddhist heritage into diplomacy. At the same time, states increasingly and explicitly use Buddhism as a diplomatic asset. India's actions are the most systematic. In 2021, it opened an international airport serving Kushinagar and Buddhist pilgrimage routes; in 2023, it hosted the Global Buddhist Summit in New Delhi; and in 2024, it loaned relics of the Buddha and his two disciples Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana to Thailand for twenty-six days. According to India's Ministry of Culture, more than four million people paid homage. In December 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution without a vote designating December 21 as World Meditation Day. China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other countries are also developing similar international Buddhist platforms.¹⁶

Readers of this book already have a framework for analyzing the trend. It is the latest form of state appropriation of Buddhist symbolic resources, structurally continuous with ancient Aśoka narratives and the linking of religion and politics in Sri Lankan chronicles (Chapter 9.1). Only the unit of competition is new. Once, Buddhist schools and royal power legitimated each other. Now, nation-states compete internationally for the position of heir to the Buddha's legacy. Relic diplomacy, infrastructure at sacred sites, and the right to host summits are bargaining chips in this competition. Buddhist philosophy's almost complete absence from this competition is telling.

8. Scholarly directions after the critique of modernism¶

One final change belongs to scholarship. As Chapters 12.1 and 12.3 explained, Buddhist modernism became established as an analytical framework in the 2000s. Scholars such as McMahan revealed that the "Buddhism" encountered by modern people is a product of reconstruction through demythologization, psychologization, and scientific recasting. By the 2020s, this critique itself had become common scholarly knowledge, and debate had moved to what should follow it. Three books can serve as points of reference.¹⁷

In Why I Am Not a Buddhist (2020), Evan Thompson speaks as a philosopher long involved in the dialogue between Buddhism and science to criticize "Buddhist exceptionalism," the popular view that Buddhism differs from other religions and is fundamentally a science of mind. He argues that this view both misunderstands science and weakens Buddhism's integrity as a religious tradition. A naturalized Buddhism stripped of its religious dimension may well fail on both counts. The debate the book provoked moved the problem of secular Buddhism (Chapter 12.1) from the community level to the philosophical level.

McMahan's own Rethinking Meditation (2023) advances the critical framework from within. Meditation never takes place in a cultural vacuum; its effects are partly constituted by the worldview, ethical framework, and social context practitioners bring to it. This challenges the assumption that meditation is a universal psychological technique. It also implies, however, that a decontextualized criticism of decontextualized meditation is no way forward either. The question becomes how to reconstruct context deliberately.

Jay Garfield's Losing Ourselves (2022) shows another direction. Buddhist philosophy enters mainstream discussion as philosophy in its own right, rather than as an object of religious studies. Arguments for no-self are presented and defended as substantive contributions to contemporary philosophy of mind and ethics. The growing number of such works marks cross-cultural philosophy's shift from a marginal initiative to a regular practice in English-language scholarship.

Together, these three directions show scholarship moving beyond the stage of exposing Buddhism's constructed character. That character is now common ground; the real disagreement has shifted to normative questions. Once we acknowledge the historical conditions of every transmission and reconstruction, which reconstruction deserves defense? This is precisely the question Volume 2 takes on directly.

The Buddhist world after the pandemic can be described simply. All the old questions of criteria remain, concerning who counts as awakened, as a Dharma teacher, or as a Buddhist, and what counts as practice. Each faces new sources of pressure, from algorithms and drugs to war and state diplomacy. The next chapter turns to Buddhism and women, the thread with the deepest accumulation of history.

References¶