Chapter 5: Buddhism During and After the Pandemic¶

For the Buddhist world, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was not only a public-health crisis but an accelerator. Within two or three years, it brought to the foreground trends that had accumulated slowly over the preceding three decades: digitization, decentralization, and the loosening of authoritative certification. The preceding chapter treated developments from 1990 to 2020. This chapter examines several currents since the pandemic: the normalization of online Saṅghas, the Saṅgha during Myanmar's coup, substantive breakthroughs in women's ordination, AI's entrance into Buddhism, empirical testing of meditative experience and the psychedelic controversy, several new settings in secular societies, and changes in academic orientation.

The nature of this chapter's sources requires an advance qualification. Most of the events discussed are still unfolding, and the principal sources are news reports, institutional announcements, and preliminary academic research. The chapter's judgments are more provisional than those of earlier chapters, and some accounts may require revision in several years. This book was completed in the middle of the 2020s; every statement about the "present" takes that period as its reference point.

I. Online Saṅghas and the Hybrid Normal¶

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the great majority of Buddhist Dharma centers worldwide suspended in-person activities. Traditions were forced to move their teaching activities online in an extremely short time: Zoom Dharma assemblies, online retreats, and video teachings. The transition was relatively smooth for some traditions, especially Western insight meditation. It was more difficult for traditions emphasizing physical settings and embodied copresence, such as the Japanese Zen sesshin. After the pandemic's peak passed, many traditions retained some online activities, producing a new normal of hybrid practice, combining physical Dharma centers with online access.

The hybrid normal raised several questions that had previously been largely theoretical. At the ritual level, can ceremonies dependent on bodily presence—refuge, ordination, empowerment—be validly completed by video? Traditions answer differently. Some Tibetan masters conferred online empowerments during the pandemic, immediately provoking traditionalist objections. Full ordination in Southern and Chinese Buddhist traditions is generally considered incapable of moving online. At the communal level, does an "online Saṅgha" whose members have never met retain the meaning of the Saṅgha as an object of refuge? At the practical level, online retreats remove the protection of a closed environment and direct observation by a teacher, leaving participants to manage the risks of prolonged, intensive meditation themselves. This directly relates to the issue of meditation safety in Section V.

None of these doctrinal questions is entirely new. The pandemic transformed them from marginal hypotheticals into everyday problems that every tradition had to answer in practice. After the 1990s, digitization changed the transmission of teachings. After the pandemic, it began changing the organizational form of contemplative life itself.

II. Myanmar: The Saṅgha during the Military Coup¶

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar's military launched a coup and overthrew the elected government. For Buddhist history, the most important feature of the ensuing years was the contrast between the Saṅgha's response and the Saffron Revolution of 2007. In that year, monks walked at the head of the protest movement. After 2021, the Saṅgha as a whole maintained a conspicuously low profile.¹

Behind the low profile lay a three-way division. First were nationalist monks allied with the military. Some senior monks publicly prayed for the regime, and individual ultranationalist monks participated in organizing and legitimating pro-military militias. Images of robes beside rifles circulated on social media. The effectiveness of the military's decades-long patronage network—funding, land, and support for the monastic education system directed toward senior monks—became visible after the coup. Second were a limited number of "revolutionary" monks. They supported the resistance within a framework of restoring the true Dharma, interpreting dhamma here as a just society; a few disrobed and joined the fighting. Third was the silent majority. The national democratic movement was led this time by secular forces and resorted to armed resistance, two features that made intervention in traditional monastic forms difficult for most monks.

The division has two levels of historical significance. First, it marks a substantive dissipation of the Myanmar Saṅgha's political authority. In 2007, monks could still set the terms of a national movement from a position of moral authority. After 2021, that position was vacant and was filled by secular youth, a substantial proportion of them young women. Second, it moves the problem of Buddhist nationalism, discussed in Section VI of the preceding chapter and in Chapter 9.5, into a new phase. When the discourse of "protecting Buddhism" becomes deeply bound to a military regime that has lost majority popular support, nationalist monks pay with the credibility of the entire Saṅgha. Myanmar suggests that alliances between Buddhism and state power carry institutional as well as ethical costs, and the entire tradition bears the former.

III. Women's Ordination: From a Dispute in Principle to an Accomplished Fact¶

Section V of the preceding chapter recorded the progress and resistance surrounding women's ordination before 2020. The change in the 2020s can be summarized in one sentence: the controversy continues, but the facts have moved first.

The most consequential event occurred in Bhutan. In June 2022, the Je Khenpo, supreme authority of Bhutan's national Saṅgha, conferred full bhikṣuṇī ordination—gelongma in the Tibetan system—upon 144 women at Paro. It was the first large-scale bhikṣuṇī ordination in Tibetan Buddhism in centuries. Tibetan Buddhist women had long remained at the śrāmaṇerikā level, and the question of full ordination had been discussed for decades without resolution. In 2025, the Je Khenpo again conferred ordination, this time upon 265 women from fourteen countries. The second ordination was especially important. It showed that 2022 was not an isolated gesture but an institutionalized path, while the international body of ordinands made Bhutan a de facto center exporting Tibetan-system bhikṣuṇī ordination.²

In Theravāda, change accumulated more diffusely. Since the 1998 ordination at Bodh Gayā, Sri Lanka's bhikṣuṇī community has developed a generation of senior native preceptors. Ordination no longer depends on external assistance, and the community continues to grow. Thailand's bhikṣuṇī community has expanded to several hundred despite lacking official recognition. Around 2023, as several Khmer women successively received full ordination, a Theravāda bhikṣuṇī Saṅgha began taking shape in Cambodia. Researchers have called this the "era of senior nuns." The question's center has shifted from "is ordination legally possible?"—a question substantially answered by the textual research of Anālayo and others, as the preceding chapter explained—to "when, and in what form, will the established Saṅgha receive official recognition?"³

This book considers the case an excellent annotation to a recurring theme: institutional recognition and practical fact can remain disconnected for a long time. When the disconnection lasts long enough, the mechanism of recognition itself begins to lose its capacity to define reality. The "unresolved institutional knot" discussed in Chapter 9.5 remains unresolved at the legal level. Yet factual developments in the 2020s have already changed the nature of the problem. The open question is no longer whether women can renounce and receive ordination, but how long national Saṅgha authorities will take to recognize what has already happened. The doctrinal and textual dimensions of the question of women are treated in detail in the next chapter.

IV. AI and Buddhism: From an Object of Discussion to Infrastructure¶

The preceding chapter recorded the configuration of digital Buddhism before 2020. By the middle of the 2020s, the entrance of artificial intelligence had raised the stakes. AI was no longer only an object of Buddhist philosophical discussion—whether AI possesses consciousness or counts as a sentient being—but was becoming part of the infrastructure of Buddhist knowledge.

Change occurred on two levels. At the textual level, machine translation and cross-lingual retrieval tools began altering Buddhist philology. The Dharmamitra, or MITRA, project is representative. Developed through collaboration between researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Buddhist translation organizations, it supplies machine translation among Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, and modern languages and supports cross-lingual semantic retrieval—using Chinese to find a parallel Pali sentence or English to search a passage in the Tibetan canon. Initial translation quality cannot yet replace scholars, but these tools turn comparison among traditions, formerly requiring years of language training, into an operation any researcher can begin. It is the largest change in the tools of Buddhist textual research since digitization.⁴

At the pedagogical level, specialized Buddhist question-answering bots began to appear and to be adopted by institutions. Beginning in 2021, a team at Kyoto University developed BuddhaBot, trained on canonical corpora. Later versions were introduced by Bhutan's central monastic institution for testing by several hundred monks and nuns. Specialized systems such as Norbu, developed by Malaysian Buddhists, also circulate in English-speaking Buddhist communities. Supporters make a practical argument: in regions with too few teachers, a question-answering system trained on carefully selected materials is better than no teacher. Critics point to questions this book's readers should already recognize. Who certifies an AI "Dharma teacher"? Whose teaching do its answers represent?⁵

These developments make the following analysis of bias more urgent, not obsolete.

Bias in training data. The training corpora of current large language models are primarily English, followed by Chinese and then other languages. Within English Buddhist literature, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and the modern secular mindfulness movement have far greater coverage than other traditions. Theravāda possesses relatively systematic English translations from Pali through the Pali Text Society, SuttaCentral, and other sources, but detailed discussion of its meditative systems remains a minority of English online material. More specialized traditions—local Buddhist practices of individual Southeast Asian countries, the Theravāda of the Dai people in Yunnan, and the deeper theory of Japanese Shingon—have extremely sparse coverage. AI descriptions of these fields are conspicuously less reliable.

It must also be recognized that English Buddhist content has itself already passed through the filter of Buddhist modernism. Large quantities of English Buddhist material online assume demythologized, psychologized, science-friendly narrative frameworks. AI learns from this already slanted corpus and internalizes the bias as the background of "Buddhist knowledge."

A default resistance to the "antitraditional" produced by reinforcement learning. Modern AI is normally fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF. The standards by which human annotators judge AI responses embody particular value preferences. In Buddhist discussions, this can produce a subtle effect. When users make statements aligned with mainstream Western modern Buddhist narratives, AI tends to agree and add support. When they make challenging, antitraditional arguments or arguments grounded in earlier texts, AI may push back by "defending tradition," even when those antitraditional propositions—such as "the Four Noble Truths do not presuppose rebirth" or questions about "early Buddhism's treatment of divine figures"—are academically serious and well supported. Conversely, when the mainstream narrative itself differs from tradition—for example, by equating mindfulness with Buddhist practice—AI often fails to correct it proactively.

In short, AI sometimes reinforces mainstream prejudice while generating an "automatic defense" against arguments that challenge it.

The risk of a personal echo chamber. One easily overlooked risk arises when users discuss Buddhist teachings with AI. AI is extremely good at rendering a user's initial position more persuasive and supplying it with historical support. A Pure Land practitioner who discusses Pure Land theory with AI receives detailed materials supporting Pure Land teaching. A meditator discussing sudden awakening receives abundant positive material about sudden awakening. A secularist discussing the claim that "the Buddha was really an atheist" will likewise normally receive supporting arguments. This adaptability makes AI an efficient "search engine for doctrine," but also readily turns it into an amplifier of confirmation bias rather than a true spiritual friend (kalyāṇamitta).

A balanced assessment. Acknowledging these problems does not mean that AI has no value for Buddhist learning. AI really can retrieve definitions and sources for particular terms quickly, compare parallel texts across traditions, provide introductory explanations, and offer a reasonably reliable starting point when no human is available to ask. These functions are real and practically useful to both scholars and practitioners. The issue requiring attention is AI's structure of bias. It is better at stating mainstream positions in modern English Buddhism; less reliable in handling minority traditions, fine distinctions, and academic controversies; and inclined to support users within their own frameworks rather than challenge them. At the present stage, treating AI as an introductory assistant rather than a final arbiter is the more honest use.⁶

Translation as interpretation returns in the age of AI. The next chapter will show how Kumārajīva's handling of a single word in his translation of the Lotus Sūtra shaped more than a thousand years of debate over whether the female body can attain buddhahood. When models translate in bulk, the same problem returns on a larger scale and with lower visibility. A model fixes one interpretation through innumerable minute choices, while users cannot see where those choices occurred. Machine-translated Buddhist scriptures will probably become the first textual layer through which the next generation encounters Buddhism, and that layer is saturated with the biases of its training data. This book does not regard that as a reason to reject the tools, but as a reason for Buddhist scholars to audit today's machine translation halls with the same seriousness applied to the translation bureaus of antiquity.

V. Meditation under Examination: Adverse-Effect Research and the Psychedelic Controversy¶

In the 2020s, two currents placed pressure on "meditative experience" from opposite directions. One applied empirical methods to test meditation's effects and risks. The other attempted to trigger meditation-like experiences with drugs.

The maturation of research on adverse effects. Section IV of the preceding chapter recorded the achievements and methodological criticisms of dialogue between Buddhism and science. A new development in the 2020s was the transformation of meditation's negative effects from anecdote into an object of systematic research. A 2021 study by Willoughby Britton's team found that, when actively questioned, more than half the participants in mindfulness-based intervention programs reported at least one meditation-related adverse effect, and approximately one-third reported adverse effects that impaired everyday functioning. Earlier studies, which did not actively ask, reported rates below one percent. Cheetah House, founded by the same team, became a specialized support organization for meditation-related difficulties. Another landmark result came from Britain's MYRIAD project. This cluster-randomized trial across more than eighty secondary schools and more than eight thousand adolescents found that universal school-based mindfulness did not improve students' mental health and showed signs of worsening outcomes in some high-risk subgroups.⁷

The results require accurate interpretation. They do not prove that meditation is harmful. They prove that meditation is a sufficiently powerful intervention to have real questions of dose, indication, and contraindication. Yet the public narrative of the preceding twenty years—"mindfulness is beneficial"—rested on study designs that systematically failed to ask about adverse effects. For this book, the episode shows a Buddhist-modernist narrative—meditation as risk-free psychological exercise—being corrected by empirical tools themselves: scientific rhetoric is finally constrained by more rigorous scientific tests. Safety devices already present within traditions—graduated stages, qualified teachers, the protected environment of retreat, and practical knowledge of "meditation sickness"—were stripped away in secular transmission and are now being reinvented as "trauma-informed mindfulness" and "meditation safety guidelines."

Direct collision with psychedelics. During the same period, the revival of psychedelic research—clinical trials of psilocybin, MDMA, and related substances in treating depression and post-traumatic stress—met Buddhist practice circles directly. The focus of the controversy was not new. The psychedelic culture of the 1960s had already provided an important entry into Buddhism for the first generation of Western practitioners. What was new was the question's public expression. Some Western insight teachers openly integrated psychedelics with meditation training, including intensive retreats combining ayahuasca with calm abiding and insight, arguing that drug experiences can soften deep-rooted psychological defenses. Opponents, including both monastic traditions and some secular teachers, invoked the fifth precept, understood as a principle of nonheedlessness, together with a more technical argument: drugs trigger a state, whereas cultivating the path requires irreversible transformation of stage. Treating the former as the latter is a category mistake. The rejection by United States regulators of an application for MDMA-assisted therapy in 2024 slowed clinical development but did not cool the internal controversy among practitioners.⁸

This book holds that adverse-effect research and the psychedelic controversy are two faces of the same question. Contemporary Buddhism must again explain its criteria for practice beyond "experience." If meditation's value consists only in the experiences it produces, then experiences induced more efficiently, whether by drugs or technology, have an equal claim. If the criterion of practice lies not in experience itself but in the long-term cessation of greed, hatred, and delusion, then meditation and drugs alike must undergo the same more demanding test. This returns precisely to the problem of criteria in early Buddhism, discussed in Chapter 5 of Part I.

A thought experiment. Extending the drug question one step further produces a thought experiment that this book does not intend to answer but considers worth placing before readers. Assume the primacy of matter: mental states supervene on brain states, and there is no mind independent of a physical basis. Assume further that the stages of fruition, from stream-entry to arhatship, are stable psychological transformations, as Buddhist modernism understands them. Together the two premises imply that fruition corresponds to identifiable structures and functional configurations of the brain. Given sufficiently precise technology—the action of psychedelics is diffuse, while the imagined neural technology would be targeted—it should in principle be possible to bypass every stage of learning, reflection, and cultivation, directly alter the brain, and "manufacture" a liberated person. The scenario is not wholly fantastic. Research teams have already attempted to induce deep meditative states directly through focused ultrasound and other forms of neuromodulation. They remain extremely far from "manufacturing fruition," but lie along the same extended trajectory.¹⁰

The value of the thought experiment is that it produces a fork, each branch of which has a cost. Those who accept the conclusion turn liberation into an engineering problem but must then answer whether the resulting condition still counts as fruition. Buddhism's definition of fruition is not merely a description of a state. It also contains a property of path—afflictions are cut off through knowledge and vision of things as they are—and irreversibility. For someone "made liberated" without learning, reflection, and cultivation, whose afflictions were cut off? If the path itself belongs to the criterion, fruition contains a normative component that no brain state can exhaust. Those who reject the conclusion must say which premise they reject. They must either deny the primacy of matter, which is in practice the majority position in traditional Buddhism, since karma and rebirth already presuppose a continuity of consciousness that does not supervene on a single brain; or accept physicalism while arguing that fruition is partly a normative concept in its very essence, so "how it is achieved" is internal to "what it is." Whichever branch is chosen, the distinction between descriptive and normative components in the concept of liberation comes into view—a distinction normally left implicit in traditional doctrine.

The first premise requires an additional metalevel observation that is often passed over. The contemporary popularity of the "primacy of matter" is normally not the result of metaphysical argument but rests on implicit trust in scientific method. Yet scientific method has constitutive boundaries. It handles public, observable, repeatable phenomena, and third-person testability is a condition of entry. This boundary is not a temporary technical deficiency; it belongs to the definition of the method itself. At root, this remains Hume's old problem: how far are we entitled to go from observable regularities? First-person experiential phenomena—why red appears as this red, why painful feeling feels this way—fall precisely outside the condition of entry. They are not public and cannot be observed without presupposing experience. Contemporary philosophy of mind calls this consciousness's hard problem.⁹ A circular risk follows: scientific method first defines what counts as "real," then judges first-person phenomena reducible or unreal. That judgment is not a scientific conclusion but a methodological decision. The revisability of scientific theories is often treated as evidence that science "continually approaches truth." At the object level this is true; at the metalevel it requires qualification. Theories within the method are revised, but the method's own conditions of entry do not move as theories change. Denying the primacy of matter therefore need not arise from religious dogma. It can express reasonable doubt about the move by which a third-person method adjudicates first-person reality. That doubt must of course bear a corresponding burden of argument. Physicalists can respond that over several centuries scientific method has repeatedly brought domains once thought irreducible—life, heat, psychological functions—within its jurisdiction, and this record of sustained success is itself inductive evidence. More radical positions simply deny that the "hard problem" is a genuine problem. This book does not adjudicate the issue here. The point is only that the primacy of matter is a philosophical position rather than a scientific discovery, so the first premise of the thought experiment is contested from the start. Buddhism's position here is subtle. Its central claims—suffering, craving, and cessation—are precisely first-person. This is both why they are difficult to "validate" in a scientific age and why Buddhism, as a systematized first-person inquiry, might fill a blind spot in scientific method. The problem of validity in first-person inquiry—the shaping of experiential reports by expectation and doctrine, noted at the beginning of this section and in Volume II—is equally real. The limits of the two sides are asymmetrical, but both exist.

Returning to the thought experiment, it is worth noting that the imagined path—precise physical intervention in the brain directly attaining liberation—has a certain unexpected affinity with Vajrayāna. Tantra's distinctive claim is precisely that the body is the technical interface of liberation. Practices manipulating winds, channels, and drops, together with inner heat, presuppose that body and mind are isomorphic at the subtlest level and that altering the body's energetic structure can directly transform mind, as Chapters 8.4 and Part XI explained. The argument for attaining buddhahood "in this very body" depends on it. At the level of formal structure, "attaining liberation through physical intervention" received an affirmative answer from tantra a thousand years ago. Its "physicality," however, was the yogic physiology internal to its worldview, and every operation was embedded within frameworks of empowerment, ethical discipline, master, and view. The imagined neural technology extracts the intervention from that framework and preserves only the operation itself. Whether it remains the same path—or whether the framework is a protective shell or a constitutive part—receives no conclusion here. The question is left to the reader and to Volume II's part on esoteric Buddhism.

VI. Youth Buddhism and Wartime Buddhism: Two Sites in Secular Societies¶

Post-pandemic Buddhism has not receded everywhere. Two previously overlooked sites, from opposite directions, reveal new positions for Buddhism in secular societies.

The phenomenon of youth Buddhism in South Korea. In the middle of the 2020s, Buddhism experienced a conspicuous resurgence of popularity among younger generations in South Korea. Emblematic scenes included the transformation of the Seoul International Buddhism Expo from a trade exhibition into a youth cultural event attended principally by people in their twenties and thirties; a comedian-turned-DJ performing electronic-music Dharma assemblies at Buddhist events under the stage name NewJeansNim, combining the name of an idol group with an honorific for a monk, and becoming a cultural phenomenon; Jogye-order matchmaking events in monasteries receiving thousands of applications; and continually full templestay programs. This wave of interest is characterized by low commitment and high aesthetics. Most participants neither take refuge nor observe precepts. They consume Buddhist space, a sense of ritual, and an atmosphere of "healing."¹¹

Evaluation depends on the evaluator's framework. From a traditional perspective, Buddhism has been demoted to a lifestyle commodity. From the perspective of the sociology of religion, amid the general aging of East Asian religions and accelerating closure of Japanese temples, any form of rejuvenation is a rare countervailing signal. The transnational friction it provoked also deserves record. NewJeansNim's performance in Malaysia was canceled after protests by local Buddhist organizations. The same performance accepted by the Korean Saṅgha was regarded as sacrilegious in Malaysia, showing that different Buddhist societies give substantively different answers to the question, "Where are the boundaries of Buddhism?"

Buddhists in the Russo-Ukrainian War. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Buddhism entered the narrative of a European war in a previously rare form. Russia's Buddhist population is concentrated in the republics of Kalmykia, Buryatia, and Tuva, marginal ethnic regions that suffered disproportionately high shares of military deaths. In the autumn of 2022, Kalmykia's highest lama, Telo Tulku Rinpoche, publicly condemned the war and expressed support for Ukraine. Russian authorities subsequently designated him a "foreign agent," and he resigned his religious office and moved abroad. Some leaders of Russia's traditional Buddhist Saṅgha, by contrast, chose to support the state's position.¹²

The case has significance beyond Russia. It is the European version of the tension between "national identity and universal values," discussed in Section IX of the preceding chapter, and displays the cost of two choices with unusual clarity. A Buddhist leader exiled for refusing to pray for war and the Myanmar monks who prayed for a military regime, discussed in Section II above, occupy opposite ends of the same problem. When a state demands religious endorsement of violence, the Saṅgha's response admits no neutral middle ground.

VII. Saṅgha and State: The Protest Square and the Diplomatic Stage¶

During the same period, relations between Buddhism and state power were rearranged in two other directions.

Sri Lanka: from nationalism to the protest square. Sri Lanka's economic collapse in 2022 produced the nationwide Aragalaya protest movement demanding the president's resignation. The monastic position deserves historians' attention. Ten years after the Saṅgha had appeared in the form of Buddhist nationalist organizations such as BBS, discussed in Section VI of the preceding chapter, substantial numbers of monks now joined the protest encampments, while major Saṅgha authorities publicly called on the government to yield. This does not mean that Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism ended; nationalist monastic networks still exist. It shows that the Saṅgha's political energy does not necessarily flow in an exclusionary direction. When state governance fails, the same traditional drama of "the Saṅgha representing the conscience of the people" can serve an entirely different political direction.¹³

The diplomatic use of Buddhist heritage. During the same period, states increasingly and explicitly deployed Buddhism as a diplomatic asset. India acted most systematically: in 2021 it opened an international airport with direct access to Kuśinagara, oriented toward Buddhist pilgrimage routes; in 2023 it hosted the Global Buddhist Summit in New Delhi; and in 2024 it lent Buddha relics excavated at Kapilavastu to Thailand, where millions paid homage. In 2024 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution designating December 21 World Meditation Day, with Buddhist-associated countries predominating among the sponsors. China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other countries operate similar international Buddhist platforms.¹⁴

For this book's readers, the analytical framework is already available. This is the latest form of state appropriation of Buddhist symbolic resources, structurally continuous with ancient Aśokan narratives and the binding of religion and government in the Sri Lankan chronicles discussed in Chapter 9.1. Only the units of competition are new. Early schools and royal power once conferred legitimacy upon each other; nation-states now compete in the international arena for the position of "heir to the Buddha's heritage." Relic diplomacy, infrastructure at sacred sites, and the right to host summits are stakes in the competition. The position of Buddhist philosophy within it is revealing: it is almost wholly absent.

VIII. Academic Orientations: After the Critique of Modernism¶

Finally, a change at the academic level should be recorded. Chapters 12.1 and 12.3 explained how Buddhist modernism became an established analytical framework in the 2000s. Scholars such as McMahan showed that the "Buddhism" encountered by modern people was a product reconstructed through demythologization, psychologization, and scientization. By the 2020s, the critique itself had become common academic knowledge, and discussion entered the stage of "what comes after critique?" Three books can serve as coordinates.¹⁵

Evan Thompson's Why I Am Not a Buddhist (2020), written from the position of a philosopher long engaged in dialogue between Buddhism and science, criticizes Buddhist exceptionalism: the popular belief that Buddhism differs from other religions and is essentially a "science of mind." He argues that the idea misunderstands science while weakening Buddhism's integrity as a religious tradition. A naturalized Buddhism stripped of its religious dimensions may fail on both sides. The controversy generated by the book elevated the problem of Secular Buddhism, discussed in Chapter 12.1, from the communal to the philosophical level.

McMahan's own Rethinking Meditation (2023) advances the critical framework itself. Meditation never takes place in a cultural vacuum; its effects are partly constituted by the worldview, ethical framework, and social setting that practitioners bring to it. The claim targets the assumption that "meditation is a universal psychological technique." Yet it also implies that criticizing decontextualized meditation from no context at all offers no way forward. The question becomes how context can be consciously reconstructed.

Jay Garfield's Losing Ourselves (2022) shows another direction: Buddhist philosophy enters mainstream discussion as philosophy, not merely 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 proliferation of such works indicates that cross-cultural philosophy has moved from a marginal advocacy project into regular practice in English-language scholarship.

Together, these three directions show academic treatments of Buddhism moving beyond the stage of "exposing construction." Historicity and construction are now accepted. The real disagreement has shifted toward the normative question: once it is acknowledged that every lineage and reconstruction is historically conditioned, which reconstruction deserves defense? This is precisely the question that Volume II will confront directly.

Post-pandemic Buddhism can be summarized in one sentence. All the old questions of criteria—who counts as awakened, who counts as a teacher, who counts as Buddhist, and what counts as practice—remain, but each has acquired new sources of stress, from algorithms and drugs to war and state diplomacy. The next chapter turns to the current in which these tensions have accumulated most deeply: Buddhism and women.

References¶