Future Buddhas

“The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

- Martin Luther King Jr., 1959 Sermon on Gandhi

The crossroads King describes here is present in our time, where we find ourselves. And his choice of “beloved community” is an urgent call. That a battle, an attack, a violation and abuse is underway is all-too-apparent. These are twisted times, and we are tangled up together, wherever we stand, in webs of confusion, in webs of solidarity and love.

Choosing and practicing nonviolence, non-harming, ahimsa, is in mind-heart and deed the path of buddhas, and I’m grateful to be linked and united with all of you, that path open before us. Let us travel together, as far as the path leads!!

This three-month season has been a swirl of energies, both connective and disruptive. Far from retreating and defending ourselves against these forces, our spiritual practice embraces them as medicine – however strange. What we need from each other in this process is friendship and common vow, learning to trust in the continuous practice that unfolds through phases of seeming lapse and bereavement.

In this spirit, I bow in appreciation for your presence and engagement during this 90-day Dharma Between Worlds sabbatical and ask how I might continue to serve you in seasons to come. Particularly, I’m wondering whether you might like to receive audio (and maybe video?) transmissions from our dharma gatherings here in Columbus, OH. It’s fairly standard now for Kisei and me to alternate week to week giving 20- to 30-minute talks (with discussion) on Wednesday evening. So far we have not been recording. (Kisei’s ZCO group meets virtually on Mondays, and those talks circulate through Earth Dreams.) But we’re thinking about starting to record, and your feedback and encouragement would help us move this train along. So every 2-3 weeks I’d send out an audio offering through this substack newsletter, with some nice images and/or video to go along. How does that sound? Thoughts? Requests?

Thanks to those who read “Playing the Buddhist Mind Card.” Your comments, impressions, and counterpoints – especially on these long essays – are always welcome. As spring semester winds down, I’m re-entering that current of inquiry and can feel the next wave emerging – with hopes to set sail in early summer.

The themes of that essay are vividly active in my life and practice and path as a teacher (those are not three separate things!). These themes also form something of a bridge with aspects of my bubbling academic work. Broadly, this work traverses a zone of questioning about the mutual impact of religion and modernity, the future of religion in the midst of technological and social transformation, the possibility of religion beyond anthropocentrism, maybe beyond Earth, the place of tradition and perennial truth within an adaptive form of community and practicing.

For purposes of this message, we can focus the questioning on the future of buddhism (if not of buddhadharma). Could it be that the best way to embody buddhahood in this historical moment is not to practice in a traditional buddhist form? This is not an abstract, hypothetical question but very real, practical and immediate. It’s also not a question to be answered by any individual, arrived at and held to as some kind of intellectual self-certainty. Rather, I think we are wondering and questioning and discerning and engaging together. Is it most wise and compassionate, most genuinely and deeply and wholeheartedly buddhist, to be buddhist?

Modern buddhists (like the 14^th Dalai Lama) have been engaging in this kind of inquiry – with its consequent practical experiments – for centuries. In some form, these questions even precede modernity, in any familiar world-historical sense, and are just part of the radical self-reflexivity and skeptical interrogation animating buddhism from its beginnings. And of course practicing deeply we all know that “being a buddhist” is not what this is about, that the question “whether to be a buddhist” is not all that important or profound, that subscribing to or identifying with some “ism” is hardly the point.

Yet these are real questions, with real day-to-day practical, mundane, conceptual, symbolic, relational, philosophical, cultural, political, economic, ethical-spiritual consequences. Getting down to it, the consequences, as always, are soteriological; they matter for liberation. Everything does. And it’s also true that this particular set of questions operates through relatively superficial formations and complexes of meaning – names, conventional identities, categories of representation, but also cultural traditions, customs and norms, lineages of authority and influence, morphogenetic inheritances, ritual technologies, secrets. The terrain is complicated.

Because what constitutes “buddhism” (which I recently stopped capitalizing in most settings) is complicated. The forms and vehicles of tradition encompass the full range of what we think of as “the manifestations of life and death.” As a buddhist, every moment, every detail of time and space, has some ritualized, buddhistically conceived articulation and place within the chaos-infused open system. Buddhism is life-and-death, and being a buddhist shapes life and death in every conceivable way.

On one level, we could approach all of this as a question about “the obsolescence of religion” and so drift in a more sociological, speculative, and abstract direction: What is the future of life on Earth? Are we moving towards a technological singularity driven by a runaway artificial superintelligence, and if so how does this alter our sense of reality? What if we are already living in some kind of superintelligent simulacrum or Matrix? Is that something we’re on the verge of discovering, through breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing, advanced physics, neuroscience, etc.? Will we meet our superhuman technological creators? Have some people already met them? What happens if technology leads to the transcendence of biological death, as envisioned by Bryan Johnson and other transhumanists? What if people like Jeffrey Martin and Shinzen Young succeed, and we end up with a button to push for instant enlightenment? Are psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT already fulfilling this vision?

These are all significant and imminently relevant questions – but not exactly the gist of the present reflection. I’m thinking about the words I use in my bio, what Mud Lotus puts on its event-flyers, how we describe our spiritual practice in conversation, how we communicate and trace the genesis of our spiritual-cultural inheritances. Is “buddhism” a beneficent and felicitous category for defining the scope of our aspiration and engagement?

The answer here need not (and in any case will not) be an absolute yes or no. I do find myself fluidly slipping in and out, sometimes “being buddhist,” sometimes more or less, sometimes not very much at all. It really depends.

And this is in the spirit of buddha’s own irreducible, open pragmatism. Buddhism as liberatory play, spontaneous happening, adaptive medicine, “skillful means” (upāya). The Lotus-of-the-Wondrous-Dharma Mahāyāna Sūtra elucidates this open, liberatory orientation, revealing upāya as the natural, infinitely potent spirit of reality itself. All of this just kaleidoscopic, interactive dream-display manifesting spontaneously and responsively, in perfect tune with our liberating, our opening, on and on and so on.

This buddhism-as-upāya vision allows buddhism to enter and exit the playing field as needed, according to a deeper buddha-logic, beyond-buddha.

How we proceed with this medicine play is always a springing-forth of myriad multifold adaptations, lotus-blossomings. How much of the tradition are we bringing aboard for this journey? What configuration of rituals, forms, concepts, symbols, gestures, will comprise this vehicle? The Lotus Sūtra uses the metaphor of “vehicles” to convey the different modes of dharma historically sprung from the buddha’s infinitely generative teaching-awakening. There the suggestion is that apparent variety ultimately returns to the one – ekayāna, the “one vehicle.” But what does the one return to?

See, these historiological and categorial questions about “buddhism” and its vehicles are not separate from basic theology, buddhology, spirituality, call it what you will. Start asking, and you are right in the heart of kōan.