Can Mindful Politics Be Meaningful Politics? Socially Engaged Buddhism as a Political Project within a Liberal Political Order

Abstract

Throughout the Western political world, and particularly in the United States, contemporary Buddhist political thought has largely become synonymous with the movement of mindful politics, also known as Socially Engaged Buddhism. Focusing primarily on issues of social, economic, and environmental justice, mindful politics has found a natural ally in Western left-wing and progressive movements to the degree that Buddhist political thought in the United States is now seemingly indistinguishable from these Western political positions as a practical matter. While the practical alliance of Socially Engaged Buddhism and progressivism is well established, what is less clear is what the movement of mindful politics brings to this relationship beyond its Buddhist veneer. By basing its political project on the secularization of Buddhist compassion (karuṇā), mindful politics fails in creating a political project which can be compelling to those outside of the confines of Buddhist religious belief and practice. While the mindful politics movement and contemporary liberal progressivism share an overlap in policy commitments, the religious roots of Buddhist mindful politics ultimately preclude it from properly aligning with the pluralistic requirements of the prevailing liberal political order. This article will examine the foundations of Socially Engaged Buddhism and explore the standing of the possibility of Socially Engaged Buddhism as the foundation for a political project within the confines of a liberal political order.

1. Introduction

In May of 2015, a group of one hundred and twenty-five politically active American Buddhist practitioners convened and met with officials from the White House and the U.S. Department of State (Boorstein 2015). Predominantly Western, predominantly white, and predominantly liberal in their politics, this group sought not so much to provide guidance in policy but to seek answers to more basic questions such as “what even constitutes a Buddhist political agenda in contemporary American life?”1

This article will examine the standing of Buddhism as a political element in contemporary American and Western political life. It will argue that the contemporary movement of Socially Engaged Buddhism finds itself hung on the horns of a dilemma, torn between its standing as a religious movement and its standing as a political movement. The brackish standing of Socially Engaged Buddhism, a religious movement seeking to integrate itself into a liberal and pluralistic political program, creates a tension at the heart of the project. As a political movement founded on religious principles within a liberal political order, Socially Engaged Buddhism finds itself in a position where it must necessarily make a choice between the exclusionary nature of its religious claims, compelling only to Buddhist believers and practitioners, and the pluralistic requirements of liberal society. This incoherence caused by Socially Engaged Buddhism’s primary commitment to its religious foundations leaves Socially Engaged Buddhism in a position where it ultimately comes to be untenable as the foundation of a political project within the confines of a liberal political order.

The goal of this article is neither to promote nor denigrate the standing of either Socially Engaged Buddhism or liberalism as political projects in their own right. Instead, the aim is to examine the standing of their compatibility as concurrent political projects in the world as we find it, which is to say a global political order defined by and premised on the political language and assumptions of Western liberalism. Following the end of the era of colonization, the Buddhist world largely regained its political autonomy. However, this autonomy was not regained in a vacuum, as the Buddhist world was equally thrust into a global geo-political condition defined by a hegemonic liberal order. As a matter of practical politics, historically Buddhist countries approached this new condition in a variety of ways, including both the quick integration of Burma into the United Nations, with U Thant serving as the first non-Western Secretary General beginning in 1961, as well as the more hesitant approach of Bhutan, which has largely promoted a policy of isolation from the West.

However, the focus of this article is not practical politics, but political theory. In particular, this article focuses on the attempt made by Socially Engaged Buddhism to blend and integrate the principles and beliefs of Buddhist political thought into the practice and political thought of this hegemonic political order. As a matter of political realities, Socially Engaged Buddhist thinkers and practitioners find themselves at a natural disadvantage in this project in that they are from the beginning set back on their heels. Simply by the nature of being a foreign practice seeking to exist and thrive within a pre-existing condition, if Socially Engaged Buddhism wishes to be viable as a means of political action in any respect larger than simple individual practice, it must be able to accomplish the dual project of both maintaining its principles as well as making clear how those principles can fit within the liberal political order which it is entering.

The meeting in 2015, though interesting, was simply perfunctory and no meaningful public policy was crafted there. Yet despite this, the meeting raises the question of the necessity of a meaningful relationship between the Buddhist religious community (sangha) and the larger political authority in a context like modern America. At least in theory, the nature of democracy is such that the sangha, insofar as its members are also members of the greater political community, is in fact consulted and present in political decision making as a member of the democratic process, albeit with its numbers drowned out by the pluralistic mixture of other interests in society. That Buddhist practitioners would be treated as would any other interest group in American political life seems an obvious notion, but its repercussions are more complicated as a matter of Buddhist political theory. As given in the teachings of the Buddha in the texts of the ancient Pāli Canon, such as the Aggañña and Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Suttas, political action (and private political action in particular) is viewed with suspicion, if not seen as an outright morally denigrating act, and is explicitly framed as damaging to the process of enlightenment. Ruling is left to virtuous kings, who themselves have such personal characteristics that they are able to withstand the deleterious effects of political life (Moore 2016, p. 19). What political action there is for Buddhist practitioners at the popular level is even further contained to members of the formal monasterial sangha, who while not partaking in political activity themselves nonetheless help to inform kings. This system breaks down in any number of obvious ways in the contemporary political setting of the United States and most of the liberal world order—there are no kings to advise and the rulers which exist are not chosen for their virtue but for their supposed ability to rule in the name of the people; in the Western context, there is no meaningful monasterial sangha and what sangha there is is understood more broadly as the simple public collective of Buddhist practitioners at large, lay or otherwise; and finally, the proposed end of political life is not Buddhist virtue (or religious virtue of any sort) but a respect for liberal values such as equality and liberty and the prospect of an individuated, self-governed life.

The question for a contemporary Western Buddhist, and the particular question sought to be answered by the White House meeting in 2015, is precisely how a modern Buddhist is meant to act simultaneously as both a spiritual being seeking enlightenment and a political animal living in a world premised on liberal values. This is not a matter of policy (in this regard, at least, most contemporary American Buddhists seem to favor a progressive agenda), but rather a question of what proper political action should look like in this condition, if political action is even allowed or warranted at all. This is the primary question facing those who seek to engage in mindful politics.

As the world barrels forward through the age of globalization and traditionally Buddhist countries such as those in Southeast Asia continue to take on increasingly Westernized political practices, the teachings and practices of the Buddhist world have begun to take hold in and shape Western politics in turn. The most explicit expression of this adaptation is found in the rise of the practice of mindful politics (also known as Socially Engaged Buddhism), a mixture of Buddhist ethics and Western political advocacy which eschews both the hesitancy and suspicion towards the value of politics seen in the ancient Buddhist teachings of the Pāli Canon, as well as rejecting historical forms of Buddhist political practice, namely a Buddhist king who rules on the basis of the authority granted by the sangha, that characterized essentially all secular governance throughout the Buddhist world prior to the introduction of Western colonization. This project has seen a sharp rise with the recent explosion of the Mindfulness Movement in the Western mind, capitalizing on a renewed interest in the principles underlying Buddhist practice. While the Mindfulness Movement forwards Buddhist principles as a means to correct the distortions of the mind due to the effects of modern social and cultural pressures in the realms of personal experience and emotional/psychological well-being, the mindful politics of Socially Engaged Buddhist thought presents an application of these principles to the realm of political life, seeking to apply this method as a means to not simply aid individuals but society itself. Their concurrent rise serves as an indication that the larger project of an opening of the Western mind to Buddhist principles and teachings is beginning to show some practical effects. No longer contained to academia and fringe religious practice, Buddhism, or at least the principles therein, is beginning to have some mainstream recognition in the West, and particularly in the United States.

However, a rise in mainstream popularity also brings with it the risk of a mainstreaming of Buddhist principles, distorting these principles to make them more palatable to Western practice. In the case of Buddhism, which rests itself on philosophic premises which are so foreign to the Western experience as to be almost unintelligible in their original form, this mainstreaming carries the risk of fundamentally bastardizing the original motivating aspects which make Buddhist thought so appealing to the West in an age of apparent spiritual and philosophic malaise. Adaptation risks the danger of becoming adulteration, wherein those aspects which are unique become so misshapen in the process of fitting themselves into a new box that they no longer hold the value they once did.

In the social realm, this has manifested in the ways that the Mindfulness Movement has deteriorated into a new form of self-help.2 We can see an example of this recuperative bastardization manifesting itself in mindfulness’ political counterpart of Socially Engaged Buddhism by looking at the writing of former United States Representative Tim Ryan. An outspoken proponent of mindfulness and Socially Engaged Buddhist thought, though himself a practicing Roman Catholic, Congressman Ryan lays out his understanding of the value of this practice in works such as A Mindful Nation, where he attempts to show the role that mindful practice can play in both private and public American life. However, Ryan’s intentions here are betrayed by his subject. Opening a chapter entitled “How Mindfulness Can Improve Performance and Build Resiliency for Our Military and First Responders”, Ryan quotes Marine Corps Major Jim Toth, relaying that “Mind fitness training is applicable to everything you do, whether at home with family or at work in the Marine Corps. It can be used for elite athletes, military, IBM executives- anyone who has any type of stress” (Ryan 2012, p. 113). Highlighting the rebranding of mindful Buddhist practice as “mind fitness training”, Ryan’s choice of quote precisely demonstrates the role that mindfulness and Socially Engaged Buddhist thought has allowed itself to be thrust into. Buddhism cum mind fitness training is now the perfect tool for anyone with an excess of stress, be it those who run the war machine or those working to exploit the Buddhist populations of Southeast Asia from the boardroom.

Though its origins are in the homelands of Buddhist practice and its tenets mostly aligned with mainstream natal Buddhist stances, at its core Socially Engaged Buddhism is an example of the Western mind seeking to make Buddhism something it is not, namely a secularized phenomenon rather than a system of religious truth claims. Yet this watering down of the Buddhist elements of mindful engaged practice, as we see with Tim Ryan, is only one side of the issue. While the societal-level risks inherent in a project of this sort are low when viewing something like Sam Harris’ attempt to examine the claims of Buddhism as a function of modern neuroscience, the stakes are decidedly higher in the realm of politics.

As Buddhism becomes increasingly watered down with elements that make it appear more and more Western and less and less Buddhist, it becomes easy to forget that mindful politics rests on religious origins at all. While obfuscating religious claims in the attempt to secularize them may run the risk of corrupting the underlying principles of Buddhist thought, it more importantly runs the risk of creating a foundation and justification for a theological politics which is able to successfully masquerade as a seemingly pluralistic and secular political order. The fundamental principles set forth by the proponents of Socially Engaged Buddhist thought (broadly speaking, a commitment to social, racial, environmental, and economic justice) are themselves wholly compatible with Western political life, but we cannot rightly view or understand these Western-friendly political commitments outside of their philosophic origins. From a Western perspective, these positions are most clearly and primarily justified as an outgrowth of liberalism, resulting from the philosophic privileging of the individual as the primary unit of political life and the subsequent respect for this individual’s standing in the political sphere. It is from this privileging of the individual that liberalism develops many of its key political premises, including a commitment to a pluralistic politics and the necessity of the maintenance of ideals like the separation of church and state that come with it.

This is not the case for those who wish to forward these positions as a function of Socially Engaged Buddhist thought. Instead, here these principles (as would rightly be expected) are justified in terms of Buddhist thought, primarily in relation to the necessity of Buddhist practitioners to exhibit compassion to all sentient beings. Though Socially Engaged Buddhist thought and contemporary liberalism arrive at much the same political conclusions, they nonetheless ground their belief on wildly differing premises. As a function of political outcomes, the two are natural allies, and it is thus not surprising to see such support for Socially Engaged Buddhist thought among many liberal-minded Western thinkers. But what is lost in this rush to alliance is the fact that Buddhist compassion, as liberal as it may be in its ends, is nonetheless an explicitly religious doctrine. Its standing cannot be separated from its origins. Accordingly, despite any appearance to the contrary, any politics crafted from Socially Engaged Buddhist thought is by definition illiberal, as it is premised inextricably on a claim of religious particularism. Though Buddhist practice may claim the universality of compassion, this claim is only compelling to the Buddhist practitioner. When a Socially Engaged Buddhist speaks of compassion, we must understand that this is not simply compassion as a function of empathy or pity the way it might be used in common parlance or within the Western tradition of political thought by Rousseau or Tocqueville.3 Buddhist compassion (karuṇā) is a particular religious term with particular religious connotations and meaning, and its value is not justified by Socially Engaged Buddhists as a function of its political worth but of its use as a means to further the greater Buddhist project of enlightenment. It is not a secular claim, and thus by necessity is inherently exclusionary and by extension non-pluralistic.

Though a Buddhist politics founded on karuṇā presents itself as universal, this universality could only be achieved as a political reality in a condition wherein the entirety of the political population took this religious claim seriously, either by circumstantial accident or by force. The former of these, the alignment of a nation to a particular religious stance by circumstance of historical accident, is the fundamental issue at hand as regards Myanmar and its current conflict-ridden transition into liberalism (Sukala 2023). The problems of a situation like Myanmar, in this regard, are in the unsustainability of this sort of circumstance in a pluralistic condition. If a condition is truly pluralistic, there will be an inevitable clash (at least philosophic, if not physical) between the religious stance on which the regime is premised and the free action of those over which it rules.

But these are the problems of a religiously grounded condition moving towards liberalism.4 The danger of a seemingly liberal politics built around the principles of a movement like Socially Engaged Buddhism is grounded in the possibility that the general social agreement on the validity of Buddhist teachings found in the historical accident of religiously homogenous Myanmar would instead have to be instituted by force in a condition such as the West, which begins from a position of religious and cultural heterogeneity. The risk of this sort of condition is widely acknowledged as it relates to situations like the increasing political influence of Christian nationalism. That a Buddhist nationalist state seems quite unlikely to actually materialize as a realistic possibility in the United States or Europe is quite beside the larger issue. A Buddhist nationalist state differs from a Christian nationalist state only as a matter of aesthetic and particularistic dogma, not in kind, and that one seems unlikely to manifest makes no difference as regards the level of concern that one should have for it at a philosophical level. If mindful politics is to continue to become an increasingly meaningful force in Western political life, its foundations are worthy of equal scrutiny to that of any other religiously founded political movement.

If general spiritual consensus is necessary to ground a politics based on a fundamentally religious claim, wherever this consensus is found lacking there must be an ever-present concern that this consensus will be viewed as so important that it must be manufactured. While it would be foolish to claim that the proponents of Socially Engaged Buddhism themselves are seeking to forcibly convert Western citizens into Buddhists and Western society into a Buddhist condition, the scars of the rise of the political religions of fascism and communism in the twentieth century demonstrate precisely how important it is to not lose sight of the dangers of a politics which mandates intellectual and social homogeneity to maintain its standing. However well-intentioned the political goals of Socially Engaged Buddhism may be, it must not be conflated or confused with a secular project. Though its ends appear liberal, its means are not, and its groundings must be fully examined if we are to rightly judge its standing.

2. The Origins and Principles of Mindful Politics

At its core, Socially Engaged Buddhism is built on bringing together the principles of Buddhist practice and Western political action. As its name implies, Socially Engaged Buddhism understands itself as an attempt to distance Buddhist practice from its heritage as an individually focused attempt to achieve enlightenment in favor of a practice of social engagement undertaken in light of Buddhist principles. Whereas classical Buddhist practice would simply seek to foster an understanding within an individual practitioner of the necessity of principles such as compassion and non-violence in the hope that this understanding will lead that individual to enlightenment, Socially Engaged Buddhism, building on the emphasis on compassion seen in the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhist practice, posits that if one has a true and proper understanding of these principles he or she will further see the necessity of placing these principles into larger social action. One cannot realize the real truth of compassion, for example, without also seeing the corollary necessity of acting in line with the requirements of compassion. Enlightenment is not an intellectual activity, at least not in full. Proper enlightenment begins with intellectual (be it rational or arational) activity, but only is properly fulfilled in the subsequent actualization of this comprehension.

Though there are a number of organizations which help to further the ideas and causes of mindful politics, there is no proper central authority which oversees Socially Engaged Buddhism, nor is there a central creed or series of beliefs which one is mandated to adopt. While its origins lie most clearly in the Mahāyāna Thien tradition of Vietnam, its influence is spread across Buddhist traditions, such as the Tibetan thought of the current Dalai Lama or the Theravāda thought of Sulak Sivaraksa.5 The term itself originates from the thought of Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, in the mid-1960s. He worked to develop this novel and modern understanding of Buddhist practice not as an intellectual exercise, but as a practical response to the horrors engulfing his country during the periods of European and American occupation. The ultimate catalyst of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s thought is typically understood as the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức in the streets of Saigon, captured in the infamous photo which spread quickly across Western media. During the early period of American engagement in Vietnam, Nhất Hạnh left the country, teaching Buddhism and comparative religion at Columbia University (Batchelor 1994, p. 357). During this period, serving as an advocate for his native country, Nhất Hạnh began lecturing at various American universities and engaging in correspondence with Western counterparts in social action, such as Martin Luther King Jr.

The principal tenets of Socially Engaged Buddhism are laid out by Nhất Hạnh in his book-length essay, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism. At their core, these precepts do not differ fundamentally from the ancient principles set forth by the Buddha, grounded on an emphasis of the role of suffering in human existence.6 In practice, the principles of Nhất Hạnh’s Socially Engaged Buddhism do not seek to supersede the Buddha’s core teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, but instead present themselves as a necessary, though unstated, addendum. Whereas the Buddha concluded that through knowing the cause of suffering we are able to move beyond it through the cultivation of the wisdom necessary for enlightenment, Nhất Hạnh believes that this knowledge creates in the Buddhist practitioner a necessary responsibility to use this knowledge to a social end.

Section Four of his mindfulness program for Socially Engaged Buddhist practice states the following: “Aware that looking deeply at the nature of suffering can help us develop compassion and find ways out of suffering, we are determined not to avoid or close our eyes before suffering” (Thích Nhất Hạnh 1998, p. 18). This passage exhibits the core of Nhất Hạnh’s project. An awareness of suffering and how to alleviate it in one’s own being is not sufficient. We need the knowledge of the Four Noble Truths, but having grasped this knowledge we need also to move beyond it. Suffering should not merely draw our attention to our own cravings; it should allow us to empathize and feel compassion for the suffering caused by cravings in others. In Nhất Hạnh’s formulation, if we rightly understand suffering, we are compelled not to simply seek release for ourselves but instead are compelled to seek release for all beings. Equally then, compassion and compassionate action in the thought of Socially Engaged Buddhism is only intelligible as a function of religious practice and its justification as humanity’s driving force rests on its value to the Buddhist soteriological project.

Despite its soteriological origins, this particular understanding of compassion as driving action is also the introduction of the political element into Socially Engaged Buddhist thought. Unlike Western conceptions of political life, which understand it as either natural (as with Aristotle) or as emerging through shared agreement (as with the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), Nhất Hạnh’s Buddhism premises the emergence of political obligation on a spiritual realization of the interconnectedness of existence and the requirement of one who comes to this realization to set aside personal gain for public benefit. Compassion is the foundation of politics itself. Socially Engaged Buddhism then is a theology of liberation not simply in the form of personal spiritual liberation, as with the ancient teachings of the Buddha, but of social liberation in line with similar theological movements in the West (Queen and King 2011, p. x). Christopher S. Queen, a noted scholar of Socially Engaged Buddhism, describes this distinction as a “profound change in Buddhist soteriology- from a highly personal and other-worldly notion of liberation to a social, economic, this-worldly liberation” (Queen 2011, p. 10).

3. The Grounding of Mindfulness’ Political Turn

Looking at the once politically suspicious thought of the Buddha as presented in the Pāli Canon, how does a religious practice philosophically justify moving from a view of political action as marring one’s being to promoting a slogan of “Educate! Agitate! Organize!”? (Queen 2011, p. 5) In the case of Socially Engaged Buddhism, the basis is three-fold, consisting of (1) an acknowledgement of the requirements placed on a Buddhist practitioner by the necessities of compassion, (2) the secularization and rationalization of Buddhist symbology and practice, and (3) politicization through the process of the Westernization of Buddhist concepts and language. Through a combination of these three factors, Socially Engaged Buddhism has been able to reorient established Buddhist understandings of liberation into a system of thought which Queen describes as “unprecedented, and thus tantamount to a new chapter in the history of the tradition” on par historically with the three major Buddhist traditions (Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna) which preceded it (Queen 2000, p. 1).

3.1. Compassion

As a matter of religious doctrine, the characteristic of Socially Engaged Buddhism which most clearly differs from its historical counterparts is its emphasis on the political consequences of compassion. The concept of Buddhist compassion (karuṇā) is found throughout the early texts of the Buddhist tradition. Its importance is further emphasized in the later Mahāyānan conception of the bodhisattva, or one who elects to direct their life towards the purpose of Buddhahood and in some instances, having achieved enlightenment, chooses to forestall their release from perpetual existential suffering (saṃsāra) in order to help others achieve the same, performed in the name of wisdom and compassion (Ichikawa 1979, p. 248; see also Leighton 2003). Socially Engaged Buddhist thought does not deny these understandings of compassion, but it does view them as ultimately insufficient or at least not fully realized.

Socially Engaged Buddhism’s presentation of compassion mirrors that of the Mahāyānan bodhisattva (Thích Nhất Hạnh was himself a disciple of a branch of this school and makes frequent allusion to its concepts in his writing) but extends its logic further, going beyond viewing it as simply creating an obligation to help further others in the project of individual enlightenment and instead moving this obligation into the realm of social and political action. Common understandings of the bodhisattva present them as driven by the dual forces of compassion and wisdom to help cultivate in others the necessary conditions to help achieve enlightenment. Nhất Hạnh views this as insufficient given the conditions of the modern era. Speaking of compassion in Interbeing, he writes, “When a village is being bombed and children and adults are suffering from wounds and death, can a Buddhist sit still in his unbombed temple? If he has wisdom and compassion, he will find ways to practice Buddhism while helping other people”(Thích Nhất Hạnh 1998, p. 31).

Nhất Hạnh’s quote is interesting not only because of his stance that compassion breeds a necessity for action, but in his assessment of what form of action is apparently required. He says explicitly that, in a condition such as this, a Buddhist must practice Buddhism while also helping those around him. Further, Nhất Hạnh seems to maintain that this established Buddhist ideal of compassionate action is not really action at all, more akin to only sitting still in an unbombed temple. The old ways of the bodhisattva are clearly now insufficient, if they were truly ever sufficient at all. But this does not mean that modern conditions have relieved Buddhists of the requirements of compassionate action; quite the opposite, they have simply made clear the true nature of their obligation.

This necessity for action is emphasized by David Brazier in his book, The New Buddhism. Writing on the relationship between wisdom and compassion in driving the actions of Buddhist practitioners, Brazier emphasizes that though they are complementary, they are not equal. “Compassion power is, therefore”, he writes,

the highest value in Buddhism. Compassion means concern about the afflictions suffered by others. Compassion needs wisdom in order to be effective. Compassion is highest, however. Wisdom is the servant of compassion. Compassion tells us what needs to be done and wisdom tells us how to do it. Buddhism is not about disappearing into a magical wisdom world. It is surely about doing something real.

(Brazier 2002, pp. 24–25)

With this passage, we can see a few interesting facets of the “new Buddhism”. First is the necessary connection between compassion and social action in Socially Engaged Buddhist thought. Throughout his writing, echoing both Thích Nhất Hạnh and the Dalai Lama, Brazier speaks of compassion not as a psychological stance or sensibility, but instead as itself a type of action. The realization of the true nature of compassion is such that it bears upon the recipient a burden of compassionate action. The two are inseparable, as to truly feel compassion is to acknowledge its incumbent burden. “Compassion demands of us”, he claims, “that we step out of our old identity, however comfortable, and make ourselves available for a greater work” (Brazier 2002, p. 24). This language is mirrored by Stephen Batchelor, who writes that “compassion demands that one tackle the root societal causes of this suffering” (Batchelor 1994, p. 365). In this regard, it is important not what compassion demands of us specifically, but that it necessarily makes demands of us at all. Compassion contains action, even if it is potential rather than kinetic. It may not be surprising then to find Queen refer to these contemporary presentations of Buddhism as an “energetic engagement” with the realities of the modern world (Queen and King 2011, p. ix).

But what Brazier’s passage further reveals is a reorientation of the conventional Buddhist presentation of the relationship between wisdom and compassion. Conventional presentations view the two as intertwined and balanced, offering privilege to neither. Here, Brazier creates a hierarchy of their value as a means of proper Buddhist action. Wisdom, he claims, is the servant of compassion. Wisdom itself cannot even tell you what needs to be performed; this is reserved to compassion. As Brazier makes clear, Socially Engaged Buddhist practice, by placing a preeminence on the value of action as the proper means to observe compassion, devalues the role of wisdom at its expense. Proper action (understood as action guided by compassion) is not based on a reasoned assessment, nor is it predicated on acting in line with some objective standard. Proper action is dictated by acting in line with compassion, as derived from a condition of mindfulness and attentiveness to the interconnectivity of being. But, more importantly, given the nature of compassion as inherently tied to action, it is also the case that Socially Engaged Buddhism privileges the realm of activity (which is to say the realm of politics and the political) over the realms of contemplation and religious doctrine. By intertwining personal enlightenment with social goods and ends, Socially Engaged Buddhism socializes and politicizes heretofore private Buddhist practice.

3.2. Secularization

By politicizing Buddhism’s ends, Socially Engaged Buddhism also manages to fundamentally alter the classical understandings of Buddhist community. We see this first in the modern expansion of the understanding of who or what constitutes the sangha. Originally, this title was reserved for the formal community of Buddhist monks. In modernity, this understanding has been transformed, with the sangha instead being understood as the totality of Buddhist practitioners. The importance of community is not lessened in Socially Engaged Buddhist thought, but the relationship of the individuals within it is altered. One result of the privileging of compassionate action over wisdom is the commensurate lowering of the standing of monastic practice relative to personal, private practice. Within Socially Engaged Buddhist practice, this equalization is made explicit. James William Coleman, writing on this reconfiguration, claims that “In the new Buddhism, this fundamental distinction between monk and layperson is almost wiped away. Although some people live a more monastic lifestyle while others live as householders, the pursuit of liberation is common to them all” (Coleman 2002, p. 13). He goes on to conclude that “In one sense everyone is a kind of monk, and in another no one is” (Coleman 2002, p. 14).

Concurrent and complementary to the rise of Socially Engaged Buddhism has been a movement among some prominent Western Buddhists to decouple Buddhist practice from its metaphysical and cosmological origins in Eastern thought. This movement, dubbed secular Buddhism, has seen moderate success as an intellectual exercise but has proven wildly popular in helping to shape popular conceptions of mindfulness and the Mindfulness Movement, and while not identical to Socially Engaged Buddhism is nonetheless its intellectual companion and exists as a result of the same Westernizing forces.

Popularized and defended most ardently by Stephen Batchelor in works such as Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, After Buddhism, and Buddhism Without Beliefs, secular Buddhism (unlike much of greater Socially Engaged Buddhist thought) explicitly understands and presents itself as a direct response to and reimagining of classical Buddhist practice in light of modern concerns and beliefs. These changes run so deep that Batchelor, in describing this sort of Buddhist practice, feels comfortable in claiming that “The kind of Buddhism sought out by [these contemporary Western practitioners] on the basis of their practice of mindfulness may have little if anything to do with Buddhism as it is traditionally understood and presented” (Batchelor 2012, p. 89).

For his part, Batchelor does not view these transformations and reorientations as a negative, drawing on Buddhist history as evidence that these changes are not only wholly with precedent but also not against the Buddhist conception of truth as that which leads someone to the appropriate end rather than as an objective standard. Comparing his presentation of secular Buddhism to past traditions, he writes that “Just as the term ‘Tibetan Buddhism’ describes the kind of dharma [truth underlying the teachings of the Buddha] that evolved in Tibet, so, in its broadest sense, would ‘secular Buddhism’ describe the kind of dharma that is evolving in this secular age” (Batchelor 2016, p. 19).

These changes are necessary according to Batchelor not because traditional Buddhist teachings are not “true” objectively, but because they are no longer persuasive. Insofar as the teachings and metaphysics of ancient Buddhist practice no longer convince modern practitioners (and practitioners in the West in particular), they should, and perhaps must, be abandoned, as they have ceased to help to lead practitioners towards the ends of Buddhist enlightenment. This pragmatism, which is itself well-grounded in classical Buddhist practice, leads Batchelor to conclude that accessibility is more important than metaphysical consistency. Speaking to those who would consider this a process of distortion rather than of adaptation, Batchelor offers the following:

So embedded is this Indian soteriological framework in Buddhism that Buddhists might find it unintelligible that one would even consider questioning it. For to dispense with such key doctrines as rebirth, the law of kamma, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death would surely undermine the entire edifice of Buddhism itself. Yet for those who have grown up outside of Indian culture, who feel at home in a modernity informed by the natural sciences, to then be told that one cannot “really” practise the dharma unless one adheres to the tenets of ancient Indian soteriology makes little sense. The reason people can no longer accept these beliefs need not be because they reject them as false, but because such views are too much at variance with everything else they know and believe about the nature of themselves and the world. They simply do not work anymore, and the intellectual gymnastics one needs to perform to make them work seem casuistic and, for many, unpersuasive. They are metaphysical beliefs, in that (like belief in God) they can neither be convincingly demonstrated nor refuted. One has to take them on trust, albeit with as much reason and empirical evidence that one can muster to back them up…

… At first sight, it would seem that the challenge facing the dharma as it enters modernity would be to write another software program, e.g., “Vipassana”, “Soka Gakkai” or “Shambhala Buddhism”, that would modify a traditional form of Buddhism in order to address more adequately the needs of contemporary practitioners. However, the cultural divide that separates traditional Buddhism from modernity is so great that this may not be enough. It might well be necessary to rewrite the operating system itself, resulting in what we could call “Buddhism 2.0”.

(Batchelor 2012, pp. 89–90)

The final stage of the construction of a viable Buddhism 2.0 is to decide precisely what of the old Buddhism will remain and what will replace the refuse. This facet of the project is still in its relative infancy, and by its nature can only be accomplished as a function of public Buddhist practice as it organically evolves, seeing what is accepted by practitioners and what is not. Batchelor offers a bare minimum set of functions that this refounded Buddhism would have to meet, finding that “it would need to be founded upon canonical source texts, be able to offer a coherent interpretation of key practices, doctrines and ethical precepts, and provide a sufficiently rich and integrated theoretical model of the dharma to serve as the basis for a flourishing human existence” (Batchelor 2012, p. 90).

What this would look like in Western practice, or how it would significantly differ from traditional practice, is as of yet unclear. Batchelor’s project, however, has seen some successes in recent years, albeit in a somewhat modified form, in the guise of mindfulness. Language from sociology departments to pop culture has come to be dominated with talk of “mindfulness”, or the attempt to live in line with the recognition of the presence of the now and an awareness of our actions. Though much of this mainstream talk comes to nothing more than pop psychology, the language of mindfulness itself is equally common throughout the writings of Socially Engaged Buddhism, to the degree that it has itself become rebranded in the West as “mindful politics”. From collections of essays such as Mindful Politics: A Buddhist Guide to Making the World a Better Place, featuring contributions from thinkers as diverse as Thích Nhất Hạnh, bell hooks, and Sam Harris (McLeod 2006), to essays like Peter Matthiessen’s “Watering the Seed of Mindfulness” (Matthiessen 2000) or gatherings like the conference on “The Politics of the Mindful Revolution” at meetings of the Western Political Science Association, the principles of this seemingly secularized Socially Engaged Buddhism are beginning to be taken seriously across a number of intellectual spaces, if only under another term. Though the number of practicing Buddhists in America who recognize themselves as such may be holding relatively steady relative to historical trends, the actions of a practicing Western Buddhist and his “mindful” Christian or atheist neighbor may be more similar than any of them realize. But despite this process, while the atheist or Christian mindful practitioner might remain unaware due to its secularized language, the practice underlying mindfulness remains, at its core, Buddhist. Though its origins are obscured, mindfulness rests on a delicate balance, with religious principles being smuggled in under secular pretenses.

3.3. Politicization and Westernization

The key facet which differentiates Socially Engaged Buddhism from its classical counterparts is its embrace of political action as the proper end of Buddhist practice.7 The groundwork for this novel contemporary understanding is laid first by Socially Engaged Buddhism’s privileging of the realm of activity over that of mere contemplation and further bolstered by the movement of formerly sacred religious symbols and practices into the mundane, secular realm. But though these conditions are necessary for the intellectual justification of Socially Engaged Buddhist practice, they are not sufficient to bring about a near wholly new politicized version of an ancient tradition.

The privileging of politics seen in Socially Engaged Buddhism is not an organic development or evolution from within Buddhist thought itself but rather is a reaction and adaptation to Western pressures, interests, and approaches. Though Socially Engaged Buddhism is undoubtedly an outgrowth of Buddhist thought, at least insofar as it premises itself on Buddhist epistemology, ontology, and soteriology, its use of these elements is unique within the greater Buddhist tradition and likely would never have been realized were Buddhism to have never spread to the West. Kenneth Kraft, describing the difficulties of scholars attempting to parse the peculiar standing of Socially Engaged Buddhism, describes the situation as follows: “When they reexamine Buddhism’s 2500-year-old heritage, these authors find that the principles and even some of the techniques of an engaged Buddhism have been latent in the tradition since the time of its founding”. However, he continues, “Qualities that were inhibited in pre-modern Asian setting, they argue, can now be actualized through Buddhism’s exposure to the West, where ethical sensitivity, social activism, and egalitarianism are emphasized” (Eppsteiner 1988, pp. xii–xiii).

Christopher Queen offers three primary qualities of contemporary Western Buddhist practice. These are (1) a recognition of the inalienable value of the human person, whatever his or her level of achievement or standing in the community, (2) a recognition of the social and collective nature of experience, shaped in particular by cultural and political institutions that have the power to promote good or evil, fulfilment or suffering, and progress or decline, and (3) a recognition of the necessity of collective action to address the systemic causes of suffering and promote social advancement in the world (Queen 2000, p. 3). With the exception of an emphasis on the language of suffering, this passage reads like a list of the requirements written by a political scientist as much as that of a Buddhist practitioner.

This approach, the couching of Buddhist concepts and arguments in the language of Western political life, is typical of Socially Engaged Buddhist writing. Throughout Interbeing, his most fully fleshed out statement on the principles of Socially Engaged Buddhist practice, Thích Nhất Hạnh drifts in and out of Buddhist and Western parlance. His focus throughout is the cultivation of compassionate action through mindfulness. This is a very Buddhist approach, albeit with a modern bent. But his method of justifying this project is undertaken in decidedly Western terms. Early in his essay, Nhất Hạnh works to explain how we should approach mindful exercise. Here, he says that “Mindfulness trainings are practices, not prohibitions. They do not restrict our freedom. They protect us, guarantee our liberty, and prevent us from getting entangled in difficulties and confusion” (Thích Nhất Hạnh 1998, p. 7).

As this passage is indicative of Nhất Hạnh’s approach throughout the text, an important issue is raised by the fact that the language of freedom and liberty are themselves foreign to Buddhist discourse. To the extent that they do exist in some analogue in Buddhist discourse, they lack the political connotations that Nhất Hạnh here implies. For example, the closest Buddhist term to freedom would be moksha, meaning liberation achieved through enlightenment. This is undoubtedly a type of freedom, but not a political one. Nhất Hạnh makes no effort, here or elsewhere in the essay, to parse out this Buddhist/Western distinction, choosing simply to speak in a language comfortable to Western readers without burdening them with the difficulties of Buddhist metaphysics. He equally does not shy away from admitting the necessity of this philosophic elision to his larger project. One of the four founding principles of his Order of Interbeing relays that “A teaching, in order to bring about understanding and compassion, must reflect the needs of people and the realities of society” (Thích Nhất Hạnh 1998, p. 8). Given then that he views modern society as a “destructive momentum of social and economic pressures”, it is fitting that he crafts a Buddhism which can address the ailments of modern, political humanity (Thích Nhất Hạnh 1998, p. 33).

One of the more striking examples of Socially Engaged Buddhism’s intermingling of Buddhist and Western political language is found with the notion of justice. Throughout his writings, Nhất Hạnh makes frequent appeals to the idea of justice, be it promoting the ends of social justice or arguing against the injustices created by economic oppression. Though these appeals would not be surprising within the context of Western political thought, Socially Engaged Buddhism’s preoccupation with justice does decidedly set it apart from classical Buddhist political thought, which lacks any discrete and discernable conception of justice. Instead, within the scope of Buddhist thought, justice (insofar as it can be discovered as such) is found nestled within the larger concept of dhamma, or the truth of the nature of reality as expressed in the teachings of the Buddha (Patyal 1994). Yet for all of its novelty, Nhất Hạnh makes little effort to characterize his exact understanding of justice.

When the topic of justice is discussed in more than a passing fashion, it becomes clear that though Nhất Hạnh is choosing to frame his discussion in terms of the Western ideal of justice, his presentation is grounded more in Buddhist thought than that of the Western tradition. In an interview with bell hooks on the nature of love and community, hooks introduces a discussion of justice. Addressing the subject, Nhất Hạnh says,

This is a very interesting topic. It was a very important issue for the Buddha. How we view justice depends on our practice of looking deeply. We may think that justice is everyone being equal, having the same rights, sharing the same kind of advantages, but maybe we have not had the chance to look at the nature of justice in terms of no-self. That kind of justice is based on the idea of self, but it may be very interesting to explore justice in terms of no-self.

(Hooks 2017)

He offers no more by way of explication, but from his statement here we can draw certain conclusions. Justice, in its traditional Western conception, is insufficient for Nhất Hạnh. Traditional presentations of justice are founded, perhaps necessarily, around the Western conception of the individualized self. It is the project of Buddhism at large to break down this understanding philosophically, and it is the project of Socially Engaged Buddhism in particular to then transition this new understanding into the political realm. While he says it would be an interesting idea to explore, he does not do so.

Nhất Hạnh gives some clues as to what this new no-self conception of justice might look like in an essay entitled “True Justice Should Have Compassion in It”. The thrust of this essay is exactly what the title would imply, that a proper understanding of justice is one which contains a conception of Buddhist compassion. To help explain what this might mean in practice, Nhất Hạnh addresses the idea of justice as a means to guide punishment. However, what Nhất Hạnh makes clear throughout is that justice can only be rightly understood if we step back and reexamine our notions of victims and perpetrators. He opens his essay,

I believe that true justice should have compassion in it. When someone does something harmful, destructive, the destruction is done not only to the person who is the victim, but it is also done to the person who has committed the destruction. We all know that every time we say something unskillful, that can damage our relationship to the other person, making him or her suffer, we know that we have also done harm to ourselves, and created suffering for ourselves. That comes from our lack of skillfulness, our lack of mindfulness, and our lack of compassion, and we suffer as the other person suffers. Maybe not right now, but a little bit later we will suffer. The real cause of the action is our ignorance, our lack of skillfulness.

(Thích Nhất Hạnh 2017)

The presentation of justice here, leveling the actor and acted upon as both equal victims of the creation of suffering, is a good example of an application of Nhất Hạnh’s wish to separate justice from the idea of the individuated self. Western conceptions of justice as remunerative punishment premise themselves on the notion that one person suffers whereas the other person creates suffering. Justice then is found in leveling an equal amount of suffering against the offender. What Nhất Hạnh is trying to express is that this understanding of justice is redundant and in itself destructive, insofar as its end is already contained in the act itself, administered in the form of kamma. Justice cannot simply be found in repaying a destructive act with another destructive act in the form of punishment, because destructive action already contains cosmic moral punishment within itself. By acting destructively, we not only harm someone else, but the action itself harms ourselves as well.

The solution then, according to Nhất Hạnh, is to approach the idea of justice not from the perspective of leveling the scale, but from the idea of compassion. By viewing injustice through the lens of compassion, we can see that those who cause injustice are equally victims themselves. “So if we know how to look at the so-called criminals, we will have compassion”, he writes,

Society has created them like that; they have not been lucky, they have been born into a situation where social conditions, and their parents and other influences, have created that kind of behavior, and that person is very much the victim of the situation. If we see that, we see the nature of interbeing in that kind of act, we will be able to be compassionate, and the punishment that we propose in that case will be lighter, because we want justice. That’s not only understanding; that’s not only compassion—although there is understanding that has brought compassion—but that’s also justice.

(Thích Nhất Hạnh 2017)

What is hidden within Nhất Hạnh’s description of justice is that though he is framing his argument in the language of justice, it is not really justice which is the prevailing force here but rather Buddhist compassion. When Nhất Hạnh claims that “With compassion, you can always offer a kind of justice that will contain more patience, understanding and tolerance”, it becomes clear that justice is not truly the standard by which we are meant to guide our political action. The proper standard must be a refashioned compassion cum justice. Justice, in its Western conception defined by an understanding of self, posits itself as coming into being as the result of an encounter between separate individuated interests. Nhất Hạnh’s compassion cum justice views justice not as arising from confrontation, but from an acknowledgment that the confrontation itself is illusory. Though he claims that justice contains compassion, his analysis is such that we must ultimately conclude that justice does not simply contain compassion, but likely is compassion. Nhất Hạnh’s employment of the language of justice is just as much a rhetorical tool as it is an honest attempt to help guide human behavior. In and of itself, this strategy is neither surprising nor damning. Nhất Hạnh is clear on the notion that we must address problems in the language of those we are seeking to help. Though the language of justice is wholly foreign to the tradition of Buddhist political thought, it is the primary vehicle of political expression of those in the West, and thus is viewed as a tool which is fair game to use.

But what is important to understand with Nhất Hạnh’s use of Western, political language is not that it offends the sensibilities of Buddhist thought. The issue with Nhất Hạnh’s Westernization and politicization is that it is left so thoroughly unexamined and unjustified. Neither Nhất Hạnh, nor the thought of Socially Engaged Buddhism at large, offers any exploration or apology for Buddhism’s inherently apolitical philosophic lexicon, which lacks the conceptions of ideas like justice and freedom as understood in the Western philosophic and political tradition. The fact is simply ignored. However, by then premising their project on the necessity of introducing a political element into modern Buddhist practice, and subsequently choosing to do so by simply inserting pre-existing Western political conceptions into Buddhist discussion, or vice versa, with no real effort to differentiate between the two, Socially Engaged Buddhist thought betrays a key principle of the pluralistic liberal political tradition it is trying to ingratiate itself to, the separation of politics from religious foundations.

The mindful politics of Socially Engaged Buddhism runs the risk (intentional or otherwise) of obfuscating the inherently religious nature of the concepts which undergird its thought. Speaking of justice is a useful tool, but when one uses the language of justice while actually expressing a conception of Buddhist compassion, we quickly lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with a religious idea rather than a philosophic or political one. Liberal conceptions of freedom and justice are understood as premised not on religious claims but on philosophic claims universally available for examination to all by the use of their reason. The compassionate justice of Socially Engaged Buddhist thought or the idea of justice as dhamma of the larger Buddhist tradition are both inherently exclusionary in their presentations insofar as they are and can only be compelling to a Buddhist practitioner. Though this does not mean that they are then incapable of serving as the foundation for a political order, it does mean that any political order which takes them as its grounding will necessarily be incapable of also maintaining the pluralistic stance necessary to serve as a viable political program within the confines of a liberal political condition.

Confusing the issue even further is the fact that without the benefit of close examination, it is difficult to meaningfully distinguish between the political aims of Socially Engaged Buddhism and that of contemporary progressive liberalism generally, allowing the realities of its religious foundations to be easily obscured and forgotten. Throughout various collections of essays on mindful politics, the contours of a progressive political project are formed. Concerns surrounding issues of racial justice (see Vesely-Flad 2017; Ferguson 2006), environmental action (see Thích Nhất Hạnh 1988; Aitken 1988; Gross 2000b; Kaza 2000), feminism (see Gross 2000c, 2006; Ragir 1988; Moon 2000), and economic globalization (see Sivaraksa 2015; Sivaraksa 2006; Gross 2000a) form the backbone of the Socially Engaged Buddhist political ethic. This political project is also backed by burgeoning analysis in the field of economics. Economists like Clair Brown (Brown 2017) and Laszlo Zsolnai (Zsolnai 2007) find themselves in league with religious figures like Sulak Sivaraksa (Sivaraksa 2009) in examining and critiquing the core competitive principles of capitalism in favor of a new Buddhist economic approach which favors the Socially Engaged Buddhist stance of human interdependence.

Given the preeminence which Socially Engaged Buddhism places on compassion, it is not surprising to see it favor a political and economic approach which directly confronts the transgressions of oppression. But when Clair Brown writes that “you don’t need to be a Buddhist to embrace a Buddhist approach to economics. You need only to share the Dalai Lama’s belief that human nature is gentle and compassionate and embrace the idea that economics can be a force for good”, she betrays the universality that her use of concepts like Pareto optimality and the Gini coefficient seems to imply.8 The notion that Socially Engaged Buddhism, be it in the form of politics or economics, can freely be detached from Buddhist practice and principles is a dangerous falsehood which is left all but unacknowledged and unexamined by the practitioners of Socially Engaged Buddhist thought and mindful politics.

4. Conclusions: Mindful Politics and Pluralistic Political Action

Mindful politics attempts to walk a fine line, dancing between Buddhist religious concepts and Western philosophic concepts, theological claims and rational claims, and spiritual ends and political ends. To a great degree, this lithe flexibility has contributed to the excitement on the part of adherents of Socially Engaged Buddhism as it relates to its potential and possibilities. With this approach, Socially Engaged Buddhism is able to maintain the allure of its ancient wisdom while avoiding the concurrent religious baggage that plagues the teachings of the religions native to the Western tradition. It is a matter of having your cake and eating it too; despite many in the contemporary West (and particularly so among the progressive set most inclined to embrace Socially Engaged Buddhism) being turned off by the notion of religion and religious practice, and even more so by its expression in political life such as with Christian nationalism, Socially Engaged Buddhism is easily explained away as secular, or at least secular enough in its language, conceptions, and ends to not be of any concern.

This approach is embraced by even one of the most outspoken critics of religion in the West, the neuroscientist, political commentator, and outspoken atheist, Sam Harris. In his essay on creating a secularized approach to Buddhist practice, Harris claims that “For the fact is that a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a Buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religions” (Harris 2006, p. 294). This approach, centered on the idea that Buddhist teachings are not proffered on grounds of faith but on testable, quasi-scientific claims, is typical of those who wish to reorient Buddhist thought into a secular practice. Despite his frequent and outspoken attacks on the mixture of politics and religion elsewhere, Harris believes that Buddhism offers a unique opportunity to sidestep these issues. The teachings of Buddhism themselves are valuable but “the religion of Buddhism currently stands in their way” (Harris 2006, p. 299). His solution then is to work to divorce Buddhist truths from Buddhist practice, something that he sees as rooted in historical precedent, offering that we do not refer to “Christian physics” or “Muslim algebra” even though each practice originated from within these religious traditions (Harris 2006, p. 298).

What Harris misses here, and what the discourse on Socially Engaged Buddhism obscures generally, is the fact that religion and politics are not related to each other as religion and algebra might be. It greatly undersells the nature of reality to claim that religious practice and political philosophy, both enterprises centered on guiding proper human action, can be as easily separated from one another as human ethics and mathematics. Harris ignores that there has never been a war fought over math or physics, and that any violent conflict which may have arisen in relation to these fields was itself a result of their conflict with standing religious beliefs. Harris, along with other proponents of the Socially Engaged Buddhism movement, premise their project on the assumption that Buddhist teachings, or at least those parts of Buddhist teachings which they consider important enough to maintain, are capable of supporting themselves when divorced from the larger Buddhist context (be it historical, cultural, metaphysical, or cosmological) in which they arose.9

Lost in the program of secularization and politicization is the reality that, when in the hands of actual Buddhist practitioners, Buddhist principles are not simply a philosophy or a set of ethical guidelines on par with any other system of thought in the liberal West; they are religious claims and are taken as such. We cannot ignore the foundation of Socially Engaged Buddhism as a system of religious practice simply because its ends mirror that of liberal politics. We equally cannot ignore its standing as a religion because its language has been secularized and the standing of its underlying metaphysical claims has been obscured. A politics founded on a series of religious claims, no matter how liberal they may appear, is fundamentally contradictory to the foundations and political commitments of a pluralistic liberal order due to the nature of their exclusionary origins. Socially Engaged Buddhism wishes to view itself as exempt from this formulation, believing that an agreement on ends is sufficient to justify a break on the matter of core principles.10

Socially Engaged Buddhists speak in the language of freedom and of rights. But rights in this context are only justified as a function of the religious principle of karuṇā, and freedom (at least as a political virtue) is given no real philosophic basis at all. Socially Engaged Buddhism is liberal as a matter of practical ends but arrives at these conclusions solely as a function of inherently illiberal religious claims. The project of Socially Engaged Buddhism has sought, likely without ill intention, to ignore or obscure the foundations of Socially Engaged Buddhism as a religious practice as a means of bolstering its standing as a political project.

Socially Engaged Buddhism offers a political program with no real underlying political theory. There is no underlying political conception of citizenship, or of justice, or of rights. These notions (insofar as they are addressed at all) are, without explicit awareness, assumed and borrowed wholesale from the Western liberal tradition which Socially Engaged Buddhism has worked to graft itself upon. While this is not a damning approach in and of itself, it becomes so when Socially Engaged Buddhism subsequently seeks to hand wave away its origins as a religious design and claim instead that it is first and foremost a secular, political program, as we see with the Mindfulness Movement at large. By coopting the philosophic political conceptions of the modern West, without any real attempt at redefinition or differentiation, Socially Engaged Buddhism obscures its origins. It posits itself as the grounding for liberal political action but fails to live up to the requirements of pluralistic liberal politics. Socially Engaged Buddhism may be valuable as a guide to human action or a social project designed to foster Buddhist ethics, but it falters by overstepping its role and assuming that it can be further extrapolated into a new foundation for liberal political action. Though it posits that it is a new ground upon which to build, it offers no novel political theory and, by failing to go beyond merely coopting the language of liberalism as a means to reassure its Western supporters, it also cannot rightly maintain to have divorced itself from its lineage as rooted in religious practice and religious truth claims. In failing to do so, it forces us to confront a deceptively difficult question: is superficial agreement on political ends a sufficient foundation on which to build a workable politics, or must there also be agreement at the level of first political principles? As of yet, the proponents of Socially Engaged Buddhism have failed to acknowledge that this tension even exists.