Western Buddhism and the New Age

Western Buddhism has been heavily influenced by the New Age movement. In online forums it is common to encounter nominal Buddhists proclaiming New Age beliefs that are alien or even antithetical to Buddhism. Adherents of such ideas rarely seem to be aware of those ideas’ origins, however; nor of their problematic nature from a Buddhist point of view. And even less rarely will they self-identify as followers of the New Age. The latter is typical, however. As Margrethe Løøv remarks in a recent book about the New Age movement, “very few people actually denote themselves New Age — the preferred self-designation is by far ‘spiritual’”.¹

Originally, the New Age was a countercultural movement that arose in two waves. The first wave is associated with the emergence of New Thought and especially Theosophy in the 19th century. The second wave was in the 1960s. Since then, New Age has gradually become much more mainstream, but its countercultural origins remain central to the movement’s ideas and identity. That is, the New Age presents itself as an alternative to mainstream religion (i.e., Christianity, as the New Age is mostly a Western phenomenon) and mainstream science.

While the New Age movement is extremely heterogeneous, there is a loose collection of attitudes and ideas that — in one form or another — is shared by its followers. Many of those attitudes an ideas have origins in the aforementioned Theosophical and New Thought movements, but I’ll mostly ignore history here to focus on the New Age ideas that are most influential within Western Buddhism.² Before looking into more specific ideas, there are some aspects of the New Age approach that need our attention. (One might call these the “methodological foundations” of the New Age, except that this term suggests something much more systematic and rigorous and much more solid.) The first of these is “an emphasis on the individual self as the authority, agent, and goal of spiritual practices”.³ The second is eclecticism. Closely related to the second is one of the most conspicuous features of New Age thought: perennialism.

individualism, eclecticism, and perennialism

The New Age is radically individualist in several ways, including epistemologically. The highest authority in matters of truth and falsehood for an individual follower of the New Age is (typically) that follower itself. Løøv writes that

The epistemological individualism of the New Age produces a relativistic attitude toward truth. It is typical to hear New Agers emphasize that what may yield right and true for them personally may not necessarily be an objective or universal truth.⁴

It is not entirely correct to call this “relativism”, however. As that term suggests, relativism holds that something (like truth) is relative to something else, such as language or culture, but this isn’t the typical position with regards to truth in New Age thought. Truth isn’t held to be relative to language, culture, or something else, but rather, truth is held to be radically subjective, and consequently the term “subjectivism” seems to be more appropriate.

Eclecticism is the adoption of selected elements from various sources without (necessarily) trying to integrative them into a single cohesive worldview or theory. More often than not the criterion for selection of an element from some source is that it can be interpreted in such a way that it appears to support a belief or opinion that was already held. In the process, selected elements tend to be lifted out of their context and to lesser or greater extent re-interpreted. While such an approach may seem problematic from some perspectives, it is more or less a corollary of the individualism mentioned above. From the New Age perspective, the individual is the authority on matters of one’s belief and practice, and consequently, any eclectic selection and re-interpretation is — by definition — authoritative, at least for that individual.

Since the New Age presents itself as an alternative to mainstream religion and science, the sources from which it selects materials can include almost everything except Christian and other perceived to be mainstream Western ideas. Typical sources include Stoicism and other Hellenistic philosophies; “Pagan” (i.e., pre-Christian European) and non-Western religions; Gnosticsm, Hermeticism, and (other) Western esoteric movements; Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and other Asian religions/philosophies; but also — apparently incongruously — aspects of science such as quantum physics, thermodynamics, and chaos/complexity theory (although these are rarely well understood). With regards to the New Age attitude towards science, Løøv writes:

In the contemporary New Age movement, references to scientific theories and concepts are abundant. However, the interpretations of modern science in the New Age should be seen as more than the mere appropriation of science as an explanatory framework, or as a legitimation strategy for essentially alternative beliefs and practices. … … Science offers a common legitimation strategy in the New Age. In a social context where modern science has a strong status as a source of knowledge, invoking science can be used as a strategy for “roping outsiders in”. There is a tendency to refer to any systematic or broadly empirical approach as science, as seen in expressions like the science of yoga, scientific therapy, the science of mind, and so forth. Scientific terminology is also frequently used in the New Age. Some concepts, like energy and quantum, have become staples in the New Age vocabulary.⁵

The best example of some of this in the context of Western Buddhism is probably Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True.⁶ This book’s popularity is due mostly (if not entirely) to its conspicuous appeasement of the craving for legitimation. (The title itself is brilliant marketing given the apparent pervasiveness of this craving among Western Buddhists.) At the same time, that legitimation ultimately fails completely, mostly because Wright builds his case on evolutionary psychology, which is not accepted science, but which is highly controversial for many reasons.⁷ (Several other problems for Wright’s argument/approach are discussed by Evan Thompson in his Why I Am Not a Buddhist.⁸)

New Age eclecticism is motivated and supported by perennialism, the belief that the apparent occurrence of common themes and ideas in different religions and philosophical systems reflects and reveals universal truths about the nature of reality and more. New Age inherited this perennialism from Theosophy. As Løøv points out, a “fundamental principle” of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, “was that there exists a perennial wisdom” and that “philosophy, science, and religion all reflect this eternal wisdom, but dogmatic and materialistic views inhibit the realization of the truth”.⁹ It is because of the belief in perennialism that New Age followers have no qualms combining aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, or even proclaiming that Buddhism and Hinduism are essentially the same. (Or Buddhism and Daoism, and so forth.)

From a Buddhist perspective, perennialism, eclecticism, and subjectivism (or epistemological individualism) are deeply problematic. Henry Steel Olcott was involved in the rise of Buddhist Modernism in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in the 1880s and even officially converted to Buddhism. It didn’t take long, however, for Anagarika Dharmapāla and other Ceylonese Buddhist Modernists to take offense to Olcott’s perennialism. Largely for the same reason, when Olcott visited Japan for the second time in 1891, he didn’t find much of an audience for his ideas among Japanese Buddhist Modernists.

Buddhism arose in opposition to Vedic/Brahmanic religion and other religions in northern India. It competed with the religions and philosophies that much later would be identified as “Hinduism”, but also with Jainism and other views. There are very significant philosophical and other differences between these religions/philosophy and for many centuries there was a lively debate between representatives of the various schools. While it is true that there are some shared ideas in most Indian religions/philosophies — such as the beliefs in karma and rebirth — there are also many fundamental differences, and often even what is apparently shared turns out to be very different if you look closer. (As is indeed the case for karma and rebirth: Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu views on these diverge so much that they have little more in common than these terms.)

While it is absurd to claim that Buddhism and Hinduism (for example) are essentially the same or are merely two different expressions of the same ancient perennial wisdom, perennialism also effectively denies the originality of the Buddha. From the perennial point of view, the Buddha was merely one of several “masters” transmitting this ancient perennial wisdom, and thus wasn’t teaching anything new. From a historical perspective this is nonsense, as the Buddha was most certainly teaching something new, but from a Buddhist perspective it is downright offensive, or even an example of “slandering the Dharma”, one of the most serious transgressions in Buddhism.

The subjectivism or epistemological individualism of the New Age is equally problematic from a Buddhist point of view. The individual can only be an authority on matters of doctrine and practice if that individual is an awakened or enlightened being like the Buddha. In contrast, unawakened/unenlightened beings are fundamentally misguided and deluded by definition. Lacking a living Buddha as teacher, all we have is the Buddha’s teachings, the Dharma, and the monastic community or Saṃgha that is tasked with safeguarding, interpreting, and explaining those teachings. For a traditional Buddhist, the Saṃgha is authoritative; for a Buddhist Modernist, the Dharma (i.e., scriptures and other texts) is authoritative;¹⁰ but for no living Buddhist, the individual self is authoritative.

While there have been prominent Buddhist thinkers who argued that scientific findings are part of the Dharma,¹¹ the final authority in Buddhism rests in the Buddha’s teachings as recorded in Sūtras and Vinaya (even though sects and schools differ in their ideas about which scriptures are authentic and/or important). Texts from other traditions have no status. If they happen to say something that is true (from a Buddhist perspective), then that is merely because they happen to agree with some Buddhist teaching, but it is that Buddhist teaching that determines “truth”.¹² The other, non-Buddhist texts don’t really add anything; they have no epistemological value. Eclecticism, then, is utterly nonsensical from a Buddhist point of view. (From a more neutral perspective, the traditional Buddhist exclusivism is as problematic as the New Age eclecticism, of course, but that’s not the issue here.)

metaphysics: anti-realism, holism, and the Universe

Of all translations of the Dhammapada, that by Thomas Byrom is probably the worst. It deviates so much from the original text, in fact, that it is quite inappropriate to call it a “translation”. Nevertheless, it is relatively popular among New Age Buddhists, which is probably partly due to its anti-realism. The first two sentences of the text,

Manopubbaṅgammā dhammā
Manoseṭṭhā manomayā

are translated by Byrom as follows:

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.¹³

While this corresponds closely to a common New Age trope, it is not at all what the original means. For comparison, the renowned Pāli scholar K.R. Norman has:

Mental phenomena are preceded by mind,
have mind as their leader, are made by mind.¹⁴

While I’m not sure whether “have mind as their leader” is the best translation of manoseṭṭhā — “have mind as their superior” seems closer — it should be fairly obvious that the text means something quite different than what Byrom is claiming. It does not say at all that “we make the world with our thoughts” (as New Agers like to believe). Instead it only makes the claim that mental phenomena or experiences (dhammas; sk. dharmas) are produced by the mind. (What follows after the quoted passage in the text concerns ethics, by the way, not metaphysics.) Buddhists do not believe that we make the world with our thoughts.

With regards to New Age anti-realism, Løøv writes that

New Agers often make no distinction between experiential and objective reality, as epitomized in the popular catchphrase “Perception is reality.” There are two main versions of the notion that we produce our own reality. The first is psychological, and states that our perception of reality is shaped by our psychological conditioning. … The second version states that we quite literally have the power to create our own reality by means of our thoughts.¹⁵

The second version is called “manifesting” and plays, as far as I can see, no significant role in New-Age-influenced Western Buddhism, so I will ignore it here. The distinction mentioned by Løøv is similar to the Buddhist distinction between conventional or phenomenal reality and ultimate reality. That distinction (or some variant thereof) is fundamental in much (but not all) Buddhist metaphysical thought. Furthermore, while there are a few Buddhist texts that suggest the existence of multiple conventional/phenomenal realities (rather than realities simpliciter),¹⁶ these are shaped by karma rather than by psychological conditioning and are species-specific rather than individual. The New Age idea of producing “our own reality” (in the first version) means that my reality is shaped by my conditioning and your by yours and so forth.¹⁷ In contrast, pretas (hungry ghosts) see pus or blood where humans see water, but these are not individual differences.

The New Age worldview typically includes a vaguely interrelated collection of beliefs called “holism” that bears superficial similarity to ideas found in the Buddhist tradition. New Age holism (again, typically) includes a belief in the interconnectedness of all things, which is sometimes compared to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination or to the metaphor of Indra’s net in Huayan 華嚴Buddhism (a school of Chinese Buddhism). To what extent these Buddhist ideas are really similar to New Age holism is quite debatable, however,¹⁸ and typically New Age Buddhists merely lift these ideas out of their contexts and use them to give a Buddhist aura to an essentially Western New Age idea.

New Age holism also includes “a rejection of the dualism and reductionism of traditional religious and scientific paradigms”,¹⁹ such as the distinctions between mind or spirit and matter, between God or the divine and nature, between God or the divine and human beings, and so forth. Instead of seeing these as fundamentally distinct (as in the mainstream Christian worldview), these are considered interrelated, overlapping, interpenetrating, or even essentially identical. So, some New Agers might proclaim, for example, that they (and you and everyone else) are God, or that nature is God, or that the universe is God, or that the universe is spirit/mind, or that everything is both matter and spirit/mind and the same time and, therefore, that everything is conscious, at least to some extent.

The word “God” might not be entirely appropriate here, as New Agers rarely believe in a God in the monotheistic sense. Nevertheless, New Age thought does involve a belief in the divine, even though it might rarely be called (or identified as) such. The divine in the New Age is conceptualized in a number of different, but overlapping ways: “a universal consciousness or mind, a cosmic intelligence, life force, energy, or simply the Universe”.²⁰ These ideas go back to the 19th century New Thought movement, but a superficially similar idea can also be found in the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism (also mentioned above), which held that the whole universe is the one body/mind of the cosmic Buddha Vairocana. However, aside from Vairocana, the exact interpretation of which is a matter of debate, these New Age beliefs are alien to Buddhism (if not fundamentally un-Buddhist).

New Age holism implies that the divine (i.e., the universe, energy, universal consciousness/mind/spirit, etcera) is omnipresent and thus holds a kind of pantheism or panentheism (as well as panpsychism). (Notice that the omnipresent divine is commonly associate with Buddha or Buddha-nature among New Age Buddhists.) This belief is also related to another aspect of holism mentioned above: the rejection of the God/human distinction. Given pan(en)theism, humans are also (or especially!) divine. According to Løøv, “the ‘I am God’ theme is so widespread that it often is presented as a self-evident truth, serving as the logical prerequisite for practices like healing and self-development”.²¹ (New Age Buddhists prefer to claim that they are a Buddha instead of God, or more commonly, that everyone is (a) Buddha.) Similarly, New Age pan(en)theism is related to the “holistic” rejection of the God/nature distinction (also mentioned above): “the divine is present throughout nature, and nature is often attributed some sort of spiritual agency”.²²

the self and Buddha-nature

Closely related to the aforementioned beliefs, one of the most commonly mentioned goals of New Age religious practice is becoming one with Everything or with the Universe. This idea depends on the notion of a divine/spiritual universe, universal consciousness, life force, and so forth mentioned two paragraphs back, but it also depends on a belief in the self: it is the self that becomes (or in some sense already is) one with the Universe/Everything. However, while “becoming one with everything” has become one of the most conspicuous tropes of Western Buddhism, it conflicts with Buddhist thought in every aspect. The implied notion of “everything” (or the Universe; see above) is not a Buddhist idea; Buddhism explicitly rejects the self; and the notion of “becoming one” with something makes no sense from a Buddhist perspective either.

The Buddhist rejection of the self conflicts with Western individualism and especially with the New Age. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that many Western Buddhists try to reinterpret or even deny the doctrine of “no self” (anātman). Finding your true or authentic self (or your “center”), being true to your authentic self, and similar ideas are extremely influential in the New Age movement, and have spread from there to the rest of Western society. Buddhism, in contrast, rejects such ideas. More specifically, Buddhism rejects self-defining essences. My self-defining essence — if such a thing would exist — would be something that defines and identifies me, both synchronically and diachronically (i.e., through time). It would be what makes me me. It would be the “thing” that makes me_20-years-ago and me_now the same being. The paradigm of such a self-defining essence in many intellectual traditions is the soul (or something very similar). According to Buddhism, however, such things (i.e., self-defining essences) do not exist.

Buddhism doesn’t just reject personal self-defining essences, moreover, but holds more generally that what doesn’t have “own being”, svabhāva is empty (śūnya), and therefore, merely conventionally/phenomenally real. (Recall the distinction between conventional/phenomenal reality and ultimate reality mentioned above.) Svabhāva is something like existential independence, and consequently, what is required for something to be real is existential dependence — more specifically, causal dependence, part/whole dependence, and conceptual dependence — but emphasis differed between schools. (For example, Madhyamaka stressed causal dependence, while in Abhidharma the emphasis tended to be on part/whole dependence or conceptual dependence.) This more general metaphysical theory of svabhāva as a criterion of reality seems to have developed a bit later, probably in part to support the theory of no self (anātman). Any possible candidate for a “self” is existentially dependent in at least one, but more often all, of these senses — it depends on its parts, it depends on its cause(s), and it depends for its recognition as a “thing” on some kind of conceptual construction or naming. Hence, the self is not (ultimately) real.

One of the most common ways in which New Age “Buddhists” try to support or legitimize their beliefs in an authentic self (or something very similar), is by appealing to the notion of Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha/buddhadhātu, 佛性 ch. foxing / jp. busshō), which has become a cornerstone of East-Asian Buddhism, but which also has met significant resistance within the Buddhist tradition. The 7th century Chan/Zen monk Shenhui 神會 and the 20th century Japanese “critical Buddhists” Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō rejected pretty much the same aspect of Buddha-nature doctrine — namely, the notion of a fixed universal metaphysical ground of everything (遍一切處 bian yiqie chu) — for pretty much the same reason.²³

In a book about Dōgen 道元, Matsumoto made an important distinction between innate and immanent Buddha-nature doctrine (仏性内在論 busshō naizai ron vs. 仏性顕在論 busshō kenzai ron).²⁴ The former is the idea that all sentient beings have the capability of (eventually) achieving awakening. The latter is the metaphysical idea that all of reality is, consists of, or has Buddha-nature; that Buddha-nature is the ultimate reality of everything; or that Buddha-nature is they underlying metaphysical ground (dhātu) of everything. It is immanent Buddha-nature theory that Matsumoto (as well as Hakayama, Shenhui, and others) object too. Regardless of whether immanent Buddha-nature is as problematic as Matsumoto thinks it is (I think it isn’t), the distinction he makes is an important one, as innate and immanent Buddha-nature are fundamentally different. However, throughout the history of East-Asian Buddhism, this distinction was rarely made explicitly, making Buddha-nature doctrine(s) needlessly obscure.

Buddha-nature, in its immanent, metaphysical sense, has often been linked or even equated to “thusness” (tathatā), which is one of the standard Buddhist philosophical terms for the (qualities of) the ultimately real ground(s) or cause(s) of our phenomenal experiences. Ultimate reality is by definition beyond language, so there are no words to name or describe the ultimately real grounds/causes/correlates of phenomena (i.e., things in phenomenal/conventional reality). But “thusness” doesn’t really describe or name a particular kind of thing or quality; it merely means something like “ultimately-real-ness” or “ultimately real ground/cause/correlate of a phenomenon” or something similar. To speak of “thusness” is not to assign any particular quality to a thing, or even to assign “thingness”. (“Thusness” is empty in that sense.) To speak of “thusness” is not to classify or describe. And consequently, to say that everything has “thusness” or Buddha-nature is not to say that everything shares some quality, belongs to the same kind, or has some underlying substrate. It is merely saying that everything has some kind of cause or ground in ultimate reality. I don’t think that this is necessarily problematic from a Buddhist point of view, even if it may be mistaken from some sectarian points of view.

It is sometimes claimed that the true or authentic self is Buddha-nature, but when taken literally, this is really quite nonsensical. Recall that a self (ātman) is an unchanging self-defining essence. That is, it is some thing that identifies me as me. However, Buddha-nature cannot identify anything. Saying that the self is Buddha-nature is a bit like saying that the defining essence of the Amazon is water. Sure, the Amazon (in some sense, at least) consists of (mostly) water, but so do the North Sea, the West-Antarctic ice cap, and Mimas (a moon of Saturn). Consisting of water is obviously not sufficient as a definition of any of these. Furthermore, saying that the self has Buddha-nature doesn’t mean that the self is ultimately real either — it merely means that something (not some thing!) that is ultimately real grounds or causes the phenomenal experience of a self.²⁵ (Notice that even hallucinations have Buddha-nature in this sense, as even hallucinations are caused or grounded by something.)

The foremost authority on Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) was probably David Seyfort Ruegg. In a book about the topic he wrote that “the tathāgatagarbha is characterized as permanent (nitya), immutable (dhruva), blissful (sukha), and eternal (śāśvata), and sometimes we are even told that it is ātman.²⁶ This may seem like the metaphorical smoking gun from a New Age point of view, but it must be kept in mind that “everything depends on just what the Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophers mean by the word ātman” and that “Buddhists and Brahmanists evidently do not always intend exactly the same thing when they use this word”.²⁷ The confusion here is due to the fact that in the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, the word ātman isn’t used in reference to some kind of unchanging self-defining essence (i.e., the self in the typical sense; the kind of self or ātman that Buddhists reject), but in reference to ultimate reality.²⁸ Hence, ātman here is Buddha-nature indeed, in the immanent, metaphysical sense, but this has nothing to do with the self as the latter is normally understood, and thus does not contradict no-self (anātman) either.

Much more can be (and has been) said about Buddha-nature theory, but let’s not stray off topic any further. The point I wanted to make here is that the ideas associated with Buddha-nature do not in any way support typical Western beliefs in a true self, authentic self, or any other kind of self as something like an essence that identifies and defines me, both in the present and over time. From a Buddhist perspective, there are no selves in that sense, and there certainly are no “authentic” or “true” selves in this kind of sense either. One can seek for one’s “authentic self” as some kind of fundamental, unchanging, real, core of one’s being, but there is nothing to be found. There is no such thing.

practice: wellbeing versus awakening

In both Buddhism and the New Age concepts and goals of practice can be arranged on a spectrum from more lofty or distant to less lofty and more proximate. In case of Buddhism, the ultimate goal of practice (at the lofty end of the scale) is awakening/enlightenment and becoming an Arhat or Bodhisattva. A more intermediate goal is a change in one’s perception of, and attitude to the world around us. Jay Garfield explains that Buddhism aims

to correct a “natural” way of experiencing ourselves as standing as independent agents at the center of a moral universe who take their own welfare as the most rational basis for action, and others as of secondary interest. This natural egocentricity induces a mode of comportment to the world that Buddhists take to be fundamentally irrational and to lead to suffering for oneself and others. The aim of ethical practice is — by following a path, or multiple paths — to replace this experience with a non-egocentric experience of oneself as part of an interdependent world. … Ethical practice is about the transformation not in the first instance of what we do, but of how we see.²⁹

At the more proximate end of the scale there is a variety of practices aimed at gaining merit (i.e., good karma) to assure a better rebirth, wherein “better” means that future lives are more conducive to working on the loftier goals of practice. (For a more detailed explanation of the nature and path of Buddhist practice(s), see the section “On practice — in theory” of Is Secular Buddhism Possible?.)

It is important to notice that Buddhist practice is almost exclusively concerned with rebirth and future lives, and ultimately with avoiding those. There may be no sharper contrast with the New Age and much of Western Buddhism than this — New Age practice is mostly concerned with “improving the individual self in the here and now”,³⁰ often focusing on (physical and mental) health and wellbeing. The New Age and much of Western Buddhism are not at all concerned with facets and implications of rebirth (or other other-worldly goals), but instead with happiness, stress reduction, removing “negative energy” and cultivating “positive energy”, self-improvement, and a range of closely related self-centered and this-worldly goals. Even practices at the loftier end of the spectrum, like becoming one with Everything or the Universe (already mentioned above) or achieving some “higher level of consciousness”, are really focused on expected this-worldly benefits like mental/spiritual wellbeing. (Notice, by the way, that, while becoming one with Everything has absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism, achieving some “higher level of consciousness” could be interpreted as something closer to Buddhist goals of practice, although it generally isn’t very clear what such a “higher level of consciousness” is and what achieving this goal amounts to.) A more intermediate goal of New Age practice (between becoming one with the Universe at the one end and improving one’s health and wellbeing at the other) has to with seeking/finding one’s true/authentic self and (or by) attuning to one’s unconsciousness or instincts (which supposedly reveal this true/authentic self).

All of these goals and concepts of practice are deeply un-Buddhist. They depend on a belief in the self, which Buddhism rejects. And the idea that one’s unconsciousness or true/authentic self could provide anything approximating wisdom conflicts with the Buddhist view that unawakened/unenlightened beings are fundamentally deluded. Furthermore, the proximate goal of self-improvement in the sense of increased health, wellbeing (including happiness and stress reduction), and spiritual attunement, is merely an intoxication from a Buddhist perspective, as illustrated in the Sukhumālasutta (AN 3.39), for example:

There are, bhikkhus, these three kinds of intoxication. What three? Intoxication with youth, intoxication with health, and intoxication with life. (1) An uninstructed worldling, intoxicated with youth, engages in misconduct by body, speech, and mind. With the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the plane of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell. (2) An uninstructed worldling, intoxicated with health, engages in misconduct by body, speech, and mind. With the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the plane of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell. (3) An uninstructed worldling, intoxicated with life, engages in misconduct by body, speech, and mind. With the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the plane of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell.³¹

closing comments

It is possible (and not even all that difficult) to find ideas in the Buddhist tradition that are superficially similar to New Age beliefs. A New Ager might cherry-pick such Buddhist ideas, take them out of their context and understand them through a New Age lens, and then mistakenly believe to be proclaiming something Buddhist. New Age spirituality involves many beliefs that are deeply at odds with Buddhism, however. For example, beliefs like the following, which are very common among New Agers, are almost universally rejected by Buddhists:

there are many common themes and ideas in different religions revealing important universal truths (or more extremely: the deepest core teaching of all religions are essentially the same)³²;
what is true for one person may not be true for another;
we make the world with our thoughts;
there is a kind of life force or consciousness that spans the entire universe and that everything is part of.

Other common New Age beliefs can be contrasted with more or less opposing Buddhist beliefs. For example,

New Age: people are their own authority with regards to spiritual beliefs (or “truths”) and practice; Buddhism: unawakened/unenlightened beings are deluded (and thus not an authority about anything);
New Age: people have true/authentic selves; Buddhism: there is no self (and certainly no “authentic” self);
New Age spiritual practice is concerned with benefits in this life and this world; Buddhist religious practice is primarily concerned with rebirth and future lives (and eventually avoiding those);
New Agers try to improve their health and wellbeing; Buddhists try to change their attitude to and perception of the world;
New Agers aim to become one with Everything/the Universe; Buddhists aim to (ultimately) achieve awakening/enlightenment (and become an Arhat or Bodhisattva).

I feel that I’m merely scratching the surface here — surely much more can (and should) be said about this topic, but this article is already getting much longer than I originally intended. The close links between Western Buddhism and New Age spiritualism (including its predecessors such a Theosophy and New Thought) really need a book-length study by some historian with sufficient knowledge and understanding of both traditions, as well as of relevant aspects of 20th century cultural history. While such a book would surely be fascinating, researching and writing it seems a daunting project (and certainly not the kind of project I could pull off, lacking much of the necessary expertise and skill). It might also be interesting to try to “convert” some of the foregoing into an online “test” format (perhaps something like BuzzFeed), although some of the differences between the New Age and Buddhism are too subtle and/or require too much explanation to fit in a quiz-question format. For now, however, the above will have to do. I hope the point is clear enough: there is a heavy dose of New Age in much of Western Buddhism, to the extent that some Western “Buddhism” is really nothing but New Age with a different name.

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Notes

Margrethe Løøv (2024), The New Age Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4.
For more details, including historical details, see the aforementioned book by Løøv.
Løøv, p. 23.
p. 25.
p. 35.
Robert Wright (2017), Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon & Schuster).
There’s a decent overview on Wikipedia.
Evan Thompson (2020), Why I Am Not a Buddhist (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Ibid., p. 11.
Buddhist Modernists also often redefine the Saṃgha as including lay Buddhists, thereby effectively denying the Saṃgha’s traditional role as guardian and chief interpreter of the Dharma.
Nichiren seems to have suggested something like this, for example. See: Lajos Brons (2022), A Buddha Land in this World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism (Punctum), pp. 84–5.
Buddhist Modernists typically adopt the same attitude towards science. With rare exceptions, scientific findings are only accepted if they can be interpreted as conforming to or confirming Buddhist wisdom.
Thomas Byrom (1976), The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha (New York: Bell Tower), p. 21.
K.R. Norman (2000), The Word of the Doctrine (Dhammapada), PTS Translation Series No. 46 (Oxford: Pali Text Society), p. 1.
p. 31.
For example, Asaṅga (4–5th ct), Mahāyānasaṃgraha, II.14; Vasubandhu (5th ct), Viṃśatikākārikā, 3b–c; and Candrakīrti (7th ct), Madhyamakāvatāra, VI.71. I discussed these and related text before in chapter 8 of A Buddha Land in this World.
Similarly, making the/our world(s) with our thoughts, in the words of Byrom (see above) means that my reality is produced by my thoughts. This, again, is not a Buddhist idea.
The theory of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) holds that all phenomena (dharmas) arise in dependence on other phenomena. It doesn’t really mean or imply that everything is interconnected in the New Age holist sense.
Løøv, p. 34.
Løøv, p. 28.
p. 29.
Ibid., p. 34.
On Shenhui’s critique, see: Robert Sharf (2017), “Buddha-nature, Critical Buddhism, and Early Chan”, 『불교학리뷰』 (Critical Review for Buddhist Studies) 22: 105–150.
Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗 (2000), 『道元思想論』 (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan).
A particularly interesting illustration of the misunderstanding of Buddha-nature by New Age Buddhist is the use of the term as a count noun. Rather than saying that something has Buddha-nature, New Age Buddhists sometimes say that something has a Buddha-nature or speak of their (or my) Buddha-nature. Everything has its own unique Buddha-nature in this (mis)understanding, and the term “Buddha-nature” is used as something like a self or essence, which isn’t what the term refers to, and which is (again) rejected by Buddhism moreover.
David Seyfort Ruegg (1989), Buddha-nature, Mind, and the Problem of Gradualism in a Comparative Perspective: On the Transmission of Buddhism in India and Tibet (London: School of Oriental and African Studies), p. 19.
Ibid., p. 20.
Ruegg uses the term “absolute reality”.
Jay Garfield (2021), Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: OUP), pp. 22–3.
Løøv, p. 32. Emphasis added.
The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Anguttara Nikāya, translated by Bhikkhu Boddhi (Somerville: Wisdom, 2012), p. 241.
I have seen nominal “Buddhists” make this latter parenthetical claim online.