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Western Science, Eastern Spirit: Historical Reflections on the East/West Encounter Martin J. Verhoeven Professor Verhoeven finds parallels between the Western attraction to Asian religions and the Asian attraction to Western technology, attractions that have been growing steadily stronger since the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Verhoeven describes the contributions of the Japanese philosopher Sakuma Shozan (1811– 64), who adopted the slogan “Western technique, Eastern spirit” in his advocacy of modernizing Japan while preserving its ethical core. Similarly, American Buddhists have attempted to adopt Eastern meditative techniques while keeping to their Western postmodern spirit. Dr. Verhoeven shows how in both cases, the ethical or spiritual halves of these equations have been overwhelmed or trivialized by the desacrilizing forces of modern life.

When our country neither knows what foreign countries know nor can do well what they can do, in the end our country will not be able to match them . . . . In order to strengthen our country and make the enemy countries fear us, I believe we must know what they know, be able to do well what they can do, and finally excel them.

Eastern ethics and Western technique Complete a circular pattern Just as two semi-circular molds Form one mold.

The girth of the earth is ten thousand li.

One half of it should not be missing.1 —Sakuma Shozan, in a letter dated 1854 However much people today realize it, the encounter of Oriental and Occidental religious and philosophical traditions, of Buddhist and Christian and Hindu and Islamic perspectives, must be regarded as one of the most extraordinary meetings of our age. . . . Arnold Toynbee once wrote that of all the historical changes in the West, the most important—and the one whose effects have been least understood—is the meeting of Buddhism and the Occident. . . . And when and if our era is considered in light of larger societal

 ,  

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Martin J. Verhoeven patterns and movements, there can be no doubt that the meeting of East and West, the mingling of the most ancient traditions in the modern world, will form a much larger part of history than we today with our political-economic emphases, may think. —Arthur Versluis2 We know that East and West are opposed to each other, and yet the (idea of) one cannot exist without the (idea of) other—thus is their mutual service determined. —Zhuangzi, ca. 320 B.C.E.

Part I: East/West Issues & Background

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he very use of the terms “East” and “West” raises intractable problems, and in some cases hackles. To begin with, to call the whole of Asia “East” reveals the most obvious level of bias: East in relation to what? In relation to Europe, of course. East is east, West is west, depending on where one stands on the compass—in short, the terms are at best relative; at worst grossly ethnocentric. The Chinese, for example, have long referred to themselves as the Central Kingdom (zhungguo), not as Easterners. And the famous Buddhist monks Xuanzang, Yijing and Faxian, who pilgrimaged from China to the “Western world” (xiyu), to “the regions where the sounds of moral instruction have come,” in search of “the most secret principles of the religion of Buddha,” were referring to the peoples and countries west of China, namely India and Central Asia—not Europe.3 But beyond the obvious geographical limitations of this simplistic dichotomy lie hidden assumptions and more significant issues that are not as easily dismissed—issues embedded in terminology, historical discourse, political power, and in some cases, outright fantasy. For example, there is the mistaken tendency to think of Asia or the West as unified, homogeneous and monolithic entities. “Western culture,” in fact, derives from two main cultural currents, Greek and Judeo-Christian, which often conflicted with each other. The West remains a cauldron of many contrasting trends of thought. Similarly, at least three, and perhaps four “Asias” exist, each distinct and possessed of at least as much variety and diversity as in the West: China, India, Japan and the Islamic heartlands. The concept of a monolithic Asia is simply untrue; the idea that Western culture constitutes a global culture, patently biased.

Nonetheless, scholars with highly specialized knowledge on a subject or area (such as Indian philosophy or Japanese Buddhism) continue to overgeneralize and speak of “Asian religion” or “the Oriental mind,” and “the Western world” or “the Western psyche.” A certain tyranny of language results in which a concept like “Asia” or the “Occident,” merely from

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the fact that it is talked about, or that one has an idea about “it,” suddenly becomes real.

Such thinking further encourages academic exercises in “compare and contrast.” Two camps emerge—those who like Schopenhauer exuberantly affirmed things non-European, and those like Hegel who equally passionately rejected matters non-European. The contrast school overstresses the differences and sees East and West as antithetical civilizations destined to irreconcilable conflict.4 The compare school, on the other hand, oversimplifies the uniformities and sees opposite halves whose reconciliation constitutes a whole, a progressive new civilization that brings together the best of each and offsets the worst of either. In this group we find such thinkers as Toynbee, Northrop and Tagore.5 All, however, share nearly identical presuppositions: that East and West comprise distinctly separate universes with fundamentally divergent modes of thinking and feeling.

The Orient is said to be spiritual, introverted, synthetic, subjective; the Occident decidedly materialistic, extroverted, analytical, objective. One excels in the passive contemplation of the spirit; the other in the active and practical development of material life. The East seeks self-mastery and is either indifferent to, or wishes escape from the “real world.” The West seeks mastery of the environment, and endeavors to harness nature to fulfill its desires. In the East, the goal of life consists primarily of reflection, selftransformation, and the realization of the inner or spiritual world; in the West, the goal of life is to maximize external happiness through pragmatic action and scientific technique. Looking back to the first East-West philosophers’ conference held in 1939, Wing-tsit Chan notes, “We dealt in generalities and superficialities. . . . [W]e saw the world as two halves, East and West.”

In general, since those early years, there has been a trend away from dichotomizing the peoples and cultures of Asia and Euro-America into large, holistic and homogeneous blocks. By the 1960s, the distinguished historian of ideas Hajime Nakamura could assert that “there are no features in the ways of thinking exclusively shared by the East Asians as a whole, unless they are universal traits of human nature in the East and the West.”6 Nakamura argued that though one can distinguish “certain longcontinuing and distinctive modes of thought, certain key values and attitudes, . . . and slowly evolving ways in which people sort and classify experience, argue with one another, and make value judgments or practical decisions,” still there is not one definite Asian trait that can be isolated and singled out for comparison with the West.

Yet, in the end, he too could not completely resist the urge to compare and contrast. Instead of the standard shibboleths of East and West, he  ,  

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offered more nuanced dichotomies—but dichotomies nonetheless. “We must acknowledge,” he wrote, “that there exists no single ‘Eastern’ feature but rather that there exist diverse ways of thinking in East Asia, characteristics of certain peoples but not of the whole of East Asia.”7 Why does this polarizing tendency persist, ironically almost more so as we enter an era of unprecedented globalization?

I would offer that, despite the limitations and shortcomings of the East/West dichotomy, it still legitimately engages thinkers both East and West for three reasons: 1) it is not completely false—intrinsic differences and contrasts do inhere, and they stimulate discussion and innovation in politics, religion, art, economics, philosophy, social organization, education and psychology, to name a few; 2) the East/West dichotomy provides a bridge of accommodation, an elastic structure of ideas, images and language that can find compromise between divergent and seemingly incompatible systems; and 3) it offers a screen upon which we can stand back and view ourselves; it acts as a kind of chemical precipitant that isolates those indigenous habits of thinking in each culture that are most enduring and resistant to change.8 Thus, although the East/West dichotomy is indeed overstated and simplistic, it nonetheless remains useful. Its tenacity as an idea might be attributable to its enduring utility as a sounding board—a device that helps give voice to utterances and propagate opinions. In this case, it offers a venue for critical self-reflection; it can serve to highlight contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas within a culture by locating them without, hence rendering them less threatening and more amenable to solution.

Such appears to be the case with Sakuma Shozan (1811–64). His story illustrates the complex allure, creative uses, and inherent shortcomings of the East/West paradigm. This nineteenth-century Japanese thinker adopted the slogan “Western technique, Eastern spirit” as a part of an overall strategy for coping with the threat that Westernization posed for traditional Asian values. Shozan believed that this catch-phrase suggested the perfect solution for a society riven by a profound spiritual-material crisis. It held out the hope that Eastern ethics could be retained despite the inevitable appropriation of the material aspects of Western culture. It thus offered a bridge between the past and modernity; a way of using the known to deal with the unknown in the midst of a tumultuous change.

The strength of Shozan’s approach was its brilliant simplicity: it offered a solution to large and seemingly intractable problems while upholding the core values of both worlds. As a compromise between divergent and incompatible systems, it permitted radical change while it promised that the important things would remain much the same. Moreover, it ad-

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dressed one of the pressing problems of the modern age: the deep longing to reunite the spiritual and material dimensions of life into a single piece.

In an interesting and perhaps unconscious way, Shozan’s strategy is being mimicked today by many American Buddhist converts who struggle to accommodate traditional Buddhist forms to modern needs. Though separated by nearly a century, both cultures, Asian and American, then as now display remarkable convergence in one significant area of concern: the erosion of the sacred by the forces of modernity. At the same time, the limitations to this strategy as experienced by Shozan in Japan show every sign of repeating themselves in the American setting.

Part II: “Western Technique, Eastern Spirit” Although the initial Japanese response to the West in the mid-nineteenth century was one of fear and hostility, an increasing number of thinkers saw a certain inevitability to the ending of national seclusion and to borrowing from the West. As a leading voice in this shift, Sakuma Shozan quite early on became convinced of Japanese backwardness in relation to the West and of the detrimental consequences that might follow. The cry to “expel the barbarians” to him seemed hopeless and foolish. This conviction fostered an openness to learn from the “barbarian” or “alien” West, and when fully adopted during the Meiji Restoration, it propelled Japan from a rigid feudal system in 1870 into a major world power in less than four decades. The quest to catch up with the West, however, posed a serious problem in Shozan’s view: he feared imitation could result in a loss of national identity or cultural ethos. He therefore passionately advocated learning from the West without sacrificing national character. The motto or phrase he coined for this strategy was “Western technique; Eastern spirit.”9 Shozan saw the West as acquisitive and powerful, opportunistically seeking to take over Japan as part of a larger imperialistic ambition to rule all of Asia. This view no doubt was reinforced by the Opium Wars (1839– 42). China’s defeat radically altered Shozan’s image of China as well as the West. He no longer believed China to be the land of sages possessed of a powerful civilizing influence capable of pacifying the barbarians. Moreover, if Japan did not quickly and thoroughly acquire the keys to Western strength, he was convinced it would soon meet the humiliating fate that had befallen China.

After the Opium Wars, Shozan advocated the introduction of Western skills, as well as Western designs, into Japan. He took up the study of the Dutch language and soon came to the opinion that the West alone commanded valid science. From his studies of Western sources he concluded  ,  

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that the military-technological superiority of the West was rooted in Western science—as far as he was concerned, the only valid science in the world.

To his great disappointment he concluded that the theories of the Confucian system that were supposed to account for natural phenomena were erroneous, speculative, boring and irrelevant. Yet he never abandoned his belief that the East alone was the repository of genuine metaphysical knowledge. While Shozan acknowledged the superiority of Western science and even some of its economic and educational systems, he conceded nothing to the West in the area of morality. Its moral shortcomings notwithstanding, the Occident had certain strong points that merited, even necessitated, imitation by the Orient.

For Shozan, then, the challenge lay in mastering those Western powers without abandoning Asian ethics. He advocated emulating Western designs, firearms, machinery, technology, even science (i. e., the “materialism of the West”), while safeguarding Eastern “spirituality”—which was for him a complex blend of Confucianism, some Buddhism, and Japanese Shintoism. In short, Shozan espoused a position of compromise: “Learn the strengths of the West so as to make up for our weaknesses.” He sought to complement the worthwhile teachings of virtue in the Confucian classics with the Western learning based on measurement, experiment and attention to the actual observable workings of the natural world.

To Shozan, Eastern ethics (dotoku) and Western technique (geijutsu) comprised the two limbs of a single body of human knowledge, with Western science and technology providing the necessary counterpart to the spiritual dimension of knowledge, Eastern ethics. Shozan’s “Western technique, Eastern spirit” then presented a two-in-one pattern that merged East and West, the spiritual and material spheres of the human experience, into a single philosophy. For him, the West had no ethics as such, and the East no science. While Westerners lacked the spiritual richness of life, Shozan believed the Japanese lagged behind materially and needed to equal the West in this regard. Only in tandem could the optimal results be obtained.

In a clever adaptation, or in an attempt to find a common ground, Shozan argued that although the concerns of those two systems totally differed, they shared an identical approach to learning—gradualism. The Confucian emphasis on slow, unceasing moral cultivation was reiterated in the gradual accumulation of scientific knowledge through careful experiment. 10 At his own school Shozan taught students Western gunnery and the Chinese classics (Four Books, Five Classics and I Ching). He wrote, “When the great Way of the Sages is unknown, the foundation of human ethics does not stand.”11 In a letter in 1854 to the father of one of his students, he included his famous poem:

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Western Science, Eastern Spirit

Eastern ethics and Western technique Complete a circular pattern Just as two semi-circular molds Form one mold.

The girth of the earth is ten thousand li.

One half of it should not be missing.

And elaborated on it as follows, Nowadays, equipped with Chinese learning alone, one cannot help putting on empty airs. On the other hand, after studying Western learning one may do so great a work as to astound others, yet that work falls short of the sages’ deeds. For the study of ethics and human relationship is unknown to Western learning. Therefore, neither Chinese learning nor Western learning alone is perfect unless the two are combined.12 Shozan conceived of the world as made up of the East and the West, just as the various regions made up a single Earth. Asia and Europe, East and West, geographically and in every other sense, made a whole universe, a complete world. It was a circle rendered imperfect, incomplete without both: spirit and matter, ethics and technology. Western science did not oppose or contradict Eastern ethos; it completed it. Conversely, Eastern morality and spiritual values humanized and rounded out Western science. For Shozan oneness was two; not further isolation but inclusion. But the proverbial “devil” in this case was in the generalities, not in the details.

To illustrate, Shozan began to recognize that behind the machinery, ships and technology of the “enemy” lay something more—a dynamic energy, or a “spirit,” if you will. The dynamics of the West, in turn, were based not only on science and technology but grounded in certain institutions.

Thus, to defend against Western encroachment, Japan not only needed to acquire the designs, but also the dynamics of the West. But here was the rub: how could Japan emulate as many strong points of the West as possible without corroding her own way of life? Was it possible to absorb one without the other; to imitate the technique without the spirit behind it?

Shozan’s gradually growing appreciation of what underpinned the dynamics of the West was reflected in his changing use of the word “technique.” He used it to mean “skill, technique or science”—all interchangeably and at the same time. At first, he used it to designate what we call “technology” or “applied science,” as distinct from “pure” science (mathematics,  ,  

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chemistry and the like). With time and study he began to see that what at first seemed merely “practical studies” such as gunnery, shipbuilding, etc., were branches of a broader field of knowledge and learning we would call science and technology.

Moreover, the big guns, large ships, fortifications, advanced technology, scientific knowledge and highly trained technicians and engineers all grew out of the economic and educational systems of the West which Shozan considered to be superior to those of Japan. Some of these and in careful degree should be imitated, he argued, but not all, lest Japan lose its ethos— the distinguishing character, moral nature and guiding beliefs of the nation. So while he recognized that other Western institutions of a sociopolitical nature were part of the dynamics of the West, he insisted these not be adopted by Japan because of their incompatibility with the Japanese way of life.

He did not hesitate to rebuke the “unproductive priestly class” of Buddhist clergy. Nor did he shy away from calling for the mobilization of all potential manpower via broader education. But Shozan stopped short of promoting the egalitarianism of Western society even though he admired how it weeded out the unfit and brought into service only those who were capable. The Western social and civic democratic “way” led to advancing people of talent and ability and fostered inventors in science and technology whose “ability counted rather than family lineage.” But it also undermined class status, the rule of old established families, inherited power and position, privilege and prestige—all essential elements of Eastern spirit as he knew it. When confronted with this discrepancy (and the nearly unthinkable prospect that some form of “egalitarianism” might be vital to the “dynamism” of the West he admired) he simply insisted that Japan was unique. It had a monarchy ruled by an unbroken line of semi-divine emperors from ages past; the American system, however admirable, was simply unsuitable for Japan.

He wrote, The political system and law of the United States, however excellent they may be, cannot be put into practice in this country. The reason is that there is no monarch in the United States. I understand that whoever is considered the most wise and learned, regardless of his nationality or background, is elected to hold the reins of government, and that even such a talented man as this is replaced every four years.

Indeed there is the difference of ice and red-hot charcoal between America and the Imperial Country, where the ruling house, un-broken for one hundred generations, still reigns.13

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The progressive social mobility that Shozan saw as part of the Western dynamics could only mean mobility within the existing class arrangements of the Japanese; not without or between. He never doubted that Japanese customs and manners were capable of withstanding those of the West.

What we gain from Western learning is not theories of government and ethics, but highly ingenious technique and machinery, borrowed so that we might be prepared to ward off indignities from the West. It is evident that we would profit from such adoption and lose nothing.

To this end he penned a verse expressing his lifelong belief that imitating Western technique could only augment, not attenuate, Eastern ethics, People say that if Western learning is studied, The teaching of Confucius will fall away.

I say that if Western learning flourishes, The teaching of Confucius will gain ground.

For Western learning is technique; The teaching of Confucius is ethics.

Ethics is like rice [the main dish]; Technique is like vegetables and meat [side dishes].

Vegetables and meat are supposed to whet the appetite.

Who can say that they spoil the appetite?14 Within his lifetime, however, it was becoming clear that such neat demarcations would not hold. To modernize, Japan would need to imitate not only the machines but something of the “mind” of the West, i.e., the dynamic institutions and fluidity born of an open society. Moreover, to make a fit he would fundamentally alter Confucian ethics.

Besides a number of institutional adjustments and revisions to the Eastern way of life that he found inescapable, he reluctantly felt compelled to abandon the cardinal tenet of Confucianism: virtue. As the pivotal feature of almost all East Asian religious and spiritual systems, virtue or “Wayvirtue” stood for all that was quintessentially “Eastern” in its ethics. An individual or a country was firm and benevolent if either was governed by virtue (or the virtuous). The converse was equally true: a person or state went awry because the cultivation of virtue was neglected. Put succinctly in the Great Learning (da xue), “Virtue is the root; everything else, the branches (xiushen weiben).” Paradoxically, it was this core concept that Shozan, in his eagerness for Japan to equal the West, determined was no  ,  

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longer sufficient (as witnessed in China’s failure to repel Western dominance), nor even necessary to Eastern “ethics.” What counted was power, that is, strength in terms of military and technological prowess. Weakness bred contempt; contempt, conquest. So Shozan favored developing large naval ships, opening to foreign trade, sending men abroad to learn Western ways and style. This represented a fundamental spiritual-philosophical shift. Instead of the Confucian dictum of moral self-cultivation, Shozan held up Sun Tzu’s watchwords, “know the enemy, know yourself; in a hundred battles, a hundred victories.”

In sum, the power and strength Shozan saw in the West had a deeper source than mere guns and ships—namely, science; and science was only one element of the dynamics of the West. A wide variety of institutions and practices of the West comprising a distinct way of life explained the mechanically superior civilization of the West. The Japanese philosopher thought and hoped the mechanicalShozan believed that to materialistic West could be appropriated and imitated without affecting the ethical-spiritual essence of the East.

Westernize, power must Although he continued to anchor Eastern ethics in the tradition of classical learning, he felt he had replace virtue as the ideal Confucian to dissent and stretch to make a fit. But, the dichotomy or bifurcation of “Eastern ethics, Western techniques” foundation of society. was a synthesis that could not be maintained. Most critically, he believed that in order to Westernize, power must replace virtue as the ideal foundation of society. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 was an extension of his thinking and the writings of other Bakumatsu thinkers in this regard.15 This creative stratagem calls attention to a less tangible but nonetheless indispensable element of cross-cultural encounter. Shozan’s strategy of accommodation did more than serve as a translation tool, a bridge that allowed him to enter the new and unknown through the old and familiar.

It also assuaged the “loss of face” that would be entailed in conceding that one’s own system and culture are inferior to the West. This psychological, emotional as well as intellectual rapprochement that lies at the heart of the “Western technique, Eastern spirit” synthesis seems essential to a fuller understanding of the more subtle, and perhaps more important, dynamics of radical change. Without some skillful dovetailing and grafting, there may result only rejection and conflict when opposites meet. Yet with it, one runs the risk of oversimplifying, distorting and even bastardizing another system or tradition.

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Part III: “Eastern Technique, Western Spirit”—An American Version We may be witnessing a variation of Shozan’s strategy in the American fascination with and adaptation of Buddhism— in this case, “Eastern technique, Western spirit.” The specific Eastern techniques of meditation, for example, are being taken up stripped of what are seen as the traditional “trappings” of moral precepts, rituals of repentance and purification, bowing, devotion and even textual study. The governing spirit behind this imitation of Eastern technique is Western: individualistic and iconoclastic, one imbued with a liberal-progressive search for freedom and an experimental scientific outlook.

A large part of the growing allure of Eastern spirituality in America (as with the allure of Western science and technology in Japan) grows out of a profound sense of cultural dislocation. In Japan, the cause of that cultural malaise was the felt need for rapid modernization which resulted in a “turning West.” In America, the cause of the cultural malaise was due to the unintended consequences that flowed from modernization, and the result was a “turning East.” Broadly speaking, as Japan abandoned or radically altered its traditional spiritual ways to pursue a new way of life imitating Western technique, America in the aftermath of pursuing that same way of life began to imitate Eastern spirit. In both cases, however, the lines between spirit and technique blurred and interfused to produce new forms—a distinctive Japanese form of capitalism and development and a distinctive American form of Buddhism(s).

In the West, modernization resulted in new levels of disenchantment and alienation as capitalism and industrialism ushered in a way of life based on money and the commodification of people and things. The erosion of human community and the evaporation of meaning that accompanied this over-materialization in America spurred interest in Oriental religions. Increasing numbers of people sought alternative altars of spiritual revitalization to replace the outworn religious traditions of the West. In Japan, the disenchantment and alienation, the evaporation of meaning, preceded the takeoff into modernization and stimulated an almost frenzied quest to materialize. Both societies, however—Shozan’s Japan and contemporary America—faced virtually the same problem: how can a society keep intact its spiritual values as the material organization of its civilization undergoes wholesale change? The adoption of an East/West strategy in both can be seen as a response to this challenge and an attempt to reconcile the disturbing split of matter and spirit associated with modernization.

First, some clarification of terms is in order. The term “modernization” defines the larger process of late economic development that historically  ,  

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has been accompanied by rapid demographic changes, disruptive urban and rural shifts, and major adjustments, even threats, to the established patterns of social and cultural life. Adaptation to the harsh exigencies of a market economy—the factories, large urban commercial centers, environmental exploitation and reallocation of resources that spur productivity— require reorganization of institutions at all levels, from the national government to personal roles and family relationships. While this process benefits some sectors of society, it clearly leaves others worse off. Finally, modernization entails a reorientation to a scientific worldview that undergirds much of the technology, fueling development as well as the rationalization of the economy.16 Modernization ushers in profound changes in attitudes and expectations stimulated by cheap mass-produced goods, a dazzling technology, and an alluring mass culture of consumption and increased leisure. In its Western and particularly in its American form, modernization relies on an ideology that enshrines private property, extols self-interest, and favors a view that acquisition and enjoyment constitute the measure of life’s meaning. From a religious point of view, the cumulative effects of all these shifts— the increasing organization of life around profit, power and consumption— would presage a spiritual crisis. It might be expressed in the Biblical caution: “what does it profit one to gain the world, but suffer the loss of the soul?” This losing of the “soul,” the shift to hedonic values and narcissism, was early on seen as one of the casualties of modernization, or as the lateVictorians put it, the “acids of modernity.” “Desacralization,” the loss of the sacred in everyday life, describes not so much the receding influence of organized religion in public life as the more immediate angst of modern individuals, “the hollow men.”17 Then as now the increasingly secularized view of the world and ourselves, while factually sound, leaves individuals feeling rootless and without meaning.

The turn East for many Americans from its outset was propelled by larger hopes and hungers growing out of a deeply but often unconsciously felt ebbing of the sacred that has come to characterize the modern world.

This spiritual emptiness in turn breeds a particular contemporary nihilism: a dream of wanting where everything wanted is finally worthless, or if attained, unsatisfying. It is underwritten by a pervasive moral relativism whose philosophical inspiration is postmodernism. At the popular level of culture such thinking creates a sense that nothing is certain, anything is possible, and everything is permissible. The overall effect is desacralization.

While Christianity as a whole may actually have been instrumental in the modernization process of the West, it has also served as a countervailing force against some of its excesses and abuses.18 It has represented and voiced

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the concerns of the disenfranchised and the displaced in the modernization process, as well as called for an overarching set of civic and communal values to offset and ameliorate narrow self-interest. It has advocated greater civil rights, humanitarian relief and justice for people who have been marginalized by impersonal market forces and are most vulnerable to rapid social change.

Modern scientific thought, however, has dealt traditional Christianity its worst setback and its greatest challenge. The triumph of modern science resulted in a profound spiritual crisis throughout the whole of Christendom. In brief, the discoveries of science undercut the literal authority of the Bible and orthodox belief, fundamentalism notwithstanding. The crisis in faith threatened to divorce Writ from reason, religion from science. This spiritual crisis in the West has led some to conclude that the “turning East” on the part of many modern Americans was a negative, not positive, attraction, reflecting more the failure of Christianity than the success of Buddhism.19 Regardless, major thinkers such as John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead and others felt that resolving the issue of the proper relations between religion and science would constitute the greatest challenge facing the West.

Moreover, there is growing concern that the rift is widening, and where religion once provided the tacit framework within which all of our public discourse was conducted, it does so no longer. A sacred core of shared values by which we steer our public debate and decisions already diminishing, has eroded almost completely under the deluge of postmodernism. Some analysts (Gellner, Armstrong, Some see the rise of et al.) see the rise of religious fundamentalism as a reaction to this growing problem, and interpret such religious fundamentalism pietistic resurgence not as a sign of vitality but as a symptom of frustration and further social disintegra- not as a sign of vitality but tion.20 Samuel Huntington pushes this analysis into an even more stark dichotomy that anticipates an inevi- as a symptom of frustration table “clash of civilizations.” Modernization thus raises a key question: can morality/spirit survive as the be- and social disintegration. lief systems which once underpinned it wither away?

Certainly, with modernization, at least implicitly, we are increasingly moving into a system of shared values—the ideology of market capitalism.

But is this a glue that will hold together a society, or is it a value construct that tends to undermine community even as it generates immense personal wealth? To be sure, the mechanisms of the market are enjoying unprecedented sway as the dominant economic model. They hold out the promise of unlimited opportunity for individuals and countries hoping to  ,  

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emulate the impressive material cornucopia of the West. Yet it remains uncertain and increasingly dubious that market values in themselves are wholesome, beneficial, conducive to the common good. Nonetheless, they are becoming increasingly more widespread and “shared” as “globalization” comes to define and dominate our beliefs and behavior.

Theologians, philosophers and social thinkers suspect that the triumph of the “pleasure principle” (which ironically often leaves people in the end dissastified) is not, as some would argue, morally neutral and benign, and therefore not a threat to spiritual ideals. It is instead, they argue, a religion without God. Yet, how then does one account for strong assertions of religious faith in a time of increasing secularization? Isn’t this a sign that spiritual growth can keep apace with material growth? The apparent incongruity is not as strange as it might seem. In a desacralizing milieu the old values will survive and often for a time revive even as the beliefs which underpin them decline. But eventually the religious capital that informs the old beliefs and ethical constructs (whether Judeo-Christian or ConfucianBuddhist) will be depleted, leaving nothing to draw on. By analogy, it is like a boat moving through the water. Once the gas runs out, the boat will continue its forward momentum for awhile propelled by its inertia. But eventually resistance overcomes inertia and the boat comes to a stop. Broadly speaking, the combined forces of modernization cut the engine, and as a result the morality and beliefs diminish with each successive generation.

What remains at the core of life—the unfettered market principles and a society fragmenting under economic pressures and the antisocial philosophies of the market—is a society in desperate need of finding a sense of the common good, which religion once afforded.

People become commodified, rationalized into “consumers” with “purchasing power” valued less for who they are than for what they have. This materialization of existence eventually displaces nationalism as an identity. It divides the world into “haves” and “have-nots,” “developed” and “developing,” “global partners” or “rogue nations.” The alienation that results from such erosion of identity may lie at the heart of another contemporary phenomenon: the “tribalization” of societies into smaller and conflicting units. It may fuel as well the religious fundamentalism that both supports and in some ways masks it.

The American theologian Harvey Cox, in his early work Turning East (1977), made the point that the spiritually eroding effects of modernization were the root cause of the Western interest in Eastern religions. The “death of God” movement in theological circles, Cox wrote, combined with the large-scale degeneration of Western society toward “profit and power,” caused the erosion of human community and the evaporation of genuine

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experience. All of these were one way or another the direct outcome of modernization and “the organization of a whole civilization around greed.”21 Sakuma Shozan’s Japan and contemporary America thus confronted parallel problems.

The growing interest in Buddhism among Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, in some degree can be seen as an attempt to address these questions. Many Americans have come to see Buddhism as progressive, dynamic and capable of addressing the central problems of modernization. This embrace of Buddhism as a forward-looking force in the West stands in marked contrast to its perceived irrelevance and sometimes outright rejection in the modern East. Asian Buddhism no longer occupies the place of authority and influ- The embrace of Buddhism ence in contemporary life it once enjoyed. Paradoxically, it is in the West that Buddhism has come to the as a forward-looking force forefront as a philosophy uniquely suited to modern life. America is in the midst of an unprecedented in the West stands in congrowth of interest in Buddhism: by some estimates there are currently 4–6 million American Buddhists trast to its perceived irreldrawn from both Asian-American and Euro-American ethnic groups, making Buddhism a religious move- evance in the modern East. ment larger than many Protestant denominations.

Some two dozen North American universities have full-time faculty in Buddhist studies; Buddhism and other non-Western religions are the fastestgrowing religious movements in America.22 We might ask, how has Buddhism been enhanced and perhaps distorted in its new setting, America, in order to assume this important position? Does Buddhism, beyond a superficial harmony with modernity, in fact run counter to certain scientific tenets and market-economy values?

The idea of “Western technique, Eastern ethos,” originally an Asian strategy of accommodation to Western power and “pollution,” has been embraced in a reverse version by key Western thinkers as an antidote to that very same pollution. The notion of an East/West synthesis has now acquired more cachet in the West than in Asia and remains a powerful motif in the continuing encounter. One must also ask if imitation of the Buddhist “spirit” comes embedded with its own “technique,” i.e., implications for dramatic change to the whole social fabric of Western life. And what is the significance of this phenomenon for Asian societies in their own search for spiritual, ethical and normative values?23 A slow but steadily growing American fascination with Oriental religions can be traced from Cotton Mather through the New England Transcendentalists. Western interest in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism,  ,  

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historically coincided with the rise of modern science and the corresponding perceived decline of religious orthodoxy in the West. Put simply, modern science initiated a deep spiritual crisis that led to an unfortunate split between faith and reason—a split yet to be reconciled—and early on in this crisis, Buddhism came to be seen as an “alternative altar,” a bridge that might reunite the estranged worlds of matter and spirit. Thus, to a large extent Buddhism’s flowering in the West during the last century comes about to satisfy post-Darwinian needs to have religious beliefs grounded in new scientific truth. Hence, interest peaked during the Gilded Age and became something of a vogue.24 The Buddhism-science link was already made by the late nineteenth century through educated and articulate individuals who saw in Buddhism a healthy antidote to the spiritual crisis afflicting Western civilization. Ernest Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, Lafcadio Hearn, Sir Edwin Arnold, Henry Steele Olcott, Marie Canavarro, Paul Carus, D. T. Suzuki, Anagarika Dharmapala and Albert Edmunds, to name a few, all enthusiastically portrayed Buddhism as uniquely attuned to a modern empirical worldview.

At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago, a watershed event in the East/West encounter, the connection between Oriental religion and Western science was further cemented. The progressive delegates, both Western and Asian, spoke glowingly of a Buddhism “new” and reformed, one fashioned by and for the modernist proclivities that most Western converts and young Asian missionaries were themselves heirs to and exponents of.

For example, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), the Buddhist missionary from Ceylon, proclaimed to the Parliament audience, “Buddha inculcated the necessity of self-reliance and independent thought,” and “accepted the doctrine of evolution as the only true one, with its corollary, the law of cause and effect; he condemns the idea of a creator.” Dharmapala noted that Buddhism meshed both with scientific views in that Buddha, who “looks upon all beings with equanimity,” also accepts the cosmos “as a continuous process of unfolding itself in regular order in obedience to natural laws.” The Ceylonese missionary to America backed up his claim by crediting the Western Buddhologist Eugene Burnouf with the “first rational, scientific and comprehensive account of the Buddha’s religion.”25 Soyen Shaku (1859–1919), a Buddhist monk from Japan, gave an equally convincing speech designed to catch the ear of many Americans predisposed to the empirical, the evolutionary and the natural. Soyen’s address set forth with calm, Aristotelian logic how reason and inference demonstrate that “there is no beginning . . . there is no end to the universe. . . . [T]he causal law is in a logical circle changing from cause to effect,

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effect to cause.” Because the law of causality is “the law of nature, independent of the will of Buddha, and still more the will of human beings,” one had no need of divine intervention to explain wealth and poverty, growth and decay, misery and happiness. Immutable laws directed the progress of the universe “just as the clock moves by itself without any intervention of external force.”26 The German-American writer and editor Paul Carus (1852–1919), who attended the Parliament, soon wrote with excitement and authority, “There are many similar agreements that can be traced between Buddhism and the tenets of science . . . and this is not at all surprising, for Buddhism is a religion which recognizes no other revelation except the truth that can be proved by science.”27 Shortly after the Parliament Carus published his Gospel of Buddha (1894), a prose narrative that went through thirteen English-language editions, sold more than three million copies, and was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Russian, Czech, Italian, Thai and other languages.28 An especially articulate American apologist for Asian ideas, Carus, as editor of the Open Court Publishing Co., proved instrumental in convincing many that the East might well have an answer to much of what ailed the West spiritually, philosophically and psychologically. Buddhism could address the concern John Dewey voiced over the “pathological segregation of facts and values” or “bifurcation of nature” whose integration posed “the deepest problem of modern life.”29 For Carus, Buddha was “the first positivist, the first humanitarian, the first radical freethinker, the first iconoclast, and the first prophet of the Religion of Science.”30 Shortly after the Parliament, Soyen Shaku’s young disciple D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) came to America. He stayed in Carus’s home in LaSalle, Illinois, to collaborate on translating and publishing Asian religious and philosophical texts into English. Like his teacher, Suzuki’s presentation of Buddhism to Americans stressed a near-identity of the Dharma with science.

In his English work, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (1907), Suzuki’s notions of karma and dharma both cleave to the authority of science, not spiritual awakening, as the arbiter of truth. “This doctrine of karma,” he states, “may be regarded as an application in our ethical realm of the theory of the conservation of energy. . . . We need not further state the conception of dharma in its general aspect is scientifically verified.”31 This conflation of Dharma and science marks the beginning of a shift that would eventually culminate in a full-scale adaptation of Buddhism to Western thought and values—one I characterize as “Eastern technique, Western spirit.” The “technique,” Buddhist forms of meditation and insight, later to blossom in the West following World War II, was already  ,  

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quite early on grafted to the “spirit” of Western scientific thought. It remains a central feature of modern American versions of Buddhism.32 Contemporary interest in the complementary relationship of Buddhism and science has become a serious pursuit as well as something of a fad in the West. The current excitement echoes the earlier hope of the late nineteenth-century “turners East” that Buddhism offers a bridge for reconciling religious belief and scientific thought. Simply put: we believe science is truth; therefore if Buddhism can be shown to be “scientific,” it is true. By extension, our science gains legitimacy because it is validated by the authority of ancient wisdom.

As early as the 1940s Neils Bohr sensed possibilities of congruence between modern science and Eastern mysticism. The quest of atomic physics for a unified explanation of reality reminded him of an Eastern perspective. “When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators,” he noted.33 He often mentioned Buddha and Laozi in his discussions of physics and even designed a coat of arms featuring the Yin/Yang symbol—illustrating his theory of “complementarity,” in which opposites complement rather than conflict. Fritjof Capra, in his The Tao Of Physics (1975), expanded at some length on Bohr’s tentative impressions. Capra argued that modern science and Eastern mysticism offer not only parallel insights into the ultimate nature of reality, but “that the profound harmony between these concepts, as expressed in systems language, and the corresponding ideas in Eastern mysticism, is impressive evidence for my claim that the philosophy of mystical traditions, also known as the ‘perennial philosophy,’ provides the most consistent philosophical background to our modern scientific theories.”34 But how close and profound really is the relationship between Buddhism and science?

We find among traditional Buddhist teachers a far more discerning and critical stance toward the equation of science with Buddhism. For example, a pioneer in introducing Buddhism to America, Chan Master Hsüan Hua (1918–1995), wrote: Look at modern science: military weapons are modernized every day and more novel every month. Although we call this progress, it is nothing more than progressive cruelty. Science takes human life as an experiment, as child’s play. It fulfills its selfish desires through force and oppression.35

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Master Hua felt that science fell within the limited world of “relative, not absolute dharmas.” Thus, “science absolutely cannot bring true or ultimate happiness to people—neither spiritually nor materially.”

Again, in a 1989 convocation address at the University of Kelaniya, the Venerable Dr. Walpola Rahula noted that our daily life is permeated by science and warned that “we have almost become slaves of science and technology.” The Theravada monk warned, “Soon we shall be worshipping it. Early symptoms of it are that we tend to seek support from science to prove the validity of our religions, to justify them, and to make them modern, up-to-date, respectable and acceptable.” This trend, although wellintentioned, is at the same time ill-advised, he cautioned. While there are “some parallels and similarities” between Buddhism and modern science that seem intellectually very stimulating, interesting and exciting, they are, he stressed, “peripheral and do not touch the essential part, the center, the core, the heart of Buddhism.” The Venerable Rahula first pointed out that the “instrument” used in Buddhism to discover these parallel truths (such as the nature of the atom, the relativity of time and space, or the quantum view of an interdependent and interrelated whole which includes the observer), was “insight developed and purified by meditation (bhavana)”; these truths, then, were discovered “without the help of any external instrument.” He concluded by saying, “It is fruitless, meaningless, to seek support from science to prove religious truths. . . . It is incongruous and preposterous to depend on changing scientific concepts to prove or support perennial religious truths.” Moreover, he noted, “Science is interested in the precise analysis and study of the material world. It has no heart. It knows nothing about love or compassion, righteousness or purity of mind.”

Science, according to Rahula, does not know the inner world of humankind; it knows only the external, material world that surrounds us.

On the contrary, religion, particularly Buddhism, aims at the discovery and study of man’s inner world: ethical, spiritual, psychological and intellectual world. Buddhism is a spiritual and psychological discipline that deals with man in toto. It is a way of life; it is a path to follow and practice. It teaches man how to develop his moral and ethical character (sila), and to cultivate his mind (samadhi), and how to realize the ultimate truth, Nirvana.36 Like Master Hua, the Venerable Rahula views Buddhism as a disciplined study whose purpose and scope surpasses science. To compare Buddhism to modern science “entails the risk of reducing Buddhism to a mere school of thought similar to the Greek schools of philosophy.” The key  ,  

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distinction between Buddhism and the various schools of Western philosophy (to which science in his view belongs) is that science is for study and intellectual discussion, not for practice. Buddhism, he concedes, also includes intellectual study, but is “more importantly, primarily and essentially, a practice in life . . . a teaching to live.”37 One of the scriptural sources often quoted as evidence for a strong correspondence between Buddhism and science is the Kalama Sutta. But a closer reading of this text calls into question such a facile plaiting. The key passage of the discourse relates how the Buddha once visited a small town called Kesaputta in the kingdom of Kosala. The inhabitants of this town who shared the name Kalama, voiced their doubt and perplexity in determining the truth or falsehood of all the competing teachers and doctrines of their time and asked the Buddha how they might go about ascertaining the truth. The text says: The Buddha replied, “Yes, Kalamas, it is proper that you have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kalamas, do not be led by what is simply repeated and reported, or tradition, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, not by mere surmise of logic or inference, specious reasoning, nor by bias towards an idea, nor by considering appearances, nor by the delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities [alt. nor upon another’s seeming ability], nor by the idea: ‘this is our teacher.’

“But O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome (akusala), and wrong, and bad, and when undertaken lead to harm and ill, then give them up. . . . And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome (kusala) and good, and when undertaken and observed lead to benefit and happiness, then accept them and follow them.”38 At first glance, this statement would appear to confirm the impression of a close consistency between Buddhadharma and the aims and methods of modern science, i.e., science broadly defined as an attempt at neverending exploration, which keeps an open mind and challenges its own presuppositions again and again, and for whom experience is the ultimate arbiter. On the basis of this passage, the Buddha is made out to be a pragmatic skeptic, a radical empiricist free of all doctrines or faith, whose teaching invites one to accept whatever unhindered free investigation leads to.

As with science, no prerequisites or parameters apply, save impartial objectivity and adherence to a strict positivism. Pushed further, the passage

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has been used to justify a moral relativism or solipsism where one is free to accept or reject whatever one likes, and Dharma interpreted according to whatever notions are congenial to oneself. This interpretation, however, would be a mistake.

First of all, the text must be considered within its context: a particular audience with specific questions, namely, how do we know which path toward ultimate liberation (moksha) is correct? How do we know the outcome of good and evil deeds? Or the nature and reality of samsara? It must be remembered that by the Buddha’s time the basic facts of human existence included concepts of karma (actions have corresponding effects that are impossible to avoid), samsara (life as an endless series of births and rebirths), moksha (release or liberation from this process), and Dharma (the basic truth of the universe, the way things are, and the way one should act).

Buddhism emerged from an Indian religious matrix that by the Buddha’s time had evolved and transformed into sects of ascetics, mystics and renunciants who sought for spiritual truth beyond the long-established authority of the Brahmin priests. They place less emphasis on invoking external gods, preferring to look for “god” within. Emphasis was shifting away from ritualized acts of worship, sacrifice and devotion to an increasing focus on searching for the sacred behind and within all things. Union with the “divine” was to be achieved less through external ritual than through an inward transformation. Increasingly, the external world of the senses came to be seen as ephemeral, illusory; the locus of truth was more to be found in an eternal spark of the divine (brahman) that was in the soul of all beings. The prime concerns then became “knowledge/insight” into this abiding truth, and release or liberation (moksha) from the transmigration of the soul (atman). These were achieved through yoga, meditation, ascetic discipline, in combination with study.

Since truth lay behind the illusion of the external world, some form of seeing through the illusion and mastery of one’s actions (karma) was essential to moksha and entry into the “divine.” Dharma, the basic law of the universe and the mainstay of all things, was the term used for this truth.

As the basis of all Indian religions it was, however, both descriptive and prescriptive, i.e., the way things are, and the way we should behave to attain liberation. As such, “truth” implied the understanding and practice of an eternal and universal moral code. The Buddha and the Kalamas shared a worldview that accepted this moral law (karma), which states that every action has a corresponding and unavoidable reaction. Karma governs the process of particular and collective destinies. Desire born of ignorance was the cause of action, and because of desires and corresponding delusion,  ,  

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our actions constantly bind us to rebirth in a cycle of samsara, endless chain of births/deaths. The present arises from the past; the future is being planted in the present. The universe was an intrinsically moral universe.

The competing teachers referred to in the text were undoubtedly primarily made up of munis, or sramanas—wandering renunciants who practiced meditation and asceticism to overcome limitations of the world and to discipline their minds. Well-established by Buddha’s birth, these religious teachers had left home, families, and passions behind to practice austerities (hence “sramana” from the Sanskrit root “sram,” “effort, austere”).

They begged for food and often retired deep into the forest, where they gathered fruits and vegetables. To avoid attachments to home, they continually moved. Buddhism drew on and expanded on this underlying shared tradition. By the sixth century B.C.E., the concepts of karma, samsara, moksha and dharma constituted the basic facts of existence. They were the larger ontological context within which the Kalama Sutta occurs.

The Buddha’s exhortation to “doubt . . . and know for themselves” then already assumes a fairly high level of ethical awareness or moral sensibility on the part of his audience. Personal experience and experimentation clearly were to take place within a system grounded in moral discipline and mental purification. In a sense the Buddha was saying, “Do what you know leads to goodness, happiness and inward peace here and now; avoid what you know leads to defilement, harm and suffering both personal and social. Your doubts will dissolve in the face of practice.” He is directing their attention to what is immediately verifiable because it is intrinsic; what they already “know” to be true and reasonable given the shared worldview they operate within. Far from dispensing with all faith, doctrine or moral precepts, the passage assumes it, and affirms it. It offers most reasonable advice to people not ready to believe in the Buddha himself (but who did believe in something); advice on the most practical and wholesome way to live when ultimate questions could not be immediately determined.

What is not said explicitly but implied then reveals the purport of this passage. Context and frame of reference are critical. Thus the Kalama Sutta, depending on one’s frame of reference, could be seen either to correspond with or to critique modern science. The key to understanding this difference lies in a correct Buddhist interpretation of “know for yourselves,” “wholesome” and “unwholesome.” These terms refer to a specific and disciplined form or methodology of self-cultivation which when diligently practiced leads to true knowledge and wisdom. This method is referred to in Buddhism as the study of morality, concentration and wisdom (Sanskrit: sila, samadhi, prajña; Chinese, jie, ding, hui) together called san wulou xue, literally, the “three non-outflow learning.”

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The ethical component cannot be overemphasized, as “seeing things as they really are” entails an indispensable preliminary: “purification of the mind.” This clarity of mind and concentrated awareness has its own prerequisite: moral conduct. The Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification), an early Buddhist manual compiled in the fourth century by Buddhagosha, lists the Buddha’s “science” of inquiry as an interrelated three-step exercise of virtue, meditation and insight—quite a different approach to knowledge than a modern-day scientist would presume or pursue. Thus, fundamental and qualitatively different views of what constitutes knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge separate Buddhism and science.

Aspects of the above epistemological formula appear throughout the Asian religious traditions. For example, Daoism speaks of cultivating the mind (xin), regarding it as the repository of perceptions and knowledge— it rules the body, it is spiritual and like a divinity that will abide “only where all is clean.” Thus the Guanzi (4th to 3rd centuries B.C.E.) cautions that “all people desire to know, but they do not enquire into that whereby one knows.” It specifies: What all people desire to know is that (i.e., the external world), But their means of knowing is this (i.e., oneself); How can we know that Only by the perfection of this?39 The “perfection” refers to the cultivation of moral qualities and in Buddhist terminology, the elimination of “afflictions” (Sanskrit: klesha, Chinese: fan nao) such as greed, anger, ignorance, pride, selfishness, and emotional extremes. Mencius spoke of obtaining an “unmoving mind” at age forty, again referring to the cultivation of an equanimity resulting from the exercise of moral sense. He distinguished between knowledge acquired from mental activity and knowledge gained from intuitive insight. This latter knowledge he considered superior as it gives noumenal as well as phenomenal understanding. Zhuangzi spoke of acquiring knowledge of “the ten thousand things” (i.e., of all nature) through virtuous living and practicing stillness: “to a mind that is ‘still’ the whole universe surrenders.” 40 Even Confucius’s famous passage concerning the highest learning (da xue) connects utmost knowledge of the universe to the cultivation of one’s person and the rectification of one’s mind.41 D. T. Suzuki, who initially showed great enthusiasm for identifying Buddhism with modern science, came to doubt the sufficiency of a religion based on science. He even saw the need for religion to critique science. In 1959, Suzuki wrote that his early modernist agreement with Carus  ,  

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and others that “religion must stand on scientific grounds . . . that Christianity was based too much on mythology,” was ill-founded. “If it were possible for me to talk with them now,” he reflected: I would tell them that my ideas have changed from theirs somewhat.

I now think that a religion based solely on science is not enough.

There are certain “mythological” elements in every one of us, which cannot be altogether lost in favor of science. This is a conviction I have come to.42 Suzuki’s turnabout is telling and problematic. At the very least it cautions against a facile identification of Buddhism with science. While their aims and methods may appear tantalizingly parallel, fundamental differences inhere. But more to the point of this paper, his reversal reveals the flaw in the American version of Shozan’s “Western science, Eastern spirit.”

As Shozan discovered, the imitation of technique often entails an overhauling of an entire system of thought, even a way of life. Certain forms or techniques, designs and technologies possess their own inner dynamics and integrity. They cannot be adopted piecemeal. Just as modernization in Japan ushered in a degree of Westernization that went far beyond a purely technological development, so too Buddhism in the United States may demand a degree of “Easternization” that goes well beyond just sitting meditation and superficial emulation. As we have seen, Buddhism comes with its own “spirit,” one that offers fundamental challenges to prevailing Western ways of thinking—science being a case in point. The meditation, insight and moral self-cultivation on which authentic Buddhist practice depends may require a reorientation to a worldview bringing profound changes to the inner life and challenges to received traditions. Eastern technique (or Buddhist practice) comes embedded in its own spirit—one noticeably suspect of materialism and the reigning paradigm of objective scientific knowledge.

Why does any of this matter? It matters because of the deeper issue it bespeaks: how to counter the loss of the sacred in everyday life that has come with modernization in both the East and the West. Shozan and early American converts to Buddhism were keenly aware of this problem and struggled to retain or infuse an ethical/spiritual dimension into the process of modernization. Interestingly, both eliminated the cardinal tenet of their spiritual systems in a sincere effort to reach an agreement between the essentials of their religion and the demands of modernity. In dismissing or marginalizing virtue, Shozan unwittingly gutted a principal feature of Eastern spirit. It seems that one could not modernize with it, nor be

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spiritual without it. The same might apply to those who substitute science and agnosticism for morality and faith in fashioning an American Buddhism that is “existential, therapeutic and liberating agnosticism.”

This then highlights the dilemma and exposes an important limitation to the “Western technique, Eastern spirit” strategy. Ironically, it is precisely this element, virtue, that offers the best prospects for a corrective to the myopic materialism and moral wasteland that are increasingly evident in modernization. If Cox, et al., are right, then modernization exerts such a powerful influence on the whole of life—individual, national, international—that we can expect to see similar patterns of rapid material development and rapid spiritual degeneration as standard and tragic features of modern life. Without the virtue emphasis, both Buddhism and Confucianism (and perhaps Christianity) may contribute to, rather than countervail, a spiritual crisis which threatens to divorce the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.

One is reminded of a story out of the Confucian tradition: a disciple of Mencius observed that the cardinal virtue of benevolence (ren) seemed unable to improve many individuals or correct the abuses and injustices of the state; that human greed and folly, selfishness and venality were so deeply rooted that the virtue of benevolence was too weak a force to overcome them. Mencius responded, Benevolence subdues its opposite just as water subdues fire. Those, however, who nowadays practice benevolence do as if with one cup of water they could save a whole wagon-load of fuel which was on fire, and when the flames were not extinguished, were to say that water cannot subdue fire. This approach, moreover, greatly encourages those who are not benevolent. The end result will be the loss of even that small amount of benevolence.43 ❧ Notes 1

Quoted in R. T. Chang, From Prejudice to Tolerance: A Study of the Japanese Image of the West, 1826–1864 (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970), p. 152.

2 Arthur Versluis, “American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions,” in Religion in America, ed. Harry S. Stout (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 320–26.

3 S. Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World: Translated from the Chinese of Hiuan Tsiang, A. D. 629 (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1994), pp. lxxxiv, 6.  ,  

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See Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. For a critique of Huntington, see the address given by Edward Said at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Fall of 1995, on tape at the Helen C. White Library.

5 See F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (New York: Macmillan, 1953); E. F. Fenollosa, East and West: The Discovery of America and Other Poems (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893); S. N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); and A. A. Toynbee, Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947–1957).

6 For a more recent and highly informative discussion on this issue, see Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch, eds., Interpreting across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

7 Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1964), pp. 18–22.

8 For this insight I am indebted to Nakamura.

9 This phrase proposed a synthesis of Eastern ethics and Western skills. It was apparently pioneered by Shozan, but perhaps inspired by an earlier expression attributed to Sugawara Michizane (845–903). Michizane’s formula was “Japanese spirit, Chinese skill” (Wakon, Kansai). Shozan’s version echoed the main idea but replaced “Western” for “Chinese” to express the new encounter between Japan and Euro-American civilization. Thus his formulation as “Eastern spirit, Western crafts” (Toyo seishin, Seiyo gigei). A Chinese version made its appearance after the Opium Wars (1839–42) and China’s defeat by Japan in 1894–95. Chinese intellectuals impressed by the achievements of the Meiji Restoration in Japan either borrowed from Shozan or developed the concept along parallel lines. The Chinese version is attributed to Zhang zhi-tong, who in 1898 summarized the idea as “Zhong-xue wei-ti, Xixue wei-yong.” Zhang’s earlier formula actually called for “Ru-xue wei ti, Xi-sue wei-yong,” literally, “Confucian study as substance; Western learning as function.” See Chow, Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

For the following account I am indebted to Chang (1970); J. E. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); R. A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); and N. R. Thelle, Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Conflict to Dialogue, 1854–1899. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987).

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To be more precise, Shozan belonged to the Qing or Zhuxi school of neo-Confucianism. Zhuxi perfected the system of Chengyi, which espoused the “gradual” path to knowledge or spiritual/moral attainment. The other major school of neo-Confucianism, that of Wang Yang-ming who completed the system of Lu Zhouyuan, argued for the “sudden” apprehension and realization of the Way. For more, see Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, p. 281. Shozan’s emphasis of the gradualism akin to the Zhuxi system gave him a modus vivendi to accept and promote Western science, as gradualism for him constituted the central feature of the scientific method of the West.

He wrote: The mind [in Wang’s system] is the principle. Since all things are complete within us, it suffices that we study the principle of our minds. That is where Wang Yang-ming differs from Zhuxi. Since Western science also accords with the system of Chengyi and Zhuxi, indeed the two masters’ interpretation of the “extension of knowledge through the investigation of things” is the best one valid everywhere—in the seas, eastern, western and northern. If we follow the system of Chengyi and Zhuxi we may see that even Western learning is nothing more than part of our learning. Western science seems quite a different type of learning if one looks at it from the biased point of view of Lu Zhouyuan. Should Western science actually be wrong, it would be reasonable for the system to differ from it. But since Western science is right by nature, in the final analysis the Lu system must be in accord with Western science. . . . [referring to the Confucian view that the same principle governs the forces of nature and the nature of man] Chengyi and Zhuxi also were not free from the limitation of Chinese Confucians; they made such an error as this. Nevertheless, when one accepts the system of Chengyi and Zhuxi, one widely adopts even the theories of Westerners, and elucidates the principle, one reaches the point where one can discern even the errors of Chengyi and Zhuxi. (150) Shozan thus linked the familiar with the unfamiliar, the alien with the native. The Chengzhu system, like Western science, agreed on the slow accumulation of knowledge. “Both followed similarly painstaking processes in search for truth, long, arduous research and experiments, cumulative, in their respective realms, spiritual and material. . . . [T]he agreement that Shozan observed between the metaphysics of Zhuxi and the science of the West was one of approach.” For the above quote and insightful analysis I am indebted to Chang (1970).

11 Quoted in Chang, p. 156.  ,  

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Ibid., p. 152.

Ibid., p. 180.

14 Ibid., p. 181.

15 It is interesting to note that the modernization of Japan (and other parts of Asia), in greater or lesser degrees, commenced with self-disintegration of both Buddhism and Confucianism, or at least the radical revision of both to accommodate rapid development. One could make a similar case for modernization in the West—that there too the emergence of industrial and postindustrial societies necessitated a profound religious upheaval beginning with the Protestant Reformation and continuing to the present. Where accommodation proved impossible, rejection took place. For example, Shozan partially rejected the Zhuxi philosophy and embraced Western science because its theories purported to account for natural phenomena. His rejection of virtue as the nucleus of Eastern spirit in like manner came only when he could no longer reconcile it with the pursuit of “power.” He did not call this rejection, however.

Instead, he viewed it as a compromise between neo-Confucianism and Western science, and preferred to call it “gradualism.” Thus, he could assert that Eastern spirit was not entirely retrograde to modernization. It was, however, very new wine in an old bottle.

16 For a more detailed account see, E. S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). Variations to the Euro-American pattern of modernization exist—especially in Asia, where neither fundamental changes to family and kinship bonds, nor the wholesale adoption of the liberal political and social systems that characterize Western modernization have occurred.

Not all societies follow the classical liberal-developmental model of the West in their modernizing trajectory. In short, modernization need not and indeed does not mean Westernization. Nonetheless, in all cases modernization does seem to provoke a radical religious/spiritual crisis in which traditional beliefs and values struggle to cope with the demands of modernity.

17 See T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men” (1925): We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar 13

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Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion . . .

18 See R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Transaction, 1998); and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Other Essays, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002).

19 See Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).

20 Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Harper Collins, 2001); E. Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).

21 Harvey Cox, Turning East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977). Cox listed six areas of interest that Asian religions held for Americans living in an overmaterialized world bereft of the sacred, the holy, the transcendent. They were: 1) human friendship, looking to avoid the loneliness of mass society; 2) a way to experience life directly without intervention of ideas and concepts; immediacy; a real personal encounter with the Divine or the Holy vs. beliefs or codes of ethics taken up at the expense of a primary encounter with reality; 3) authority; lay hold of a teaching/discipline they could believe and trust as refugees from uncertainty and doubt; 4) a more “natural”, artless, simple, fresh faith vs. effete, corrupt, outworn religious tradition of the West—a kind of purification, cleansing of the soul from the tainted, impure; 5) female was better represented in Eastern religions; less patriarchal in doctrines and symbols; 6) concern for health, ecology, and conservation of an overexploited planet and its resources; sacredness toward nature; stress on harmony vs. exploitation; moderation vs. excess. Cox himself found in Buddhist meditation something that “filled a previously unnoticed void in my own life . . . the meditation practice itself became an integral part of my life.”

22 C. S. Prebish and K. K. Tanaka, eds., The Faces of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

23 For discussion on this issue, for example, see William De Bary and Tu Weiming, eds., Confucianism and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); William Theodore De Bary, Asian Values and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Tu WeiMing, ed., Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

24 The roots of this positive interest can be said to begin in earnest with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and culminated in the 1870s and 1880s. James Freeman Clarke’s Ten Great Religions (1871), which went through nineteen editions, included a favorable and extensive treatment of Buddhism and Hinduism. Another Unitarian,  ,  

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Samuel Johnson, published a three-volume work over the period of 1872–1885: Oriental Religions and Their Relation to Universal Religion. Johnson concluded that all major religions included truth and none could claim this truth exclusively. Moncure Conway, son of a Virginia slave owner and later Harvard divinity student, in 1873 published his Sacred Anthology, a collection of sayings from the highest religious teachings of the world. It prominently featured the Eastern sacred traditions. In the 1880s Conway visited Ceylon and India to obtain a firsthand encounter with the wisdom of the East and published his account in My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East. Phillips Brooks, minister of Boston’s historic Trinity Church, as well journeyed to India in 1883, and although he did not convert from his Boston-rooted liberal Christianity, his letters indicate that he found his outlook greatly expanded and refreshed. Moreover, The Index and The Radical, journals of a splinter group of Unitarians called the Free Religious Association, through the 1870s and 1880s gave over a large portion of their discussion to Oriental religions. Many of these early pioneers of Asian religions in America were surviving Transcendentalists directly or indirectly influenced by Emerson and Thoreau. For more, see chapter 6 of Jackson, The Oriental Religions.

25 R. J. H. Barrows, The World’s Parliament of Religions: An Illustrated and Popular Story of the World’s First Parliament of Religions, Held in Chicago in Connection with the Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Chicago: Parliament Publishing Company, 1893), pp. 862–73.

26 Ibid., pp. 829–31.

27 Paul Carus, Buddhism and Its Christian Critics (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1897), 114.

28 See Larry A. Fader, “Zen in the West: Historical Implications of the 1893 Chicago World’s Parliament of Religions,” Eastern Buddhist 15 (Spring 1982): 122–145; and Arthur E. Christy, ed., The Asian Legacy and American Life (New York: Greenwood Press, 1942/1968), p. 43.

29 Milton R. Konvitz and Gail Kennedy, eds., The American Pragmatists (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1960), p. 174.

30 Carus, p. 309.

31 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (New York: Schocken Books, 1907), pp. 34–5, 26, 29.

32 See Donald S. Lopez, ed., A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); or Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

33 John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives,” Cambridge History of Science, ed. George Basalla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 335.

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Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 3rd ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1975/1991), p. 10.

35 Hsüan Hua, Water Mirror Reflecting Heaven: Collected Writings of Tripitaka Master Hsüan Hua, trans. Dharma Realm Buddhist University (Talmage, Calif.: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 1982), p. 4.

36 All quotes taken from Walpola Rahula, “Religion and Science,” Dharma Vijaya 2 (January 1989): 10–14.

37 Ibid.

38 Quoted in Walpola Rahula, What The Buddha Taught, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1959), pp. 1–3.

39 Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 47.

40 Ibid., p. 58.

41 James Legge, Confucius: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean (New York: Dover, 1893, 1971), pp. 4–7.

42 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, “A Glimpse of Paul Carus,” in Introduction to Modern Trends in World Religions, ed. Joseph Kitagawa (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1959), p. x.

43 Mencius, Book IV, Part I, Chap.VIII, 1–2, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Dover Books, 1970).

About the Author Martin J. Verhoeven holds a doctoral degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison He is currently adjunct professor of history and phenomenology of religions at the Pacific School of Religion, Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, Calfornia; and a resident scholar at the Institute of World Religions . He writes and lectures widely on the assimilation of Asian religion in the West and on Buddhist ethics and practice.

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