In a nutshell, how can we describe a secular approach to the dharma?
And what exactly are the core elements of secular Buddhism?
Maybe you have a manuscript that you think Tuwhiri might want to publish, or perhaps you’d like to write a book and you’re wondering whether your topic might interest Tuwhiri. But then, it could be that you’re just curious to learn a little about secular dharma. Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Please read on.
Secular Buddhism, known also as secular dharma, is a novel way of rethinking the dharma in an age of global modernity. The project of secular dharma starts by reinterpreting the classical Buddhist doctrine of the four noble truths with an invitation to practice four great tasks.
From this fresh look at the teachings, it then seeks to set out, step by step, a comprehensive philosophical, contemplative and ethical way of life that dispenses with the Indian metaphysical framework which is common to the many schools of Buddhism.
With the aim of encouraging human flourishing rather than the attainment of ‘enlightenment’, secular dharma contributes to the process of making the dharma and its practice available to those of us who were raised in what might be described as ‘western’ cultures.
The adjective ‘secular’ refers here to the need for great traditions such as Buddhism to address people in the specific times, places and cultures they inhabit. Secularity contrasts with the tendency of religions to assert timeless metaphysical truths, and the value of timeless rules, practices and rituals, irrespective of historical context.
While the dharma (a word that’s understood as ‘teachings’) of Gotama, the Buddha, does rest on a timeless meta-ethic – the ethic of care – historical situations must shape how we practise it. Today, for instance, it needs to guide us as we tackle our current great crises:
- The climate and other ecological and medical emergencies that are putting the future of our species, and so many others, at risk
- The spread of war that causes such extreme suffering and instability, turning settled peoples into refugees
- The unrelenting corporate greed that has led to the breakneck increase in economic inequality as well as unjustifiable concentrations of wealth which generate conflict, and
- The presence of vast nuclear arsenals that continue to represent a real and terrible risk, heightened by threats to use them.
In the time of Gotama, no such responsibilities hung over him or his followers.
So, as secular Buddhists we see Gotama himself not as a religious prophet, but as what Greeks of that period called a ‘practical philosopher’: someone who devised a fruitful way to work with the fundamental predicaments facing people during the agricultural revolution, which was then under way.
In brief, we are people with the degree of leisure and freedom to make informed life choices, though inevitably we remain subject to birth, ageing, sickness, death, unpleasantness, frustration and vulnerability. To thrive as human beings, we need to work creatively with all these elements of the human condition.
As such people ourselves, we stand to benefit from applying Gotama’s dharma – his matrix of interpretive concepts – to get to grips with life’s experiences, and to respond intelligently to the predicaments we come up against in the cultures in which we live today.
Does it sound like the book you want to write might be a Tuwhiri book? If it does, we would like to hear from you. Send us an email.
And download this page, with two other documents, here.