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Episode Description:
We’re joined this week by Buddhist teacher and scholar Hokai Sobol to explore the broad, but crucial topic of Emergent Buddhism. As a preface to the panel that Hokai will be leading at the upcoming Buddhist Geeks Conference on “The Emerging Face of Buddhism,” he explores the nature of emergence in the history of Buddhism, pointing out that “everything that we call traditional now was at one point emergent.”
Hokai also explores some of the his deepest questions regarding “Emergent Buddhism,” namely 1) What has emerged thus far, that has worked?, 2) What is emerging right now?, and 3) What do the coming decades hold? He explores the importance of each of these questions, while at the same time tackling some complex issues regarding the massive cross-pollination and convergence of multiple religious and secular traditions with Buddhism.
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Transcript:
Vincent Horn: This is Vincent Horn again and I am joined today by a special guest here in Los Angeles. He’s here in my home studio visiting from Croatia for a week or so, Hokai Sobol.
Hokai Sobol: Hello.
Vincent: It is great to have him here. It is great to have him here in person. I don’t get to see him that often so it is always a special treat and we’ve been talking some geeky Dharma the last couple of days, sort of getting prepared for this conversation, which is basically a conversation we wanted to have in preparation for a panel that Hokai is going to be leading or chairing at the upcoming Buddhist Geeks conference in July.
The conference is on this very broad topic of Emergent Buddhism and in some ways it is the kind of core topic of the whole conference, really. It is kind of the heart of it.
I wanted to sort of ask him a couple of big questions around the topic of Emergent Buddhism, not to try to get to any sort of clear answers on this things but just to open up the questions really. The first question being why is this topic of Emergent Buddhism important? Why are we exploring this as opposed to traditional Buddhism or some other topic?
Hokai: Thanks for having me here first. It is great being in L.A. and the subject is as you say extremely open and wide and yet in a way it is also very significant for this point in Buddhism’s transmission to the West. We discuss the forms that have been developed in ever since Buddhism began its transmission and that are being developed or are taken form as we—basically as we speak.
The question of emergent, I don’t want to spoil the panel discussion or I even can’t speak for the participants who will surely approach this topic each from their own respective vantage point and experience. However in traditional terms, the quality of emergence is to some degree inherent to BuddhaDharma. We must bear in mind that every single form that these days we call traditional. At a certain point in history, that form was emergent. Even the Buddha himself is very much revolutionary of sorts having introduced several methods of meditation that were quite new and strikingly fresh for that time.
We may now speak of the time-tested tradition after 2 ½ thousand years of experimentation and we speak of a well trodden path. We speak of tested and confirmed methods but add the initial time these were very, very new ideas like an idea that’s a human being can rely on his or her own effort to develop one’s own awareness to go through a series of transformative experiences and then stabilizations and eventually reach a state of pervading wakefulness that itself was very much new at the time of the Buddha.
It is not that the Buddha was the only one saying something like that of course but he had his own special way of handling this issue that later became known as Buddhism. The Buddha’s approach was Emergent then as we know later Buddhism continued to bring new, fresh, not just practices but also theories some of which are speculative, some of which are perhaps imagination based, metaphorical. Some of which are more properly understood in the context of a traditional worldview and some of which are rational, investigative, analytical.
These various approaches stand to be developed into specific historical schools of Buddhism and these schools emerged in several big waves of innovation and later institutionalization. From this institutionalized form, there emerged the lineages, authentications, systems of practiced, systems of study, etc, etc.
Through centuries, all these became tradition, all these became established and to a certain degree they even ossify. They become rigid in their own way and meeting the new culture, these rigidities tend to become very evident.
In the context of a culture where a system is established and developed, the structure itself becomes invisible. For example the structure of Zen Japanese approach tends to be invisible to a Zen Japanese native or Japanese native that grows up in that kind of culture just as certain Western Judeo-Christian values and orientations may be virtually invisible to someone who grows up in the West informed by those fundamental values.
What is interesting to see through the history of Buddhism that each time Buddhism moved across space and across time, it encountered new sets of conditions, new cultural situations and it adapt it fairly quickly and fairly promptly just them to give rise to some new stabilized form that later then became known as Tibetan Buddhism, that Chinese Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, Burmese tradition, Korean, etc, etc.
What we are basically seeing through the history is a series of emergent properties arising somewhere, being experimented with some of which basically proved unsuccessful so we don’t hear about them these days and some of which proves so successful that they’d become permanent features of a certain type of Buddhism developed within a certain culture and then now we speak of a certain type of tradition.
But we are living now at the time when a new form of tradition is perhaps being generated and it is not just emergent in the context of a Western culture, hence we speak of “Western Buddhism,” but is emerging in the context of global culture. This is a simultaneous process of emergence and adaptation that is without precedence in terms of its complexity. Because from one perspective, we have all the traditional, historical forms of Buddhism meeting and converging in this cultural melting pot. Not just of American culture but American and European culture.
On the other hand this is not happening just in the West, because we have Tibetan teachers visiting Japan, we have Japanese teachers visiting Taiwan. We have all these teachers traveling around the world not just from East to West or West to East but within East itself namely across Asia, certain connections are being established that have been absent for centuries.
Meaning, certain types of Buddhism are meeting each other that had no historical connection whatsoever. For Example, Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Zen. So you have Dalai Lama visiting Japan and meeting with Zen Buddhist, which is a good thing to see. But specifically in the West, these traditions have entered a process of cross-pollination. There is life shoulder to shoulder in our big cities of Europe and America whether it is Western teachers or native Asian teachers living in the West, it is very difficult and artificial to basically pretend no one else is there.
Because there is a situation of dialogue and a situation of implicit collaboration, perhaps not explicit, but definitely different styles of Buddhism are existing within a single matrix of meaning and inquiry. We have already seen that these different types of Buddhism are basically informing each other and that these emergent quality is something that may not be limited to single traditions, there is something that can indeed be called an emerging Western synthetic sort of awareness.
The thing to make the whole situation even more complex is that these meeting of different strengths of Buddhism is taking place simultaneously to Buddhism’s meeting with other spiritual traditions, in the marketplace so to speak. They are not just spiritual traditions, there are these other secular traditions as well like skepticism and rationalism, philosophical practices. And there is the general humanistic background of the Western culture informing this complex and simultaneous meeting of traditions.
Not to go any further, I believe this kind of generally makes clear the importance and the complexity and the basically dynamism of the whole situation and why it is important that perhaps even though the subject maybe extremely broad, and in a certain sense not specific enough, it is good that we start the first conference in this way before we actually maybe devote some future conferences to specific subject. More narrow, more practical.
Vincent: Cool. That is a great background and a great historical overview of Buddhism. And then another question that seems relevant is a question about questions. What are some, do you think, of the most important questions that we can be asking or that we might be looking at for instance in the panel itself around like you said this incredibly broad but very important topic?
Hokai: Well the announced participants of the panel, I believe our friends out there are already aware of that are Shinzen Young, Diane “Musho” Hamilton, and Patrick Sweeney, but even if it was anyone other, we would basically have to ask them several questions that sort of ask themselves. One first basic question is, as teachers with intense experience in the field with people and who contact other teachers, what is the sense of emergence that they themselves have seen happen?
Meaning, what kind of developments, what kind of attempts, what kind of specific forms have they seen taken place and what is their opinion at this point are these new forms getting any traction? Or are we still when as the saying goes, when the going gets tough, are we still reliant on the traditional approach? Whether it is in practice, in theory, or in human relationships, meaning in the actual situation of teaching, studying, meaning the student-teacher relationship and in the way we organize our communities also which is very important, are we still generally falling back to the traditional recipe or are we developing effective new ways that basically bring Buddhism into the 21st century. That would be the first question, just to explore with them how they would testify to what is happening.
Then the second question, more importantly, would be what are they us teachers themselves trying to do, trying to innovate or improvise or use an old tool in a new way. Because that is what often happens with emergence. It is not that we are basically rediscovering the wheel or reinventing hot water or anything. We are basically using time tested techniques, time tested approaches to inquiry and to meditation and to mindful living. However we find new ways of using these tools with sometimes unexpected results.
For example, bringing serious meditation into a lay situation, it is not unheard of in Asia but here in the West it is happening in a different way, definitely. The typical lay person practicing meditation in the West has a different mindset than a typical lay person practicing Buddhist meditation somewhere in the East.
It is not a better mindset necessarily but it is not necessarily weaker mindset either. It is just different. It is more post-traditional, the values are more diversified, the questions are more individual, more of psychological often. There is more emphasis on personal growth and perhaps less on personal transcendence.
These things are important and so these teachers have their—each of them their probably their own way of basically working with such an audience, working with such students, working with such a culture as we know they have done so fairly well.
The third question is as we see these first two questions: where we come from, where we are, the next question would be where are we going? How do they see the coming decades of Buddhism’s self-investigation and self-redesigning the tradition from within?
When we speak of tradition and Buddhism, we need to understand that it is not only about the conservative element. Of course there is a need to preserve continuity. There is a need to maintain a sense of orthodoxy to some degree, a sense of authenticity and legitimacy, right? However that can only be done through constant inspiration, innovation experimentation.
Perhaps there is a tension between the conservative impulse and the so-called progressive impulse but these two basically feed into each other in a best situation. In a best situation we would always have someone pushing ahead and someone keeping the goods in the background, right? It is a collective task and it is not expected that everyone does everything. There are those who will be more concerned with experimentation, with perhaps even risky forums of practice and speculation and community building.
There are those who will be more conservative minded and then there will be those who will try to make sense of the whole richness, of diversity and somehow try to put it all together and to not see every differences of basis for conflict or parting ways.
The third question would be basically about the future. Not to define it, not to predict it in anyway, but just to basically open questions. What is possible in the future? What are challenges? Is there a place for technology in the future that we are not aware of at this time? Is there a potential for some further developments in the ways practices are used? Is there a need for institutional reform and political reform from within Buddhism than some people think? These would be the questions.
Of course, finally, last but not the least, we will continue to have input from participants of the conference, meaning the audience. People are already sending me some questions, even today we received some questions and people will have questions on the conference itself and we will try to address what we perceive is the prevailing question among the Buddhist themselves who are there, the geeks. People who will not be on the stage but the panel discussion will try to reflect their interest as well, so that is hard to predict, right?
Vincent: Totally.
Hokai: Yeah.






