This book explores the meaning of Buddhist enlightenment for the contemporary world. It raises a series of important questions about how Buddhist ideals might be appropriated into the emerging global culture of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the historical realization that “enlightenment” was an eighteenth-century European concept that was grafted onto the newly emerging Western understanding of Buddhism in the mid-nineteenth century, the book expands the sense of Buddhist enlightenment by connecting it to other connotations that the European Age of Enlightenment endorsed—the rise of ... More

This book explores the meaning of Buddhist enlightenment for the contemporary world. It raises a series of important questions about how Buddhist ideals might be appropriated into the emerging global culture of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the historical realization that “enlightenment” was an eighteenth-century European concept that was grafted onto the newly emerging Western understanding of Buddhism in the mid-nineteenth century, the book expands the sense of Buddhist enlightenment by connecting it to other connotations that the European Age of Enlightenment endorsed—the rise of scientific rationality and critical thinking, democratic decision making, the growth of human rights, social justice, tolerance, and concern for the poor and disadvantaged. The book explores the contemporary meaning of enlightenment through a wide range of topics and perspectives. It examines a Buddhist response to police brutality in Los Angeles and interprets depictions of enlightenment that appear in a contemporary Buddhist film. One chapter challenges contemporary “secular Buddhism” by elucidating the inevitable religious dimension of human culture, while another asks how enlightened Zen masters in Japan could be charged with moral travesty after the Second World War. The book examines the Buddhist concept of karma in detail and asks how it might be applicable to our own global experience and seeks to understand why serious moral mistakes continue to occur even among those considered to be authentically enlightened. The linguistic dimension of Buddhist practice is examined by asking what role language plays in both the quest for enlightenment and its actualization in awakened life.