ABSTRACT

In Australia over the last three decades, secular insight (vipassana) meditation practice has increasingly drawn away from its Theravadin origins, thus exemplifying a wider trend in western Buddhist circles over the second half of the last century, to loosen ties with their Asian traditions of origin. In 1998 Batchelor articulated the divergence by drawing a contrast between ‘religious Buddhism’ and ‘dharma practice’ in his Buddhism without Beliefs (Batchelor 1998a), a contrast with resonances in the changes now unfolding in Australia. He elaborated his key concepts, not least the ‘deep agnosticism’ he discerned in the Buddha’s own teaching, in other writings published in the same year (Batchelor 1998b; 1998c). The contrast acknowledges a strong tendency towards secularization in the re-rendering of Buddhism in culturally appropriate terms for westerners who, from the 1970s, began to practise meditation seriously in this tradition in significant numbers. As Gombrich and Obeyesekere remind us, however, this trend now visible in western countries such as Australia has Asian (not least Sri Lankan) precedents going back to the last three decades of the nineteenth century (1998: chapter 6). The elements of that earlier Asian Buddhist confrontation with modernity included a fresh re-reading of canonical texts, promotion of serious lay dharma practice, scepticism towards claims to orthodoxy, monastic authority and the efficacy of ritual, and dismissal of the folkloric accretions to popular observance. All resurfaced in the late twentieth century developments in western countries. In Australia, however, their expression has been mediated and complicated, both through being melded with central western moral concepts and through the growth of serious dharma practice from the 1970s, at a time when the certitudes of modernity were to some extent giving way to an embrace of uncertainty, ambivalence and fragmentation. This embrace has often attracted the catchall (but contested and unstable) term, ‘postmodernity’. We thus need to hold lightly any classificatory schema – be it ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ Buddhism or Martin Baumann’s (2001) suggested heuristic periodization of Buddhism into canonical, traditional, modern and today’s ‘global’ stages (1998: chapter 6).1 Nevertheless, as long as we honour its heuristic intent, appreciation of Buddhism’s current global character helpfully sensitizes us to the dangers of accounting for current developments in parochial (western or national) terms, while avoiding the ironically

totalizing assumptions of postmodern theory. In what follows, then, we present Australian developments in insight (vipassana) meditation practice as specific illustrations of global trends rather than as components of a national exceptionalism. More than ever today, little sense can be made of Buddhism in any one country without reference to this global context. The authors are both veteran dharma practitioners and have gleaned the local historical content presented in this article from their own active engagement in (often intermingling) Zen, Theravadin and insight groups on the Australian eastern seaboard over the last two decades. The first named author recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the relation between experiential outcomes of long-term Zen and insight meditation practice among senior teachers of the discipline in various western countries, on the one hand, and, on the other, the foundational assumptions about the self in economic theory. The second author fulfilled teaching and administrative roles in (among others) Wat Buddha Dhamma and the Buddhist Library and Meditation Centre in Sydney (which feature as prominent examples in the following) and is a member of the Insight Teachers’ Circle of Australia. The events described in this chapter are drawn from discussions with key actors, firsthand and participant observations of significant meetings and a continual flow of internal written and verbal communications within the organizations concerned.