ABSTRACT
Metaphysical Buddhists remade Buddhist doctrines in order to posit a religion of joyfulness, rather than suffering. This chapter discusses the notion of Buddhist joy in order to posit an end goal for the religion, which helped to reformulate the Buddhist path as a journey of individual evolution and self-discovery. It analyses Metaphysical Buddhist notions of the soul and god, which developed in popular literature on Buddhism, as well as the publications of Buddhist groups attempting to explain the religion for American audiences. The notion of a soul in Buddhism was combined with the idea of a once-great Aryan tradition and its subsequent corruption over generations. Metaphysical Buddhists posited a religion of upwards evolution in order to justify the adaptations being made to the religious tradition. In the post-war era of the 1940s and 1950s, Metaphysical Buddhists presented Buddhism as an upward evolutionary trajectory of the soul towards an eventual merger with an over-soul.
