Glancing through the Western popular media, we see that Buddhism, the systematic philosophy originated and taught by the North Indian philosopher and avatar Siddhartha Gautama, has not only survived into the twentieth century, it seems to be flourishing. An unexpected aspect of the recent upsurge of interest in Buddhist study and practice, however, is that since Asian Buddhist populations remained stable or have lost numbers, as in Korea, to Christian evangelism, this increase is almost entirely in the West. It is limited, furthermore, to middle and upper middle class educated white populations in Europe, Australia, and the Americas.

Why a philosophy and practice so profound that it has formed the cultural basis for entire societies should find its acceptance only among the well educated seems a contradiction in terms: does this mean that Buddhism in the West is attractive only to the already nearly enlightened? Why doesn’t a broader spectrum find it attractive? There is a good reason for this. It has to do with the fundamental differences between East and West, between Deic and Dharmic cultures, and why the West may finally be ready to originate and articulate its own school of Buddhism. In doing so, it could forge those mindful bonds which could successfully bridge the gaps that keep East and West apart.

Five years ago, the Harvard Divinity School held a gala 175th anniversary celebration in Cambridge. My mother had suffered a catastrophic stroke a month before and was now flatlined. Only the batteries in her everlasting pacemaker kept any part of her life in the realm of Samsara. The truth of impermanence and the necessity of change pervaded my mind as I turned my attention to the ceremonies, marinated in Harvard grandeur and dedicated mainly to the Western religious lineages. My former professors were now senior faculty and all religious philosophies were well represented. Scholars gathered, marched in academic processions, held seminars, and ate sumptuous dinners. Everything happened plus or minus ten minutes at most. Water and wine changed on time, loaves and fish were distributed efficiently, and every last supper was blessed on schedule. It was well planned and comfortably executed.

I described this in a 1992 column in Asian Business Journal devoted to a discussion of a recurring misperception. Many Western professionals traveling to Asia are annoyed when things don't proceed on schedule. Once the details are worked out, the rest should happen like clockwork, yes? But no. Plans look great on paper but the unexpected keeps happening. The average Westerner can becomes a candidate for a cardiovascular event while his relaxed Asian counterpart fills the waiting time with small talk and tea. No problem; surely the papers will arrive tomorrow.

What we observe here is one aspect of the most basic differences between Asian and Western cultures. Western cultures are almost all hierarchical and "Deic". All their major religions hold that an omnipotent and external god, a "deus", is ultimately responsible for it all and can respond to chosen petitioners with favors or protection. Asians exist in a "Dharmic" world, a systematic viewpoint of interlocking systems within systems where everything in the universe has its natural place, interconnected with everything else, God or gods included. One cannot petition a dharma, a system, any more than we can chat with our kidneys. They both operate according to complex systems. If we perform our own duties properly and don’t abuse the system, everything will work according to the nature of things. Not to worry. More tea?

The cultural difference between these two ways of thinking is profound. In a dharmic world, we maximize our potential by subjugating personal will to social and cultural necessity. In a deic world, we admire individualism and equate power with levels of personal self-gratification. In Asia, nobody can be outside the system but likewise no person can be completely responsible for anything. In the West, the buck actually stops somewhere and by God, someone's to blame. "Can't anybody make something happen, dammit!" becomes the mantra of culture shocked Westerners caught in the gears.

Like trains on tracks Asian mental culture tends to move steadily, but can’t change directions easily. Western mentality works more like our automobiles; they‘re more maneuverable, but they can turn too fast and tip over. In Asia, they depend on the tracks, not on timetables. The schedule is a given, the points already interconnected, and arrival is certain. As the system chugs along all the trains will get there sooner or later. Nobody can push the system, one can only be responsive and responsible within the rules.

It is not difficult to see how this progresses to a generally systematic viewpoint on life in general. If we become sensitive and responsive to all the interlocking systems of the body, mind, and spirit, we can experience our perfect being and that's as good as it gets. This is being in the Tao, living the Dharma, and it can drive Westerners to distraction. They want somebody in charge, a reason, an excuse, an explanation, and some righteous, timely being to be upset and punish if things aren't delivered according to the contract or the covenant.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, as technology began to integrate the world into a web of instant telecommunication networks, Westerners increasingly found themselves dealing with the systematic requirements of computer programs, reporting systems, HMOs, credit bureaus and interactive data bases that cannot be forced or petitioned. As global media pulls us together, we become aware of the great planetary systems and interconnections that make the rain forest important to the Eskimo, and Chernobyl dangerous to everyone. From El Niño to the ozone hole, we are not only at the mercy of the system, if we upset them the world suffers. On the personal front, television medical specials teach us the way our bodies are in a constant systematic harmony of change and interdependence. Looking outward, we see that no part of the human family is detached from the others. Civil wars and refugee tragedies hurt us all and we all suffer, much more than we should in a world of such abundance.

As the West awakens to the "dharmas" of data processing and Internet intimacy, we soon learn that we cannot pray to a computer for consideration. There is a health system, a welfare system, and systems for international relief when it seems that any responsible God must be on vacation. We learn we must be sensitive to the systems to make them work for us, and with us, and beyond us. The worldwide ecological movement is typical of this systematic viewpoint, dedicated to preserving the natural order of things. The West seems to teetering on the edge of a shift from personal faith in a God that could save us personally to faith in the reporting systems that can warn us all in time. The growing popularity of Asian systematic philosophies in the West may be, in other words, simply symptomatic of a growing acceptance of an entirely new way of thinking on a global scale. Still, the difficulty of detaching a culturally integrated philosophy from its cultural matrix has left most Asian systematic philosophies open to a popular misinterpretation that they were "exotic" or "different" because of their Asian origin. The different part was the cultural part. The West cannot get enough of these new "dharmas" if they come as scientific systems. The era of systems analysis has dawned in the West without anyone realizing how close it is to the most basic Asian dharmic mindset.

Buddhism and Traditional Asian Culture: The Three "Yanas"

The recent migration of Buddhism to the West, specifically to America, has been the subject of numerous papers, articles and discussions. In How The Swans Came to the Lake, Rick Fields documented the historical background of the Buddha Dharma in the United States. Very much like the propagation of Christianity in Asia, the spread of Asian Buddhist thought was never homogenous nor coordinated. However, unlike Christianity, the establishment of Buddhist communities in such widely separated areas of the world led to a phenomena which the West never experienced. All Christians are aware of the growth, spread, and propagation of their faith. Despite the traumas and tribulations surrounding religious differences, there was always a general acceptance of the Bible as the holy scripture. People fought over interpretations, but not the scriptures.

This was not the case with Buddhism. Entire cultures grew and flourished, died and revived without knowing that there were other forms of Buddhism that relied on different scriptures, saints, practices, heavens, hells, mantras, and prayers. As a result, every single Asian Buddhist tradition that made it to the West came as an extraordinarily tangled fusion of religion, philosophy, and cultural history that extended nearly 1,300 years. Each tradition is entirely self-contained within a cultural context so that each progresses to the same goals, but none use the same tracks.

Individual missionary efforts, often aided by the fortunate association of an Asian teacher with loyal American patrons, brought the various schools and their separate lineages to our shores. Scholars such as Thomas Tweed have further characterized the importation of various Buddhist schools to the United States. Not one Asian Buddhist tradition was ever successfully imported completely. This is primarily due to a reliance on monasticism in Asian Buddhist tradition and the near total lack of Western interest in monasticism beyond a weekend rejuvenation retreat. More striking is the near total mutual exclusivity found between American and immigrant Asian Buddhist congregations. They simply don’t mix. Most "devotional" forms of cultural Buddhism followed by the natives of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are so thoroughly integrated into a unique calendar of cultural ceremony and national history that Westerners are rarely able to experience what their Asian friends feel with their centuries old Buddhist traditions.

Historically, there are three major schools of Buddhist thought and practice. Each is characterized with the Sanskrit suffix "yana", often translated as "vehicle", but just as easily thought of as "method". The Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana schools represent a steady evolution of Buddhist metaphysics and methodology, although the "dharma" or basic system, doesn't change. The "Buddha Dharma" is the Buddha's description of the interaction of physical and metaphysical systems which create and regulate human experience. This holds it all together for us. We could as easily say the "table dharma" is the interrelationship of the natural laws of wood, glue, screws, and gravity that presents me each day with a place to eat breakfast. Dharmic philosophies are all systematic and process oriented. Individuals are not responsible for saving souls or converting infidels, and there are no chosen people. Buddhists proselytize, but never push.

The original "Buddha Dharma" as promulgated by Gautama in his own lifetime was influenced by and closely associated with other Vedic philosophies prevalent in India of the time. Gautama taught that complete disassociation from ego could result in cessation of the painful repetitious rounds of rebirth. By severing all attachments to this life, the individual would not return. In the shorter term, quieting the forces of anger, greed, and ignorance in one’s own life could prevent this harmful attachment which led individuals in similar circles during their own lives. The individual who had progressed to this point, called an Arhat, and could reasonably expect to check out to Nirvana upon death. This original form of Buddhism, advocating monkhood and idealizing the solitary arhat, is called the Hinayana, or "lesser vehicle". Many call it the Theravada, or "teaching of the elders". It is the predominant Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma and includes the schools of teachers such as Rahula Walpola, Buddadassu Bikkhu, and Thich Nhat Hahn.

About the turn of the millennia, a group of Buddhist scholars completely re-ordered the general metaphysics of Buddhism and reset the primary directive from solitary realization to social compassion, "karuna" in Sanskrit. The ever-returning saintly "boddhisattva", rather than the Nirvana-bound arhat, became the ideal. "Buddha" was understood as a Johannine "logos", a state of being which took form in Siddhartha Gautama, but could take any physical form in any time past, present, or future. The practice of kindness and the other active Buddhist virtues were taught as fundamental for a better human life and a good rebirth.

This new "yana", or method, for enlightenment, was directed at the householder rather than the monk. Its practices were available to all. The Mahayana, as it is called, was rolled out about the time the Christian God was proclaiming Jesus to be His son in Israel. Compassionate re-interpretations of rule-bound orthodoxies gave us the Gospel and the Buddhist Mahayana within the same century. Mahayana philosophy and practices became the basis of Indian, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhism. Mahayana is Sanskrit for "great vehicle" just as maha-rajah means great king and maha-rishi means great seer, or "rishi".

The last of the three yanas appeared between 500 and 800 C.E., when collections of powerful yogic meditative techniques and practices, referred to generally as the tantras, infiltrated Mahayana Buddhism from various cultural sources ranging from Shaivite ceremonies to shaman rites. The powerful effects of these practices were a great help to some, and a great hindrance to others. The Buddhists who took up these practices, even in their milder forms, were those who followed the vehicle, the yana, of the diamond or thunderbolt, the Vajra-yana. Others simply referred to it as Tantrayana, and it forms the foundation for Tibetan and Zen Buddhism.

Perhaps due to the cause-and-effect aspects of these practices, Tibetan Vajrayana and Japanese Zen became the most popular forms of Buddhism in the West. Just as a certain number of prayers could get one out of Catholic purgatory, a certain number of sittings, malas, prostrations or mantra repetitions are guaranteed to have actual spiritual or salutary effects. The fact that one could do nearly anything long enough and gain some insight by the process would be disrespectful the extraordinarily specific mind focusing techniques perfected by Buddhist scholars and practitioners during two thousand years of patient experimentation and practice. Meditational and tantric practices are focused exercises for the mind, and the mental physics involved will work just as well for a Boston Brahmin as a Tibetan teacher. Another Western-friendly aspect of both the Vajrayana and Zen schools is their emphasis on our personal responsibility for individual enlightenment, a self-reliant image appealing to the Western mind. Mahayana is Buddhism in the active tense, and Vajrayana practices gave it powerful tools.

Dharma and Dissonance

The diaspora of Tibetans out of Tibet and into exile in the early 1960's led to a mass exodus of Tibetan teachers of the Vajrayana and an explosive growth of this form of Buddhism in the West. However, the struggles of Asian Buddhism to gain a foothold in the West today are more complex than they seem. The root problem lies not so much with the basics of belief and practice as with the inability of most Western students and practitioners to separate the basic systematic philosophies and practices which underlie the Buddha Dharma from the various Asian cultural traditions in which each is enrobed and often encumbered.

For example, any American Christian can separate God, Jesus, St. Peter, St. Patrick, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny into a distinct religious hierarchy ranging from Alpha and Omega to a spring fairy tale of dubious and probably pagan origin. However, most American Buddhists have great difficulty separating fundamental philosophical truths from incidental Asian settings and labor to "maintain the ancient traditions" of various Asian cultures in idiosyncratic dress and style, reciting Sanskrit, Japanese, or Tibetan liturgies to a dutiful, Asianesque audience of white middle-class Westerners.

This is particularly ironic when we are again reminded that overwhelming majority of traditional Asian Buddhist practitioners in the United States, predominantly found among immigrant Asian populations, rarely meet with their American Buddhist counterparts. Buddhist holidays and traditions are to these Asian Americans as Christmas or Easter are to American culture, significant aspects of social and ritual life. Westerners are simply not part of that tradition any more than Santa Claus can ever be an incarnation of Ganesha, the jolly Hindu god known throughout the Indian subcontinent.

Asian philosophies will remain systematic in nature, and traditional Western religions are still hierarchical. These are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive states of mind. As a result, it requires that a Western Buddhist student be sophisticated enough to integrate two different philosophical perspectives in one brain, like a Windows™ environment that permits multiple programs. Although the Western scholar or traveler soon learns to unplug one chip set and insert the other as her plane lands in Bombay, the average person, Western or Asian, still finds this difficult. This is the overriding reason that American Buddhists are so rarely average. They tend to be upscale, better educated, and almost entirely white. The only sect which includes a substantial number of lower middle class and nonwhite practitioners are the American members of the Japanese Soka Gakki movement, a sect that promotes aggressive adaptation to local cultures although they chant exclusively in Japanese.

Lacking parallel-processing minds, most American practitioners are forced to abandon large parts of their Western cultural perspectives to get a "traditional" dharmic viewpoint. Gautama himself never had to face this sort of cultural dismemberment; he was born and lived his entire life in Asia. He was a part of his system in a most fundamental way. This is not the case in the West. By the time Westerners are practicing Buddhists in any basic sense they are already existing somewhat apart from their own culture.

This leads to two unsettling and unfortunate but obvious and unavoidable problems. If one has to be a little off-normal to really be a Buddhist in the West, it also means that Buddhist groups will contain a much larger percentage of odd people and will often be led by the strangest people of all. The recent tragedy of Osel Tendzin, AIDS afflicted bisexual Vajra Regent of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Dharmadatu, was a glaring example of this tendency to pass over truly deviant behavior in leaders as personal foible. Although his peculiarities were noticeable and his behavior flagrant, it wasn’t until he infected other members of his closest circle that he was finally exposed and eventually allowed to end his life in exile. The recent scandal centering on the pedophilia of Shankarakshita, British bred founder of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, has rocked the first international sangha founded by a Westerner to its very core.

Furthermore, many supposed practitioners of this truly systematic philosophy cannot  forsake their attraction to hierarchy, referring to themselves as followers of a specific lama or roshi in ways more suggestive of personality cults than reverential respect. Although the Dalai Lama has become the best known Buddhist, the complete lack of any form of indigenous Western Buddhism left the West open to a form of spiritual colonization in which rival sects, cults, and teachers vie in mildly hot competition for new dharma friends as the West begins to awaken. Unfortunately, the light of Asia is all too often transmitted through such a haze of culture and ceremony that it becomes difficult to separate sinceree seekers who want a new reality from the simply dissatisfied, who just want an escape from Western culture.

Dharma transmitted through a segment abnormal to its own culture is problematic enough. Worse, it will attract students for all the wrong reasons into groups that tolerate eccentric behavior, otherwise considered tres peculiar, as a sign of faith or sincere practice from another perspective. Being overly trusting and innocent, Western practitioners often let go their most important and most Buddhist tool: their critical minds. In fact, the competing schools of Asian Buddhism are each umique cultural islands in a broad philosophical stream. Westerners try to emigrate to any of these islands, from Nicheren to Dzogchen, from Pure Land to Zen, and attempt to adapt and integrate all manner of customs, diets, and mythologies into their 20th century Western worlds.

Bearing in mind the pragmatism and simplicity of the Buddha Dharma, it's a shame that Western men and women are still expected to suspend their common sense as well as their cultural identity to follow the path that will ease their suffering.  Must the Dharma always speak through another culture when speaking to the West? If this is universal wisdom, it ought to be beyond any national idiosyncrasy, as true in one tradition as another. If Roman Catholics can do without the Latin Mass, Westerners needn't chant in Tibetan unless they think that Tibetan is somehow the more efficacious language. Gautama, who we know spoke Magadi, would find it amusing but most Westerners still feel sincere Buddhists should do it in Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Japanese.

These, then, are just some of the problems faced by the Western Buddhist practitioner.   They are worse than black and white, which are simply color extremes that blend in a nice Zen gray. It is more like oil and water, which cannot mix unless whipped up forcibly into fragile temporary emulsions such as sauce Bernaise. Until the Buddha Dharma, the systematic mental system which is Buddhism, can be taught and practiced without reliance on idiosyncratic culture and ancient perspectives, it cannot establish roots in the West. This does not suggest Buddhism reject its Asian roots as it transplants itself into the Western Dharma. It does suggest that other paradigms congruent with a more Western, modern perspective might be a proper path for the West.

The flower mala, the garland adorning the Buddha's statue must be replaced occasionally with a fresh one. New explanations must be articulated and promulgated for our time and our culture even as the basic truths remain untouched and unchanged.

PART TWO: The Appearance of Western "Buddha" Dharmas

The best hope for a top-down Western "dharma" now lies in the possibility that modern mind science may provide the systematic structure that can anchor a Western Buddhism. Although the earlier equation of Buddhism with science was a powerful statement at the end of the last century, it was more in response to the first works concerning the historical life of Jesus which began to appear in the early Victoria era. The discoveries of Darwin and the optomistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer had created an international interest in the transformational power of scientific inquiry. The German philosophers especially embraced Buddhism as the rational, modern world philsophy in contrast to Christianity, which was now being portrayed as romantic mythology. It was during this time that Western teachers and re-interpreters of Buddhism first started having an influence on Asian Buddhism, the most profound being the creation and expansion of a socially engaged Buddhism in Sri Lanka largely through the efforts of Americans Henry Steele Olcott and Helen Blavatsky.   The era of "Modern Buddhism" started ironically both when the West discovered Buddhism, and when the various Asian Buddhist schools discovered each other.  It has been over 100 years since that period of those initial meetings, and the modern Buddhist era is still evolving rapidly.

This time around, it is not "science", per se, which is used to anchor the belief structures of the Buddha Dharma, but mind science specifically, drawing from recent discoveries which have begun to illuminate and explain the mystery of the brain, perception, conciousnesss, and the mind itself. As Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle to anchor the Christian theology of his time into a logical and systematic framework, neuroscience could provide an essential structure for the Thomism of our own time, the Buddha Dharma, to take hold and grow within the global culture. 

The younger thinkers and practitioners from the major Buddhist countries in Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka and Tibet have just as much difficulty as their Western brothers and sisters.  The new global frontiers are almost all in English and based on real technology.  Still, a Thai Buddhist has no way of communicating with a Tibetan Buddhist except on the most general points.  If either gets deeper, the Dharma submerges into a national culture and the original philosophies that once ruled the universities and debate halls of Asia are reduced to simple prayers to the Buddha or traditional funeral rites.  A Buddhism which speaks in common language and uses common knowledge is as much a blessing to international Asians and immigrant Westerners with an Asian heritage.  It allows them to talk about the Dharma without splitting into national schools, and share it with the Internet-worked Buddhists of Asia.

The Mayayana holds that reality cannot be a property of an external state as it is limited to those aspects which can be perceived by a consciousness, which in turn is limited by the neurological complexity available at any given time in any given brain. Reality must be relative as each mind perceives a slightly different version. Any true reality would require a "perfect" mind in a "perfect brain", a consciousness which would demonstrate no perceptible personality. We can over-tax our neural systems and create such blank states momentarily, but these are transitory and therefore not reality either.

Viewed in this way, neuroscience becomes the "system", in a novel systematic philosophy which, in its fully developed form, can be utilized to answer questions of a metaphysical nature as well as provide an ethical code and the basis of useful mental practices. It seems quite possible that using a scientific, neurological method to prove basic aspects of the Buddha Dharma may allow a far larger number of Westerners to enjoy the benefits of Buddhist practice without feeling that they have to become followers of an specific Asian lineage with their categories, rivalries, and idiosyncracies.

The development of a Mayayana, a path that utilizes "maya", our "virtual reality", could help to catalyze a movement already in progress. The West is, demonstrably, becoming more sensitive to systematic viewpoints. It is very Western, moreover, to use our new grasp of the interrelatedness of phenomena to devise new ways to direct them in fields of medicine, commerce and technology. For example, it was the powerful systems of the U.S. Army that brought water to the parched Rwandans, not the Christian God they prayed to.  Perhaps God works through the Army these days, at least they have the equipment. The Asian world, in contrast, rarely organizes to help anyone outside their territorial cultural hegemony. In a way, the East has been practicing a sort of avoidance Hinayana while the West has become the master of a compassionate, global Mayayana.

Physical science is, for the West, the powerful and active dharma that makes our life possible and pleasant as well as a source of wonder and miracles. Asian philosophy is pure, but very passive. As monks in Asian monastic centers of learning wore a distinctive garb that inspired respect, the West replaces saffron robes with lab smocks. Jesus quoted the Old Testament, which was authority to His people. Lamas and roshis quote Buddhist scriptures, which are authority to them. The Western Mahayana, the Mayayana, relies on the material sciences which are authority to our people in this day and age.

The MAYAYANA: Illusion Through Reality, Reality Through Illusion

The breakthrough that allowed a Western Buddhism to emerge is in the manner which neurotheology posits a method of thought, a vehicle of understanding, a yana, which teaches that the world we perceive with our senses rises from the physical while at the same time being truly illusory. The term "Mayayana" means the system, or the method, of "maya". This single Sanskrit word means "beauty", "power", and "illusion". Maya refers to the power of our beautiful illusion, this world of personal desires and avoidance, we each perceive and believe in. By understanding how this world is both real and illusory at the same time, the practitioner gains a truly non-dualistic perspective.

The underlying premise of the neurotheological paradigm is that the only world we can possibly know is our own virtual reality, a distorted, behind-time limited analog of whatever may be really happening in a world we never experience directly. This is the Buddhist teaching that our "real world" of the senses is nothing more than maya, an egotistical illusion, a powerful, personal fantasy built of self-constructed attractions and avoidance, locked into a confusing personal chronology. It's our personal "virtual maya" with no ultimate validity. Still, it's the best illusion we've got and close enough to others that we can pretend that we share the same world until desire, anger, or ignorance banish us to the isolation of disconnectedness and duality. The final paradox is that the personal illusion world we assume to be real is perceived moment to moment by means of real interactions of molecules, ions, and multiple neurotransmitters shuttling between physical neurons, synapses, and all the varied operational parts of the brain.

We thus have an illusion created by interactions among countless real physical parts, none of which has the slightest intention or direction at the operational level. The only world we can perceive can be, therefore, no more than a moving image created by a meaningless interaction. However, provided the with the proper motivation, perspective, and skill, this waking dream state can, in fact, be mitigated, modified, and ultimately directed in an ever more precise manner by the student as he or she becomes adept at really using the system that makes it all happen. The term "system that makes it all happen" is just another way of saying "dharma". Using Sanskrit, then, it could be said that by understanding this "dharma" and following its practices to help rearrange our neural networks, clarifying our distorted perceptions. By this we become enlightened, which is to say we gain a new perspective, self-understanding, the ability to choose a better path in life, and even the techniques and practices by which to achieve it.

"Neurotheology", upper case, was the first attempt at presenting these ideas for a general audience. Western Reform Buddhism is the result, a systematic philosophy using basic neurological proofs which are neither esoteric nor culturally biased. The one language which our world shares universally is the language of science. This is necessary or technical communication between civilized nations wouldn’t work. Using modern terminology, Western Reform Buddhism provides its perspectives in a language far more widespread than Sanskrit, Latin, or even English. It can be translated into any other culture since the language of science is truly universal. It provides unequivocal answers for the major metaphysical questions, a fully rounded world view, a believable basis for ethical and moral behavior, and an uplifting perspective on our ability to reach a higher level of being in our own lifetime. The majority of those adopting these concepts in the West initially do not recognize it as a school of Buddhism as it lacks any specific Asian bias or flavor. Still, it remains as true to the basic philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama and his lineage as any lineage or yana.

This could, in other words, be the start of a new path, the physical vehicle of the Mayayana, the path that makes sense and never asks us to be medieval philosophers. We love the Asian cultures for what they have to offer that is different from our own, but there is nothing in the Dharma that prohibits the enjoyment of our natural cultural heritage, nor the perhaps even greater happiness of sharing ourselves fully into the worlds of others.

The Buddha Dharma is not, never has been, and was never meant to be presented in an alien context. It has always found local cultural expression, local teachers, saints and local boddhisattvas. They all hold to certain basic beliefs which have nothing to do with their differing cultures. The Hindu Mahatma, Ghandi, was, after all, a disciple of an American Buddhist Henry David Thoreau, whose retreat at Walden Pond was preserved and enlarged through the work of American rock star David Hemley of the Eagles. As the jewels that make up a priceless necklace are precious stones of many kinds, so are Buddhist traditions as varied as their followers. The cord that strings them together is an enlightened knowledge that has no attachment to any of them. Likewise, there is no reason to expect the Dharma to be more effective in any specific form of expression. If it works, it works. No other philosophy is so pragmatic about its spiritual evolution, and no Asian lineage could deny that.

The basics of the Buddha Dharma are as basic to the West as the East. "The change it had to come," sang Peter Townshend of The Who, "We knew it all along. We were liberated long before, that's all." Townshend then demonstrated the impermanence of dharmas by reducing his own electric guitar to wood, screws, and glue and released them from the laws of gravity by lofting them out over the crowd. Modern concepts like neurotheology are perhaps a little direct, but they are definitely from our generation, early examples of a new flowering of the Dharma and the continuing evolution of the enlightened realizations of the man from Bodhgaya. He told us so very long ago all along that anybody who took the time to look hard enough would find the same answers he did.

The truth is out there, and available if we work hard enough. The new wisdom of mind research has made itself available and it may be the best way to help the people avoid their suffering through a better personal understanding of the Dharma that awakens, the system that enlightens, the vbision of the way it really seems to work. Explanations change but truth is eternal. The West needs a strong yana, a cutting-edge science-dharma, some natural path for the people who are not afraid of the material worlds or Material Girls. There is no God in the Mayayana,  but plenty of good reasons to be a good Christian, Muslim, or Jew. That the method of our ultimate reward or punishment is usually the result of our own enlightened or ignorant actions seems closer to karma but it works. If the ultimate experience is technically more Brahman than pearly gates, well, that's the way it turned out. In the Mayayana, we accept the real unreality of it all as our daily challenge to make everything better.

The Buddha Dharma may finally speak with some familiar authority in the West, giving the West a path. A Mayayana appropriate to the masters of the physical world and their technology of physical and spiritual transformation. We are all very temporary, but this yana will last until a better vehicle is located. And then it, too, must fall to pieces and others will have to find their own ways to explain it all. Gautama said it for us all, "Everything of dependent origin has its eventual dissolution, Ananda, seek thine own enlightenment." And, God willing, we shall go out and do just that.