Let me begin with the historical relationship between the several civilizations of “the axial age,” Karl Jasper’s term for a period (sometime between 600 and 400 BCE) when similar important ideas—literacy, rationality, criticism—appeared in Israel, Greece, China, India, and Iran (though Professor Bellah does not say much about Iran). It is a time of breakthroughs, or breakdowns, in all of them. But the problem with the idea of a breakthrough is that evolution goes too slowly to be pinpointed in a single age—that change is gradual. In the case of India, for instance, Professor Bellah rightly notes that there were continuities with older inquiries, that there was, already in the Rig Veda, in c. 1500 BCE, the questioning, the uncertainty that we find in the Upanishadic debates of around the 6^th century BCE. The axial spirit of inquiry, of challenge, is therefore not a breakthrough in the Upanishads or Buddhism.

But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that in each of these ancient cultures (India, Greece, China, Israel) there was, simultaneously, a breakthrough, then we must ask, where did these changes come from? What was the historical relationship between these cultures? Did the axial idea grow up in one, to be transmitted to the others?  Did it arise in all of them at the same time because of some shared social or economic development? Was there a sudden simultaneous appearance in all of them of some vibrating pillar like the one in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001, A Space Odyssey”? The tension between independent origin, borrowing, or diffusion from a common source is an age-old question in the discipline of comparative religions, and Professor Bellah wisely does not attempt to resolve it.

But the apparent conflict between these explanations might be resolved by a modified version of the argument that Claude Lévi-Strauss made (in “Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America”) about cross-cultural parallels:

The simplest hypothesis is that of historical contact or independent development from a common civilization. But even if this hypothesis is refuted by facts, or if, as seems more likely, it should lack adequate evidence, attempts at interpretation are not necessarily doomed to failure. [...] Even if the most ambitious reconstructions of the diffusionist school were to be confirmed, we should still be faced with an essential problem which has nothing to do with history. Why should a cultural trait that has been borrowed or diffused through a long historical period remain intact?

Lévi-Strauss further argues (in The Story of Lynx) that borrowing is never haphazard, that what is borrowed is not just fitted into a preexisting structure: the borrowing takes place because of the similarity in structure between concepts in the culture that “lends” them and concepts in the culture that “borrows” them. In the case of the axial age, Professor Bellah suggests a similarity not in mental structures but in social and economic events. But then, what explains the confluence of such events in several cultures at once?

There is no clear, single reason why, for instance, ideas of reincarnation and renunciation arose in India in both Hinduism and Buddhism at this time (let alone in Greece, as well). Professor Bellah, true to his discipline, notes the general changes in the economic and social background, but these changes also took place, sooner or later, in many other parts of the world, often in places where no such ideas arose. To explain the Indian instance, at least, we might use a modified version of the intriguing hypothesis that Walter A. Fairservis laid out in his book, The Roots of Ancient India. Fairservis suggests that the theory of reincarnation may reflect an anxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst (a word ultimately derived from what the Rig Veda calls amhas, the terror of being confined in a small space).

The terror of overcrowding was also a precipitating factor in the ancient Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish. Actual overcrowding, as Professor Bellah notes, in a most moving passage near the end of the book, precipitated several crises in the history of the planet earth, including the one that seems to be beginning now. The terror of overcrowding, however, arose not when the earth as a whole was crowded, which could not have been a problem in the ancient world, but when there were clusters of overcrowding in certain places: the first cities.

The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacher asks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and more people continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement, “As a result, that world up there is not filled up.” (Chandogya Upanishad 5.10.8; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.1.1 and 6.2.2). The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of the Hindu myth of the declining Four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) and recurs in the Mahabharata as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earth begins to sink beneath the cosmic waters). Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the new experience of city life in the Ganges Valley?  Were there already slums in ancient Kashi/Varanasi (as there may already have been in Harappa , in the Indus Valley Civilization, before 2000 BCE? )?   Did a fear of this sort inspire the theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls?

The spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges valley, producing a surplus that could support cities, created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous nation on earth (History, 5.3). Population densities had significantly increased as a result of a combination of the incorporation of indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses. This led to a burgeoning of all the things that people who (like the ancient Vedic Indians) like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’t like about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements to renounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing to return to the good old days preserved (or imagined) in the Vedic texts, when life was both simpler and freer. Such a longing is reflected in the village settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in the writings of the early sects, both inside and outside of Hinduism. Within the cities, the Buddha sat in an isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. The Upanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settings where master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent of the bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast with the conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages.

Perhaps in reaction to this fear of the crowd, the whole Indian tradition at this time was becoming not just renunciant but individualistic; we begin to see a transition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation, forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe.

As Professor Bellah rightly notes, it seldom if ever occurred to anyone in India, then or at any time before the 19^th century, to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against the world, particularly the social hierarchy of their world, and opted out, or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religious movements of the axial age located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud, too, located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of your burning house”)—rather than socially oriented, as non-renunciant Hinduism was—“Your identity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body—that is, the hierarchy of caste.”  This in itself was a tremendous innovation.

I don’t think that these ideas can be explained in terms of social factors alone. Someone, someone, thought of the particular Hindu variant of the idea of reincarnation that became the theory of karma. And someone else thought of the Buddhist variant. Of course, these individuals did not produce their ideas in a vacuum, and Professor Bellah gives full credit, throughout his book, to the impact of great individuals such as Plato and the Buddha. The idea of karma, first laid out in detail in one of the earliest Upanishads (the Brhadaranyaka), was foreshadowed in many ways in early Vedic texts and perhaps developed among kings rather than priests (a possibility that Professor Bellah discusses well). There may well have also been contributions from the great Indian catch-all of “local beliefs and customs,” village Hinduism, or from that ever-ready source of the unknown, the Adivasis or aboriginals. And there is also always the possibility of an infusion of ideas from the descendents of the Indus Valley Culture, an unknowable pool of what might be radically different ideas. All great ideas are in a sense created by committees, like Hollywood film scripts and camels (in the old joke).

But rather than postulating, for the source of these ideas about individual salvation, an axial pool whose existence can’t be proved, it might be simpler to admit that some individual, some brilliant, original theologian whose name is lost to us, composed some of the Upanishads. We can line up the usual suspects: a natural development from Vedic ideas (no genius required); some brilliant person in the Vedic camp (genius required); kings rather than priests; the IVC and its descendents; Adivasis; etc. But this lineup is often nothing more than a confession: “I can’t find it in the Veda.”  And perhaps something roughly like this is what happened in axial Greece, and China, and Israel—that is to say, to use Monty Python’s phrase, something entirely different. Our failure to identify the individuals in many of these essential cases, to name a Plato or a Buddha, should not, however, drive us back upon the unfalsifiable hypothesis of an axial Zeitgeist.

Among the several factors that Professor Bellah regards as characteristic of the axial age is the dawn of a universal ethics; in India, he sees this as happening particularly in Buddhism. I would argue that various forms of, and alternatives to, universal ethics, existed before the axial age in India.

The first problem with using universal ethics as a defining breakthrough is the assumption that this particular brand of ethics is all that defines religion, and therefore that when ethics improve, religion evolves. But many other aspects of religion also underwent dramatic evolution during this period—mysticism, theology, the use of narrative in argument, changes in ritual, the beginnings of sectarian worship, and so much more. Moreover, although certain forms of ethics did in fact evolve at this time, other ethics were already there long before. Generosity in particular was basic not only to the ethics of Vedic religion but to the broader Indo-European world that preceded the Vedas.

My colleague Jim Gustafson, in Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, working from assumptions he derived from Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, made a useful distinction between, on the one hand, an ethics of obligation, a universal, Kantian agenda of following the rules, doing your duty to society; and, on the other hand, an ethics of appreciation, generosity, and art. An ethics of obligation may well have thrived or even developed in the axial age; but an ethics of appreciation was in place before it, and continued to thrive after it. Moreover, even if we grant that the ethics of obligation evolved or improved at this time, we must also grant that other aspects of social ethics got worse: women, for instance, had enjoyed many privileges, and a degree of freedom, in the pre-axial Vedic age that they lost in subsequent eras of Hinduism. (And in Buddhism, though many women thrived in Buddhism in ways that were not yet available to them in Hinduism.) I don’t want to veer into promiscuous relativism here, nor to rank the different sorts of ethics, but merely to point out that something that I would call ethics was already in place throughout the Indo-European world long before the axial age.

And this takes me to my final point: Rationality is one of the defining breakthroughs of the axial age; scholars tend to turn Indian enlightenment (spiritual awakening) into European Enlightenment (an 18^th century philosophical development), mistaking the Buddha for Voltaire. But near the very end of the book, Professor Bellah begins to talk about the importance of play, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and all that, which seems to me to be part of the irrational or non-rational aspect of religion, and a very important one. The ethics of obligation is generally not playful—too much is at stake, the great challenge of human suffering. But there’s a lot of playfulness in the Upanishads and in early Buddhism. Play, the love of nature and generosity are intrinsic to the ethics of appreciation, which is also an ethics of aesthetics. Overemphasizing the ethics of obligation short-changes other religious changes and concerns that evolved at this time in the ethics of appreciation, changes in narrative, in art, in the performance of religion, the singing of religion. These seem to me to cry out to be given more prominence in any broad survey of the history of religion, especially in one so deeply humane and compassionate as Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution.

This essay is a slightly revised version of remarks delivered last month in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.—ed.

Excerpted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead

In his 1915 essay, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.” Four years later, the American Theosophist Walter Evans-Wentz, traveling in the Himalayas, chanced upon a Tibetan text and asked the English teacher of the Maharaja’s Boarding School for boys in Gangtok, Sikkim to translate it for him. What is known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the product of their collaboration.

The Tibetan work that was given this name by Evans-Wentz is one of many Buddhist texts known by the title Bardo Todol (in transliterated Tibetan, Bar do thos grol, literally, “Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing”). It belongs to the genre of Tibetan literature called terma (gter ma) or “treasure.” It is said to have been composed by the great Indian tantric master Padmasambhava, who visited Tibet in the eighth century. Knowing that his teachings would be needed in the distant future, he dictated books to his consort and scribe (the queen of Tibet) and buried them—sometimes in a cave, sometimes in a lake, sometimes in a pillar, sometimes in the heart of a disciple yet unborn—to await discovery when the time was ripe for their contents to be revealed to the world. He composed thousands of such works. The book called Bardo Todol, buried in the eighth century, had been unearthed in the fourteenth century. Evans-Wentz would discover that Tibetan text in the twentieth century and, burying it under prefaces, commentaries, introductions, and annotations, he named it The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since its publication in 1927, the book has been discovered by millions of readers in the West who have used it to do what Freud deemed impossible: imagine their own deaths.

Once it had appeared in English with this title, The Tibetan Book of the Dead would go on to have its own series of discoveries in the West, over the course of almost a century. Seven major reincarnations (and several minor ones), seven discoveries of this text, each somehow suited for its own time, have occurred in English since 1919. So although the first sentence of Evans-Wentz’s preface to the first edition reads, “In this book I am seeking—so far as possible—to suppress my own views and to act simply as the mouthpiece of a Tibetan sage, of whom I am a recognized disciple,” the version of the book that we have today is filled with other voices (the various prefaces, introductions, forewords, commentaries, notes, and addenda comprise some two thirds of the entire book) that together overwhelm the translation. The increasing popularity of the work compelled this unusual assortment of authorities to provide their own explanation of the text.

This amalgam of commentaries, surrounding a translation of several chapters of a much larger Tibetan work, has become the most widely read “Tibetan text” in the West. Its appeal derives from the irresistible combination of two domains of enduring fascination: Tibet and death. At the time of the publication of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tibet, still a remote land in the high Himalayas, was regarded by many as a place where esoteric wisdom, long since lost elsewhere, had been preserved. Bounded on the south by the highest mountains in the world, at a time when mountains signified a cold and pristine purity, Tibet was imagined as a domain of lost wisdom.

Even greater than the lure of Tibet is the eternal fascination with death. When Freud asserted that it is impossible to imagine one’s own death, what he meant by death was the cessation of mental functions. But in the Buddhism of Tibet, consciousness never ceases, but passes through birth, death, the intermediate state or bardo (a Tibetan term that, as a result of Evans-Wentz’s book, found its way into Webster’s Third New International Dictionary), and rebirth, over and over again, until the achievement of buddhahood. Much of the allure of The Tibetan Book of the Dead can be attributed to the fact that it was the first work to offer an extended discussion of the Buddhist doctrine of death and rebirth to a large audience in the West, a doctrine elaborated in the Tibetan text with detailed descriptions of visions of peaceful and wrathful deities that appear in the nether world between death and birth. This vision of the afterlife found a ready audience during a different intermediate state, the period between the world wars. The late nineteenth century had been the heyday of Spiritualism, where mediums claimed to contact the spirits of the de-parted. Spiritualism experienced a revival after the First World War, when so many sought to know the fate of their lost fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, turned to Spiritualism and sought to contact his son Kingsley, who died as a result of wounds suffered at the Battle of the Somme, while Freud wrote Thoughts for the Times on War and Death in 1915 as two of his sons served in the German army. The publication of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927 preceded by two years the onset of the Great Depression, a period of profound anxiety in Europe and America about the future of the living. An ancient Tibetan text that described the post-mortem state in such precise and elaborate detail, and which explained that death was not an end, but a beginning, and that death was, indeed, an opportunity for enlightenment, offered both fascination and comfort.

Yet beyond the historical exigencies of its publication, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has proved remarkably resilient in subsequent generations, gaining far more readers in its English version than the Tibetan text—upon which it is based—ever had in Tibet. And it has been put to a remarkable range of uses. Today, in addition to various translations, one can purchase an audio version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, read by Richard Gere; a video dramatization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, including film footage from Ladakh and an animated depiction of the state between death and rebirth, narrated by Leonard Cohen; The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Reading Aloud adapted by the playwright Jean-Claude van Italie; and a comic book version, The Comic Bardo Thodol by Thomas Scoville.

In a footnote to his introduction, Evans-Wentz writes that he and Kazi Dawa Samdup felt, “that without such safeguarding as this Introduction is intended to afford, the Bardo Thodol translation would be peculiarly liable to misinterpretation and consequent misuse . . .” They could have had little idea of the myriad ways in which their collaboration would be read. Removing the Bardo Todol from the moorings of language and culture, of time and place, Evans-Wentz transformed it into The Tibetan Book of the Dead and set it afloat in space, touching down at various moments in various cultures over the course of the past century, providing in each case an occasion to imagine what it might mean to be dead.

This biography tells the strange story of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It argues that the persistence of its popularity derives from three factors: The first is the human obsession with death. The second is the Western romance of Tibet. The third is Evans-Wentz’s way of making the Tibetan text into something that is somehow American. Evans-Wentz’s classic is not so much Tibetan as it is American, a product of American Spiritualism. Indeed, it might be counted among its classic texts.

*  *  *

NS: Tell me about the genesis of your studies in China. How did you choose the region where you have spent the last twenty years doing fieldwork?

MY: I received a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to do field research on nongovernmental organizations and the emerging civil society in China. Since my other research had been in urban contexts, I wanted to study a rural environment. A Chinese friend took me to visit his relatives in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, and I was taken aback by both the social dynamism of the economic activities there and the impressive revival of traditional Chinese culture—quite different from the usual dreary, impoverished life in much of the Chinese countryside I have seen. The ethos of families going about their daily business as well as frequent indulgence in festivals and rituals reminded me of growing up in the 1960s in Taiwan. I checked out many NGOs in Wenzhou—a stamp collecting association, a Writer’s League, a local business association, and a privately owned technical middle school—and found that none of them were really independent of the state. But I found that truly nongovernmental and grassroots organizations all had a religious or ritual basis: deity temples, Daoist and Buddhist temples, lineage organizations, and Catholic and Protestant churches. So, I discovered the importance of religion and ritual once I was in the field; I did not set out looking for them.

NS: Has the Chinese government interfered at all? Have they made it difficult to carry out your research?

MY: Yes, I’m afraid I have met with a lot of government interference in my fieldwork, for a variety of reasons. First, this being an area that does not have a major university, I didn’t know any local Chinese academics who could vouch for me to the authorities. Second, on a few occasions, I was hauled into the Public Security office—the police station—because my activities were not in keeping with my visa. I was questioned, made to write a confession, and modestly fined. Third, local officials wanted me to focus on studying the prosperous economy, of which they are rightly proud. They were ashamed of their cultural “backwardness,” ashamed that their people are still so “superstitious” and spend so much of their hard-earned money on their gods, ancestors, and ghosts. The officials discouraged me from studying popular religion because, first of all, they did not want their superiors to find out that so much religious activity is occurring under their watch. But they were also embarrassed about foreigners finding out how “backward” they still are. Religion is still a sensitive topic. Some local officials even warned people not to tell me too much, and sometimes I was not allowed to witness or videotape certain rituals.

NS: But you did manage to shoot enough footage to make a documentary there.

MY: Yes, Public and Private Realms in Wenzhou, China.

NS: Has working in the medium of film affected how you approach your scholarship?

MY: As an academic, filmmaking forces one to express ideas and feelings through means other than just words. Sound and sight become important. Visual description added another dimension to my thinking, and I think that in my writings henceforth I will pay more attention to conveying the context, the mood, the ethos, and the physical backdrop of my subjects. Film is also a much better medium than print for discussing things with movement or detailed visual features, like festivals, rituals, dance, and religious worship. Being a filmmaker has made me fully appreciate that, in today’s world, a religious movement cannot survive for long without disseminating its messages through the electronic media: television, film, websites, Internet discussions, and so forth.

NS: How did the Chinese government and society come to this point where religion has become such an embarrassment?

MY: The Maoist regime was vociferous in its anti-imperialist discourse and many of its political policies and activities were anti-colonial and anti-Western. However, seldom discussed is how much of nineteenth-century Western social evolutionism and Orientalist discourse Maoism absorbed and propagated. This discourse says that all societies in the world follow a single developmental progression through evolutionary stages, and that religion must be eliminated in order for a society to be modern and advanced. It is this social evolutionist thinking that has done so much harm to China’s indigenous religious traditions, such as Confucianism, Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, as well as those of ethnic minorities.

NS: What role did religion play in Chinese society before Mao?

ML: The dispersed aristocratic states of ancient times were unified in 221 BCE, and thereafter the centralized empire held sway down to modern times, interrupted only occasionally by periods of disunity. China experienced a commercial revolution in the tenth and eleventh centuries, almost a thousand years before European capitalism, and religious life flourished alongside commercialism. When it stifled religious life in the twentieth century, China lost a key arena for the promotion of local autonomy and self-government, grassroots culture and local initiative, leaving unchecked the centralized, authoritarian state. In Chinese popular religion, tutelary deities are icons of local communities, protectors of local solidarities. Such local institutions as lineage organizations, temple societies, Confucian private schools, and Buddhist and Daoist temples and monasteries used to provide key sites for local voluntary organizations, charities, and self-government. In its attacks on traditional religiosity, Maoist China was inspired by the French Revolution. But China’s institutional religions, Buddhism and Daoism, were never as strong as Christianity in Europe and could never stand against the state as had Christianity. Ironically, it was Maoism that continued what the Western missionaries could only dream of: the destruction of “heathenism,” “idolatry,” and “superstition.”

NS: How do we need to think about secularization as it’s come about in China, as opposed to in the West?

MY: I agree with Talal Asad when he suggests that we should be studying the varieties of secularism. We must remind ourselves that the Western path to secularism is not the only path, and that other historical experiences may give rise to different sorts of secularism. China’s case is distinct from the Western path to secularism in three ways. First, there is a long premodern tradition of secular agnosticism in Confucian thought. Second, modern Chinese secularism was propelled by the colonial situation, a threat to nationhood posed by both Western and Japanese imperialisms. Third, there was Marxist discourse and the Soviet influence.

NS: To what extent can Confucianism—with its emphasis on worldly responsibilities and the social order—be thought of as a premodern form of secularism?

MY: There is much debate both in China and among Western scholars as to whether Confucianism is a religion or a philosophy. This whole issue comes about because twentieth-century China adopted the new term “religion” from the West, with Protestantism as its normative example. Confucianism obviously does not fit into the Western definition of religion, since it didn’t possess its own separate institutional or clerical organization, embedded as it was in the imperial state and grassroots culture alike. Yes, one could say that Confucianism was in some ways a form of premodern secularism, because it was much more focused on the ethical and political issues of temporal life than it was on the afterlife. But it didn’t have an elaborate anti-religious discourse like modern Darwinian or Marxist secularism. It could be described as agnostic or indifferent to many forms of the supernatural—such as gods, goddesses, ghosts, and demons—though it did ritually pay homage to other kinds of transcendent powers. And Confucianism’s practices of self-cultivation and self-discipline certainly resemble those of many religious traditions and were thought to merge practitioners with larger cosmic patterns.

NS: Can you say more about the other sources of Chinese secularism: the colonial experience and Marxism?

MY: Colonialism, I believe, was what gave the secular movement an intense urgency, and it explains the turn to the radical and systemic destruction of religious culture rather than more gradual religious reforms. The absorption of Western colonial discourse also led to such things as the adoption of the Reformation’s distinction between “religion”—the more valorized term—and “superstition,” which greatly hurt Daoism and popular religion in China. The urgency and catch-up mentality also explains why Soviet-style, state-led secularization seemed the natural answer. The centralized promotion of scientific atheism was coordinated and uniformly applied across the country, speeding up the process of modernization. Thus, modern Chinese secularism was not a gradual outgrowth of economic development, but a concerted and conscious effort, imposed from above on grassroots society to wrench it out of “backwardness” and to attain “revolution,” or “progress.”

NS: And this process continues today?

MY: Yes, though in different forms. The two primary purveyors of secularism today are the state in its didactic role and the consumer media.

NS: So the new consumerist culture is adopting the secularist mantle of Maoism?

MY: Not entirely. As the Chinese Communist Party turns its attention to trade and economic development, it has relaxed its stranglehold on religiosity and muted its Communist teachings. There has also been a bursting of the Communist ideological bubble, and thus the search for Truth has been taken up elsewhere. Since the state no longer controls all the wealth, and the private sector is able to retain a surplus, ordinary people now have extra personal wealth to give as donations for building or restoring sites of worship, organizing religious festivals, supporting religious clergy or ritual masters, and organizing religious charities. The new stresses and insecurities in a society where the state no longer guarantees jobs, pensions, housing, and medical care might also be favorable conditions for the return of religion. Indeed, a major reason for religious adherence in China is the experience of illness or a close call with death.

NS: Is religion, perhaps in Weberian fashion, actually helping to foster the emergence of capitalism in Chinese culture and economy?

MY: When you say “capitalism,” you need to distinguish between the capitalism that came from the West and the capitalism that derives from China’s own tradition of premodern commercialism and handicraft industries. Both are at work in China’s market economy today. The former introduced Christianity, and it can be seen in the investments of large multinational corporations that operate through the mediation of Chinese state officials. Then there is the small-scale capitalism that derives from China’s own late-imperial history of commercialism, and which I am studying in Wenzhou. This kind of capitalism is inextricably intertwined with Chinese popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism, so it is hard to distinguish between the religious stimulation of the economy and the economic stimulation of religion. In fact, I am developing an argument that in this kind of capitalism, religion checks the excesses of the profit-driven economy and motivates the redistribution of wealth. It’s a kind of indigenous capitalism that modern Chinese have lost sight of in the rush to believe that everything superior comes from the West.

NS: Has religion actually succeeded in placing restraints on the excesses of emerging markets?

MY: Unfortunately, since government policy has left religious organizations so weak, they haven’t been able to check the greed that capitalism encourages. Instead, they are being deeply penetrated by capitalism. Take the example of the Shaolin Buddhist temple in Henan Province, the one where Jet Li played a kungfu master in the film Shaolin Temple. This temple has stirred much controversy with its MBA-bearing monks who spend more time jetting around promoting tourism, building luxury hotels, and taking in their earnings from foreign kungfu students than meditating or attending to the spiritual needs of their congregation.

NS: Do you approach the work of shedding light on religiosity as a constructive contribution to the development of Chinese society?

MY: Although I am basically a secular person, I have seen the social consequences of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” in China. Beset by colonialism, war, and impoverishment, twentieth-century Chinese were too quick to reject their cultural traditions rather than reform them, and they abandoned a rich repertoire of wisdom and teachings accumulated over centuries and millennia. Modern Chinese did not have the luxury of time to think through and debate what was to become of religion, so precipitous action was taken, which did lasting damage. In rural Wenzhou, I have seen many positive dimensions of religious life, contrary to the way that Communist discourse has painted it. These people are not backward or resistant to modernization; they are at the forefront of creating a different kind of modernity, one with many bridges to connect them to their past.

NS: To what extent are Chinese scholars working in China also studying religion as you are—that is, not only as an artifact of the past, but as something alive and active in contemporary Chinese society?

MY: There is a growing number of Chinese scholars engaged in the study of religious cultures. In the 1980s and ’90s, their work was primarily textual and focused on the historical past of Chinese religious traditions. This was a safe way to deal with a still sensitive topic and to stay out of trouble. Now a new generation of social scientists is looking at the present through fieldwork. Their biggest task is to persuade the government, its many bureaucrats and local officials, and society at large, to think of religion as a promising way to deal with the present and future. They have even started to challenge the Marxist position that religion serves the ruling class and will necessarily disappear.

NS: To what extent do scholars have the freedom to do so publicly?

MY: Actually, there is now almost no constraint on what can be said out loud, but print publication is another matter. Internet discussions, meanwhile, stand in-between what can be said and what can be printed.

NS: So the study of religion in China has become a medium of dissent?

MY: Yes. These scholars are implicitly trying to correct for a century of activist state intervention and prohibition. Intellectuals have been at the forefront of religious revival, and many academic conferences on Buddhism, Daoism, and popular deity cults have laid the groundwork for religious organizations and activities to proceed. Academics serve as advisors or consultants to religious organizations; they are a bridge between religious communities and officialdom. They have called on the state to recognize the vast “underground” Christian communities—about 70 percent of all Christians in China—who refuse to join the state churches. A few are even starting to point out that the decades of hostility towards indigenous religions may be responsible for the dramatic growth of Christianity in the past three decades.  Scholars have also tackled the new problems of the over-commercialization of religion, in which local state tourism and real estate agencies seize upon it to drum up business, riding roughshod over Buddhist or Daoist monks’ ability to run their temples in their own way. Of course, this is still a small segment of the Chinese intelligentsia, and the vast majority still dismiss religion.

NS:  Has the state’s attitude towards religion changed in recent years as well?

MY:  Yes, it has indeed. There is great historical irony in the fact that the Chinese government is now becoming more involved in building up certain religious traditions. The central government funds a program to train religious leaders of all five officially recognized religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam) at People’s University, teaching them their own religious history and doctrines. It supported the First and Second World Buddhist Forums, which were held in 2006 and 2009 in China. Local governments help fund large-scale religious events to bolster tourism, pilgrimage, and local business, and they have recognized that religious charities help provide social welfare and lower crime. The state wants to use religious culture to foster social stability while encouraging a kind of “healthy” religious development that it finds acceptable. The irony is sometimes painful; just the other day while doing fieldwork in Wenzhou, a local Daoist priest told me how his father was hounded by young Communist zealots during the Cultural Revolution and risked his life to conceal precious hand-copied Daoist liturgies from destruction. But now he, the son, has been named a valuable person of Chinese “intangible cultural heritage”—borrowing the language of UNESCO—for his Daoist knowledge.

NS: Are Christian missionary activities from the West affecting how people in Wenzhou think about religion? Does this seem to you a further example of colonialism at work?

MY: My sense is that Christian missionization by Westerners plays a very minor role today. It is illegal for foreign nationals to proselytize in China. And in large cities, Chinese nationals even find it difficult to mingle with foreigners and attend church services presided over by foreign clergy. Of course, there are Western Mormons and Christians who disguise themselves as English teachers, but there may be more South Korean and Chinese Christian missionaries from overseas active in China. The vast majority of Chinese Christians were converted by other Chinese. They have relied on memories of Christian teachings transmitted by Western missionaries before 1949; that’s why some of the Christian iconography sometimes looks so dated, especially in rural areas. This also means that Christianity in China can look and feel quite different from how it does in the West. Since underground churches are targets of sporadic state persecution, many of them in rural areas have come to resemble the secret societies and millenarian movements of the late-imperial past. They may even be more Chinese than Christian.

NS: How are all these changes in the present impacting how Chinese—both scholars and laypeople—think about their past?

MY: The discipline of history has a very long tradition in China, going back to ancient times, perhaps beginning with the very invention of writing in China. Chinese are very skilled in historical thought and research; so, since the travesty of history writing during the Cultural Revolution ended, there has been, in the post-Mao period, much good historical reflection. In the past decade, an old term has been resuscitated from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “national learning,” or guoxue. This refers to learning from classical writings, from ancient schools of thought such as Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Legalism, and others. “National learning” has been grabbing the interest of many different kinds of people, from businessmen eager to learn ancient strategies of management, to mothers who wish to teach traditional culture and wisdom to their children, to the nouveau riche who now find that material wealth cannot provide everything they desire and long for spiritual harmony. Historical novels set in a past dynasty have reached such popularity on the Internet that they are then published in print. As Chinese people come into contact with the outside world through travel, migration, or media, they increasingly face the question of identity and how to define a unique Chineseness. This usually propels them back to China’s past.

NS: Do you think history’s lessons will be useful ones for them?

MY: Yes, I do. I know a Chinese economist, for instance, who actively reads and studies Chinese history, including historical novels, as he works to come up with suggestions for economic reform today. He even wants to revive the imperial examination system to avoid the rampant official corruption. This is an extremely valuable and important development, since the Chinese really cannot adapt ideologies and discourses developed elsewhere to their own social and economic development. They need to understand their own history better in order to tailor social innovations to deep habits of Chinese thought and practice. Doing otherwise was a mistake made too often in China throughout the twentieth century, with terrible consequences.

Given that my current research concerns the effects of Portuguese colonialism on Buddhist literature and culture in early modern Sri Lanka, I propose to structure my comments around, first, what Keane’s book teaches me and, second, what my research might, in turn, offer Keane. I will say here at the outset that I find Christian Moderns to be a stimulating and useful book. Its contributions toward theorizing the relationship between religion and colonialism are numerous and substantial. Since I lack the expertise to speak to Keane’s treatment of the exact semiotic nature of language and culture in Sumba, I will restrict my comments to his anthropology of Christianization. This book contains other subjects of significance, but I happen to find Keane’s discussions of morality and purification between and within religious communities to be particularly noteworthy.

One of the aspects of Christian Moderns that I find most interesting is the contested question of agency that resulted from the missionary encounter in Sumba. One often finds studies of missions that focus on the measures by which the missionaries themselves judged their efforts (i.e., the numbers of converts made). Less common are inquiries into the kinds of cultural conversions that take place alongside or in opposition to Christian proselytization. In other words, mission encounters do not simply result in the conversion of the faithful. They also spark debates over religious truth and cultural understandings. Keane astutely points out that one of the flashpoints in the Sumba missions concerned the question of agency. Who is responsible for action in the world? Whose will is made known? And where does agency lie? Such apparently philosophical questions assumed real-world relevance in the mission encounter, as Christians condemned the local ancestral ritualists for locating religious power in material objects—a practice often labeled fetishism by those who sought to replace such traditions with Dutch Calvinism. Keane analyzes how Christians employed the question of agency to condemn the fetishes of the unconverted Sumbanese. In this sense, Christian—specifically Protestant—conversion was thought to free the Sumbanese from their material entanglements to worldly objects. By mistakenly imputing power and agency to things, the so-called “fetishists” were seen as stricken by false understandings of where true religious power lies. Missionaries thus charged themselves with the task of getting the Sumbanese to locate true agency in the immaterial realm, through the power of God and the internal beliefs and piety of the individual Christian.

The issue of agency, in other words, becomes a point of contestation between missionaries and converts on one side, and the ancestral ritualists on the other. Keane’s insightful analysis points to how debates over religious truth may reside in cultural definitions of what makes us human and what humans are able or required to do. I have no doubt that concepts of freedom and fetishism are salient issues in the mission encounter in twentieth-century Sumba. But it is worth noting, and I’m sure Keane would concur, that mission encounters are not always structured around issues of human agency and the objectification of religious power. My work with Portuguese missionaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sri Lanka suggests that different dynamics could also be in play. The Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries sponsored by the Portuguese Crown tended to distinguish the “true faith” of Catholic Christianity from the “heathen” (infiel) traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. While the latter worshipped images (imagens), such practices were condemned as repugnant not for objectifying religious powers per se, but rather for the fact that they were false images linked to the work of the Devil. Early modern Catholic missionaries were perfectly willing to recognize divine power operating through crosses, holy water, and other material objects. And given the work of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries throughout much of the globe, it may well be that “fetishism” was an exceptional problematic in mission encounters more generally.

Another rich area for reflecting upon religion in colonial and missionary encounters is the manner in which language ideologies produce social difference. Keane’s remark that language ideologies “play a crucial role in producing—in objectifying and making inhabitable—the categories by which social difference is understood and evaluated” strikes me as a very fruitful line of inquiry, according to which the capacity that an individual or group possesses to express and describe what is “true” and “correct” can be used to distinguish and privilege some people over others. Keane goes on to point out how Christian missionaries and reformers in Sumba have often utilized acts of purification in order to make separations and distinctions between persons and things. For Dutch Calvinists and their Christian converts, purification entailed teaching people to abstract the immaterial meanings from material objects, to look beyond the fetishism of ancestral rituals, and to find power in a non-physical God and the interiority of individual faith. In short, acts of religious purification entailed denying material mediations of divine agency. And yet, Keane argues that the aim of complete purification always falls short, since the reliance on semiotic forms always entails some degree of material instantiation, whether it be a creed, a scriptural text, or something else.

Once again, I suspect that this analysis is more effective in the context of Protestant mission encounters than Catholic ones. Portuguese missionaries rejected the objects of so-called “heathen” traditions, but they rarely rejected material mediations as a whole. If the idea of purification is to retain broad currency across the colonial landscape, it may need to be defined differently, more in terms of separating out truth from falsehood, or the divine from the diabolical, than of fixing boundaries between the spiritual and the material. While questions of ontological difference could be salient in Sumba and certain other mission fields, the distinctions drawn between persons and things in acts of purification fail to account for other important distinctions drawn between persons themselves. In other words, it would seem that we should also attend to the creation of hierarchies in the context of missions. In Chapter 8, Keane does address how the Christians and the ancestral ritualists cast aspersions against each other—the Christians being seen as arrogant while the ritualists are cast as superstitious. But, in my view, these charges and exchanges also represent broader efforts to purify the religious field, that is, attempts at purification that are not simply or even primarily made with regard to fetishism and material objects. Other aspects of religious practice and expression that are either immaterial or not susceptible to charges of fetishism can become the source of contention and dispute.

Moreover, while the notions of difference constituted between Christians and “fetishists” may have precluded little, if any, similarity or commonality in Sumba, other colonial settings witnessed moments where efforts to construct difference for the sake of purifying and eradicating it became undermined by shared features and characteristics between groups. For instance, early modern Portuguese writers in Sri Lanka noted similarities as well as differences, and these similarities between Christians and Buddhists clearly gave them pause. One Franciscan missionary recounted how Buddhist monks wear robes, preach, give blessing, and receive alms in ways much like that of his fellow Franciscan brothers. And another colonial writer noted in the seventh century that the Buddha left a code of laws that were similar to Moses’s. But when such writers found similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, they quickly tried to reassert other differences in order to snuff out the threat posed by such likenesses of an erosion of the boundary between “true religion” and “superstition.” As such, the negotiation of similarities seems to be just as important to the missionary encounter as the negotiation of differences. So too is the somewhat ambiguous position of the native convert, an individual who appears both like and unlike the missionary, and whose religious and cultural identities can give rise to conflicts as they attempt to mediate between the colonial and local orders.

It is not my intention to find fault with Keane’s book for not addressing, or not addressing enough, the variety of religious and cultural conflicts in mission encounters around the globe. Rather, I find that it is his provocative analysis of what it means to be both “Christian” and “modern” in Sumba that leads me to want to interrogate further the conditions through which colonial and missionary encounters often transform religious practice and cultural understandings in various places and times. Clearly, we will need to use different lenses to examine how colonial agents worked with—and against—local religious practitioners to produce new identities and ideologies that reshaped cultural worlds over the last five hundred years. Keane’s book, however, shows that such scholarly work is both necessary and fruitful.

Before I begin, I can’t resist noting that the characterization of “Buddhism” upon which the piece is premised—one that is suspiciously amenable to a modern western liberal lifestyle—gives scholars of East Asian religions fits. I am glad to see that Don Lopez has tried to introduce some historical perspective here. I’ll say no more about this topic, other than to note that a similarly deracinated, Protestantized version of my own focus of research, early Confucianism, has also enjoyed wide currency since the Enlightenment. What I’d like to focus on, instead, is the apparent confusion about what brain imaging technologies tell us about ourselves, and what, precisely, materialism is and is not.

To begin with, Brooks reports that Andrew Newberg’s neuroimaging work “has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain”! Of course they can: all mental experiences can be identified and measured in the brain, or they wouldn’t be mental experiences. This says absolutely nothing about the existence or non-existence of metaphysical entities in the world. A “friend of mine” (for the purposes of maintaining plausible deniability) recalls experiencing mystical states of oneness induced by a variety of hallucinogenic substances consumed in his 20s, including physically flowing into and becoming one with Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County and dissolving into the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know much about the psychopharmacology of LSD and psilocybin, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they, like certain meditative practices, are able to suppress activity in the parietal lobe, among other things. This may explain why both meditators and drug users report Freud’s famous “oceanic feeling” (their monitoring of ordinary spatial boundaries is being altered). While this is interesting—and the fact that it feels so good is even more interesting—it says absolutely nothing about the ontological status of the mystical Ocean.

Brooks’s conclusion that “people are equipped to experience the sacred” would more accurately read, “people are equipped to appear to themselves to experience the sacred.” Moreover, similar mediation- or drug-induced repression of the parietal lobe in practitioners prepared with other cultural primes (for instance, Catholic nuns) would probably result in very different reported experiences: not merging with some indefinite “larger presence” or Mt. Tam, but being physically embraced by a very concrete and vividly perceived Jesus, complete with flowing beard and a retinue of horn-blowing angels. The idea that “God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at [moments of transcendental love], the unknowable total of all there is” is a fairly accurate expression of a vague “spirituality” that is now quite widespread among modern, educated people who eschew the religious beliefs of their parents, but it is in no way “proven” or even suggested by experimental work in the cognitive science of religion.

This confusion of neuroimaging data with some sort of magical report about the true nature of the world, typical of the breathless manner in which the popular press covers this topic, is actually the product of a deeply seated cognitive bias in humans, our innate folk dualism (on this, see especially Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom). Intuitively, we think of ourselves as something other than our brains, even though this intuition appears to be empirically wrong. Our folk dualism gives us the feeling that there is a huge gap between “mind”-like activities, which are individual and subjective, and physical events, which are objective and measurable. We then get very excited when we discover that thinking about or experiencing X is accompanied by physical activity in area Y of the brain—X must be real! Properly speaking, though, “our” thinking about or experiencing X is, in fact, nothing more than activity in area Y of the brain (or, more likely, a network of regions).

Brooks’s piece is also characterized by a confusion concerning what “materialism,” as an ontological claim about the world, might be. This seems to be the result of conflating the philosophical position of materialism, or physicalism, with the common use of the word “materialist” to refer to people or beliefs that are perceived to be selfish, unemotional, or unloving. For instance, emotions are not, as Brooks suggests, any more “squishy” than anything else: they are reactions subserved by an entirely material body-brain system. “Hard-core materialism,” like that of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, does not preclude the existence of emotions, love, or unselfishness—in fact, quite the opposite is true. Recent work on the apparently hard-wired nature of altruism and fairness are entirely compatible with, and indeed predicted by, the neo-Darwinan, physicalist model of the self. It is often in the interest of selfish genes to build selectively unselfish “hosts” to get them into the next generation, and these hosts work best when pre-loaded with a spectrum of fast, “emotional” responses to their environments, including the all-important environment of other people. Human beings, as well as other social primates, seem to be built by their genes to be guided primarily by reactions we would characterize as “emotional,” to have the capacity for deep familial and romantic love and attachment, and to perform great acts of apparently selfless altruism for kin or ersatz-kin (such as co-religionists and fellow soldiers). Similarly, there is no reason to think that because consciousness depends upon “idiosyncratic networks of neural firings,” the relationship between neurons and consciousness is “mysterious” or somehow non-physical: the collection of dust particles I see on the floor next to my desk is idiosyncratic, but not non-physical. Again, Brooks’s conclusion here seems to involve unexamined, and unjustified, folk beliefs: if my neural network is “idiosyncratic,” then it’s unique to me, and I am non-physical, something other than my brain or my body; therefore, idiosyncratic neural networks mean that hard-core materialism is wrong.

Finally, Brooks is right that behavioral neuroscience is having a lasting impact on culture, but it isn’t going to prove that Alan Watts was right and that big bad atheists are wrong. It’s that physicalism—the idea that we are nothing more than our body-brains—fundamentally contradicts deeply-seated folk ideas that we have about free will and responsibility. This in turn has profound legal and social implications. As more and more studies come out concerning the correlation of brain state X with certain undesirable behavior Y, we are seeing more and more instances of what Michael Gazzaniga calls the “my brain made me do it” defense in legal cases. Paul Bloom is one of the people who has articulated most clearly what is wrong with this type of thinking; as he notes in a recent commentary:

Micheal McGough, reporting on a 2005 conference on law and neuroscience, outlines [the "my brain made me do it"] logic very clearly in his first paragraph:

“Suppose you’re a juror in the trial of an accused child molester. A medical expert called as a witness for the defense says that magnetic resonance images of the defendant’s brain show unusual activity in an area that lights up in many—though not all—pedophiles. Are you now willing to acquit the defendant on insanity grounds?”

For anyone who is not a Cartesian dualist, this is all seriously confused. There is no immaterial conductor using the brain to accomplish its will. And the notion that pedophilia involves the brain is not a bold empirical hypothesis; it is a truism, and if it leads to the conclusion that the pedophile is blameless, then it follows that everyone is blameless for everything.

The “everyone is blameless for everything” position is not one likely to be widely embraced, but it does raise challenges. How to get our intuitive notions about free will and moral responsibility to peaceably coexist with a materialist conception of the person—which, pace Brooks, is in fact the consensus coming out of modern cognitive science—is the real intellectual and cultural task that still needs to be accomplished.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith reminds us that “neither the computational-modular model of the mind nor the idea of innate, automatically triggered mental mechanisms is a foregone conclusion of contemporary cognitive science or of any other science.” This is perhaps the most significant caution stated so far. Contrary to the overreaching claims of some scientists (and their followers in the world of religious studies) that the mind can be, and has to a great extent already been, explained, there is a huge gap between any cognitive model of the mind-brain and the real thing. It is also quite far from obvious that even the most virtuous and useful cognitive model would render superfluous other kinds of investigation into religion, whether scientific or non-scientific, naturalistic or non-naturalistic. But triumphal assertions (based on one science or another) that we now have the “real story” behind human behavior have been an ongoing theme in modern western history, and they probably will not subside any time soon. This is a phenomenon worth noting in itself.

Donald Lopez comments that what David Brooks appears to assume about Buddhism—that it is centered on meditation, that it is free of dogmas, and that it is compatible with science—are “historically dubious when one surveys the various forms of Buddhism that emerged across Asia over the past 2,500 years.” It is a historian’s prerogative to remind us that the “Buddhism” we take for granted in the current conversation about neuroscience is a very limited, modern variety. True enough, but Buddhism is a living as well as evolving tradition, and now a part of contemporary western society. It is for the active participants of Buddhist tradition to decide what Buddhism will become, and the prospect of synergy between Buddhism and science (particularly neuroscience) seems to generate energy no matter how many times scholars call this a modernist Buddhist apologetic. It is worth asking what cultural configuration keeps this interest afloat, more than a century after the discourse on the scientific nature of Buddhism began.

Kelly Bulkeley not only points out that there are different versions of religious experience that measure differently in brain scans, but that what the neuroscientific study of religious experiences implies is up for grabs. For Brooks, neuroscience dignifies and substantiates a certain version of religion; diehard materialists claim religious experiences are nothing but abnormally functioning brain states. Thus, “Contrary to the popular view that [Andrew] Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the ‘militant atheism’ Brooks wants to reject.” What we see is that religionists utilize science, and its social authority, when it is useful for their purposes, and point to the limitations of science when it counters their interests. Conversely, materialists maintain that science can explain everything (irrespective of whether or not such explanations are very useful), and deploy the ready trump card that what science cannot explain now will surely be explained in the future or that it does not exist. So the question of whether religion ultimately trumps science or vice versa is answered by one’s initial ideological commitments. Leaving aside such irresolvable debates, what is truly fascinating is how it is that such contrary agendas can be served by the same practices—in this instance, the neuroscientific study of religious experience.

My very preliminary and unscientific observation is to suggest that we are witnessing an aesthetic phenomenon. The reason why dreams of the reductive “theory of everything” persist is that such visions are enormously satisfying and beautiful. As Einstein famously expresses it, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Comprehending is an act of unification, and scientific theories are particularly poetic and elegant in this respect. Just listen to scientists rhapsodize about the ability of evolutionary theory to abstract and organize the disparate data of biology into a unified picture, and you can sense the aesthetic pleasure. The economy with which the chaos of the world is marshaled into order by a theory renders that theory into much more than a scientific description: it is the thought that makes scientific thinking itself possible, and it becomes the object of its own enthrallment.

It is also the case that western scientists are drawn to Buddhism. This too is aesthetic, at more than one level. The first entails the more discrete sense of aesthetics, which refers to an interest in sensory data and experience. Perhaps western scientists are indeed deluded with an image of Buddhism’s non-dogmatic, non-superstitious, and non-ritualistic nature. But the affinity between science and the Buddhist focus on the nature of our experience within the world (in lieu of theistic revelations) is very real. Both traditions are interested in empirical observations, causal explanations, and the processes by which physical and mental phenomena arise. And the intelligence of Buddhist observation and analysis, even though its ends are quite different from that of modern science, commands the respect of western intellectuals just as it has commanded the respect and attention of other highly self-regarding cultures, such as that of China.

The larger aesthetic impulse behind the “Buddhism and science” phenomenon is the way in which Buddhist tradition seems to aid the scientific desire to unite all knowledge. Einstein again: “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree.” But most modern western manifestations of this idea are of the “science trumps religion” variety. On the other hand, while Buddhism shares significant epistemological practices with science, they are always put in the service of ethics and human religious transformation. There are plenty of triumphal materialists who tell us that ethics and spirituality can be subsumed under the known dynamics of material forces. But it seems that there are lots of other people—many scientists among them—who yearn for a less simplistic account of such things, which honors their necessary depth and complexity. This seems to me an improvement upon the status quo.

My own critical response to the “neural Buddhism” phenomenon is that theories of everything, despite their beauty, can be dangerous things because their abstractions must sweep away much of what concerns us. I do not mind them, actually, if many theories of different kinds can be allowed, but such pluralism does not seem to be commonly accepted in our current scientific culture. The drive for the totalizing narrative is very strong, and maybe someday, cognitive science may even be able to explain with satisfying detail the neural structures and processes that create this drive.

In the meantime, it seems prudent to recognize the power of such visions. It is like pointing to a portion of the rainbow and designating it as “red.” Once you have named it, it is not possible to see that region of the color band as other than red. Now it has become something obvious to be seen in the world. If neural Buddhism injects things like social and environmental interconnectedness, selflessness, and nirvana into our world as well, it seems to me an obviously good thing.

Religious experience can’t be described or explained in biological terms alone. An experience is constituted, in part, by the way it is interpreted by the person experiencing it, and it is the interpretation that makes an experience religious. Two people might have experiences that are indistinguishable biologically (slower heart rate, decrease in body temperature) or phenomenologically (sense of oneness, calm), but one might experience what is happening to him in religious terms while the other does not. Study of any experience requires attention to historical and cultural contexts that inform a person’s interpretation of what is happening to her and to the conditions under which she comes to identify her experience in particular terms. Though he criticized medical materialism, James didn’t sufficiently appreciate the need to elucidate the concepts and practices that enter into a person’s experience and to study them as historical products. He was too intent on trying to identify a common core in religious experience that would be universal across cultures.

As psychologists examine the extent to which people can control attention, emotion, and other mental and even autonomic processes, it is not surprising that they would be drawn to practitioners of spiritual exercises in various religious traditions that have developed techniques for achieving this kind of control. Buddhism in particular has a long history of sophisticated reflection on and experimentation with the control of mental and physical states, though here Donald Lopez’s comments about Buddhist Modernism are apt.

In The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience, Newberg and his colleague Eugene d’Aquili, psychiatrists at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, propose a “study of theology from a neuropsychological perspective” that they claim would explain all elements of religion. They describe their book as the culmination of almost 25 years of research on the relationship between the brain and religious experience. This suggests that their theory carries the prestige and credibility of science. In fact, the model they offer is based on speculation, not laboratory science. There is nothing wrong with this. They are as entitled to speculate as are other theorists of religion, but their conclusions ought not to be given special scientific status.

D’Aquili and Newberg maintain that there are core elements in religious experience that “appear to be universal and can be separated from particular cultural matrices.” They suggest that sensations of awe and a unitary experience may be caused by deafferentation, the cutting off of incoming information to a brain structure. From speculation about localization of functions in different areas of the brain, they develop a structural model that includes a holistic operator that “might allow us to apprehend the unity of God or the oneness of the universe.” This structuralism, combined with deafferentation, constitutes their theory of religion.

In the one experimental result cited in the book directly relevant to the theory and in another paper published in 2003, Newberg and his collaborators report experiments using brain imaging (functional neuroimaging) on experienced meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. They found that meditation was associated with mildly increased blood flow in the frontal areas of the brain, consistent with studies that show increased activity in the prefrontal cortex associated with concentration. They had hypothesized that there would be decreased flow in parietal areas of the brain associated with altered experience of space, but results here were mixed. In one kind of analysis of the data they found no significant decrease, though they did find it using another kind of analysis.

These results are consistent with Newberg’s theory, but they don’t provide experimental support for it. In addition, by ignoring the concepts by which their subjects understood what was happening to them they fail to ask what makes these experiences religious. Newberg’s comment about apprehending the unity of God and Brooks’s statement in his column that people are equipped to experience the sacred and overflow with love include interpretations that go way beyond anything measured in these experiments. “God,” “the sacred,” and “overflowing love” each have a culturally specific provenance that can only be elucidated historically.

Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, and his colleagues have undertaken a project to study mental abilities achieved by long-term meditative practitioners that is more sophisticated than Newberg’s. Here, again, the subjects are Tibetan monks, but the researchers are trying to study the ways in which these monks pursue and attain compassion through meditation. That requires them to attend to the content of Buddhist doctrine and practice.

In Visions of Compassion, the volume he and Ann Harrington edited describing the project, Davidson surveys psychological research on emotion and notes that much has been done on negative emotions, but considerably less on positive affect. Psychologists have identified distinctive facial expressions recognizable across cultures for negative emotions, but not for their positive counterparts. The only basic classification of positive emotions that correlates with biological data, he says, is that between pre-goal attainment and post-goal attainment affect, between eager anticipation and satisfaction. For his research, Davidson writes, he will focus on this division rather than on distinctions within the emotion lexicon that don’t have biological correlates.

That may be a reasonable research decision, but it substitutes a simple bipolar classification for a much larger set of emotion terms, each of which has its own grammar and criteria of application. For example, within the category of post-goal attainment positive affect, we can easily distinguish between the meanings of contentment, pride, enthrallment, and relief. The choice of which is appropriate in a given situation requires knowledge of context, background assumptions, and reference to relevant norms.

Davidson and his colleagues compared Buddhist monks who had been training in Tibetan traditions for at least 15 and in some cases 40 years with control subjects who had undergone just one week of meditative training. During the study both long-term practitioners and control subjects were asked first “to let their minds be invaded by a feeling of love or compassion” toward someone they cared about, and later “to generate unconditional loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings without thinking about anyone in particular.” The researchers recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) activity and found that the monks had induced in themselves high-amplitude EEG gamma oscillations and phase synchrony during the nonreferential compassion meditative state. This kind of synchronization, Davidson writes, may reflect attention and affective processes, and is consistent with the idea that these are flexible skills that can be trained.

This study may be valuable for training subjects to control their affective states, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the Buddhist notion of compassion or its pursuit. Traditional Buddhist texts on meditation distinguish between calming (achieving a stillness of mind and body) and discernment (insight). The first is considered preparation for the second. Davidson’s EEG study may measure calming, but it leaves discernment unexplored, in this case discernment of Buddhist teaching about compassion and its application to oneself or others.

Instructions to “generate a state of loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings” must have been understood very differently by the Buddhist monks and by members of the control group. The monks had undergone years of training in debating skills that are a large part of Tibetan scholastic pedagogy. They had cultivated practices that include not only techniques for the control of mental and physical states, but also criteria for the proper use of terms like “compassion” and “sentient beings.” Their understanding of these terms would be quite different from that of the controls, who had trained for a week in an admittedly superficial way.

Georges Dreyfus, a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, writes in Visions of Compassion that there is no Tibetan word for emotion and he asks whether compassion is an emotion. He cites a distinction drawn both in texts and practice between beginners who feel compassion (they are saddened by the sufferings of others and moved to wish them relief) and advanced bodhisattvas who attain compassion with equanimity without being themselves moved.

Is compassion then a trait? The difference between a state and a character trait is not only one of endurance over time. We call someone “loving” or “kind” not on the basis of what we take her to feel, either on the basis of her self-report or some other evidence, but because we take the term to capture something of her character. We ascribe kindness to her by observing how she acts in response to different situations over time. Similar observations and attempts at discernment are at work in my reflections on my own character, though usually clouded by bias in my own favor. To understand Buddhist compassion meditation one would have to explicate the criteria that govern the way the monks themselves use that term in their own self reflection. Were Buddhist practitioners to agree to conditions under which they would be given simultaneous feedback of their gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation, it might be possible for them to manipulate those variables more directly, but that would have no bearing on their judgment or anyone else’s about the extent to which they were on the path to compassion.

The study of religious experience requires attention to culturally specific language and social practices by which people come to understand themselves and their world in religious terms, as well as to the results of neuroscience and other inquiries into universal characteristics of mind and body.

Brooks’ essay is not really about Buddhism; the term only appears twice: first, when he argues that advances in neurobiology will not lead to militant atheism but to “what you might call neural Buddhism,” and second, when he says that the new work will come from “scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.” That Brooks does not define what he means by Buddhism is itself interesting. He may assume that it is common knowledge, and he is probably right.

Although it is always risky to speculate about authorial intention, one might imagine that by Buddhism, Brooks means an ancient Asian tradition that is largely free of beliefs, dogmas, and rituals; whose central form of practice is meditation; which focuses on the here and now rather than the past or the future; which has no personal deity; which is fully compatible with Jewish and Christian mysticism and, especially, with science. Each of these characteristics is historically dubious when one surveys the various forms of Buddhism that emerged across Asia over the past 2,500 years. Those characteristics, however, are all central tenets of something called Buddhist Modernism, which emerged as a result of the colonial encounter.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Methodist missionaries in Sri Lanka, Chinese revolutionaries in Shanghai, and Japanese reformers in Tokyo were all dismissing Buddhism as superstition and (in the case of the former) dismissing its followers as idolaters. A group of Buddhist elites, several of whom would visit the West, responded to these charges by claiming that Buddhism was not primitive, but instead was modern. Indeed, with its lack of a creator God and its mechanistic universe (driven by the engine of karma), it was the religion most suitable for the modern world. Some went so far as to say that Buddhism was not a religion at all, but rather a philosophy, even a science. In this way, viewed in light of the academic model of the day, which saw a movement from superstition to religion to science, Buddhism was able to leap from the beginning of the evolutionary chain to its end.

But the formation of Buddhist Modernism cannot be credited entirely to Asian Buddhists. Central to the process was the work of nineteenth-century European Orientalists. Although there were Buddhists almost everywhere else in Asia they found no Buddhists in India, the land of the Buddha’s birth; Buddhism had disappeared there by the fourteenth century. Instead, they found monuments (often in ruins), cave temples (overgrown by jungle), and statues (often broken). There were stone inscriptions to be deciphered, and there were Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Nepal to the north and Pali manuscripts in Sri Lanka to the south. These were the materials from which European scholars would build their Buddhism.

What would come to be called “original Buddhism” or “primitive Buddhism,” became the domain of European and, later, American and then Japanese scholars. They would create a Buddha and a Buddhism unknown in Asia, one that may never have existed there before the late nineteenth century. Just as there was a quest for the historical Jesus, there was a quest for the historical Buddha, and European Orientalists felt they found him. Like Jesus, the Buddha wrote nothing and, unlike Jesus, nothing that he said was written down until four centuries (rather than four decades) after his death. This Buddhism then became a model against which the various contemporary Buddhisms of Asia were measured, and were generally found to be lacking, not only by Europeans, but eventually by Buddhist elites in Asia as well.

The Buddha was transformed from a stone idol into a man of flesh and blood, a man very much of modern times. Described by some as “the Luther of Asia,” he became famous for having spoken out against the corrupt priestcraft and the crippling caste system of “Brahmanism.” He also became something of a Romantic hero. In 1879, Edwin Arnold published a poem on the life of the Buddha, entitled The Light of Asia, that would become one of the most popular books of the Victorian period, and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself; Arnold was knighted for his work. The Buddha became an alternative Jesus, a Jesus who was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a Europe obsessed with questions of race and questions of humanity, the Buddha was both racially superior and a savior for all humanity, an ancient kinsman, a modern hero. This Buddha was the product of a different Enlightenment.

This is the Buddhism of Brooks and the Buddhism of the burgeoning business of Buddhism and neuroscience. Here, researchers who often identify themselves as Buddhists measure the effects of meditation techniques that are not unique to Buddhism. Their Buddhism bears the mystique of the infinitely morphable, the ever modern, the perfect alternative; we can be confident that whatever these neuroscientists discover will somehow be “Buddhist.” This neural Buddhism may indeed lead to big cultural effects, as Brooks claims. But if it does, it will be important to remember how we got there, and what might have gotten lost along the way.

To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. The mind may, as Brooks says, have “the ability to transcend itself,” but we didn’t need Newberg’s SPECT scanners to tell us that.

Scientific research on “universal moral intuitions” is sure to appeal to a social conservative like Brooks, and he’s correct that evolutionary psychology has made big advances in our understanding of attachment, bonding, and pro-social emotions. Of course, these were the staple themes of early 20th century psychoanalysis, so I’m leery of calling this a “revolution” (for more on “disciplinary amnesia” in the psychology of religion, see Jeremey Carrette’s essay in this collection). In fact, Brooks leaves out the other half of the psychological equation, which Freud and Jung understood all too well: the anti-social instincts of aggression and xenophobia. In addition to showing that “love is vital to brain development,” contemporary neuroscience is also revealing how deeply primed humans are to react with hostility toward those whom we view as “other.” Given that most religions have been, and continue to be, guilty of prejudice, discrimination, and violence against perceived outsiders, I find only modest theological comfort in the latest findings of cognitive science. Brooks betrays perhaps too much confidence that the atheist cause is doomed to irrelevance.

This leads to the boldest claim made by Brooks, that “the cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.” From my perspective, he’s got it exactly backwards. Our growing knowledge about the nature and functioning of the human brain-mind system is revealing the importance of cultural influences (like the Bible) in the development of our “highest” mental faculties, while at the same time challenging traditional monotheistic belief in a single universal deity.

Regarding the Bible, I imagine Brooks means that a fundamentalist belief in the literal meaning of scripture can no longer be held. Once again, we didn’t need neuroscience to tell us that. Setting aside Creationism and other scientifically invalid claims in the Bible (and in the Qur’an, for that matter), what remains is a valuable collection of teachings about history, morality, and collective meaning-making. This is where cognitive science becomes relevant, because researchers are finding that the most sophisticated aspects of human mental functioning (language, memory, reason, imagination) are dependent on cultural influences shaping our minds from the very beginning of life. Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, a leader in the study of cognitive science and religion, has taken to speaking of “embedded cognition” to emphasize the dynamic interplay of cultural and psychological factors in the growth of each individual mind. In sum, the cognitive revolution is giving us new ways of understanding why people’s faith in a cultural system of meaning-making like biblical religion remains so strong and is sure to continue despite its apparent incompatibility with modern science.

And what of God? Brooks speaks eloquently of God as “the unknowable total of all there is,” a formulation similar to Newberg’s “absolute unitary being” as the apex of all religious experience, whether it be Christian, Buddhist, or secular. There’s a superficial appeal to this kind of “neurotheology” (Newberg’s term), but it founders on one problematic fact: Religious experiences are more different than they are the same.

Consider the research of Nina Azari and colleagues, who performed PET scans of evangelical Christians praying to the words of Psalm 23 and found, contrary to Newberg, heightened activation of a frontal-parietal region of the brain associated with sustained reflexive evaluation of thought. Consider, too, the research of Hans Lou and colleagues, who used PET to study the brain functioning of a group of highly experienced yoga teachers during a relaxation meditation called Yoga Nidra, which includes a series of visualization exercises. Their PET results showed heightened activation in exactly those brain systems corresponding to the guided imagery tasks, which are different than the brain systems involved in praying to Psalm 23 or the types of mind-emptying meditation studied by Newberg.

The point is that there is no single model for religious experience. Humans are capable of many different modes of being religious, and the brain subserves them all in predictable and measurable ways. Brooks may follow Newberg in advocating belief in a single totalizing deity, but the actual findings of neuroscience are pointing in the opposite direction. What’s emerging is a new appreciation for the radical pluralism of religious experiences that humans are capable of generating. As better brain imaging technologies come online, we will begin to study a wider variety of spiritual phenomena (not just what occurs when people are sitting perfectly still in a laboratory), revealing new multiplicities of cognitive processing involved in different modes of religiosity. This research will not support traditional monotheistic faith in God, though it may spark a renaissance of spiritual exploration by researchers of a poly- or pantheistic bent. That’s the cultural-scientific revolution we may yet live to see.