The Dharma as Living Tradition

An essay adapted from a talk given by Carol Russell on December 2, 2025

I hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving Day. In many ways it is my favorite holiday. For me, it’s all about getting together with loved ones and giving thanks. I like that there is no exchanging of gifts. For my whole life it has been a strong tradition in my family to gather and spend the day together preparing and enjoying a wonderful meal. The details of the family tradition have evolved over the years, and who is available to get together has changed, but there is a core tradition that has held.

In light of that, I’ve been thinking of the dharma as a tradition. If you were here for Brenda’s talk last week, we went on a journey of how Buddhism has spread through the world over the millennia. She gave an overview of some of the broad differences between the different branches of Buddhism. To last for 2500 years, Buddhism is clearly a strong tradition.

I like to imagine the world the Buddha was born into. It was primarily an agricultural society, which is why we have so many beautiful agrarian similes in the suttas.  The first cities and large kingdoms were being established. Metallurgy had just been discovered. Written language was not widely used for religious or literary purposes. This is a society almost unimaginably different from ours, with our access to world travel, mass communication, information at our fingertips, and a society centered around industry. 
 
A few years ago, Grace Burford and I gave a talk on the evolution of Buddhism, and how, as Buddhism spread from northern India, to virtually all over the world, it has always been influenced and changed by the cultures it found itself in. Some Western scholars of the late 19th and early 20th c had the hubris to believe they could strip Buddhism of all its cultural ‘baggage’ and get to the ‘real’ teaching of the Buddha. This, of course, is impossible, as we now have a better understanding of the fact that one is always influenced by a point of view, a conceptual framework, that comes from the culture we are in. 

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