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. 

In addition to being influenced by the cultures that it arrived in, there were translations of the texts and commentaries that accompanied the movement of Buddhism across Asia and into the West.  Buddhist scholar Donald Lopez writes about how translations of teachings both preserves traditions and creates traditions. Over the centuries, as Buddhism arrived in a new place, a translation into a new language was a huge undertaking. And this translating even began right from the beginning of the Buddha’s teaching. Did you know that Pali wasn’t the language the Buddha spoke? Pali was an artificial language invented so that the monks and nuns from different parts of India could read, recite, and write in a single language. There was a translation from the get-go.

Translations inevitably result in editing and expanding, as well as misattributing sources. This is how translations create traditions. As Lopez says, after a new translation, apocrypha begin to be composed. Apocrypha are writings of unknown origin, or of dubious authenticity. Buddhist texts are layers of derivation. This is part of our tradition.

I was recently reading about how the Buddha appropriated early Vedic culture and traditions into his teachings. For instance, it was important at the time that you keep three ritual fires burning in your home. This was believed to keep creation going – the rains would come, and sun would rise each day. The Buddha co-opted this ritual as the three poisons: greed, hatred and delusion, turning that belief on its head: saying, we don’t want to keep creation - in the sense of the wheel of dependent arising leading to suffering – going, we want to extinguish the wheel of becoming, break the cycle, and thus be liberated. Isn’t that interesting? I can’t help wondering, if it had been the traditional that two ritual fires be kept going would we have had only two poisons? 

Buddha was both responding to and countering the world view he lived in.

Some teachers posit that the five aggregates – which the Buddha taught as the five elements that make up human experience – body, vedana, perception, mental formations, and consciousness – were gathered from the different beliefs people had of ‘who we are’ that were prevalent at the time. There were those who believed we are just the body, those who believed we are bliss (pleasant vedana), or mental formations, or ultimately just consciousness, and so on. If you have ever thought (like me) that the five aggregates were a kind of strange way to divide up our experience, that’s something to wonder about, how that division came about. Perhaps the Buddha appropriated these understandings in opposition to the culture of the time, as a way of offering his radical teachings in contrast to existing traditions.

These are interesting things to ponder as I think about Buddhism as a tradition that continues to be relevant today. What do you think? If a tradition travels too far from the original teaching, whatever that is, is something essential lost? Or are the changes, adaptations, and expansions rich and beneficial additions to the tradition?

Buddhism has come to the West quite recently - we might think of it as beginning to blossom in the second half of the 20th century, when Westerners began venturing East and bringing back practices and teachings. As Buddhism has come to the West over the past 50 years, how has this Asian tradition been influenced by Western culture? 

One that comes to mind is the framework of scientific materialism, the philosophical view that everything that exists is either matter or is dependent on matter, and that all phenomena can be explained through scientific inquiry and empirical evidence. Things are real if they can be observed and measured, including consciousness and thought.  In this conceptual framework, even concepts like love and justice can be explained through biological or social science. There is a kind of dis-enchanting of the world. This is a view that has tremendous implications in our lives and is so deeply rooted that for most of us it is unconscious. 

How about psychology? The Buddha’s teachings contain a great deal that resonates with current psychological thought. I think western psychological thinking has had a tremendous impact on Western Buddhism, but I daresay Buddhism is not limited to psychological perspectives.

Neuroscience and the expanding knowledge about neuroplasticity have intersected with Buddhist thought. I am thinking of Rick Hansen’s work. 

Some teachers have proposed that non-dualism/Advaita perspectives have influenced Western Buddhist teachings. I don’t know enough about those teachings to be specific, but I include the possibility here.

[**See footnote below**]

How has Buddhism survived, even thrived, as a tradition? 

There are layers of traditions here when we gather each Tuesday evening. The Theravadin Buddhist tradition (the one that our Sangha generally follows) of 2500 years. There is the Western Buddhist tradition The tradition of our sangha, Prescott Insight, founded over 30 years ago by Carol and Monty Cook, where we have certain customs we follow, like how the room is set up, how the schedule of the evening goes, the tradition of dana, which someone speaks of each evening. 

A tradition is thought of as the passing on of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, whether a holiday tradition or a spiritual lineage. I listened to a talk recently by Rob Burbea where he examined how a tradition can be rigid and fundamentalist or it can be a tradition that is healthy and vital. What might be some of the qualities that make a tradition alive and flourishing? You might think about the different layers of tradition – from the ancient Theravadin tradition to the Western Buddhist tradition to the Prescott Insight Meditation tradition - that we find expressed here, as I offer these possible attributes of a healthy, living, vibrant tradition.

• Does a living tradition have shared values, goals, aims?
  
• Shared practices? 
• Shared stories and anecdotes and history from the past (remember when…?)
• Shared vocabulary (meaningful, functional, like a short hand)
• Shared beliefs, conceptual frameworks, ontological concepts (the nature of being), what we invest in as true.
• Shared texts (for study, for expanding our understanding) Are these texts respected. Is there latitude for interpretation?
• Does a living tradition need tension between authoritative and autonomous interpretation of the practices and understandings?
• Does it include some diversity of choices on how to practice or the direction of development?
• Is some level of mystery needed? Some level of irreducibility – there’s not one conclusive explanation for everything, but rather bottomless levels of understanding, from the poetic to the incomprehensible?

How many of these qualities do you find in this tradition? As a contrast, when I considered these elements in light of the mindfulness movement in the West, it seems to me there are many more aspects of a living tradition found in Buddhism. I’m not disparaging the mindfulness movement. A lot of good comes from that in terms of alleviating stress. But in a way it’s a movement that has been cut off from its roots in Buddhism. Maybe something is lost.

We are part of a tradition that was founded upon other traditions – some absorbed, some turned on their heads. This tradition has been changed and expanded through multiple translations of the texts and profoundly impacted by cultures through the passage of time. In my experience, and I imagine yours, too, it remains relevant today. What Buddhism offers me for understanding myself, the world and my place in it is incomparable. What it comes down to is the practices work, they have changed me in profound and positive ways.

Putting this talk together and looking at the profound richness and depth of this tradition, I find myself deeply comforted. What came to mind was the second of the three refuges – the refuge of the Dharma. The tradition is not the Dharma, the teachings, but maybe it is the container for the Dharma. And when I consider a container that is vigorous, malleable, alive, and healthy, it feels like a container I can trust, a container I can take refuge in. It is not solid, rigid, and brittle. It is strong enough to hold the responsive and adaptive Dharma, while at the same time having no boundary or limits. I won’t get to the end of it. There will always be something new to understand about myself, about the world, about awakening. 


May our hearts be filled with gratitude with whatever benefits we have received from this ancient and evolving tradition. May our efforts sustain and grow this tradition so that future beings may benefit. May the merits of our practice today serve all beings.


**Footnote: In the lively discussion that followed this talk, Cheryl Cross added that in coming to the West, Buddhism has benefited from intersecting with feminism, helping to expand the traditionally patriarchal structure into leadership and teaching by many excellent women. In addition, a friend later mentioned that perhaps Buddhism has been influenced by democratic values, eroding a traditional system of authoritative leadership. I am reminded of this striking quote by Thich Nhat Hanh:
It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.