Other elements of past Buddhism are also being appropriated in new ways. According to the sutras, Angulimala was a murderer who became a disciple of the Buddha. Is it acceptable to use Angulimala as the patron saint of a modern prison-reform movement? “Wall-gazing” initially specified the meditation practice of the semi-legendary sixth-century monk Bodhidharma. Is is permissible to use the term today to describe meditation in a prison cell? Wratten suggests that the Buddhist teachings of no self, impermanence, and dependent origination “provide a penetrating critique of race, class, and gender associations.” Is that a justifiable application of those teachings? Andrew Olendzki draws extensively from the Pali canon in his discussion of Kabat-Zinn's stress-reduction work. He cites the following passage:

To which the Buddha replied, “It is true, sir, that your body is weak and afflicted…. Therefore, sir, you should train yourself: ‘Though my body is sick, my mind shall not be sick.’”

For Olendzki, past and present converge seamlessly: “One can almost imagine this precise conversation occurring at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester.” All such uses of the past compel methodologically aware reflection. We must ask, without prejudging the answer: When is the stretch from traditional Buddhism to engaged Buddhism too big?

Are assessments of engaged Buddhist leaders too restrained? The Dalai Lama is so universally admired (outside China) that one seldom hears a discouraging word about him. Other leading Buddhists, if judged at all, are typically questioned in gentle asides. John Powers, in his essay on the Campaign for Tibet, at least raises an eyebrow when he notes the unusual career of action-movie star Steven Segal, now recognized as a tulku, a reincarnate Tibetan lama:

His Buddhist spirituality is on diplay in his movie The Glimmer Man, in which he wears Tibetan prayer beads around his neck and speaks of cultivating inner peace. In the following scene, however, someone insults his sissy beads and he kicks him through a glass door, indicating that he may still need to put in more quality time on the meditation cushion.

Respect does not obviate the need for constructive criticism. Bernard Glassman has been charged with (in his own words) “moving too much to social action and leaving Zen behind.” It is a point worth discussing. Conversely, some activists are concerned that Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings increasingly emphasize individual calm and local Sangha-building at the cost of confronting larger political realities. That too deserves debate. Sallie King, deeply disturbed by the practice of self-immolation, goes so far as to disagree with Nhat Hanh's claim that Buddhist leaders ordinarily try to prevent it. “I must point out,” King writes, “that Nhat Hanh's statement…is not strictly true.”(56)

Does engaged Buddhist studies propose any new methods? An emerging field may permit, or require, some new approaches. For example, Stephanie Kaza experiments with a traditional technique of Buddhist logic, the tetralemma, in an essay on human-nature relations. She asks, “Can we keep peace with nature?” and then shows how the question can be answered four ways: yes, no, yes and no, neither yes nor no.(57) In a different vein, innovative praxis-linked methodologies might incorporate meditation or community-based learning.

Not knowing may even be a candidate for a new method. Queen, in his essay on Glassman's work, observes that a type of agnosticism is shared by Glassman, Nhat Hanh, Batchelor, and other leading engaged Buddhist figures. In Buddhism not knowing is quite different from an ordinary profession of ignorance. Two well-known examples are the Buddha's silence on certain existential questions, and Bodhidharma's enigmatic answer, “I don't know,” in reply to the sixth-century Chinese emperor Wu. Not knowing is intimately related to learning and insight, which are valued in Buddhist practice and Buddhist studies alike. Queen asks Glassman, “Why are you attracted to places of great suffering—the inner city, Auschwitz, the notorious needle park called the Letten in Zurich…?” Glassman replies:

I don't know. The words that come to me are the desire to learn. I don't know what it is, but it happens a lot to me when I encounter a situation I don't understand. It generally involves suffering. When I enter a situation that is too much for me and that I don't understand—I have a desire to sit there, to stay a while.

Doubt, in the sense of deep questioning, is an essential element of koan practice in Zen. This approach may contain the seeds of a method with fruitful applications in several areas, from social theory to the ecocrisis. Can the planet be saved? We don't know. And that uncertainty must be taken into consideration in environmental work. Because agnosticism is sometimes interpreted as a tepid or unwelcome doubt, and because it carries baggage from Christian theology and Western intellectual traditions, a distinctively Buddhist form may require a tag such as “deep agnosticism.”