The central question examined in the introduction concerns whether the activist impulse of contemporary Asian Buddhism is historically new—a series of responses to uniquely modern conditions and historical forces—or whether there exist substantive precedents for such engagement with social and political concerns in Buddhist history. (1996: xi)

The essay to which this preface alludes is entitled “Introduction: The Shapes and Sources of Engaged Buddhism.” This title itself is appropriately exploratory in tone; as we have already seen previously, the central thesis that Queen develops therein (as well as the conclusion that he reaches) is decidedly modernist. Four years later, the title of his introductory essay for the anthology Engaged Buddhism in the West (2000) asserts his modernist thesis up front: “Introduction: A New Buddhism.”

Indeed, Queen can perhaps be credited with making this newness question an issue in its own right. Other writers (both in Queen’s anthologies and elsewhere) have certainly stressed either continuity or discontinuity in their elaborations of engaged Buddhism, but they have generally done so in passing—it has not been their main topic. What I will attempt to show in this section is that Queen has analyzed and then defined both of the terms “engaged” and “Buddhism” in such a way as to not only (1) foreground the newness issue as a central issue; but also so as to (2) favor the conclusion that engaged Buddhism is new. In brief, he has defined “engagement” as relating to “this-worldly” concerns, especially institutional and systemic causes and forms of suffering, and he has characterized “traditional” Buddhism as other-worldly (following Weber). I will examine each of these in turn. Firstly, I will argue that his narrowing and specifying of the term “engagement,” although extremely interesting, valuable, and useful, may go so far as to make engaged Buddhism susceptible to Jones’s criticism regarding secular reductive modernism. (Moreover, in the conclusion I will suggest some reasons why his insistence that “engagement”—as he defines it—is necessarily recent and Western may be unfounded or at least counterproductive.) Secondly, I will argue that his characterizations of traditional Buddhism as otherworldly (which he routinely makes in passing, perhaps influenced by his greater familiarization with Theravādin forms of Buddhism)(27) are entirely incompatible with most forms of Buddhism (especially Mahāyāna), both doctrinally as well as historically.

What is engagement?

Prior to the mid-1990s, most (but not all) scholars were fairly vague about the two or three terms involved in the label “[socially] engaged Buddhism.” Although certain authors were occasionally more precise in their definitions, the range of definitions varied so greatly between authors that the possibility of meaningful dialogue was often obscured. As we have seen, this vagueness enabled both modernists and traditionists alike to indulge in either mutual myopia or in quick, dismissive, polemical rhetoric. In The Social Face of Buddhism, Ken Jones offered a description sufficiently broad (and vague) that most would have probably accepted it:

By “social action” we mean the many different kinds of action intended to benefit human kind. These range from simple, individual acts of charity, teaching and training, organized kinds of service, “Right Livelihood” in and outside the helping professions, and through various kinds of community development as well as to political activity in working for a better society. (1989: 65)

However, later in the same book, Jones refracts this single, broad “range” of meanings into three distinct types of socially engaged Buddhism:

(1) ALTERNATIVE SOCIETAL MODELS (for example, monastic and quasi-monastic communities) and particularly “right livelihood”
(2) SOCIAL HELPING, SERVICE AND WELFARE, both in employment and voluntarily
(3) RADICAL ACTIVISM (directed to fundamental institutional and social changes, culminating in societal metamorphosis). (1989: 216)

This spectrum spans from what he later calls a “soft end” to a “hard end.” In a personal communication to Sandra Bell, Jones explains this “taxonomy”:

At the soft end are individuals and organizations who see Engaged Buddhism as ranging from being kind to your neighbors to promoting a society based on the principles of the Dharma. The hard enders do not deny the irrefutable logic of this, but claim that it robs Engaged Buddhism of a sufficiently clear definition. … Hard enders believe governments and other institutions should be included in the active concerns of Buddhist morality. (Jones, as quoted by Bell, 2000: 405)

Citing this same passage from Jones, Queen (2000: 8-10) also implicitly bemoans the past vagueness of definition (the “robbing of sufficient clarity”) and offers his own parallel spectrum from “mindfulness-based” to “service-based” engagement. Just as Jones (ahead of his time) clearly identified with the “hard end”—at 1989: 222 he notes that the main subject of his book has been the third type, “radical activism”—Queen clearly identifies the “service-based” end as his primary subject (it is, after all, the form of engaged Buddhism that he feels he can argue is “new”).