Nelson Foster, interestingly, seems to be willing to admit that early (Pāli) Buddhism may have been socially involved (or at least “aware”), but he claims that the East Asian Buddhism that he studies was not: “[I]t is clear from the Pali texts ... that early Buddhism was aware of itself as a force for social good. … As Buddhism moved into China, however, its social orientation changed quickly and thoroughly” (1988: 49). Foster then describes this quick and thorough East Asian “change,” also using Gary Snyder as an authority:

Gary Snyder has probably gone to the heart of the matter in observing that the Chinese world view (and later the Japanese) precluded a significant social role for Buddhism. … Chinese society effectively bottled up the social impulse in Buddhism and thereby set the direction of Zen. (1988: 50)

It is perhaps more common for modernist scholars to make the slightly moderated claim that there may be discernible social implications latent in Buddhist teachings. For example, in the introductory essay to the anthology The Path of Compassion, Kenneth Kraft writes:

When … [the contributors to this volume] examine Buddhism’s 2,500-year-old heritage, these authors find that the principles and even some of the techniques of an engaged Buddhism have been latent in the tradition since the time of its founder. (1988: xii-xiii)(12)

And in Inner Peace, World Peace, Cynthia Eller states her own opinion, backed by Jones and Foster:

[A] “socially engaged” nonviolence—prompted by Buddhism’s encounter with the Christian demand for social relevance—is … difficult to uncover. The elements of a socially engaged nonviolence are latent in the Buddhist tradition, but an overall concept of social engagement is not at the forefront, and advocates of modern Buddhist nonviolence are frank about admitting this. As Ken Jones laments, “Buddhism has no explicit body of social and political theory comparable to its psychology or metaphysics.” Or as Nelson Foster comments, “It is remarkable that Zen lacks a clear tradition of social action. One searches in vain for a body of teaching equivalent to the ‘social gospel’ of Christianity.” (1992: 102)

Jones himself, who at times adopts the stronger negative position, refers in the following passages to social activism as being an “extension” or an “amplification” of what is (he argues elsewhere in the same book) only latent in Buddhist teachings:

Buddhist social activism—‘Engaged Buddhism’—is … seen … simply as the logical extension of the traditional teachings of morality and compassion to twentieth-century conditions. (1989: 21)

A socially engaged Buddhism needs no other rationale than that of being an amplification of traditional Buddhist morality, a social ethic brought forth by the needs and potentialities of present-day society. (1989: 194)

As all of the above passages indicate, the modernists’ views indeed seem to reflect a resurgence of Weberian thought. In support of his contention that “after eighty years of new research, many specialists are inclined to agree with Weber” (cf. p. 9), Queen quotes another one of these “specialists,” Richard Gombrich (apparently a stronger example than Bardwell Smith), who takes the strongest possible position:

[Buddha’s] concern was to reform individuals and help them to leave society forever, not to reform the world. … He never preached against social inequality, only declared its irrelevance to salvation. (Gombrich, as quoted by Queen, 1996: 17)

The modern world faces unprecedented socio-political problems

Another factor that modernists like to stress is how “unique” or “different” our modern circumstances and problems are. For example, in “To Enter the Marketplace,” Nelson Foster laments:

The ancient teachers did not live in a world as ruined and miserable and precarious as ours. We cannot know how they would have responded had they felt the urgency of the atomic age. (1988: 51)

Likewise, in “Speaking Truth to Power: The Buddhist Peace Fellowship,” Judith Simmer-Brown quotes BPF cofounder Aitken Rōshi as saying:

The Buddha did not live in a time like ours, when dangerous competition between nations threatens to blow up the world. He was not faced with the probability of biological holocaust. … I wonder what he would say today. (Aitken Rōshi, as quoted by Simmer-Brown, 2000: 81)(13)

In an excellent special issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1997: 65, no. 2) dedicated to Articles on the Theme of “Religious Responses to Problems of Population, Consumption, and Degradation of the Environment,” Rita Gross writes:

[T]he key question is what values and practices would convince people to consume and reproduce less when they have the technological ability to consume and reproduce more. The world’s religions have not previously faced this situation, which explains why ecological ethics have not been in the forefront of religious thinking in any tradition. (1997: 335)