According to Robert Thurman, certain Mahayana texts reveal the outlines of a society that is “individualistic, transcendentalist, pacifist, universalist, and socialist.” Carried to an extreme, such interpretations envision an ideal Buddhism too far removed from its actual historical development. But the thrust of the argument is constructive: to show that the Buddhist tradition contains untapped resources for skillful social action and peacemaking, accessible to Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. (1992: 13)

Here, of course, the implication is that Thurman has carried his interpretation to an idealistic, ahistorical extreme (he has “read back,” in Jones’s terms)—for, as we saw above, he certainly does not maintain that the Buddhist tradition contains merely “untapped resources for skillful social action.”

Modern Western socio-political theory can be used to activate Buddhism’s latent potential to create a new amalgam: Western/Buddhist social engagement

Having thus dismissed traditionists’ views as naïve and reconstructionist, and having emphasized the unprecedented uniqueness of our contemporary problems, modernists finally stress the uniqueness and “modern-ness” (and “Western-ness”) of their solution, “engaged Buddhism.” So, with regard to this “nascent movement” (1988: xii), Kraft beams: “Qualities that were inhibited in pre-modern Asian settings … can now be actualized through Buddhism’s exposure to the West, where ethical sensitivity, social activism, and egalitarianism are emphasized” (1988: xiii). (16) Nelson Foster reflects and magnifies this confident beaming, producing an image of a Western Zen permeated with an excited anticipation of what could be:

Fortunately, prajña itself does not die, and as long as zazen and realization are taught, an opportunity exists to renew the tradition we inherited. Indeed, as Zen moves west again, it enters a relatively open environment that may allow the sangha to live out its politics to a greater extent than ever before. With external constraints amounting to little more than the loose demands of neighborly courtesy and local ordinances, American Zen seems free to develop according to the lights of prajña. […]
Already American sanghas can be seen shattering some of the strictures that have bound Zen in Asia. (1988: 51-52)

In fact, Foster does not merely think that such a development might occur—rather, he considers the Western “environment” to be so optimal that the “organic development of Western Zen” is “inevitable.” (1988: 56).

In “The Impact of Christianity on Buddhist Nonviolence in the West,” Cynthia Eller writes in a similar vein:

Buddhism in the West is in constant interaction with the Judeo-Christian tradition—if only because most of its practitioners were raised in homes and/or a culture dominated by these religions. … When the search for a genuinely Buddhist nonviolence is filtered through the latent demands of predominantly Christian conscience, what emerges is a new Buddhism and a new Buddhist ethics, no less valid than the many new Buddhisms that have been produced in the 2,500 years of the Dharma’s movement eastward around the globe. (1992: 91)

Likewise, Robert Aitken Rōshi traced the roots of contemporary engaged Buddhism to the Judeo-Christian West when in 1984 he wrote, “We do not find Buddhist social movements developing until the late nineteenth century, under the influence of Christianity and Western ideas generally.”(17) Queen is even more specific about the origins of this modern East-West blend. He maintains that it is only “once we have rejected two extremes of historical reconstruction” (cf. above, p. 14) that “we recognize that the shape and style of contemporary engaged Buddhism does not appear in Buddhist history until about the year 1880” (1996: 20). In particular, he states:

It is only in the late nineteenth-century revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka—and particularly in … Olcott … and … Dharmapala—that we first recognize the spirit and substance of the religious activism we call “socially engaged Buddhism.” And it is only in this context that we first meet the missing ingredient. … This ingredient is the influence of European and American religious and political thought (and perhaps equally important, western methods of institutional development and public communication) on the evolution of modern Buddhism. (1996: 20)

Thus he concludes that in fact such an engaged Buddhism is necessarily an “amalgam of Eastern and Western elements” (1996: 31). (We will be returning to these arguments in the section on Queen, et al., and in the conclusion.)