American Buddhist Tradition: The work of the Tibetan Preliminary Practices

This paper takes up the well-worn debate over Buddhist modernism from the perspective of its neglected shadow: Buddhist tradition. Can contemporary American Buddhists – particularly white converts in meditation-based sanghas, the proverbial epicenter of Buddhist modernism – ever be “traditional” (as opposed to merely “traditionalistic”)? What would that mean? Based on ongoing ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and analysis of liturgical and commentarial literature passing between English and Tibetan, I argue that the Tibetan Buddhist preliminary practices (ngondro) work to form Buddhist subjects with a visceral sense of tradition (Bourdieu 1977, 124), binding together cosmologies, bodily postures, ethical commitments, emotional habits, and sacralized relationships. This “tradition” is neither an ahistorical essence already out there in the world nor a shallow rhetorical posture batting ineffectually at the rupture of modernity: it is one possible effect of human labor and desire. For American converts engaged in the preliminary practices, both tradition and modernity are live orientations, “ways of being in the world” (Orsi 2005, 51) in a fraught and often tragic relationship to one another.

In constructing the analytical category of “Buddhist modernism,” David McMahan and others have positioned America as one focal point for “a new Buddhism” (Coleman 2001) shaped by the “nonnegotiable elements of modernity to which Buddhism has conformed” (McMahan 2008, 8) As I have argued elsewhere, “modern” Buddhists – a label which sticks to white Americans more readily than others – are depicted as the protagonists of the temporal march of progress, and as fundamentally different types of subjects: more agentive, more mobile, able to cast off culture like old clothes; a confirming loop which shows us the Buddhisms we most desire to see (McLaughlin 2019). In recent years, the debate has grown much more sophisticated, as “scholars of contemporary Buddhism have demolished any static, essentialist, and linear notion of modernity and illuminated the numerous ways that modernity and tradition are culturally constructed and context dependent” (Gleig 2019, 283), interrogating the racist and colonial frameworks beneath the very question of “American Buddhism” (Quli 2009; Hickey 2010; Cheah 2011; McNicholl 2018; Han 2021). Such work has allowed us to reconceive Buddhism in the United States as a contested and often painful multiplicity, rather than a linear arc towards secularized modernity. It is the pain I am concerned with here. As Robert Orsi puts it, “While it is true that there is a ‘plurality of imaginary worlds’ in contemporary global culture, of different ways of being and imagining, these disparate realities are not equal, and moving from one to the other provokes anxiety and disorientation” (Orsi 2013, 10).

This paper attends to one such movement. For at least the past several centuries, the preliminary practices have been an obligatory prerequisite for further tantric study and practice across the Tibetan Buddhist world. As a daily ritual, the standard preliminaries consist of internalizing four common Buddhist principles (the rarity of a human birth, the inevitability of impermanence and death, the inescapable causality of karma, and the pervasiveness of suffering in samsara) and performing five ritual acts (taking refuge, giving rise to bodhicitta, offering a mandala, making confession, and cultivating devotion to the tantric guru). To complete the preliminaries as a rite of passage, the practitioner must repeat the recitations (along with physical prostrations and symbolic offerings) associated with these steps a hundred thousand times each, a process which takes countless hours over months or years. Despite their pervasive influence on Tibetan Buddhist life both in Tibet and the diaspora, the preliminaries have attracted almost no sustained scholarly attention (for exceptions, see Pickens 2022; Fitzgerald 2020), and none whatsoever in an American context. My ongoing dissertation research includes interviews with practitioners (mostly white converts) in the network of sanghas founded by Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (1930-2002) about their practice of the preliminaries, as well as participation in retreats and translation of liturgical and commentarial literature. In my interviews, the categories of modern and traditional religion come up often and unprompted, but not in the guise which literature on Buddhist modernism would lead us to expect.

The point of the preliminary practices is to change you, and such change entails, or perhaps requires, difficulty (Fitzgerald 2020, 2). My interlocutors have repeatedly compared undertaking the preliminaries to learning a new language (occasionally literally), or being born in a new world. The technicolor imagined landscapes of tantric meditation, populated by Buddhas and guardian spirits, demand new affects: horror at the futility of samsara, regret for new categories of transgression, longing and devotion for the guru. A baffled conversion story predominates: I was an individualistic American with no time for this hellfire and brimstone tantric obedience stuff, but then I threw myself on my bedroom carpet a hundred thousand times, vowing to attain awakening for the sake of all sentient beings. And? As one interviewee put it, “at the time, I had no idea what I was doing. But looking back ten years later, I’m not the same person.” 

By the end of their preliminaries, my interlocutors find themselves bound – often so subtly they did not notice it happening – into the network of relationships, affects, and orientations which make up their particular Tibetan Buddhist lineage. With its ritual obligations, nonhuman presences, and totalizing priorities, this world is erased by the “regulative ideal” of modern religion (Josephson 2017, 3). It is also not always easy to inhabit. The formation process of the preliminaries routinely triggers the religious, familial, and sexual trauma of the converts I have spoken to; it leaves them in an uneasy relationship with their past selves and the other worlds in which they must make a living. When they turn to the epistemic regimes of modernist religion – therapeutic models of selfhood, suspicion of hierarchical authority, emphasis on hybridity and “invented tradition” – my interlocutors gain some things and lose others. The stakes of such decisions are only visible if we set aside the rupture of modernity and take Buddhist tradition seriously as a living possibility.