On the Reception of Buddhism in Modern Western Culture

Abstract

The subject of the paper is Glenn Wallis’ book “A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real” published in 2019 Wallis, having analyzed the texts of proponents of Buddhist teaching in the West, demonstrates that “Western Buddhism” is in fact a product of the Western culture itself – an answer to ideological challenges to the modern West, but an answer given in the terms and images of Buddhist teaching, though radically reinterpreted. Wallis analyses the ideologies of the Western Buddhism using the terms of J. Lacan’s psychoanalysis where the term “Real” denotes all that is independent of a subject’s mind. From this point of view Buddhist “Real”, viz. the concepts and ideas elaborated in the religious and philosophical schools of Indian, Tibetan and Far Eastern Buddhism are eliminated in Western Buddhism and replaced by the conceptions whose aim is to support economic and political status quo of the Western society.