Best Of

If you can explain Dharma in English without using foreign language terms or even the word Buddhism, while making clear its obvious benefits, then you may have something that will catch on. I think that was the great benefit of mindfulness based stress relief, that it presented mindfulness as something new, fresh, without baggage and beneficial. And that is why many therapists got on the bandwagon and promoted it.

Idle interruptions from a zafu.

Yes the title of your thread is bombastically eye-catching but this is understandable from a marketing outlook when having to compete with a million other Buddhist books.

I certainly don't envy any Buddhist author on their new book launch on Buddhism's failures, trying to assert that no spiritual materialism was involved in the making of it, because no profit from it accrues to the author. Of course, fame itself is a profit that bests any material profit.

I do not know you personally, (although I have referred other seekers in the past to your site) and so am not accusing you of the above. I only marvel at how difficult a practicing exercise it must be to labor over such love without becoming entangled with its outcome.

From this zafu's view, the world is little more than a stage where karmic inertia continually arises and departs, from former states of congealing to their latter states of dissipation.
The Buddha only offered the means of lessening the attachments and corresponding sufferings that any actor might experience of this stage's karmic chaos.

Expecting Buddhism to be something more than that, or judging it by worldly views as a success or failure, can be a classical defense of one's own spiritual materialism.

Vows can be just as bombastic but in the end, are simply an expressed hope of furthering selflessness over selfishness. I think that the quantifying of such balances are better left to the practitioner observing themself than to the world as a whole. I remind myself sometimes of all that the Buddha chose not to teach about because he said it just didn't apply to ones walk along the path towards suffering's cessation.

In Gassho

Maybe your claim is intentionally sensational to grab attention? In my mind I was asking, what is the counterfactual? What would the world have been if there was no Buddhism? Its an unanswerable question.

My other main thought was this may be a pitfall of transferring the Dharma to the west. The western mind tends to be more externally directed. Buddhism is an internally driven path. Judging the success of Buddhism by how much of a pure land our world is, I think, misses the mark.

I also worry about becoming authoritarian in the pursuit of perfecting the world. If people don't willingly go along with your plan to make their lives better, how much will you compel them "for their own good"?

I think Jon Kabat-Zinn's work in bringing meditation to the masses has been a powerful move in this direction. Also, I've long followed the Dalai Lama and his meeting with scientists in the Mind and Life conferences. I think that is also a way Buddhism has made efforts at easing the suffering in the world.

I think what is getting under people's skins here is the "Buddhism has failed" slogan. In my opinion its hyperbolic and a symptom of a problem in the culture at large, that of sensationalism and playing to our baser emotions.

A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement.

She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!”

The girl seemed crushed, suddenly deflated. But after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied,

“Well, I made a difference for that one!”

@Jundo said:
But I do not believe that the mission and Vow to rescue all sentient beings, though numberless, is yet done. Do not only look "internally," but outwardly too ... beyond in or out.

I think you can’t rescue those who don’t want to be rescued. The most you can do is make sure they know of the possibility of inner peace and freedom. Many people are too busy living the lives that society sets out for them — partner, house, children, career — and they don’t even know of the Dharma.

Certainly it’s always going to be the case that some portion of the population is going to choose not to engage with the Dharma, and so you could say that the mission to rescue all sentient beings is a never ending treadmill. If you look at the Christians they have a long history with proselytising and missionary work, and they work on the desire for pleasure (“heaven”) and the fear of pain (“hell”), and many of those people aren’t necessarily benefitted by a new religion.

The Dalai Lama once said, “don’t become a Buddhist, but become a better whatever-you-are”. He doesn’t feel that the only path to inner peace and freedom is through the Dharma. People becoming Buddhist may separate them from their family who think they are no longer ‘saved’. The whole impulse to rescue people is suspect.

I watched the whole video. The premise here seems to be that there aren't enough Buddhists in the world, despite all those centuries of vigorous bead twirling, so Buddhism is a failure. But it's going to be OK, maybe, because now there are iPhones, and also we can buy this new book.

$

Whether selling your book on this site is appropriate is for others to determine, but I do have a few questions. Let's say there are some 500 million Buddhists inhabiting the planet. Maybe that's not enough. But there are fewer than 1 million physicists. Is physics therefore a failure? Is it failing 500 times worse than Buddhism is? Should we try to sell more physics books?

Is spreading to more and more people the measure of success? I think it might be a more useful metric of "success" for cancer than for Buddhism.

Lest this sound flippant, I am actually perfectly sincere in the perspective I'm presenting. Our amazing world is rich rich rich in ideas, the ideas within Buddhism being among them. To me, success is ACCESS to those ideas. Think about it: Buddhism has been preserved and amplified over the centuries. Centuries! Seriously, that's a miracle to me. We don't have to all adopt Buddhism. But if we'd never heard of it and couldn't explore it and think about it and incorporate the parts we find inspiring or useful, then THAT would be a failure.

Peace, brother.

After some years away, I come back to see a statement the "Buddhism has failed". As far as I can tell, failure can only arise when some sort of success is aimed at. What, I wonder, is the "successful outcome" enshrined in the Dharma? As far as I can see - and my vision is, admittedly, limited, any such outcome is personal. It cannot "fail", it can only carry on from here until rebirth ends.
I hope that an image from Christian iconography does not offend but I am reminded of the Stations of the Cross where Jesus falls over and over. The point is that he gets up again.

I actually watched and listened to you @Jundo I have a few thoughts....

Buddhism is not a proselytising religion. And as I have experienced in my life, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. Also the Buddha said himself not to take him at his word but to test his teachings for ourselves. That in itself highlights that Buddhism is NOT a salvation based path and let's face it, a huge chunk of society want the easy way out. Many people just don't want to do the work. We can't force them to.

And let's face it monotheism has been around a lot longer and they still can't figure it out. Monotheism started with Judaism 5875 years ago, followed a few thousand years later by Christianity and then Islam about 1600 years later. One only has to look at the current war to see how that's going.

I hear the frustration in your voice, I GET IT. I really do. Even HH The Dalai Lama has said if science proves something wrong about Buddhism, then Buddhism has to change. It sounds like you want Buddhism to start proselytising and I don't think that would work at all.

Maybe I've misunderstood you and if so I'm willing to be corrected.

Dukkha has 3 levels. The gross level is what I think most people think of when they think of suffering. So hearing the term suffering without an understanding of what a Buddhist means by the term will lead to a wrong view.

1. The suffering of suffering
   This is the one we’re all familiar with: the pain of birth, old age, sickness, and death, as the Buddha described it.

2. The suffering of change
   When you do get what you want, you can’t hold onto it. Even if things are going great now, it’s just a matter of time. The richest, most successful person in the world will eventually lose it all (see 1).

3. All-pervasive suffering
   This is the type of suffering we are most likely not to recognize, yet the most instructive when we do. It’s the general background of anxiety and insecurity that colors even our happiest moments. Deep down, we fear that life doesn’t offer us solid ground and that our very existence is questionable. From a Buddhist point of view, these doubts are well-founded, and exploring them offers us glimpses of wisdom.

https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism-by-the-numbers-the-three-kinds-of-suffering/