Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism

Donald S. Lopez Jr. — the West’s leading scholar of Buddhism, co-editor of The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism — joins Tyler Cowen for a rapid-fire survey of Buddhist theology, history, and the West’s long history of misreading it: the Buddha’s omniscience and death, the invented ‘peaceful religion’ of the 19th century, the Dalai Lama’s fragile succession, and why an American Theosophist from New Jersey gave the world the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’.

Key ideas

1. ‘Peaceful, rational Buddhism’ is a 19th-century Western invention. European and, later, Asian reformers built the popular image of Buddhism as a peaceful, empirically-minded philosophy compatible with reason and science — largely in reaction to European colonialism and a search for a ‘religion of reason’ that avoided Christian doctrine. The historical record instead shows Buddhist armies, Buddhist monks serving as wartime chaplains, and centuries of Buddhist states waging war on each other. See Buddhist Modernism.
2. Buddhism replaces God with karma, not with nothing. There is no creator deity and no one to petition, but the universe is not amoral: karma — literally ‘action’ — makes virtue and harm generate their own future consequences without a governing agent. This lets Buddhism explain suffering and injustice (the theodicy problem) without theism, while still populating a full cosmology of heavens, hells, ghosts, and wrathful deities that everyone cycles through across lifetimes.
3. Theosophy invented ‘mystical Tibet’ for the West — and the Tibetan Book of the Dead with it. The most famous ‘ancient’ Tibetan text in Western culture was rather randomly assembled: an American Theosophist, Walter Evans-Wentz (born Walt Wentz, of Trenton, New Jersey), had a text translated in 1920s Sikkim and wrapped it in framing borrowed from his enthusiasm for the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Tibet’s status as the one Asian region never fully colonised made it the last available screen for this kind of Western projection — the same impulse behind Shangri-La and Lost Horizon.
4. Buddhism’s institutional decline tracks the decline of monarchy, not doctrine. Buddhist monasticism has always depended on royal or state patronage — monks may not till soil or handle money — so the near-universal collapse of monarchies removed its patron class. Thailand, still a functioning monarchy that actively supports the Sangha, is both the exception to Buddhism’s global decline and the wealthiest Buddhist-majority country.
5. The Dalai Lama succession is a structurally fragile, genuinely random process — that happened to work. A tulku (incarnate lama) succession means 20–25 years between a Dalai Lama’s death and an installed successor, ruled meanwhile by a regent; several Dalai Lamas were likely poisoned by their own regents. Lopez rates the current, 14th Dalai Lama as one of the institution’s strongest — a good outcome from what is, by design, closer to a lottery than a selection process.

Content

Buddhist theology on its own terms

Cowen opens inside the tradition’s own claims before questioning them historically. The Buddha’s knowledge is total: all past, present, and future, including the minds of every being in the universe — he knows the next Buddha, Maitreya, is coming, by name, roughly six billion years hence, per the elaborate Buddhist system of cosmic time (kalpas and aeons). Buddhist art gives him 32 major and 80 minor bodily marks — a tongue that covers his face, webbed fingers, arms long enough to touch his knees standing up — which Lopez partly explains through art-historical accident: Greco-Roman marble carvers left stone between fingers to stop them snapping off, and some viewers of similar statuary may have read that convention as literal webbing.

His death is traditionally attributed to dysentery (‘red flows’) following a meal from a low-caste blacksmith host, but the tradition frames this as one of the two most sacred meals a Buddha ever receives (alongside his pre-enlightenment meal), not a misfortune requiring explanation. More strikingly, the canonical account has the Buddha predict his own death three months in advance, after his attendant Ananda fails three separate times to properly ask him to extend his life span to a full aeon — turning an infection into a chosen relinquishment of life force rather than an accident.

Karma stands in for divine justice throughout: there is no creator deity, no one to ask a Buddha to keep living, and no blood sacrifice — but the universe is still, in Lopez’s phrase, ‘naturally ethical’. Virtuous and non-virtuous acts generate future happiness or suffering on their own, across a beginningless cycle of rebirth through six realms (god, demigod, human, animal, ghost, hell-being), including an elaborate system of eight hot and eight cold hells and ‘hungry ghosts’ whose food turns to weapons and whose water turns to molten lead on contact — one of the standing duties of Buddhist monks and nuns is ritually feeding them. Nirvana itself is explained through fire: not a place, but cessation — a flame does not travel anywhere when it goes out, the fuel is simply exhausted.

How the West invented the ‘peaceful religion’

The conversation’s spine is a historiographical correction. Into the 19th century, Europeans sorted the world’s religions into four boxes — Christians, Jews, Muslims, and ‘idolaters’ — and Buddhists fell in the last. The 19th century’s real innovation was carving ‘idolaters’ into discrete named religions ending in ‘-ism’: Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism. The mechanism was British colonial access to Sanskrit texts in India, combined with the discovery that Sanskrit shares roots with Greek and Latin — a ‘Sanskrit craze’ that swept French, British, and German intellectuals, many of them atheist or anti-Catholic and actively searching for a ‘religion of reason’ that Buddhist texts were then cast to supply.

The resulting popular image — Buddhism as uniquely peaceful, rational, almost proto-scientific — does not survive contact with the historical record: Buddhist monks served as chaplains on the battlefield through the Second World War, and Buddhist history includes centuries of Buddhist armies and Buddhist states waging war on one another and on non-Buddhists alike. This is the specific scholarly territory Lopez has built a career critiquing; see Buddhist Modernism for the fuller concept.

A related and more extravagant Western invention is Theosophy’s ‘mystical Tibet’. The most famous ‘ancient’ Tibetan text in Western popular culture, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a terma — a Tibetan genre of texts claimed to have been buried by early Indian teachers for later miraculous rediscovery, used to grant a text Indian authenticity without an actual manuscript chain from India. Its Western fame traces to one specific and rather ordinary act of authorship: Walter Evans-Wentz, an American Theosophist born Walt Wentz in Trenton, New Jersey (he hyphenated his name to sound more British), had the text translated by a local schoolteacher in 1920s Sikkim and then wrapped it in Theosophical framing borrowed from his prior enthusiasm for the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Madame Blavatsky’s parallel claims — ‘Mahatmas’ relocated from Atlantis to Tibet (the source of Mahatma Gandhi’s honorific), a supposed audience with the Panchen Lama, a wholly fictitious ‘Senzar’ language — fed the same broader romance: Tibet, alone among Asian regions never fully colonised, became the last available screen for Western projections of Asian mysticism, the same impulse behind Lost Horizon’s Shangri-La.

Lopez is equally sceptical of the popular ‘Axial Age’ trope (Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Zoroaster all clustering in the same era as evidence of a special epoch of religious blossoming): the Buddha’s dates are too uncertain, Confucius’s actual teachings are poorly attested, and Laozi is probably not a historical figure at all — the pattern, on the Asian side at least, does not survive scrutiny.

Sects, canon, and the question of authority

Buddhism split early into traditions that each regard the other as at least partly illegitimate. Theravada Buddhism (Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia) follows the Pali Canon and regards the later Mahayana sutras — composed from roughly the start of the common era, dominant in China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Nepal, and Vietnam — as texts the historical Buddha never spoke. Mahayana traditions accept both bodies of text and consider themselves the more inclusive ‘great vehicle’, while regarding Theravada as having rejected higher teachings. Lopez is candid that, from a scholarly rather than a devotional standpoint, the Mahayana sutras were not taught by the historical Buddha — their self-description as ‘greater’ is the tradition’s own advertisement.

Zen Buddhism cannot be traced to India at all: its founding legend (the Buddha wordlessly holding up a flower, transmitted mind-to-mind down to Bodhidharma, who brought it to China) rests on a figure who probably never existed. Even its name is an accident of transliteration — Sanskrit jhāna (meditation) became Chinese chán, pronounced zen in Japanese.

With no central authority — ‘there’s no pope’ — the question of who can settle doctrinal disputes has always been locally answered (a Dalai Lama, a monastery’s abbots) and is increasingly unanswered as teaching migrates to YouTube from every Buddhist tradition simultaneously. Lopez also flags a live development: AI-assisted translation, discussed at a recent Berkeley conference he attended, may within five years make most of the still-untranslated Buddhist canon accessible for the first time.

Institutional decline, and the Dalai Lama’s improbable durability

Buddhism has receded sharply as a majority tradition — vanished from India and Java, falling in Japan and Korea per a 2025 Pew study Lopez cites, with China’s trajectory unclear. His explanation is political and economic rather than doctrinal: monastic Buddhism has always depended on royal or state patronage, since monks may not till soil or handle money, and the collapse of monarchies worldwide removed that patron class. Thailand — still a functioning monarchy that actively supports the Sangha — is both the exception to the decline and the wealthiest Buddhist-majority country, a correlation Lopez treats as causal rather than coincidental. He has no comparably tidy explanation for why Borobudur, one of the most spectacular Buddhist monuments in the world, was simply abandoned to jungle in Java rather than repurposed: ‘I don’t have a good answer to that.’

The Tibetan Dalai Lama institution shows how fragile a working succession system can be while still, occasionally, working well. A tulku (incarnate-lama) succession means 20–25 years between a Dalai Lama’s death and an installed adult successor, governed meanwhile by a regent — several Dalai Lamas were likely poisoned by their own regents, and the sixth Dalai Lama abdicated rather than keep his vow of celibacy. Lopez rates the fifth (who became Tibet’s temporal ruler in 1642) and the current 14th Dalai Lama as the institution’s strongest outcomes — an outcome he agrees is essentially random, closer to a lottery than a selection process, that happened to land well twice.

Becoming the West’s leading Buddhist scholar

Lopez’s own path illustrates how narrow the pipeline into serious Buddhist scholarship still is. All three of his degrees came from the University of Virginia, where an undergraduate-year hiring of a Tibetan Buddhism specialist redirected him away from an intended career as a Shakespeare scholar. A 1978–79 Fulbright year in a South Indian Tibetan monastery — re-established there after the 1959 exile, and reduced from a Tibetan population of 10,000 monks to roughly 300 — left him the only non-Tibetan resident, forced to learn spoken Tibetan, and taught privately by the monastery’s most senior abbots. He frames the choice partly generationally: coming of age around the Tet Offensive, the Kennedy and King assassinations, and Kent State produced, in his cohort, a belief that Western civilisation had exhausted itself and a corresponding — in retrospect naive — turn toward ‘the mystic East’.

The resulting scholarship includes The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, over a thousand pages, written entirely (not merely edited) by Lopez and his colleague Robert Buswell over roughly a decade, now the field’s standard reference. He closes on a discipline in genuine crisis: declining religion-department jobs across the American academy are making it hard for his own graduate students to find academic positions, whatever their dedication — and his own next project, tentatively Buddhism and Business: A Brief History, is paired with a wish to move Buddhist stories into film, drama, and radio rather than relying on the declining book form.

Related

• Donald S. Lopez Jr. — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Buddhist Modernism — the 19th-century Western reconstruction of Buddhism as rational and peaceful, the episode’s central critical thread
• Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts — a comparable Cowen conversation on the internal history of a major religious tradition