Branding a New Buddhist Movement: The New Kadampa Tradition's Self- Identification as "Modern Buddhism"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the New Kadampa Tradition's North American missionary deployment of the epithet "Modern Buddhism" in publicity, text, and teaching. I argue that while "Modern Buddhism" branding supports the NKT's international growth by promoting its founder's teachings as universally accessible and not Tibetan, those teachings are more continuous with traditional Geluk doctrine than with David McMahan's (2008) portrayal of Buddhist modernism. Specifically, I find minimal evidence of detraditionalization, demythologization, and psychologization in the NKT founder's 2011 book Modern Buddhism and in public meditation instruction derived therefrom at a Canadian NKT center. My findings locate the NKT's deployment of the "Modern Buddhism" brand within a graduated missionizing strategy that combines promotional modernism and pedagogical traditionalism to attract North American non-Buddhists by offering culturally desired, this-worldly benefits (e.g., stress reduction) followed by less familiar, other-worldly Buddhist goals (e.g., happiness in future lives).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".