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What is transcultural in Buddhism?
How much of Buddha’s teaching is a local phenomenon, tied to India’s culture and beliefs during Buddha’s time, and how much of it is universal and transcultural, applicable to all of us?
Buddha taught that nothing has an independent existence. The central tenet of Buddhism is Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda), which means everything arises (or disappears) together with other things. Note that this is very different from our common-sense notion of origination. We often think of causation as single-factored. But the Buddhist notion of causation is multi-factored and mutual causality. Instead of thinking in the simplistic term of single-factor and single-effect, what we have is an intricate web of causation. In this sense, all things are linked.
Buddhism (or Buddhist teaching) itself is no exception to this rule of Dependent Origination. If we study the history and sociology of religions, we will understand that none of the world religions arises all by itself. Each of these major religions receives influences from the other neighboring religions, and, in turn, it influences the other religions. Thus, Buddhism is a product of Buddha’s time and cultural environment. In particular, Buddhism can be viewed as an offshoot of its predecessor, which is Brahmanism, although there are also significant differences between the two.
