I am a practitioner of my time. My natural home might be secular humanism, but I feel that it fails to honour any spiritual dimension to life and thus lacks true depth.

Within the range of the various Buddhist schools or movements, there are multiple options available à la carte for an independent practitioner to choose between. On a quick review, that range includes (as though on a timeline):

1. Theravāda (3rd c. BCE – Present): The ‘Way of the Elders.’ Conservative, focuses on the Pāli Canon, individual liberation, and disciplined monastic life. Dominant in SE Asia.
2. Mahāyāna (1st c. BCE – Present): The ‘Great Vehicle.’ Prioritises universal salvation, the Bodhisattva ideal (helping all beings), and the concept of emptiness (śūnyatā). Dominant in East Asia.
3. Vajrayāna (5th c. CE – Present): The ‘Diamond Vehicle.’ An esoteric extension of Mahāyāna using tantric rituals, mantras, and deity visualisation to accelerate the path to Buddhahood.
4. Buddhist Modernism (Late 19th c. – Present): Reinterprets Buddhism through science, rationality, and social activism, often de-emphasising supernatural elements in favour of psychological health.
5. Secular Buddhism (1960s – Present): A naturalistic movement that treats the Buddha’s teachings as a philosophy or ethical system for human flourishing, typically rejecting karma and rebirth, and astonishingly, awakening itself.

I’m not formally aligned to any tradition, and practise independently. That brings its own challenges, because it’s fertile ground for self-delusion and indulgence. I feel close to many aspects of Zen practice, but can’t take some of the baggage, not least the cultural baggage. I could make an obvious pact with Modernism: it’s targeted at people like me, but its concerns seem ‘presentational’, as though embarrassment obliges it to play down some of the traditional supernatural truth claims, without seeming to have anything to put in their place, except a nod to scientific supremacy, and meditation becoming personal psychological ‘hygiene’. It seems incoherent.

I once thought I could find a home in secular Buddhism, but I realise that it and I are travelling in opposite directions. In need of a label, I alternate between thinking of myself as an Agnostic Buddhist or a Buddhist Agnostic. This is where I find my own seat. I reject the ‘hollowed-out’ certainties of the secularists, but I struggle with the literal metaphysics of the traditionalists. I sit with the tensions of ‘not knowing’ and ‘Great Doubt,’ using agnosticism as a method, not an excuse.

Mapping these schools isn’t an exercise in judgment; it’s an attempt to find where my own practice can actually breathe. I look at the traditionalist’s certainty and the secularist’s neatly packaged convenience, and I find that I am left in the space ‘between’ — a position that feels like a necessity rather than a choice. It is a seat with a high overhead and no institutional safety net, where the responsibility to be ‘judge and jury’ falls entirely on me. In the next piece, I’ll explore why this particular, uncomfortable ground is the only place I can honestly practice.

Two – Reflections

1. Ground (11 Mar)
   • Setting out the ground you stand on: a rational, modern Buddhist who respects tradition without swallowing it whole, takes experience as primary, and treats logic as a safeguard. Neither traditionalist nor secular reductionist – just honest about the position from which you practise.
2. Line (25 Mar)
   • Tracing the line of your own practice: not fully traditional, not fully secular, but somewhere between. You weigh the major Buddhist schools, reject both rigid certainty and hollow modernism, and settle into agnostic practice – a seat with no safety net, where “not knowing” becomes the method.
3. Between (8 Apr)
   • Looking at the major Buddhist schools, you reject both institutional weight and secular revisionism. You take a middle seat – not indecisive, but honest – using Not Knowing, Great Doubt, and Huxleyan agnosticism as checks and balances. You practise without lineage, holding tradition lightly and refusing easy certainties; “between” is simply the only place you can stand without lying to yourself.
4. Practice (22 Apr)
   • A clear outline of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, seen through a modern, experiential lens. You describe how calm abiding steadies the mind, how insight arises from stillness, and how Theravāda and Zen offer different routes to the same clarity. Awakening isn’t dramatic – it’s ordinary mind seen clearly, right where you sit.
5. Truths (6 May)
   • A clear look at Buddhism’s Two Truths: the conventional and the ultimate, not as separate realms but as two ways of seeing the same reality. You follow Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way, showing how the sacred shines through the ordinary, how doctrines fall away, and how emptiness means relationality, not void. Different traditions rhyme here – the ultimate quietly present in the everyday, recognised when concepts loosen, and immediacy is allowed to speak.