In “The Fourth Turning of the Wheel,” Vince Horn traces the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma from early Buddhism to Tibetan Vajrayana, then argues we’re living through new turnings right now—the modern, postmodern, and metamodern waves of Buddhist practice—and asks what it takes to hold them all.
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💬 Transcript
Vince: So Modern Buddhisms — this title’s really in part inspired by my time at Naropa University. I should just say that up front, because being there for about four years or so in the mid-aughts really influenced me as a Dharma practitioner and then later as a teacher. When I started teaching, of course, my view had already been really molded and shaped in the halls of Naropa, you could say.
Naropa was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who’s quite both famous and infamous for his influence on American Dharma. When I was a student at Naropa, one of the core offerings in the Religious Studies department, which is where I spent most of my time and where I got my degree, was called the First Turning, the Second Turning, and the Third Turning — the Turnings.
There was a class on each one of them. I took the First Turning with Judith Simmer-Brown, who was an acharya, a teacher in that lineage, and a professor at Naropa. And it was cool to really learn in an in-depth way over six, seven months — a college class, you’re writing papers and reading a stack of books — in more depth about the tradition that I was in love with.
And seeing it from the point of view, in this case, of this Tibetan model called the Three Turnings. As I said, Chogyam Trungpa was Tibetan, so this model was influential and informed a lot of the curriculum at Naropa. The Tibetan model of the Three Turnings emerges later in the evolution and history of Buddhism.
So to talk about modern Buddhisms, we of course have to talk about historical Buddhisms too. We can’t just skip to the modern era — unless we’re being really hyper-modern, then we would. Then we’d be like, “Oh, yeah, it all began today. Here we are.” No. We’re going to actually kind of try to trace this back a little bit.
And of course, this is such a huge area, with so much history and so many people involved, and I’m going to totally do it injustice by compressing things and making big, broad points and claims. So I just want to kind of apologize for that upfront. It’s kind of one of the things you unfortunately have to do to talk about a topic that’s so broad and make any sense at all, I think.
So I’m going to try to make some sense without shredding apart reality here too badly. The way I understand it, and understood it then at Naropa, is that early Buddhism starts with the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Northern India, Nepal — modern-day Nepal. And there’s a particular kind of flavor to that early Buddhist philosophy, even as it starts to become diversified into many different schools.
There were, like, 17 schools of early Buddhism intact at one point in India, just kind of all competing for meme share. And what we have now that’s kind of extant, that’s currently evolved from there, is just one of those 17 schools that came through: the Theravada school of early Buddhism.
They called it the Path of the Elders, which is where most of my teachers had trained, in that lineage. This becomes known as early Buddhism, or what the Tibetans would later call the first turning of the wheel — the First Turning dharma. And why is it called the first turning? Because this is when the Buddha first taught his unique approach — what we call Buddhism now.
And the wheel represents the teachings that the Buddha gave, the core of the teachings, which are the Noble Eightfold Path, sometimes compressed down to or simplified as the three trainings, the Threefold Training. The Threefold Training in what? In Ethics or Morality or Virtue, in Concentration, Meditation, and in Insight, Wisdom.
These are the things that the Buddha taught, and this is the unique collection of trainings that made it Buddish. This is how you know the Buddish pattern, when you see these eight represented as the Threefold Training and this sort of unique constellation and specific ways of looking at things.
In the Eightfold Path, we have two in particular that are quite important here, which are Right Intention and Right View. This is how we see and do the thing. This is how we’re seeing and doing it.
So in early Buddhism there’s a particular view and intention that goes along with that view. The intention is to put an end to suffering. And the view is that it’s possible. Suffering does exist, but it’s possible to experience a cessation of suffering. The end of dukkha.
And there’s a path that you follow to do that called the Eightfold Path. This is the view of early Buddhism.
You’re stuck in samsara and there is freedom. It’s called nirvana. You can get out. You can have an experience of freedom. Later Buddhists don’t disagree on this point — they just disagree, I would say, on how far to extend it and how much to fall in love with our concepts about what’s happening here.
The Second Turning — I remember at the very end of the First Turning course I took with Judith Simmer-Brown at Naropa, she basically delivered the big rug pull after learning all these models, the Four Noble Truths and the 12 Links of Codependent Origination — I mean, model after model after model.
We’re just learning and reading texts and learning. And at the end she says, “In the next course, the second turning, they’re going to come through” — and just kind of point. And we read The Heart Sutra, and she’s like, “They’re going to point out that the problem with this whole edifice of early Buddhism is that people fell in love with their concepts and wanted to try to explain everything.”
That’s what the Abhidhamma ends up becoming — this attempt to describe how everything is related. We’re going to describe and map the entire world of interdependent phenomena and describe everything in detail. And there was something about that that was problematic, which was the freezing or the reifying of that, and it said, no.
Basically, like, no. This is not the move. And it negated that in a way that was meant to de-reify that tendency to kind of build mental sandcastles and to believe that our thoughts are the things that are real. And early Buddhism has this built in, in a way, because the early Buddhists say, “Here’s the right view. This is the way you need to understand things.”
And that is an understanding of early Buddhism. You want to download this view and understand things this way. Practice in a way that you see that this is true — the three characteristics of experience. You want to see impermanence, see selflessness, see all this stuff.
But the problem there is you’re taking the view quite seriously. It’s like, this is the right view. If you get too attached to your view — in the Second Turning, there’s a recognition that this becomes problematic, and we can describe this as emptiness: to let go of your fixed views.
To realize, oh, this is more open and fluid. So the second turning emerges. It’s described in terms of non-duality of samsara and nirvana and the emptiness of views — of not believing there’s some thing over there called nirvana that’s separate from this experience of samsara. Cosmological dualism. Oh, no, that’s a problem.
If that’s really true, we’ve got a problem here. The Second Turning releases the problem by pointing out that the problem is fixed dualistic thinking. Ah. Okay. Now we’re in the realm of non-duality. The view here shifts from the three characteristics in the First Turning — the Second Turning is about Emptiness and Interdependence. Compassion is just as important as wisdom in the second turning. I remember Shinzen Young explaining this in a way that really struck me. He said, “In the Second Turning, in Mahayana Zen, compassion has equal precedent — it’s equally important to wisdom.”
In the first turning, wisdom was still kind of more important. It’s like an absolute teaching, and then you have the relative brahmavihāras, and there’s this sort of ranking where wisdom is kind of the highest. Here, it’s like, no, these are two dimensions of the same realization, or the same awakening. Bodhicitta. One awakening heart-mind. So, to me, this is like a correction. This is an evolution, right? And this is how it’s kind of explained in later Buddhism. This is an evolution of the tradition. What’s so interesting about the Third Turning teachings in Tibetan Buddhism to me is that they understand their own tradition as having what we would now call evolved.
They didn’t use that word, evolve, and maybe they have a different understanding of it than I do. But it’s so interesting to me that they see the revolutions of the turnings. I love John Vervaeke — he’s a scholar and a cognitive behavioral therapist and psychologist at the University of Toronto.
He says, “Evolution is revolution with change.” That’s the way he defines evolution. Well, the turnings are just this revolving wheel of people understanding Buddhism in new ways, in different ways over time, over a thousand plus years, two thousand plus years. The three turnings model in a sense is the tradition’s first understanding of itself as an evolutionary development.
It’s something that’s evolved over time, and you can kind of look back — and what do they do in the three trainings? They say they’re all important. They don’t just reject them. In some sense you could say the Second Turning is a rejection of the First Turning, right? Or it’s a negation of it. You can understand that.
Of course, when you negate something, you affirm it. That’s also important to understand, right? I always think about being a college-age atheist, which I was a little bit. I’ve seen other people that are more atheist than me. But you become like a militant atheist, right?
You’re like, “I am anti-God,” and you make your identity about being anti-God and hang out with a bunch of people that talk about being anti-God, and you read a bunch of books by people that are talking about how God doesn’t exist, and it’s like your whole life is built around God. And likewise, this is how I understand the Second Turning.
It wasn’t that they were negating in any sense that they’re trying to get rid of it — it was more just sort of pointing out the holding on to. To do that, you have to point out the actual specifics: no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end of suffering, no path to the end of suffering.
In the Heart Sutra, they repeat all the models. All the lists are there. It’s not like the Buddhist lists get evaporated and we don’t remember what they are because they got rid of them. No, this is an affirmation through negation in the Second Turning. The Third Turning includes all of it intentionally in this sort of larger Buddha matrix of teachings.
And in a sense it holds the whole collection of teachings. That’s why it’s such a complex tradition in a lot of ways, the Vajrayana, because there’s so much that it’s holding in its library of esoteric teachings, including ones that are emerging and still coming from beyond, in terms of the Terma tradition.
So they’re still uncovering new Dharma teachings that are somehow timeless, by the way. So this evolution is a timeless evolution from the point of view of the Third Turning. Now we’re going to move, finally, to the topic at hand, which is modern Buddhism. So what happens when we enter into the, quote-unquote, Western Enlightenment period?
Quote-unquote, modernity. There’s a big, huge change of thinking in the Western world by Western Enlightenment thinkers. These books, of course, are being printed, and people are reading them, so that’s why this is spreading so quickly — because we’re sitting on top of the Gutenberg innovation already here, and there’s increased literacy.
Thanks, by the way, back to Egypt and Palestine — the Palestinians, my ancestors — for the innovation of the phonetic alphabet, which allows language to be communicated and carried much easier by people that don’t have to learn, like, a million hieroglyphs. Anyway, here we are in the modern world with all of these supportive technologies and infrastructure that’s kind of built toward connecting the whole of the world — of course, through colonialism primarily, through one group gaining this sort of incredible advantage in terms of certain technologies and geographies and things like that, histories of empire, resources.
That’s one part of the view, of course. There’s the looking at the Western Enlightenment as a noble thing, and there’s looking at it as a terrible thing. I’m going to try to hold both views here at once. This is a hard thing to do. But I do see truth in both.
And what I will say here is that I think we are ourselves going through different turnings now of the wheel of Dharma since the beginning of modernity, since this move toward increased globalization, which has pushed these traditions into contact with each other like has never happened before, even though it was happening before.
The way I think of it is like we’re in an atom crasher, in a way. Since modernity, all these things are crashing into each other. And there are different ways of relating to that. I will go ahead and say here what I want to explore through the course of this training together are three particular modern turnings of the Wheel of Dharma.
So these are all part of what I guess you could call the fourth turning we’re in now. Since modernity has started, I think we’re in the modern yana. We’re in this new period of Buddhist history. And the first wave of that we could just, I think, call Modern Buddhism, Buddhist Modernism, where the move is toward secularizing the practice, toward making it compatible with science, and to make it a trainable system, like a mental psychological system.
It’s to make Buddhism work for the modern individual. That’s kind of the goal of this Buddhist modernism — to improve your capacity at work. This is why the secular mindfulness movement has done so well. I would claim it’s a modern form of Buddhism that’s completely, in a way, unbundled from the original tradition, except for some of the meditative techniques and views. Of course, there’s a lot of problems with this Modern Yana that you’re probably familiar with and have heard about.
McMindfulness is one of the first critiques I heard of Buddhist modernism. And it’s so true. If you’ve studied deeply in a tradition and you really love it, you understand its roots, and you know how little you know. It’s weird to see some commodified version of a very narrow kind of slice of that becoming hyper-popular and everyone talking about it.
And it’s like, what just happened? Part of your tradition just got modernized. And sometimes modernized essentially means extracted and commodified and turned into financial value, because that’s part of the modern infrastructure — capitalism, right? So modern Buddhism is extremely integrated with capitalism, and capitalism is a global system of commerce.
So this is the first wave, I’d say. You have this sort of integrating with capitalism, integrating with science, integrating with technology. This is a very powerful wave. It’s still waving very hard now. This is how Buddhist Geeks got started. I got onto this wave at a specific time when the internet was changing, and caught this Buddhist modernist wave, which had been waving for hundreds of years actually.
It wasn’t a new thing. It was new for me and a bunch of other people, is how I would say it now. But what happens if you keep engaging with these yanas — they open themselves up in practice, right? In the same way that we can look at the earlier three as a developmental journey you go through, you can move through, so too, I think, with these modern yanas — you can move through them.
What started to happen for me in Buddhist Geeks, where we were exploring really our main question over like 10 years, was: how does Buddhism converge with modern science, technology, and culture — this globalized culture? What does Buddhism have to offer the global culture and technology, and what do these things have to offer Buddhism? Let’s not assume Buddhism is fixed and doesn’t have anything to learn, like the traditional kind of failure mode would be. Instead we want to learn and adapt, but we also want to remain intact.
What I learned through Buddhist Geeks is that one of the best ways to understand what’s happening in the modern era is that Buddhism is getting unbundled as an institution, as are all institutions which were developed in the pre-modern era. All of them, as a kind of bundled form of different things, are getting pulled apart and then commodified.
This is how global capitalism works. This is how it develops — extracts value culturally. It does that through natural capital as well, which is part of why we have an ecological crisis. And here, what’s the equivalent crisis, I wonder, for our spiritual traditions? What happens when you extract all of the essence out of them and make it really popular, and then no one knows that there’s still this deep, profound engine of transformation at the heart of these traditions?
No one cares because they’ve got their mindfulness app or whatever — they’re fine. Well, I’d say it’s something like a spiritual crisis. We don’t know what life is for. It’s like, oh, just to be comfortable, to make it through a difficult period. No, that’s not what life is for.
Remember the three trainings — the training in ethics? Well, the Postmodern Yana, the next wave, I would say, of Modern Buddhism comes around, and it really critiques hard, as I’m starting to do here, the modern Buddhism, Buddhist modernism. It points out how white-centric it is, how Eurocentric it is, how Christian it is without acknowledging its Christianity and the influence of Christianity on it, how capitalist it is, how oppressive it is when it doesn’t acknowledge the way it participates in these systems.
And there’s a powerful critique that comes online about the systems of power that are hiding inside of the modern story. This critique is powerfully deconstructive philosophically. I remember when I first encountered this critique aimed at me, when I was doing Buddhist Geeks.
There were a number of professors, a bunch of academic Buddhists, who got together and they started a project called Speculative Non-Buddhism. And they were critiquing lots of popular Buddhist teachers and using these really powerful post-modern philosophical methods for doing that, as well as just being total assholes.
They would just call people names and they would not be civil at all. That was actually part of their method — it was intentional, to goad nice Buddhists into showing their nasty sides. And often it worked. Smart people just ignored them. But for me, I found it fascinating.
There was something in their critique — I was actually like a firefly, drawn to the light. I was drawn to it. I had an interest in philosophy, and the more I sat with their criticisms, even though they were extremely painful because a lot of them were aimed at me personally — they were also right about some things, and I couldn’t help but see that that was true. The way that I was framing things, how we were selling things, our business model with Buddhist Geeks — there were so many things that I was doing that were unconscious, and I just learned to do them that way. I hadn’t questioned them in the way that I’d questioned a lot of things. And they were pointing that out in a way that really shook me to my foundation and ended up actually dissolving the company.
It was a for-profit company. I let it dissolve and fail, Buddhist Geeks. It got reborn later as a nonprofit, which it’s been since. But that was huge for me, to kind of take on those critiques. It felt very sharp, very personal, and yet because there was something to them, I couldn’t help but sit with them, even while I was grumbling and complaining and being a victim — still, something got through, and for me it opened my eyes to these different ways of seeing. These things got further opened for me with the racial awakening of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the COVID era. My teachers at this point were really leaning into this more Postmodern Yana, I would say, in terms of trying to refashion the insight tradition to take account of these criticisms and try to make space for the truth of them, which I really admired.
Because it’s not easy to do that, to change an organization. And some of you here know that because you work exactly in this field. So the Postmodern Yana, to me, is characterized by a critique of modernity that recognizes that we’ve not been looking at, especially, collective systems-level perspectives.
We don’t see how collectives are being shaped. This is where the Marxist views come in about economics. This is where ecological, environmental views emerge, because we’re looking at this perspective. The hyperindividualism of modernity prevents one from seeing these things. You just can’t see in terms of bigger than you.
Here in the Postmodern Yana, we can go beyond just our narrative, and we can deconstruct it.
But what happens if we go too far in that endeavor? Is it possible to go too far? Because deconstruction leaves you without anything. It’s similar to the Second Turning, right? In relation to the First Turning. You negate the problems of the First Turning.
We can negate the problems of modernity, but that just highlights them. It gives us freedom — but to do what? To be angry, for sure. I think that’s a natural initial response. Once you start to see these things, you get pretty fucking pissed, and you start to see the causes of a lot of suffering in the modern world, and where they come from and how unequally they’re distributed.
You start to feel ashamed, angry, whatever — all these things are natural. But what if it’s possible to move through, at least to some degree, the grief of that and the anger of that, and to sort of say, okay, instead of completely rejecting modernity entirely — it’s hard to do that anyway, because we can’t even imagine what it was like pre-modernity.
I heard stories from my grandfather who came from Palestine, which was much less developed than we were here in America. So he essentially came from, like, several hundred years ago in terms of his living conditions. I’ve heard stories like that directly from other people that I trust — wearing the potato sack to run to school for three miles while it’s raining. Literally that story. So I know there’s a huge difference in living conditions from what my grandfather grew up in and what I live in currently, what my sons are growing up in. Just massive, and that’s largely modernity there. So I know there are some good things about modernity, in terms of expanding lifespan, in terms of modern medicine.
There are some things I’m really grateful to have access to in modernity. Oh my gosh — my friend just moved back here from Mexico City. He loves Mexico City. He speaks Spanish. He loves Mexican people. He loved living in a part of the neighborhood where he was the only gringo.
And he’s that kind of person who really legitimately loves Mexican culture. And he was so happy to be infrastructurally back in the United States. He’s like, “Just a reminder, there’s a lot of things dysfunctional about our politics here, but there’s a lot of things that work in terms of infrastructure, and it’s easy to forget when you have them.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s true. That’s true.”
So what if we hold the modern and some parts of modern life and what it opens up, especially the internet? The internet is wholly a modern development. And we say, okay, could we keep some of the good things about modernity while not doing this hyper-modern thing that’s destroying our planet and culture?
Could we take into account the critiques of postmodernity and do something with them that’s constructive? That to me is the third of these waves of modern Buddhism — I’ll call it here the Metamodern Yana, which is emerging out of the generative tension between modernity and the critiques of modernity, postmodernity.
If we can hold both modernity and postmodernity, instead of collapsing onto one side or the other — this is the middle way practice, by the way, of Buddha — then we can actually find a middle way that exists between and beyond them. That’s the Metamodern Yana. That’s the idea, anyway.
That to me is pretty emergent, at least for myself. I know other people have experienced this and are talking about this. People that are talking about, for instance, the meta-crisis — they’re usually coming at it from a Metamodern perspective. The meta-crisis is itself metamodern terminology; it comes out of that whole cultural philosophical landscape, because you’re seeing the many problems that are happening in the world, in the really crisis period that we’re going through in 2026, globally. They have a deeper generator function underneath them. This is the argument of the meta-crisis, right?
There’s something underlying these different crises that connects them. They’re not just different crises. They’re not just poly. There’s something that connects them that’s meta to them.
And whatever Metamodern Buddhism is, it’s a response to that. It’s a response to the meta-crisis. It’s an attempt to update our spiritual lens to be in alignment with the actual challenge that we’re facing.
There will be different views from Metamodern Buddhists on how to do this and what we should focus on. Just like there’s always diversity, right? That emerges. But there’s a particular way the Metamodern Yana can recognize that there’s truth to both the modern story of progress and to the postmodern critique of it, and that there’s some generative tension in holding both of these together.
Both the desire to move forward and make things better, while also recognizing that we’re always doing that from a limited perspective that excludes certain beings — and thus when we move forward, we actually make things worse for them. So how do we constantly include more while also continuing to move forward?
That’s the koan here, the Metamodern Buddhist koan. The last thing I’ll say is we’re going to use these lenses in this training to explore some questions. We’re going to move through three different questions, taking each of these — the modern, the postmodern, and the metamodern lens — on each.
We’re going to try to inhabit each. The first question is: What is practice for? We’re going to look at it from a modern perspective. What is practice for? Well, it’s for making me better at meditation so I can be better. Okay, what is practice for from a postmodern lens? Well, it’s to help me see the narrative memeplex that I’m embedded in and become liberated from it, so I don’t have to keep participating in the suffering caused by, you know, X.
Okay, great. What is practice for from a metamodern perspective?
That’s the plan for this training in terms of the method. We’re going to be cycling through these almost like perspectives — you could think of this like a yoga of perspective-taking. We’re going to see these questions from the point of view of these different perspectives. The other two questions we’ll look at are: How do we know where we are on the path? How do we know where we are on the path? And then finally, How do we make a good living? We’ll end this training — the last three cycles we’ll be exploring how do we make a good living. We’ll include the modern exploration of that: how do we make a good living from a modern standpoint, where you’re including capitalism as part of what you’re interfacing with, and you are dealing with the realities of global commerce, and you’re trying to operate functionally well within that frame? How does that work? How do you make a good living from a postmodern perspective? Again, bringing this question through each of these, week by week, I want to see what we can learn from them together about these different ways of approaching the path.
