What ‘White Lotus’ Got Right

For the past several weeks, fans of The White Lotus on Max (formerly HBO) relished sitting in judgment over the idle rich. Even as the characters took various wellness treatments at the Thailand branch of the fictional White Lotus luxury resort, most found that they had brought their problems from back home with them and, in some cases, made them worse.

This season was many things, particularly soapy (incest! extortion!) and fun (Parker Posey’s southern accent! the memes!). But it was also spiritual, with Buddhism front and center: Sarah Catherine Hook played Piper, the lone daughter of the moneyed Ratliffs of North Carolina, who had, unbeknownst to her parents, come to Thailand to scout out a Buddhist monastery where she hoped to meditate for a year after she graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Now that the season is over, will its viewers continue to be drawn to Buddhism the way Piper was? Will their impressions of the religion be more accurate than hers proved to be?

I spoke with Richard Jaffe, a Buddhism scholar at Duke University (Chapel Hill’s rival), and with Josh Korda, a Buddhist pastor, to find out what The White Lotus got right and wrong and where the show fits on the spectrum of portrayals of Buddhism in American popular entertainment.

This semester, Jaffe is teaching a course on Japanese Buddhist meditation at Duke, the alma mater of the haunted Ratliff patriarch, Tim (played by Jason Isaacs), and Piper’s older brother, the bro-ey Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger). While Jaffe has used The White Lotus to approach topics in class, and his students have been interested in the show, he said, “They’re more concerned about the Duke-UNC aspect.” But Jaffe has also taught real-life Pipers, American college kids interested in going abroad to explore monastic asceticism, and he said even the macho Duke bros like Saxon now avail themselves of Duke Wellness mindfulness courses, to help them deal with the stresses of a high-expectation academic environment.

While Zen Buddhism enjoys broad name recognition in American pop culture, used as branding for teas, e-bikes, and various wellness products, Theravada Buddhism from Thailand is the originator of mindfulness meditation. According to Jaffe, this pervasive practice is only a secularized version of Theravada Buddhist insight meditation, of the kind The White Lotus depicts.

Although Theravada Buddhism originates with Buddhism’s founding in the fifth century BCE, it underwent a revival across Southeast Asia, largely in response to Christian missionary activity. Buddhism’s profile rose in American culture in the mid-20th century, sparked in part by a series of free Columbia University lectures, open to the public, given by D.T. Suzuki, a prominent Japanese religious scholar. Suzuki’s lectures gained popularity with the artistic milieu that was to give rise to the Beat movement, on which Buddhist thought had a profound influence. Jaffe said that Americans later gained familiarity with Buddhist insight meditation in the 1960s and ’70s, which in turn led to the establishment of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.

But meditation is not an end in itself for Buddhists. “[Meditation] isn’t the most widely practiced form of Buddhist practice,” said Jaffe, himself a practitioner of Zen Buddhism for many years. “There’s ritual, there’s chanting, there’s a moral code that one is supposed to follow, and ethics that one is supposed to follow.” He spoke about the Noble Eightfold Path, a network of interconnected practices intended to shape the believer’s worldview and conduct toward the ultimate goal: liberating the self from human suffering and the cycle of birth and death. Within this framework, meditation is a tool that aids the practitioner to better understand themself in the context of an impermanent, changing world.

Jaffe said that most Buddhists wouldn’t reject what he calls the “truncated,” secularized form of mindfulness meditation used by business executives and yoga moms. “Buddhists don’t eschew worldly goals. There’s nothing wrong for a lay person to be successful in business, to have a good home life, to prosper,” he said. “Eventually, one will have insight, the kind of insight that will lead one to practice more fully. So these kind of proximate goals are fine.”

Korda, who as a Buddhist pastor leads meetings of Dharmapunx, a secular Buddhist community in New York City, also gives talks and provides spiritual counseling. He said most of his clients are not Buddhist. From his description, it isn’t hard to imagine them as White Lotus guests.

“A lot of the people I meet, frankly, have been through long-term therapy and got a lot from it but then also got to a place where they were not getting answers to certain questions, or they were still stuck in not getting their needs met in relationships,” Korda said. “I get a lot of people who are in their fifties and sixties and are focused on the fact that they want to find meaning in their life,” he said. “Many people kind of just, understandably, address the most pressing matters of their life in terms of financial responsibilities but get to a point in their life where they’re feeling a kind of emptiness, or ‘What is this all about?’”

In a nutshell, this is part of the problem facing Tim Ratliff, the TV show’s tormented paterfamilias. A photo of his character holding a gun to his head while wearing a Duke T-shirt got passed around X after Duke’s loss in the NCAA Final Four tournament round in March (prompting a statement of disapprobation from the university). But behind this scene is the reality that Tim, whose ability to provide a life of comfort and ease for his family has defined him as a husband and father, cannot fathom a life of deprivation.

This is the frame of mind with which Tim encounters Luang Por Teera, a Buddhist monk his daughter admires (played by Thai celebrity journalist Suthichai Yoon). The monk diagnoses the Americans who come to him as suffering from “spiritual malaise.”

“When you’re born, you’re like a single drop of water flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness,” Teera tells Tim. “You get older, you descend back down. You die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again, no more separated, no more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home.”

At the season’s end, the Ratliff family is depicted leaving the White Lotus resort by boat. Close-up shots of water droplets descending back to the ocean are intercut with shots of Tim gazing meditatively at the water, a smile playing on his lips as a swelling choral rendition of a hymn from his youth, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” strikes up.

“Things are about to change,” Tim tells his family, moments before they turn on their phones and learn of his legal troubles.

“That’s a fundamental Buddhist teaching,” Jaffe said. “Everything is subject to change.”

Although Jaffe said that a lot of what the fictional Teera says is a “garbled version of Buddhism that doesn’t make much sense,” Tim’s storyline has some merit. Having gone through the suffering and distress of knowing he will lose everything, Tim has reached a level of acceptance, and finally, “he’s letting go on some level,” said Jaffe. “And that’s in line with Buddhist teaching.” The water metaphor, he said, comes almost word for word from Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki.

Korda doesn’t mind Teera’s insights about Americans’ dissatisfaction with materialism and their lack of spiritual foundation, and he welcomes Buddhist representation in popular art. But he sounds a note of caution.

Korda observed that assimilation of a minority culture into the dominant one usually goes through stages, beginning with the “noble savage” portrayal. “Certainly, that’s what I would say The White Lotus is doing,” he said. “You wouldn’t know that the characters that weren’t monks were also Buddhist.” Korda said he has been to Thailand several times. While the resort security guard Gaitok is occasionally depicted praying on the show, Korda said the way practicing Buddhists are primarily portrayed on The White Lotus is as grub-eating ascetics who live in austere rooms, rather than the Buddhists he met in Thailand who, despite cultural differences with Westerners, also worry about putting food on the table and paying for their kids’ educations. “As people, they’re no different.”

“I suspect if this process of assimilation of representations continues, then the next thing we’d see is kind of like a magical Buddhist,” Korda said, a wise elder who is nevertheless fundamentally different from the main characters. “It’s a long time before they’re humanized and represented in ways that are actually recognizable.”

In the meantime, some White Lotus viewers definitely recognize themselves. This season had North Carolinians dissecting the Ratliffs’ accents on social media, Texas Monthly analyzing Leslie Bibb’s Trump-voting Austinite character, and Duke kids complaining that their school overreacted to the Isaacs pistol meme. “Identity is a prison,” Teera says during a lecture early in the show’s season. And it is identity, he later tells Tim Ratliff, the self, that remains after an individual has lost connection with nature, the family, and the spirit. For some viewers, at least, The White Lotus may be holding up a mirror.