Earlier this month, an intriguing series of photographs emerged from Ladakh. Forty Buddhist monks from Thiksey Monastery, one of the region’s most recognizable Tibetan Buddhist institutions, appeared in their familiar maroon robes against the high-altitude landscape outside Leh. Yet at the bottom of those robes were something less expected: bright new PUMA running shoes.*

The images were part of PUMA India’s “Meditation in Motion” campaign, released ahead of the Ladakh Marathon, for which the company is the exclusive sportswear partner. According to PUMA, the campaign was intended to draw a parallel between meditation and distance running, practices that outwardly appear very different but that share qualities of focus, discipline, endurance, and presence. The company worked with the Ladakh Marathon team and Buddhist monks in Leh, and photographed the campaign at the 15th-century Thiksey Monastery.

The resulting images are beautiful. They are also slightly unsettling, and that is perhaps intentional. A Buddhist monk in running shoes brings together two symbolic worlds that do not readily fit—monasticism and the modern marketplace.

It would be easy to describe this simply as the commercialization or appropriation of Buddhism. But that judgment becomes more difficult when we remember that the monks themselves participated. This was not a case of an advertising agency photographing models dressed as monks on a studio set. The campaign was produced at an actual monastery with members of a living Buddhist community, in connection with a local sporting event. Consent and participation matter. However, deeper questions persist.

The photographs raise a larger question that Buddhism has confronted, in one form or another, throughout its long history: when does adaptation help the Dharma enter a new cultural world, and when does the surrounding culture absorb Buddhism into itself? This question matters far beyond this recent example.

Buddhism has never existed outside culture. Nor has it existed outside economics. From the earliest Buddhist communities onward, monastics depended upon relationships with lay supporters. Kings donated parks and monasteries. Merchants supported monks traveling along trade routes. Wealthy patrons commissioned statues, temples, manuscripts, and stupas. Medieval Buddhist monasteries could themselves become substantial economic institutions, holding land, receiving donations, hiring workers, lending money, and participating in local economies. Scholars of Buddhist economics have consequently warned against imagining some pristine Buddhism that existed untouched by material exchange. The survival and transmission of Buddhist traditions have always required resources.

Nor has cultural adaptation been incidental to Buddhism’s success. As the Dharma moved from India into Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and eventually Europe and the Americas, it changed. Artistic conventions changed. Philosophical vocabulary changed. Rituals changed. New institutions appeared and older practices were reinterpreted. Ideas encountered Daoism, Confucianism, indigenous Tibetan traditions, modern science, psychology, Romanticism, and liberal individualism. Buddhist scholar David McMahan has described modern forms of Buddhism not simply as ancient teachings transported intact into new surroundings, but as hybrids produced through continuing processes of interpretation, modernization, exchange, and reform.

Seen against this history, a monk wearing PUMA shoes is hardly evidence that an “other-worldly” pure Buddhism has suddenly become entangled with the world. Buddhism has always been entangled with the world.

Indeed, we might regard this capacity for assimilation as one of Buddhism’s great strengths. Buddhist missionaries have never demanded that new devotees become culturally Indian in order to become Buddhist. Buddhism translated itself. It found new metaphors, artistic forms, institutional arrangements, and languages. Chinese Buddhism became recognizably Chinese without ceasing to be Buddhist. Tibetan Buddhism became thoroughly embedded within Tibetan culture while retaining connections with its Indian inheritance. Similar processes unfolded elsewhere.

The difficult question, then, is not whether Buddhism should adapt. It is what is doing the adapting to what. When Buddhism takes something from a surrounding culture and puts it to Buddhist purposes, we might reasonably call that assimilation. When the surrounding culture takes something Buddhist and puts it to purposes fundamentally different from those of the Dharma, we begin moving toward co-option. The distinction is not always neat, but it is useful.

Consider meditation itself. Over the past century, meditation has moved from monasteries and Buddhist communities into hospitals, schools, corporate offices, smartphone apps, professional sports, and military training. Some of these adaptations have undoubtedly benefited millions of people. Someone need not accept Buddhist cosmology, become a Buddhist, or even know the Sanskrit word smriti to gain something from learning to observe thoughts and emotions more carefully.

Yet something changes when mindfulness becomes primarily a method for making employees more productive, soldiers more effective, traders less stressed, or consumers more content within systems that Buddhist teachings might otherwise invite them to examine critically. McMahan has noted how meditation in modern settings has sometimes become detached from traditional institutions and ethical frameworks and recast as a technique for individual psychological enhancement. The practice survives, but its purpose shifts. Here we can see the difference between translation and capture.

The same tension surrounds Buddhist imagery. Scholar Jane Iwamura has described how Western popular culture gradually developed the familiar image of the serene “Oriental monk:” detached, mysterious, wise, calm, and available as a symbol of an alternative way of being. In mass culture, the monk can become less a member of a particular religious tradition than an instantly readable visual signifier for peace, authenticity, and spiritual depth. Advertising loves such symbols precisely because they communicate so much so quickly.

A monk needs no caption explaining that he represents tranquility. A Buddha statue placed in a spa does similar work. A lotus flower suggests purity. The word “Zen” can sell everything from interior design to tea, perfume, productivity software, and automobiles. Their effectiveness depends on Buddhism retaining enough cultural meaning to lend these products an aura that the products could not generate by themselves.

This is where the PUMA photographs become particularly intriguing. Their power comes precisely from the contradiction they create. The monks represent discipline, simplicity, and freedom from ordinary worldly striving—the shoes represent a purchasable consumer good. PUMA’s campaign bridges the two through the genuine similarities between meditation and endurance running: concentration, repetition, resilience, and the return to the present moment. This is not an absurd comparison. Anyone who has run long distances may recognize something contemplative in the rhythm of breath, feet hitting the ground, moving through discomfort, and maintaining wise attention. However, an advertisement has another purpose—it exists to make a product desirable.

That produces a peculiarly Buddhist paradox. A tradition whose foundational teachings diagnose trishna—craving or thirst—as a source of suffering becomes part of an apparatus designed to stimulate desire. The serenity associated with renunciation becomes symbolic capital that can be transferred to a pair of shoes.

This does not mean that the monks were wrong to participate, that PUMA behaved improperly, or that Buddhists must withdraw from commercial society. The fact that members of the Buddhist community participated substantially changes the ethical picture. It grants agency to people who are too often treated by Western observers as passive custodians of a culture that outsiders must protect for them. Declaring every commercial engagement involving Buddhist monks to be “appropriation” can itself become paternalistic.

But consent cannot be our only test. Individuals and institutions routinely consent to arrangements that nevertheless alter the meaning of the symbols they contain. Nor can authenticity be determined by asking whether money changed hands. Buddhist institutions have relied on benefactors for more than two millennia. A better measure may be to ask where the transaction ultimately points.

Does the encounter lead people back toward the Dharma, Buddhist communities, ethical reflection, generosity, wisdom, and compassion? Does a new cultural form allow Buddhism to speak intelligibly in changing circumstances? Does the Buddhist community retain meaningful agency over how its traditions are represented? Are the people whose cultural and religious inheritance supplies the imagery participants and beneficiaries rather than merely scenery? Or does Buddhism function primarily as decoration—its imagery extracted because serenity, exoticism, or spiritual credibility can help sell something else?

These questions give us a spectrum rather than a bright line. At one end lies adaptation—Buddhism enters a new cultural form and transforms it. Somewhere in the middle lies genuine exchange, in which Buddhist traditions and surrounding cultures influence one another. Further along comes commodification, when Buddhist practices or objects acquire market value without necessarily losing all religious meaning. And at the far end lies co-option—Buddhist symbols remain, but they now chiefly serve values that may run directly against Buddhist teachings.

Even then, we should approach the distinction with humility. Buddhism itself may sometimes travel through precisely the channels we find uncomfortable. A person buys a Buddha statue because it matches the furniture, becomes curious about what the figure represents, reads about Buddhism, encounters the Four Noble Truths, begins meditating, and eventually finds a sangha. A runner sees monks in PUMA shoes and, instead of buying shoes, begins wondering what meditation actually is. Religious history is full of unintended consequences.

There may therefore be no single line separating cultural assimilation from cultural co-option. Religions do not remain alive by being sealed behind glass. They survive through contact, translation, compromise, experimentation, and sometimes contradiction. But Buddhism offers a particularly useful tool for examining these encounters—intention.

If Buddhist imagery is being used principally to make us want more things, construct more desirable identities, and attach ourselves more tightly to consumption, then something important has been reversed. The Dharma has ceased, at least for that moment, to interrogate craving and has instead been recruited to stimulate it. If, however, popular culture becomes a vehicle through which generosity, attention, compassion, ethical conduct, and wisdom are cultivated, the movement may be going in the other direction. Buddhism may be assimilating something new, as it has done countless times before.

When the monks of Thiksey walk through their monastery in PUMA shoes, perhaps we are seeing Buddhism entering another cultural world, or global consumer culture entering Buddhism. Most likely, we are seeing both at once.

* PUMA Campaign Features 40 Buddhist Monks at Ladakh’s Thiksey Monastery (BDG)

References

Iwamura, Jane Naomi. 2011. Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McMahan, David L. 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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PUMA puts monks in running shoes to bring mindfulness to motion (Marketing Interactive)

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