Within academic the study of religion, Buddhist critical-constructive reflection (also sometimes called “Buddhist theology”) has had two goals: (1) To draw on academic disciplines, together with Buddhist resources, to newly inform Buddhism in normative ways, and (2) to draw on Buddhism to address personal and social needs and to newly inform modern academic disciplines, such as philosophy, ecology, psychology, cognitive science, theories of justice, and economics. While academic work in Religious Studies is etic and descriptive, Buddhist critical-constructive reflection (BCCR) draws on those etic findings, together with emic Buddhist understandings, to suggest new normative directions for Buddhism, society and academia. BCCR, then, treats Buddhism not just as a source of data for theorization in the Western academy, but as a partner in rethinking issues, questions, and disciplines. This talk will discuss the rise of BCCR in the modern academy, the needs it addresses, and how analogues of its two goals have been operative throughout Buddhist history in Asia and the West—Buddhism newly informing and affecting each culture as it is informed and affected by it. Some current applications of BCCR in light of that history will be discussed, e.g. how the doctrine of skillful means has been used both to enable and to hide such Buddhist cultural syntheses; how that suggests the need for greater intra-Buddhist and inter-religious dialogue today; how modern Buddhists are drawing on Buddhist resources together with social and natural sciences to respond to personal, social, political and environmental problems, and how that also sheds new light on Buddhism and on those disciplines. As modern Buddhism makes contributions in these ways, it also risks succumbing too much to modern assumptions and values, which may reduce its ability to offer important alternatives to them. Possible examples of this will also be noted.