Why Is Buddhism True by Robert Wright

Part one: Culture riff

I'm listening to Why Buddhism Is True. He uses an objective scientific language to justy a secular Buddhism. He feels it is OK to take what works for Americans, not unlike colonialists who took resources from the third world, except this is the spiritual life and nobody is having anything taken from them. I don't mean to be so dismissive, I want to hear thoughts and experience from everywhere. But I am dismissing my qualms about reading this book.

In some ways I'm scared, because he's obviously just sharing his journey, without close contact with a teacher, or even community. He doesn't speak about a community of writer friends or editors or even people he hangs out with or meditates with. He goes to a meditation retreat, and basically is there by himself. How much can we figure out by ourselves without being modified by others?

Full disclosure. I really like Stephen Batchelor. I'm not afraid of being called a secular Buddhist. I think rebirth is true because people are born every day and it's not necessarily a personality, it's just birth, not really rebirth, but if you combine personality, circumstances, you could get a reincarnation of someone. I don't know and I'm open to the idea that it's like a candle flame passing from one wick to another. That's doesn't seem right because babies don't really seem to have anything, but OK. I'm willing to believe the Tulkus of Tibetan tradition all have the similar experience of having a fairly prescribed life, a concentration of teaching resources are put upon them, and their lifestyle leads to a certain kind of being. Whether it's literally true or not, the Tulku experience is going to be almost like a reincarnation or someone because they create the similar upbringings. Tibetans would not like their literal system to be contextualized like that, maybe. But if you're intellectually honest, you might not necessarily feel the same way about the sort of postulated assumptions and things you can verify. The belief in reincarnation is a cultural assumption, where as Godel's theorem is a mathematical proof. I can see the attractiveness and respect other's cultural assumptions without feeling obligated to think exactly the same way.

I read a lot of hate about secular Buddhism, how wrong headed it is, but the tradition that criticizes doesn't have explicit communication as a hallmark, so they won't really defend it in public. What you're missing out with secular Buddhism is unspeakable, behind closed doors. Maybe they are the same thing, just different personalities, who knows. I sometimes think the debate is silly, it's not a debate about real things, more a dislike of personalities, history and culture.

Infact the open source Buddhism versus the whispered tradition might be the difference between shamanism and mysticism and objective explicit knowledge. I could see teachers feeling a quiver in their being when asked to justify certain things in public. They can't, they're assumptions. Assumptions are important and useful and there's nothing wrong with making assumptions. For someone to ask, "why should I adopt these set of assumptions?" is something the secular Buddhists are saying. People can feel anger at that question if that is what arises, right? As long and you're polite, what you do when you feel anger is everything. Can you channel it for the good? Can you use your wrathful energy properly? 

The opposite side is kind of like sports people who say you can't talk about losing, that will jinx it. Imagining the possibility of losing and failure in sports will perhaps mess with an athlete, but fans don't have to concentrate with a winning attitude for the team to win. Infact inebriation and socializing seems more important to the fan. To imagine you need to focus to be a fan is to open up the door to being a fan, because you imagine yourself, you project yourself onto a team. You're there with them, even though it's a passive observation. You can't jinx the players on the field, you can only really just add your voice cheering, for whatever that is worth.

In a similar way the guru model of Vajrayana Buddhism is to not explicitly speak aloud. You speak differently to every person you talk to. It doesn't make good reading because there are often keys to unlocking Tantric texts that are only given out when a student is ready. Texts are supported in community. There is a kind of guarding of the tradition. It makes it precious and sacred.

The idea is to parse out teachings when the student is ready. The idea that westerners have spiritual indigestion because they are taking in too many rich foods, makes sense. A gradual and regulated approach. Maybe it's a fantasy of being exactly fed the right things in the spiritual life, but it could also be exactly the kindness articulated with the ideas of generosity in Buddhism. This line of thinking would also be against teaching perfection of wisdom at the start because it is a higher teaching and can also lead to ethical nihilism instead of spiritual transcendence in the wrong hands, in unready hands.

Shamanism is the cool guy who doesn't want to talk about how to be cool. It is the movie Hitch (2005), they want to guard their knowledge because that is what gives them power, but they also want to live off their insights. 

As the information age opens up knowledge to all people, there are some people that get really twisted up because they are isolated and don't have life experience to take things the right way, weigh them against other things and generally take things in proportion. Nothing is tailored to where they are at. That is why you get people going onto Reddit and saying they're having a really hard time "giving up attachments". The whole area and way of speaking about attachments is wrongheaded. The fruit of the practice is to let go of unhealthy commitments through insight. In Triratna that kind of way of talking is banished because it's unhelpful, the cart before the horse, grabbing the firebrand by the wrong end. This is one of the things that might lead to a guru approach. Many lone dog Buddhists will eventually quit because they can't get untwisted. They can't get the support they need to point them in the right direction, or even worse, they don't receive the help offered because they are not receptive.

The fantasy is that you can be oriented by someone else, and then you won't have to make too many course corrections. But what practicing in isolation has taught me, after a foundation in sangha with others, is that making your own course corrections is a vital part of the spiritual life. You're the best person to do that, most of the time. 

No extreme is ever the way, neither lone dogging it, nor subservient following. We need a mixture of self reliance and support. 

The Buddha went to two teachers to learn all they could teach. At a crucial point he went off on his own. And then after hanging with the the 5 ascetics, he even left them! They were mad when he left, they felt betrayed, they might have acted like a cult and not let him return. Somehow they felt he'd done something, so they gave him a chance, and he taught Kondanna the path. Thus the teachings were born, the teachings could be shared, they were not too personal, it wasn't an idiosyncratic result. You can be taught how to become enlightened. 

There's a lot missing in the Pali Canon because it's not a transcript. It's what the monks chanted for hundreds of years before the words were written down, and it's come to us 2500 years later, in translation. 

In 2022, they just corrected the idea that Chaucer was a rapist, by unsealing records in a salt mine in Cheshire from the 14th century. In 2012 they found Richard the 3rd body! He died in 1485! Today they're finding all kinds of amazing transcripts in Gundhara. Buddhist archaeology is finding amazing things every day it seems, recently they found a unexpected statue. Receding waters exposed underwater statues.

The Buddha died roughly around 483 BCE. Going that far back into the mist of time, so much is lost. What we have is amazing but hard to read because it's made for chanting and not a transcription. Now we have generalizations about decades, and decade playlists and discussions about trends in generations. It's hard to imagine back into time like this. Lineage is the faith dream of connection back to the Buddha.

The fantasy of lineage helps the Buddhist. My lineage goes back to the Buddha so it's the one true path. I get a lot of anger when I shatter that illusion. Like rebirth, it's an assumption of a group, one you need to be inside that group, but is obviously just an assumption when you're outside the group. Talking about it as an assumption is hidden knowledge, to be in the group you have to forbid exploring that question, because exposing it as an assumption devalues it. Some things must be unspoken.

This is why, in a way, we'll never transcend the cultic aspect of American politics. There are crucial ways in which people don't want to know things. My conservative Baptist relatives aren't interesting in challenging or even looking at the assumptions of their tribe. They are as true as living and breathing in the tribe. The tribe chooses a leader. The leader is to be followed and can't really be questioned. There is order and no fuzzy questions. I'm sure it's not as bleak as I present it, I love my relatives, and they may have a superior way of being that I have. 

Figuring things out in the tribe, inside the embedded but unexamined assumptions is what being in a sangha is, in part. You can't join the sangha until you agree to the rules of joining. You don't get teachings unless you do the proper dance with the teacher. If so-and-so isn't your guru and teacher, then you have no business in sharing the fruits of that group. The group may appear to be open and welcoming and even intellectually honest, but you must get inside to get the deeper truths and support. Everyone wants support, everyone needs support. It's the price of admission to the group. That is one take on sangha.

There's a kind of rugged individualism, and I don't think Sangharakshita appreciated this aspect of the American Transcendental movement. The writings are awful, so maybe that is what his distaste was for. They're trying to create a very authentic and complex sounding way of talking that is free from the hegemony of Puritanism by replacing it with nature and classical education, which is a deeper foundation than the (then) new theology of Puritanism. Schisms, sects, blasphemy are all just brand making and living making, with hyperbole and bombastic theology. It's the fight against chaos. What is a spiritual community if you can't be sure they all have the right beliefs?

The individual rejects the call to have to think certain ways, and it's the traditionalists in Buddhism that push the secular Buddhists away. You have to think this way about rebirth or you're not a Buddhist. Right view is their justification for that way of being. They won't even explicitly say it because examining it in the light of day would mean it was objective and could be examined. 

Robert Wright is writing this book about his experience, without a teacher and sangha guiding him, is exactly what the Buddhists inside traditional sangha will warn you against. You're going to go off the rails all by yourself. See how he goes wrong?! They never explicitly say how, nevermind that detail.

To the extent he does go off the rails is going to be explicit and something objective you can discuss, but in discussing it, you've already stepped outside the sangha. You're self reliant. Discussions inside the sangha are not shared. There are million spiritual communities all around the world privately discussing things all the time. 

People talk about information bubbles, I can only tolerate so much conservative oriented political talk because it just does not compute. I don't share the assumptions, and it's too jamming to always be trying to articulate why I don't share those assumptions. One of the problems of democracy is it's profounding destabilizing to constantly be debating assumptions. We need common ground.

We're getting better at tolerating the disorientations of others, but I would argue that is at the heart of rejecting multiculturalism. Nobody is going to convince someone else to have a different personality. Everyone emphasizes both aspects of each party, but the major emphasis, is what makes the political party. In a way it's so confusing because I believe, in the abstract, many of the principles of republicans, I would just not exercise them that way, in those cases, for those decisions.

In the same confusing way that secular Buddhism and open source Buddhism is in conflict with traditional Buddhism, because our spiritual life is profoundly subjective. In the age of information, that can be quite annoying. We're not sure how to take subjective knowledge. "True for you" isn't really how we like our truths, we tend to prefer them universal and objective. We fancy all of ours are universal and objective. 

Because I have a daughter that asks questions I have a lot of weird knowledge at the moment. Some sharks lay eggs inside themselves and then they hatch inside the mother, and then they give birth to the shark later. 

The deepest well into the earth was 8km (5 miles) and cost $100 million dollars. 

We know the algorithm setting rent prices in NYC, that are counter intuitively raising rents during a near recession, and people leaving the city because of high rents. It comes from the company RealPage from Texas and is called YieldStar (source). (End of random "knowledge".)

Humanity was always asking what are the right assumptions and what do we really need to know? What should we teach children? Read, writing and arithmetic hasn't really been improved on. Religion takes on a portion of these questions. Science has stolen some of them, made it smaller, and maybe put it in it's right place as an assumption for personal psychology. Philosophy, public and objective, have taken some more. Analytical philosophy is boring, I like continental philosophy, that includes literature.

My grandfather asked me when I told him I was an atheist, "how will you know what is right and wrong?" Sure, adopting a boiler plate platform of ethics can simplify things, but still the ten precepts are really quite vague in a way, and don't really settle any problems. Utilitarianism is either simple enough to use in every case, or is so needlessly complicated that it is no longer useful for the everyman. 

The Vietnam War broke American society. The metaphysical threat of the domino theory was too abstract and perhaps wrongheaded. It opened things up for examination and questioning of assumptions. It was a profoundly difficult time that makes some people cling to tradition because of a profound feeling of disorder. My grandfather threw my mother's Bob Dylan record out the window. I have the feeling my grandfather had in those days, in our present times. Things seem out of whack. Two men in road rages shot each other's daughters (People). What the fuck is going on?

Now the metaphysical threat is climate change, and the right is denying that as the threat. One side sees disharmony in racism and culture wars, the other side sees disharmony in lack of traditionalism. Meanwhile the Alaskan crabs have left an area because of climate change.

In that opening up, in a time of profound chaos and disillusionment, was a flourishing of art and a willingness to allow in foreign influences like Buddhism. What are these times disillusioning us from?

In some ways Biden is the FDR of our times, passing sweeping legislation to the shagrin of people who only want government for police and military, to reinforce the order that is increasingly unfair. There's a lot of, "off with their heads," talk, and anger at challenged assumptions. 

The reason the 20's won't be like the 60's/70's is that conservatives have power now, and the left hasn't seized control yet, but the swing is coming. That's why the right is increasingly cheating in elections, questioning elections they don't like. 

Democracy can also have people voting for the end of democracy, in a bizarre twist. Unlike the 70's education isn't cheap, the American dream isn't being fostered by veterans who want a more calm stable life after surviving the depression and a just war. Populist politicians are gaming the information age by lying and appealing to a nefarious culture war. The information age has come to white supremacists and anti-democratic forces. Income disparity is widening the middle class has disappeared. So what is the society we're losing that we cling to? It's already gone and it never existed.

An untethered, untaught writer sharing his tales out of sangha, with backup in scientific writings, will stir up a lot of people, though mostly the best response to something you don't like is to just ignore it. Don't read it. Keep it moving.

Even sports results are surprising. Braves lost to the Phillies in the 2022 MLB playoffs? Nobody saw that coming. A huge argument about the national soccer team is about the coach trusting players he's found success with in the past, and players that are clearly in better form and are outplaying them directly, like Brandon Vazquez running past Aaron Long to score the winning goal for Cincinnati to beat Unhealthy Energy Drink sponsored team. Aaron Long is on the USA team and roundly criticized. Brandon Vazquez isn't on the team and had an amazing season. People who care about the national team are pulling out their hair because the coach has been hired by his brother, and that would be fine if he were a great coach, but he's a hugely controversial coach, and everyone is second guessing his choices. Sports drama is a nice diversion from real life drama where fathers shoot each other's daughter in road rage (People).

So that is why Robert Wright's book is so dangerous, different, interesting and confusing, for me at least.

Some people want heresy trials in Burma, want these entrenchings of tradition, enforced belief. If some secular American journalist can trumpet the virtues of Buddhism, and speak about his experiences beyond the reach of traditional Buddhist courts, what else can happen?

With a penchant for action, the republicans are busing immigrants to progressive cities. Forget asking the question "how should these people be distributed in our country?" Just distribute them to other people. They can't appeal to a federal policy because they don't like the federal government, despite all the money they get from them.

Leonard Cohen poem from Book of Longing:

(The poem represents proprietary attitude in a teacher, not open source, a sort of exclusive relationship.)

Part 2

Wright does actually talk about his teachers at IMS in Barre Massachusetts, and he does quote fellow meditators. I honestly really like this book, it reminds me of an article I once wrote about teaching mindfulness in a women's prison. 

That people are offended by this book, well, I don't think they really read it. But was that just a story I concocted in my head? I went back and read the old reddit posts from 3 years ago. It came out 5 years ago. Hardly anything negative. 5 years ago. Not much negative. Why was I so afraid of this book. They even talk about the resistance to the book.

My friend who's retired only listens to books now. I like listening because I feel like I need to train my auditory skills. And when you space out, it keeps reading, where as when I space out reading, I just put the book down or reread what I missed. Maybe that's why I'm not reading as much any more. Anyway, audio books are another interesting tool in this changing world we live in.

Also note, I really liked Wright's book on Evolutionary Psychology, The Moral Animal. (I don't think he makes up his titles.)

I don't think research can prove to me what I already know that meditation, sangha, Dharma study, devotion and ethics are right for me. But nonetheless see research below. I'll add on anything I find to this post.

Links on research:

Natural high:  “New research from the University of Utah finds that a mindfulness meditation practice can produce a healthy altered state of consciousness in the treatment of individuals with addictive behaviors."

(Published 2nd draft 10/16, edited 3rd draft 10/17/22 11am, 4th draft (part 2): 10/18) Last edited 4/4/23.

was Thich Nhat Hanh a secular Buddhist?

Interesting post in r/Buddhism: "was Thich Nhat Hanh a secular Buddhist?"

First off what is secular Buddhism?

To me it means you don't have to believe in the 33 god realms, you don't have to believe in any metaphysics, and you can still love mythological thinking but not take it literally, and you can still respect the tradition and culture that Buddhism came from. I can also respect my modern outlook, my modern education, and my modern worldview, that says gods don't exist, exceptionalism is wrong and multiculturalism is right. That governments should be secular, have freedom of religion and freedom from religion, and shouldn't follow wackos even if they claim to be of my religion, or other religions. It's a modern sophisticated world view, that doesn't mean you have to pretend you believe things to belong to the tribe. I don't have to believe in reincarnation even if it's important to many traditions and the new sanghas that don't require it haven't existed for long.

Secular Buddhism doesn't mean you have to believe any modern thinking as Buddhism. Know what you think and where it comes from. If it come from the enlightenment or Thomas Jefferson, then that is where it comes from. Secular Buddhism isn't new age fuzzy thinking, you have be exacting and precise in what you think. You can also be influenced by Ram Das if you've read his book, but you know he's a Hindu, and that's not Buddhism. (I haven't read his book.) You can be influenced by whatever, just know where everything comes from. 

I don't think psychedelics help the spiritual life but if you imagine you've gotten insight through drug use, whatever, good for you. Secular Buddhists can be aware of the Theravadan traditions and respect them greatly, but we're not fundamentalists or traditionalists, or think only Asians can be Buddhists, that heritage Buddhists are superior somehow. I am willing to listen to critiques of colonialism and whiteness because we're interested in everyone's opinion. I'm not afraid of people having their experience, and I want to be inclusive and understanding. Not "anything goes," but willing to listen.

Syncretism is the blending of ideas and thought worlds. So in China you can blend Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. In America in 2022 you can blend multiculturalism and make sense of the world through whatever cobbled together worldview you have. 

I think when the Buddha whisked a fellow to the realm of the 33 gods, he was telling him not to renounce the robes, and keep up the spiritual life, and we can get lessons from the mythology without committing to 33 realms. I used to say the 33 Hindu realms but supposedly these realms predate even Hinduism. 

Whatever the indigenous times the Buddha created his Dharma, we don't have to literally now think about the 33 god realms as real outside the psychology of the time. They could be a useful and colorful mythology, and they're not false just because they were not the mythology I grew up with, but they're also not automatically true. The way in which they exist is probably psychological and up for debate. Just embracing the 33 realms of the gods because the Buddha mentioned them, in the teachings that come down to us from 2,500 years ago, doesn't make you a better Buddhist. I'm disinclined to say a certain way of being is less Buddhist. I do have judgements and discernment but I'll use that for my practice. I come from a meditation emphasizing biased society, and you don't have to meditate to be a Buddhist, though anyone on the path will want to engage in what the Buddha was doing when he crossed over, at least a little bit. You can lay the groundwork for walking the path and put eggs in the next life basket if you wish. I don't put any eggs in that basket. That's my worldview and it would violate me to say I had to believe that. I could be wrong, I know I'm wrong quite a lot of the time, but I have to really believe something and I don't get a feeling for other lives. That's just me being honest and authentic. One of the great things about the sangha is that you meet all kinds of people who believe all kinds of things.

For me, as a refuge from Christian America, I don't want to have to believe in anything and I like the Buddhism that is more about practice, doesn't get out the sticks to enforce right view, though right view would come in handy and is the first step in the 8 fold path of Buddhism. Theological hair splitting to me is about branding of a sect, and sects are about giving someone credit, and flows of money, and while that is important to some, I'm not into that. I prefer the forest traditions, the hermit traditions, and I'll go off and be a hard working and devout as I can be based on my understanding. I can think for myself. That is where I'm coming from. I do need the sangha, I can be wrong. I'm grateful for the traditions and the developments and elaborations of the traditions. I appreciate another synthesis. At the end of the day I have to work it out for me in my mind.

I don't like it that people come onto r/Buddhism and say, "this and that is making me not believe in Buddhism." You have a responsibility to make it work out for you, and you can always abandon the Dharma. You can't embrace the Dharma if you can't reject it. Obedience isn't primary. You own your own spiritual life. Make it make sense however you want. If that makes people feel uncomfortable, well that's probably not the only thing that makes them feel uncomfortable. 

Stephen Batchelor's secular Buddhism is a version of secular Buddhism, and his Buddhism Without Belief is inspiring to me. His biography is interesting. He was involved in a Tibetan sangha, but went to a Korean Zen (Soen) sangha. I liked his book Living With The Devil. I liked his first book Along with Others. I liked his memoirs and his book about new traditions. He's an interesting person and a good writer. 

When I first encounter Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings, I honestly didn't like the Christian language he uses sometimes. That actually put me off when I first started reading him. I think he's trying to communicate in the Christian centric English language. USA is 65% Christian, and 0.7% Buddhist.

The other thing is he's a Zen teacher in the Rinzai tradition, so with the perfection of wisdom teachings, there is a sophisticated outlook. He's on the lookout for duality.

Reading Thay's wikipedia page isn't without his controversy in his monastic life and conforming to the traditions in his country. He was fired from teaching and he was taken off the books. He's not hyper-orthodox, he could think for himself. He was banished from his country and had to live in exile. He was ordained and he went to school, but he switched around some. 

He's the leader of a movement. His movement was started 1964. He's less controversial than Triratna (1967) or NKT (1991), Hannah or Tri Dao. All these people are vilified on r/Buddhism as not Buddhism by some. There's a witch hunt against new Buddhists. 

I'm not unsympathetic. I don't like Shambhala, with Trungpa sending for teenage girls to be sent to his room or 8 year olds snorting coke at the party, Trungpa dying of alcoholism and his successor teacher spreading HIV under the guise of spirituality. 

Or Ole Nydahl or Tri Dao, from what I've heard. Go investigate for yourself, make up your own mind. What I've heard can be wrong, but supposedly Tri Dao hasn't been ordained no matter how many followers he has on Tik Tok. Tri Dao supposedly was caught impersonating a security guard 5 years ago, and has a past of fraudulent and impersonating behavior. He could adopt a police officer persona, and this is suggestive about his present behavior, that he's adopting a monk's behavior without actually ordaining. The signs aren't good.

Time will tell. Insincere movements fizzle out or swerve towards cultism. But there's also something there. Hannah started a bunch of sanghas, I admire that. Triratna has taught a lot of people to meditate and has a lot of Buddhist centers in England. Sangharakshita is my teacher. I've met a lot of people in NYC who have been to NKT and feel they have gotten something positive from it.

Of all the new movements, I feel like Thich Nhat Hanh feels kind, feels centered, feels maybe popularizing and modern, but I don't know what goes on behind the monks closed doors in the monastery. I haven't been yet. 

Many Zen teachers are obsessed with lineage, and I haven't gotten that from Thay.

Anyway, upshot, it's not clear to me what secular Buddhism is, and I'm not an expert of Thay, but I think it's an interesting question. At this stage in my life, I like the questions more than the answers I can give. It leads to more questions. The Thay sangha I participate in has a lot of Christians in it. So it's flexible enough to accept that.

Poem by Thay.

My take on whether secular Buddhism is real Buddhism.

I think this is a battle of worldviews, culture and the battles inside us.

In modernism, a modern view of the world takes up Buddhism, westerners are skeptical, scientific, often refuges from a Christianity that insists of belief. Seems like Buddhism doesn't have orthodoxy, but orthopraxy, where it's what you do that counts: Meditate, study, reflect, commune, be kind. With the perfection of wisdom tradition there's even a sophisticated almost postmodern viewpoint. A leading spokesman is Stephen Batchelor who broke with Tibetans and went to Korean Soen. He articulated it beautifully, but when he got more into the Pali Canon faltered a bit.

Then you have credulous traditional eastern Buddhist who are rightly twitchy about colonialism and people thinking they know better. They run into the western modernist and don't recognize the Buddhism that is deeply embedded in the culture they hope to preserve. They might insist on a more literal polytheistic worldview, maybe haven't read the perfection of wisdom tradition, and they can behave like an orthodox Christian who focuses on believing questionable metaphysical things literally, in this day and age. They go hard on right view and say modernism just isn't even Buddhism, too much syncretism. Are they protecting the tradition or gatekeeping and confused?

You're allowed to make sense of the tradition and think for yourself. I interpret the story where the Buddha whisks a monk off to the realm of 33 gods as a lovely mythological story that isn't literally true. When I called them the 33 Hindu gods, I was corrected, Hinduism didn't really exist then and they wouldn't have gone away in Buddhism, if you believe in them. I think the mythology of Avalokita and archetypal Bodhisattvas is beautiful and a Jungian could go nuts. So it's not like we're really stripping away that kind of thinking, it's just we don't think you need to pay some kind of belief price to enter. This makes a traditionalist uncomfortable, and the different ways of using language clash in a kind of misunderstanding that seems like there are two different ways of being, and the traditionalist can be persuasive to the insecure who distrust their thinking and want to be obedient. To the modernist it looks a lot by all the harping on obedience in Christianity, regardless of your own thinking.

Buddhism is rooted more in your experience because meditation is about your experience. Christians who went on long meditation retreats have said this is what spirituality is really about. We can't talk about the transcendental because it's beyond words, but I see all the God talk as trying to connect to the transcendental and the mysterious.

On top of that the Pure Land tradition smacks of a trying to get to heaven thing. I don't believe mappo, that the world has degenerated so that nobody can get enlightened any more. That seems like a statement that you can't prove, and a self fulfilling prophecy. I get it that it takes the foot off the pedal and you can just try for enlightenment in the next life, and it brings in more Buddhists. Pure Land is the most popular form of Buddhism. I love the Pure Land sutras, but I take them as inspiration to get on the cushion. And since USA is a Christian nation, Thich Nhat Hanh used to use Christian language to communicate the Dharma in English. To the anti-Christian that's hard to swallow.

Then to accuse the person who rejects the Christian power games, to be called a colonialist is quite challenging. I'm not trying to influence anyone's practice and I'm not a teacher, I'm just discussing how it all makes sense to me. I'm not going to get upset if you call me not a Buddhist. But I also don't think it's a philosophy, I do think it's a religion. And most secular Buddhists are folded into a traditional sangha, and just don't talk about that stuff.

Buddhism has interacted with Confucianism and Taoism in China, and it must interact with the modern world. It must stand the buffeting of ideas the Buddha never commented on, forms of government, scientific advances like DNA, and the rapid change due to technology, and social media. We can see through the patriarchal systems of power. A Buddhist informed westerner with a highly educated and sophisticated worldview is welcome in Buddhism I hope.

Some of the newer forms of Buddhism are marginalized because they try harder to modernize, and they have good teachings, but NKT and Triratna have been marginalized on this subreddit because there have been very human growing pains and abuses of power. There are other traditions that maybe should die because of the level of abuse. The very public scandals that are well documented show the abuse of power and exploitation, and traditional forms seem to do better in fighting an anything goes abuse of power, so there might be some wisdom in being a traditionalist.

Even if Chinese immigrants brought Buddhism to North America 500 years ago, Buddhism is very new in North America, and there are many things to figure out. Add to that in the USA we are battling a political worldview that spits personalities in half, those who want a minimalist government and those who want to try to ameliorate some of the systems that hurt people, modify capitalism into a kinder form. There is a lot of confusing manipulation to try to get their way, information wars. And the leave-me-alone ideology has won a lot lately, it's almost an anti-awakening movement. There is great turmoil in the USA at the moment, growing pains for a young nation. And traditionalism versus progress is part of that. Traditionalism isn't bad, my relatives who stayed in the church don't have drug problems, they build stronger families. And yet I've lost 40% of my friends lately because of politics and culture wars. America is deeply troubled and I almost could see mappo. The pandemic has been very stressful. Then look at what is going on in Ukraine.

There are still monasteries and great teachers who haven't been disgraced or abused power, and many foreign teachers who are willing to try and seed Buddhism in North America. America has an intellectual meditation focused Buddhism, but is weak on community because our society is so fractured at the moment, our rugged individualism, and traditional sanghas are foreign, cling to foreign culture. There is no true American sangha, except maybe new movements in a lay Theravadan tradition in IMS, where you're also allowed to have a secular bent. I have no wonder that traditionalist eastern Buddhist are shaking their heads at the wooly headed Americans. Meanwhile after years of horrible Civil War, Sri Lanka is on the brink of financial collapse. If only the chaos in my head and the chaos in the world would go away. And yet, that is the very mud for the lotus.

Stephen Batchelor quote

"I see the aim of Buddhist practice to be not the attainment of a final nirvana but rather the moment-to-moment flourishing of human life within the ethical framework of the Eightfold Path here on earth." from Tricycle.

That is in part based on his rejection of rebirth, of which he states: "Given what is known about the biological evolution of human beings, the emergence of self-awareness and language, the sublime complexity of the brain, and the embeddedness of such creatures in the fragile biosphere that envelops this planet, I cannot understand how after physical death there can be continuity of any personal consciousness or self, propelled by the unrelenting force of acts (karma) committed in this or previous lives."

Also in article:

Edward Conze drew the conclusion that “Buddhism hasn’t had an original idea in a thousand years.”

And

"Western enthusiasm for things Buddhist may still be a Romantic projection of our yearnings for truth and holiness onto those distant places and peoples about which we know the least."

And

"It [secular Buddhism] is neither a reformed Theravada Buddhism (like the Vipassana movement), a reformed Tibetan tradition (like Shambhala Buddhism), a reformed Nichiren school (like the Soka Gakkai), a reformed Zen lineage (like the Order of Interbeing) nor a reformed hybrid of some or all of the above (like the Triratna Order, formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order)"

And

"It is in this sense that my secular Buddhism still has a religious quality to it, because it is the conscious expression of my “ultimate concern”—as the theologian Paul Tillich once defined “faith.”"

There's much more in the article, but I've quoted enough. Quite appealing to me.