I'm sharing this here (thanks Ryou) because I appreciate Dr Jared Jones, a scholar-practitioner's structuring all of these arguments in one place, particularly in relation to monotheism/s. There is a lot of really good, long form content on his YouTube.

This approach can really help other Buddhists get a deeper understanding of how Buddhists throughout the centuries, have responded to other traditions. With the rise of monotheism, we've also witnessed Buddhists develop responses, outside of their usual critiques of Hindu/Indian/shramanic based critiques.

Hey Dhamma friends

Please support this smaller creator (Let's Talk Buddhism), you can check out his substack as well: https://substack.com/@shincheng

Let's see if we can add more complexity to the question raised in another post.

>I am very interested in learning from the purest/original teachings of Buddha (if there is such a thing).

The most interesting part is here: "if there is such a thing". So let's look at the illustration shared again:

https://preview.redd.it/dq16syha05ih1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=092b0b5411df5d1401d2eebd1d4f15a852243b39

The first thing that jumps out here: a thoughtless lumping of categories of different types:

The 'Thai Forest Tradition' is not "a kind" of Buddhism and 'Burmese Buddhism' refers to Theravada Buddhism within a national boundary. The category of 'Theravada Buddhism for the Modern World' is a wholesale construction without a referent in the material world. Bon is closely related to Vajrayana traditions, but is its own distinct tradition, that critiques Buddhism.

We can see here how academic categories can become reified into opaque, concrete truths, obscuring the liminal, provisional and utilitarian nature of these categories. Pure Land and Chan are often woven together, for instance. They're seen as complimentary strategies for Awakening. Theravada Buddhism tends to subordinate and integrate diaspora Chinese religious pantheons in Southeast Asia, etc etc.

First we start with working definitions

So, to refine the idea of pure/original Buddhism, we have to give shape to our search beyond vibes:

What is the basis for the claim that there is a discoverable "original" Buddhism available to us in 2026. What evidence do we have that search a thing is even viable?

Well, we have some parts of the Pali Canon, the Chinese Agamas, Gandharan text fragments, Ashoka pillars and other archaeological evidence to give us some kind of intimation.

So, what we have available to us are sectarian records of the earliest Buddhist communities and teachings. We have what others have curated and framed – via their sectarian commitments – what the teachings of Lord Buddha are.

And the conventional wisdom is that the most repeated and overlapping content can be considered "authentic" and "original". Now, we have not compensated for the fact that "authentic" and "original" may have been lost or preserved in other Buddhist traditions. Nor have we problematised notions of authenticity and originality.

So then we must ask: authentic in what context?

If we posit the existence of a pure Buddhism in the distant past and place current traditions as deviant from the pure original, then what is considered "authentic" and "original" will differ depending on which tradition one hails from. Since we have no unmediated source.

Even if we had podcasts and footage, they'd still be subject to mediation and interpretation.

So "authentic" and "original" are very much contextual, constructed categories that emerge out of personal, communal and political need. Theravada reformers pressured by the Thai state, Pure Land revivalists responding to modernity. All of this wrapped up in notions of authenticity, purity and utility.

Is it an uncovering or a making?

Imagine a tomb raider on a quest to retrieve a bejewelled crown in an ancient tomb. The map says the crown is in a certain chamber but as the tomb raider progresses through the mazes, he picks up a golden tiara, diamonds and rubies and gets to the chamber. No crown there, but he can place what he's collected along the way, and console himself that that is in fact, really the crown.

This is what the search for a pure, original Buddhism ends up being, it's more an active construction, than a passive uncovering. You're going to find a pure Buddhism, because you've created it.

Self reflection

If you're going to search for a pure Buddhism, we need to investigate what the basis for this is, starting with some idea of what we mean by "original", and what evidence we have that there's weight to the claims of originality.

Then we also need to unpack the non-neutrality of terms like "authentic", "pure", "original" etc. Because how they are employed is often reductionist, political and hierarchical. Pure sits opposite impure, original sits opposite fake. What does that say about our investments in creating boogeymen deviants and placing ourselves as the virtuous holders to "pure" Buddhism.

To consider: the failure of Protestantism

When Protestants framed the Catholic Church as satanic with its rituals, liturgy, social organisation and hierarchical structures, it presented in its stead, a seductive but incoherent idea: that the primeval truths of the Bible could be accessed outside of textual learning and authority. Personal intuition/the holy spirit would guide the reader to revelations.

Queue 2026 and we have Pentecostals and Evangelicals reproducing shamanic, ecstatic, magico-religious rituals. They simply rejected one form of "satanism" to be seduced into another.

The reason this happened is that the core Protestant claim is simply not true or viable: there is no way other way to engage with Biblical truths, other that through structured, historically rooted traditions that provide shape and intelligibility to the Christian traditions.

To reject historically rooted Buddhism/s as deviant, always ends the same way: seduced by notions of purity and originalism, one simply replaces one form of essentialism for another.

This happens because no human experience is unmediated. No human can have a non-cultural experience because humans produce cultures (ways of going about doing things) and Buddhism is another form of culture. This is why anyone, regardless of nationality, can practice within any heritage Buddhist tradition.

Understanding emic Buddhisms

The working assumptions that we bring to a Buddhist sutra/sutta determine what we get out of it. If we're looking for the end of dukkha for ourselves and other sentient beings, we're going to apply its teachings and test the results in daily life, this is how Buddhist sutras/suttas are considered "authentic" from the Buddhist (insider/emic) POV.

For non-Buddhists "authenticity" means something completely different. If a text's age becomes the criteria for "authenticity" then we run into other problems. Lateness is no indication of inauthenticity. This seismic shift in epistemic frameworks locks sentient beings out of being able to access the Dhamma/Dharma.

There's so much more to say on this topic, particularly how harmful simplistic reductionist takes of Buddhism can be: "Buddhism is really all about mindfulness", "Buddhism really is all about letting go" etc. These are all Miss Rachel level takes and that's ideally not the culture we wish to encourage in Buddhist spaces. But let's leave it here for now.

Hey Dhamma friends

So this thesis does a deep dive into the early Buddhist sources as relates to dhammakaya.

It's over 300 pages long and requires time and attention to appreciate. I'm sharing this here, inspired by the previous poster sharing insights into the Pali/Sanskrit term brahman/brahma.

LINK TO FULL THESIS: READ / DOWNLOAD HERE

From the intro:

>...there has been no detailed study thus far on early Buddhist dhammakāya, especially in regard to its philosophical and soteriological significance. Even though some of the above works also refer to the term’s appearance in early Buddhist texts, they mention it only briefly, mainly to outline a historical background for detailed study of Mahāyāna dharmakāya. Possible reasons for this deficiency seem to be the following.

>First, some scholars claim that this term appears only once in the Pali canon which represents the early Buddhist thought.21 Some claim that it occurs four times in the same set of texts. The frequency of its occurrence in early Buddhist texts might have been considered insufficient to facilitate enough discussion for a separate study.

>Secondly, some previous studies claim that its appearance in those early texts indicates no philosophic implications.23 Most scholars are content with the idea that the term’s philosophical, and perhaps also soteriological, import belongs to Mahāyāna creation.

>Even though others have suggested otherwise, their suggestions are either expressed only briefly or their voices are subordinated to the above academic mainstream claim. 25 Probably for these reasons, the early Buddhist dhammakāya has not received the scholarly interest it deserves...

--------------------------------------------

Let's address the Asian elephant in the room: Wat Phra Dhammakaya (Dhammakaya Temple), the controversial temple in Pathum Thani province, Thailand. Since the mere mention of this term, will lead many to assume an assent to the values of that temple.

This Wat is the main temple of a modernist movement within Thai Buddhism. It fully embraces spreading a reformed, socially conservative, capitalist model of Buddhist expansion. It's main meditation technique however, is derived from the (currently marginalised) yogavacara meditation traditions (see Kate Crosby)

The popular (misleading) term is Esoteric Theravada. Kate Crosby herself cautions against assumed links to Vajrayana traditions from Tibet etc. It is best to think of these traditions as Boran (ancient), in the sense that they've been passed from student to disciple throughout mainland SEA for hundreds of years.

The most popular remaining method of boran kammathana is the eighteen body method, also called kaya-dhamm or dhamma-kaya. The master and re-discoverer of this technique is Luang Pu Wat Paknam Pasicharoen. (born on October 10, 1884, and died on February 3, 1959)

His teachings are not the sole preserve of the controversial temple but are diffuse throughout the Thai kingdom and the world.

During the 19th century Buddhist reforms in Thailand, meditation was evolved into a psychology, divorced from its metaphysical frameworks. How we tend to approach bhavana (mid development) today, is very much a product of colonial and post colonial contact and reforms. The development of mindfulness retreats was directly linked to Burmese decolonial movements for instance.

So the irony here is that the vaunted Pure Buddhism / Early Buddhism discourse is very much a product of reconstruction and response to historical circumstances.

Buddhist movements like Santi Asok and Wat Phra Dhammakaya, like all modernist/reform Theravada movements, begin their polemics with the current degenerate state of the Sasana and then provide safe passage to a pure, but neglected Buddhism that has been brought to the fore via respected Masters.

I say all this not just for context, but to get the reader to understand that what we think of as Theravada is really a flexible, evolving tradition that responds to contemporary crises and challenges with a form of essentialism: a strident, polemic assertion of a Pure Dhamma rooted in the distant past, brought to the present via textual criticism and reform.

This is a super interesting, in-depth look at Buddhist epistemics related to how we view and relate to texts. What Buddhists consider to be buddhavacana and buddhadharma.

Funny, since there's a bit of overlap with how I became more critical of the notion that buddhavacana is only what the historical Buddha said.

If we look at the Sutta Pitaka, we actually find no such epistemic rule set by Lord Buddha. The Mahapadesa Sutta gives four criteria on how to sift through claims of authenticity. The Gotami Sutta also gives an interesting set of criteria for what may be considered buddhavacana and dhamma vinaya.

What we don't find in these criteria is the insistence that only his direct speech should be considered buddhavacana.

So when we get to the modern period and Biblical Studies goes on the goose chase to find the historical Jesus, Orientalists, spurred by textual research and archaeology, begin a similar search. And over time, our own, emic criteria for buddhavacana then gets overlayed with this etic, academic goose chase.

And it's really only now in hindsight, that we can see how vast and seismic the difference and shift is. The quest for historical authenticity is not a bad one (a foolish one perhaps?), but there is simply too much fuzzy thinking and certainty that has now become lodged in these discourses.

The Pali literature is as much a construction as the Sanskrit and Gandharan. And any attempt to uncover a pre-sectarian Buddhism is an active, constructing project, not a passive uncovering of what simply lies in waiting.

Colonial consciousness: the inability to access one's own experience. To be convinced that someone else's experience is one's own. - This definition comes from SN Balagangadhara.

Have a listen here and see how you can connect the dots to some of what we're facing as Buddhists.

----------

If you've spent time in english language spaces (in this case Reddit, with white American men having the most interest in Buddhist subs) you'll be able to see patterns of coloniser rhetoric:

Who gets to describe their experience and have it regarded as knowledge. One of the key features of colonialism is this throttling of knowledge, right? This understanding that if you can horde what knowledge, like you horde resources, then you have access to another form of power.

This is why my strategy on this sub and GS has been to center Buddhist people (not fans, not the curious, not the meditators etc) has been so radical/revolutionary.

Everyone who coughed up blood in rage when GS was started understood one thing: power.

They understood what they stood to loose: control/hegemony. In changing Buddhist discourse online, what we need to establish for ourselves, is rhetorical power. And I continue to be proud (and grateful) of what I've managed to accomplish here, with the help of dedicated well-wishers.

May we continue to flourish in knowledge, understanding and power.

A few days ago things popped off on that Map of Buddhism thread. And of course I got my ass up in the middle of it 😂

Check this out:

https://preview.redd.it/1wm9pwquwbch1.png?width=1608&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e169f9bd2bf883787c7578be63853c96135a196

Your Average American...

https://preview.redd.it/my4cmu70xbch1.png?width=1966&format=png&auto=webp&s=ceb49d005965e2457df9caae7d7d104e54ac646b

This is why you can't separate white supremacy from the discourse of Buddhism in the US and Anglosphere. Now we know that Buddhists have been in the US for close to 200 years. Beginning with Chinese immigrants in 1848.

The musings about who is an American is literally a white supremacist discourse. And it's top of mind for the current Nazi regime installed in the US government in 2026.

Terms like: average American, salt of the earth, American heartland etc, are all racialiased terms, they're all white supremacist terms. Dog whistles.

No white person on this platform has been able to explain to me, the reason for the systematic erasure of Asian American Buddhists from Buddhist discourse in the US. We get excuses about language, culture and all that shit, but we never get the open acknowledgement of racial segregation that forms the foundation of American-ness/Whiteness.

There are literally, other Americas made invisible through racism.

Asian Americans ARE the original Western Buddhists. Western Buddhism is already here. White men just pretend they don't exist and construct alternative facts and histories.

This talk really captures how language impacts how we experience and internalise Buddhist teachings and concepts. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche unpacks the Tibetan meanings related to vipassana and contrasts that with popular understandings.

Also important is his take on the english word meditation, which has Christian theological roots. Bhavana/phawana is closer to cultivate/to grow/to tend in Thai and Pali for instance.

From a Theravada perspective, there are in fact a lot of discursive themes that make up the 40 meditation subjects. The pure mindfulness/bare awareness approach should ideally work in concert with the subjects/themes.

Again, even mindfulness is a terrible translation for sati. Which is in fact, closer to recall/remember/bring to mind. Recollection is a more neutral term that conveys the skill being discussed.

Also, his podcast Siddhartha's Intent is really great.

https://preview.redd.it/gbuwvayhbt9h1.png?width=1744&format=png&auto=webp&s=fa6de3c6189231ee2371866597d54a5b9c4dfff3

Me scrolling on my phone and reading this 😂

https://reddit.com/link/1uh1ea1/video/49i3jkw6ct9h1/player

Here we can see the foundational point of incoherence: "Secular Buddhism is different from Religious Buddhism."

Like I've said, the central takeaway from what I've been documenting here is this: the claim that there is a Buddhism outside of Buddhism, a Buddhism other than Buddhism.

This incoherence is so fundamental to their project of exploitation but was and still is, completely missed.

What we usually get are critiques of their doctrinal distortions:

• They're cherry picking
• They're distorting the Dhamma

But while that is understandable and an immediately perceivable issue, there are deeper issues that actually inform what we see on the surface level.

Without deconstructing their fundamental incoherent claims and assertions, we're simply playing whack-a-mole related to doctrine. I firmly believe my frameworks get to the root of what is happening here.

The Buddhist religion/s has/have uniquely been subjected to what I would call: a cultural laundering process. We simply do not speak about any other tradition like this. (Taoism comes close I think)

Thought exercise:

What if anthropologists opined how Irish people couldn’t really understand Catholicism because of their Irish cultural baggage. Or Egyptian Muslims are Muslims in name only, since they're really too cultural to really practice true Islam.

We ONLY speak about Buddhism, Buddhist societies and Buddhist people like this.

These ideas are very old and go back to the Orientalist understandings of India. This form of racialisation and essentialism have not really substantially been confronted in academia either.

I saw a comment the other day from a professor no less, that Buddhism, like Confucianism, can be practiced without spirituality. Now, if you think about it, that statement only has the veneer of intelligibility. When reflecting on that assertion, we can easily see how vacuous it is.

Think about this other meme: Buddhism has religious and non-religious aspects.

Image if someone said to you parts of a woman are pregnant and other parts are not pregnant. Now, we know that pregnancy is a holistic and integral experience for a woman. She IS pregnant.

Similarly if we're asserting that parts of a religion are actually not religion, then we've headed straight into dumbass territory. Something cannot simultaneously be inside and outside a constructed category. Why?

It throws into question the conceptual foundation of the category. To the extent that we can't possibly make truth claims when we admit that the category is entirely subject to personal whims and feelings.

So if the category of religion depends on personal feelings and idiosyncratic readings, divorced from social consensus, then no truth claims can be made about the categories of religion and non-religion.

For example: you then cannot claim that Buddhism has religious and non religious aspects, since, idiotically, what is religion can simultaneously be and NOT be religion, depending on how you intellectually squint at it.

To start, I want to make it clear, I see very little value in exchanges like this, since it's all just for clicks and going viral. It may give folks their first exposure to Buddhist people, but this vid does a poor job overall, I think. Below will be my observations and some commentary.

[CLICK TO VIEW VID HERE]

Let's start with the three ladies repping Buddhism.

https://preview.redd.it/1b5zu08py58h1.png?width=1836&format=png&auto=webp&s=806ae3897a44cd442fc7ab725d688760b0e77f2d

You'll notice the lady on the far left, going off on a tangent, with nothing much Buddhism related to what she's saying. She's typical of our contemporary situation, in that the person who's the least knowledgeable is the loudest when it comes to Buddhism. Her being there is baffling and cringe in 2026.

The Asian lady in the middle seems to be rooted in a Nichiren tradition, based on her modernising reformulation of Shakyamuni's teachings and Buddhism's historical development. (Sokka Gakkai perhaps?) And the lady on the far right is so Theravada coded when as speaks of "who's truth". But that's my subjective take.

CLICK TO VIEW VID HERE

Overall, I think the Hindu ladies did much better at articulating their doctrines to non-Hindus. In this, we're seeing the fruition of many Hindu practitioners doing decolonial work and re-articulating their traditions from the emic perspective. They're smart enough to prepare for Christian evangelical rhetoric, giving us a sense that they understand the society around them and respond accordingly.

The Buddhist ladies seem to be free balling it and might not have the formal exposure to doctrine or might not be able to articulate it, even if they have the knowledge.

Thoughts:

The Buddhist camp in that clip reiterates everything we've been observing even here on Buddhist Reddit. Non-Buddhists take up all the space (and do all the damage) and we simply can't respond directly to that. And we know historically, why, in the US, this is the current predicament for Heritage/Born Buddhists there.

I think the ladies did OK overall, I love the interrogation and problematising of "truth" by the Buddhist lady on the far right. Non-Buddhists might not get this about us and it's a pity there was no depth to unpack that.

Hi dhamma friends, so this post on the main sub had me cackling.

https://preview.redd.it/0bs533r52l7h1.png?width=1896&format=png&auto=webp&s=95f3aebc2939e3f7f46e20437bbac9665fa68864

So let's see, a caucasian pontificating about Buddhism, gets accused/warned of Orientalism (add in Wendy Williams allegedly here) and then comes to Reddit to be gassed up by other caucasians (and the asians who love them).

Where have we seen this before....

https://preview.redd.it/tytpkpn32l7h1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3f637cf265ed1bd84012e9c6bea4907a2d7b86fb

Note, no one actually tries to find the context for what he claims (the sceptical comments are downvoted), and also, no one can know the truth of said claims.

But it was more important for the commentators to take it as gospel and run with it. This is how whiteness/ power/hegemony basically works.

The girlies gather in a circle and go: "the power one... the power of two... the power of maaaa-nnnyyy". If you can gather a majority to shut down critical thinking and self reflection, you've terminated that convo before it can get going.

Nice job Brendyn.

Of Orientalism

What's so wild is that we absolutely encounter Orientalism in Anglo (english) literature related to all Asian religious traditions all the time. It's still one of the chief mediums through which the Anglosphere creates (what it claims to be) knowledge about "The East".

So if we're learning about Buddhist traditions, we need to develop a critical eye as to the literature/content we consume, whether it is emic or etic etc. Is it content about Buddhism or is it literature written by monks and nuns, lay people? Is it a travel guide? Someone's memoirs from a century ago?

Think of it like this.

If you want to learn about Islam, you go to the local mosque and the Imam can help you. If you want to learn about Christianity, you find a church and speak to the priest or pastor.

Now, it should be a no-brainer, but here goes: If you want to learn about Buddhism, you learn it from a trained nun, monk or priest. Reading academic stuff alongside emic stuff is great and for the intelligent, will bring into relief the two frameworks at play.

If you treat etic (outsider) literature as Buddhist teachings, you'll end up in that secular ideological desert. Your position will essentially be: only non-Buddhists understand and can make knowledge related to Buddhism.

And that folks, is Orientalism. It erases the subaltern from the discourse of Buddhism.

So rather than be defensive about critiques of Orientalism, they can become a powerful tool of investigation to bring oneself closer to solid understandings of Buddhist traditions.

A quick primer on how theological concepts become secularised and how that prevents us from accessing our own experience.

A quick caveat, I'm not advocating for abandoning words or using Sanskrit or Pali or even other Buddhist vernaculars really when we communicate in English. Although that would be an interesting experiment.

What's in a word?

Take the english word 'worship'. It has deep theological connotations but everyone tends to use it in english language spaces. Singaporean and Malaysian Buddhists and Hindus tend to use many theological terms they learned in fancy Catholic and Jesuit Missionary schools: idol, worship, prayer, merit, heaven etc

So lets quickly unpack the theological roots of the term worship as an example.

In Christianity, all humans were created with the desire to worship the true god. But Satan and his minions deceive humans beings to direct their worship to the false god (Satan and his minions). The Christian project then is to get humans to redirect their worship to the true, Biblical god.

This theology presupposes a belief of what a human is (a from of Christian anthropology): a creature created by a god to give true worship to the Biblical god. In the secular account, which is the secular sublimation of this is that all human cultures have and create religion (true or false worship).

We're also told that there are different ways that religion shows up: animism, deism etc.

So then we learn that there are humans who worship cows, worship ancestors, worship trees, worship stones etc. To explain why people worshiped things/objects, it was explained via a concept called 'concrete thinking'. Certain humans in Africa, Asia and Americas were only really capable of concrete thinking.

We're then told that the religions that developed in the Near East (semitic monotheists) and the West, were rooted in abstract thinking, producing religions that worshipped a sophisticated, abstract conception of a deity. These religions directed their worship to something more sophisticated than a tree.

They worshipped the tree maker, the stone maker. Whereas other people worshipped cows, those within these sophisticated religions worshipped the creator of cows.

This is why 'worship' as a term can be so misleading and deny us access to our own experience.

So for Buddhists, among ourselves, we get what we mean by puja and even the english word worship. We make/do puja to a particular buddha rupa, we recite its associated katha/gatha to receive the merit from that act.

Buddha recollection is not even a form of puja, much less worship. To recite Amitabha Buddha's name is a form of anussati, rooted in the development of the heart to attain awakening (in His Buddhafield) for the sake of all sentient beings.

But all of this, we label as 'worship'. Which gives outsiders basically no clue as to what we're up to.

[Puja (honor) and vandana (to revere/bow to) as concepts, are found throughout our suttas and sutras, with Lord Buddha over and over stressing that this forms the basis of learning and development of the Path.]

So we can see a few things here:

Non-buddhists / the Buddhi-curious have no context for ideas and ways of being that developed way outside of their cultural milieu. They see Christianity not simply as a religion, but as being what religion is. All other religions are simply versions of Christianity.

Why? Because they learned that all humans are creatures that do worship. And all religions developed to support this "universal" human desire to worship. This is how secularism expands Christian theology way past the sphere of explicit religion. See the hokum from Kabbat-Zinn, Batchelor et al.

So here we can see clearly WHY arguments of idol worship (worship directed to the false god) are so contentious in Buddhist online spaces. The memes of Lord Buddha not wanted to be worshiped (since that would be false worship) are rooted in the outdated Orientalist Indological (the study of India) projects.

Translating Buddhist using Biblical terms created lots of confusion and entrenched long-expired zombie facts within the academic and cultural soil. This is simply one of the reasons we recommend learning sutras / suttas via well trained, educated monastics. This puts us on the right footing from the start, allowing us to discover what Buddhist traditions have to say, rather than running in place reproducing Christian theology.