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.