Taking secularism out of Buddhism

Secularism isn't a truth or even verifiable.  It is a particular world view like any other, for example, materialism.  We could even think of it as a way of dealing with religion in the most general and  superficial sense in which religion has a neutral value.  It isn't good or bad.  Religion is just about how to live your life, which is up to the individual.  

This is not to suggest that religion, including Buddhism, has been, in a manner of speaking, relegated to a psychiatric hospital.  It just means that religion has no longer any ability to persuade the typical modern.  On the same score, this implies that an individual could be persuaded to follow a certain religion with a good marketing strategy just like, today, people believe in the big bang and black holes, although there is no such thing.  This is the result of effective marketing—not truth.

The secular narrative is not, presently, without a good marketing strategy.  It has within it a certain appeal to a certain type of individual.  It is only a matter of profiling and exploiting such individuals that makes secularism seem popular.  You can't sell it to hardcore Southern Baptists but you can market it to a certain segment of society that is unconsciously still sympathetic with Protestantism's 'faith to doubt' and the 'questioning of authority'. 

Secularism is too flat to be of any lasting appeal.  Buddhism would certainly have more appeal if it were taken out of the hands of so-called secular Buddhists who are working day and night to suppress the real message of the Buddha, namely, that within each person lies the path to  the real meaning of life which culminates in seeing, directly, what this universe is really made of, including our very thoughts.

The seeds of secularism begin with Protestantism which questions transcendence; which makes it seem no more possible since God as Christ as died or really never was.  But God only died in the West.  He wasn't needed in the part of the world that embraced Buddhism and its many forms.  In Buddhism, man’s true nature is the Buddha-nature which is transcendent.  He only has to remove the illusion that makes it seem absent.  Put it in simpler words, man’s intrinsic nature has always transcended his temporal life, even his birth and death.  In his present state, he doesn’t see it.  Nevertheless, it is real.  The task for Buddhist today is put an end to secularism thus making Buddhism relevant to today’s Western culture.  

Comments

[Solon]

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
 
Karl Marx
 
 
For over decade now I have observed the swift decay of Buddhism in the west, and in the east (China, Thailand and Japan) during my travels. Sure there are some few places with old mystics practising the good dharma in solitude, but they are rapidly dying off leaving a void behind them rapidly filled up by the stench of materialistic ignorance.
 
I am awestruck by the insecurity and laziness dominating, and in a way paralyzing todays youth, bringing out the worst in them where there could be something more really profound.
 
To borrow from Karl Marx, one could say that their spiritual abilities are really low, or even non-existent, and their need of awakening from the nightmarish realities of samsara, equally absent.
 
In ten or twenty  more years, when we "old-timers" and lovers of the good dharma have left this world-realm, my bet is the Buddhadharma will be like buried fossils of what once was a dinosaur. Future "Buddhists", by picking the bones of a once magnificent creature walking this earth, will determine and practise a Buddhism, based on the futile observation of a few remaining bones of a ghost from the past.

All good "paleontologists" will be dead and gone. Left will be nothing more than starving internet forum crows, with no abilities and much less genuine need of true gnosis, using these bones to calm their volatile senses and every day lives in a dog-eat-dog world. 

Woe to the poor souls born into such a world.