Post-Buddhism: No Religion
Buddhists teachers will often say that Buddhism is not a religion. But when you enter a temple or join a sangha, what you are confronted with is something that looks and feels very much like a religion. It’s every bit as dogmatic and oppressive as any religion, plagued by rigid narrow-mindedness, fraught with power trips and control issues. My experience has been that Buddhism-as-a-religion is just awful, the worst religious experience I have ever had. Having been born and raised a Roman Catholic, that’s saying a lot. So now I practice post-Buddhism. This is something akin to post-modernism: the “post” being “what comes after” modernism. Post-Buddhism is “what comes after” Buddhism-as-a-religion. It’s something akin to Speculative Non-Buddhism, but that’s a very academic form, defined within a tightly structured philosophy. The Non-Buddhist blog covers similar territory but is geared toward the non-academic. Matthew O’Connell’s Post-Traditional Buddhism blog and “Imperfect Buddha Podcast”…
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