Western Buddhism and the New Age
Western Buddhism has been heavily influenced by the New Age movement. In online forums it is common to encounter nominal Buddhists proclaiming New Age beliefs that are alien or even antithetical to Buddhism. Adherents of such ideas rarely seem to be aware of those ideasโ origins, however; nor of their problematic nature from a Buddhist point of view. And even less rarely will they self-identify as followers of the New Age. The latter is typical, however. As Margrethe Lรธรธv remarks in a recent book about the New Age movement, โvery few people actually denote themselves New Age โ the preferred...
“Protestant Buddhism”
The term โProtestant Buddhismโ was introduced in 1970 by Gananath Obeyesekere to describe a development in Ceylonese Buddhism that started with Anagarika Dharmapฤla almost a century earlier. The notion was further developed in a 1988 book he co-authered with Richard Gombrich, but variants of the term have also been used outside the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) context โ in reference to certain trends in Western Buddhism, for example, as well as to the switch from โself-powerโ ่ชๅ jiriki to โother-powerโ ไปๅ tariki in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The term is also sometimes used in a more general sense in reference to...