Out East 1

 
I had previously been exposed to what a superstitious shit show Buddhism had been prior to the Victorian period, but I had not investigated the matter very deeply. Today, I listened to the Stuff You Should Know podcast [1] and learned that mindfulness (sati) was not known to common people, instead confined to monasteries. The claim is that the event that led to these practices becoming available to commoners in the area, let alone Westerners was the British take-over of present-day Myanmar. The Buddhists priests were forbidden, and so for Buddhism to survive, it had to move to lay leadership and produce texts... It was some form of these processes that became the first wave of Buddhism to spread through the West, to be read about by figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Nietzsche.

The problem is that this was a pre-screened, pre-influenced type of Buddhism, which ignored the rituals, folk ways, and relic worship that Buddhism for somewhere in the high 90 percent of all practitioners for centuries.

I don't know if knowing this earlier would have helped me to avoid going too deep down Eastern thought or not. I would like to think it would have, as it would have shown how much of what I agreed with was false positives.

[1] That podcast is my main intellectual diet right now, as I am burying my head in the sand around politics and the replacement of humanity.