RosySep 27, 2025

Reading the Lotus Sutra, it is obvious that Buddhism is a religion with mythology and supernatural ideas like any other. So, I wonder why so many people insist that Buddhism and Daoism are "philosophies, not religions." I was taught this in school and many Western books on Eastern spirituality say the same thing.

I think it is good that Buddhism is adaptable enough to be secularized, but the complete ignorance of the other stuff even existing is crazy. When I was in school I was taught about meditation, but never anything about bodhisattvas or the six realms or things like that. Maybe my teacher had never heard of them.

#MastoDharma #LotusSutra #Buddhism #religion #Taoism #Daoism #SecularBuddhism

Show threadVoid ChickenSep 27, 2025

@lalah #Mastodharma yeah I think the 'its not a religion' thing is two fold

decades of the western self help industry stripping Buddhism of all the eastern cultural and religious aspects and whitewashing it to sell it to a western audience

but also western chauvinism where western abrahamic religions get treated as the default and the norm and everything else gets meeasured against that norm. colonialist thinking basically

Show threadNeia masks
@Taweret @lalah By "western abrahamic religions" you mean Christianity, right? Because Westerners don't know jack about Islam (it's me, I'm Westerners) and think of Judaism as Christianity minus the New Testament (it's very much not).

#Mastodharma
Sep 27 at 4:41pmWeb
Show threadVoid ChickenSep 27
@neia @lalah lol yeah. fair enough
Show threadVoid ChickenSep 27
@neia @lalah and taoism gets it even worse somehow. getting completely flattened into an instragram quote with a mountain int he background. while in China its an actual religion with dieties, scriptural traditions, priesthoods, immortality cults, sacred texts and and lineage transmission
Show threadJosh Sep 27
@neia @Taweret @lalah it seems worth mentioning that the statement ‘religious figures exist within Buddhism, their worship is not required to follow the dharma’ would work equally well if you replaced ‘Buddhism’ with ‘Judaism’, and ‘dharma’ with ‘halakhah’. The extent to which Judaism tends to be interpreted through the highly distorting lense of Christianity, is very parallel to the similar misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Buddhism. Atheism is entirely compatible with both religions.