The Hypocrisies of Early Buddhists and Secular Humanists

Buddhist elitism, consumer pride, and where ancient wisdom meets modern folly

Photo by Pixabay, from Pexels

In paradigmatic fashion, Buddhism passed through a transition that seems to characterize every social movement, from the founder’s elitist cult, to broad-minded, sell-out centrism for the masses.

There’s a handy distinction to make that reflects that transition in the history of Buddhism, between the Theravada and Mahayana varieties.

Drawing exclusively on the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, the Pali canon, the former says that enlightenment is possible only for committed monastics. The latter kind of Buddhism, the name of which means “the greater vehicle,” is meant to be universal, the idea being that enlightenment is possible for everyone, thanks to the teachings of bodhisattvas, of those who delay their enlightenment and thus their withdrawal from worldly affairs, to help the benighted folks.

The same sort of distinction is found, for instance, in Christianity, between the elitist Gnosticism and Essene-like puritanical Judaism that may have characterized Jesus’s inner circle, on the one hand, and on the other the later Catholic and Protestant institutions that debased Jesus’s anti-establishment vision, to uphold the Church’s political power…