Are You Culturally Appropriating Buddhism?
By Kim Tran
Asian cultural and religious practices are — with painful frequency — stripped of their context and meaning.
Imagine this: You’re a practicing Christian. You believe in God and Jesus, and you go to church every Sunday. You pray before bed. You even help at church fundraisers.
As you walk into the entrance of your workplace one day, you see a statue of a decapitated Jesus head sitting on the floor decorating the hallway.
How do you feel?
This is a true story.
Except instead of Jesus on the cross, it was a statue of the Buddha.
Buddhism is a religion practiced by nearly 500 million people. There is worldwide reverence for the tradition and its beliefs, which include at the very most basic level: the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering.
You can think of it very simply this way: “Suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end; and it has a cause to bring about its end.”
Buddhism is complex, comprised of countless teachings and challenging practices.
