Western Buddhists

This is too often the normal issue of spiritual consumerism, that meany Western Buddhists treat Buddhism as a lifestyle brand, meditation apps, yoga retreats, mindfulness at work. It gets packaged and sold as “wellness,” stripped of its history, politics, and social context. It’s self-care as consumption, not transformation.

This is the normal pushing of individualism over community. Where, traditional Buddhism is about Sangha (community). Westerners, raised on #stupidindividualism, flip it into a solo project, my mindfulness, my enlightenment, my peace of mind. It’s therapy without solidarity, which fits perfectly into capitalism but cuts the heart out of the practice.

This is the path of whitewashing & cultural appropriation. To meany, Western Buddhists act like they’ve “discovered” mindfulness, ignoring or erasing Asian teachers and communities who preserved it through colonization and suppression. You get white meditation teachers charging thousands to teach what’s been freely shared for centuries. This commodified mindfulness, is in te end, confusing inner calm with social change.

This is the path of political quietism, a big one. Western Buddhists love to retreat into “it’s all impermanent” and “just observe without judgment.” This gets twisted into political apathy. Instead of facing injustice, they retreat into cushions and incense. It’s the #deathcult of neoliberalism wearing robes.

With every subculture, you find Guru Culture & its abuse. Western sanghas are riddled with power abuses, sexual exploitation, financial scams, authoritarian teachers. This happens when seekers hand over their critical thinking in search of “authentic spirituality.”

Why this matters? Western Buddhism mirrors the same flaws we’re composting in #mainstreaming tech: It sells hallucination (smiling calm while injustice burns). It reinforces individualism (your inner peace, not collective liberation). It bows to the #deathcult (capitalism, exploitation, hierarchy).

With this subculture, like the #OMN and #4opens, the task isn’t to burn it down but to compost it. Keep the fertile parts: compassion, interconnection, collective practice. Shovel away the #fashionista fluff and capitalist branding.

Yes, some “Western Buddhists” aren’t bad people, they’re just stuck in a #mainstreaming hallucination where inner calm is mistaken for social change. If we go at them only with polemics, they’ll retreat further behind incense smoke. Mediation needs a different path.

The mediation path is not about trying to drag them onto “spiky” activism ground (agitprop, polemic). Instead, more fruitful is the fluffy path of composting their illusions from within their own language.

Compassion → solidarity.

Mindfulness → awareness of systemic harm.

Sangha → commons.

It can help to frame activism as engaged compassion: suffering isn’t only in your head, it’s in the world. Reducing suffering means addressing systems, not just breathing through them. This way, they’re less likely to block, more likely to shift. Maybe, reframe blocking as attachment. When they block change, call it what it is in their own language: attachment – to comfort, to neutrality, to ego. Instead of knee-jerk attacking, reflect: “Is clinging to ‘neutrality’ helping reduce suffering, or feeding it?”

#KISS