We in the west are very diverse. There are lots of people in America and Europe who are very attracted to the "soft parts" of Buddhism. Especially secular peopl

We in the west are very diverse. There are lots of people in America and Europe who are very attracted to the "soft parts" of Buddhism. Especially secular people who started meditating out of desperation and found that the most attractive instructions were Buddhist. Quite a few of them end up doing a Goenka retreat, because they're free and they're advertised as secular and nonsectarian—although they also claim an unbroken teaching lineage descending from Gautama Buddha. I think the momentum of soft Buddhism is strong enough to warrant some healthy critique. What does it actually mean to align oneself with an ancient and foreign religious tradition? What's the relation between meditation and Buddhism, and what are the good reasons to not be a Buddhist? What is Buddhism, even? How well does it actually work? And so on. Nobody expects Buddhists to strip Buddhism from their meditation. But the phenomenon here is the scores of Western people who become Buddhists, or quasi-Buddhists, mostly because they like to meditate and are seeking some source of meaning, truth, and devotion. It's an extremely interesting phenomenon, and I'm a quasi-Buddhist myself in just this way (took precept vows at a Zen center, have gone to multiple meditation retreats, have read plenty of Buddhist literature, visited some rural Thai temples, etc).