Chen is talking about Buddhism the religion, which millions of people have practiced and are still practicing. You wrote that Chen was wrong saying meditation w

Chen is talking about Buddhism the religion, which millions of people have practiced and are still practicing. You wrote that Chen was wrong saying meditation was/is not a mainstream lay practice. It is not wrong. While you might be able to construct a philosophy from the Buddha's teachings, Buddhism is not it. The Buddha never created Buddhism; he never said these are my teachings and this is Buddhism. Buddhism was established by the people who listened to him. It also contains aspects such as the vinaya and rebirth, which make it not a philosophy but a religion (or are rules on robes philosophical ideas?). Therefore it is entirely appropriate to look at it from an anthropological lens. And from that lens, it is not inaccurate to claim that lay people did not generally practice meditation, and there has been reform, by people who likely had to invent their meditation practice as it did not come by lineage. Surely you won't claim that Jack Kornfield himself read the scriptures or whatever and got closer to the Buddhism as Buddha intended it! And he left stuff out to make it palatable in the West, unless he teaches about the realm of hungry ghosts? That makes what Chen wrote entirely accurate both in the paragraph you quoted and in a wider sense as well.