" I could go on, but realistically who will read this far?"

Me! I'll read this far.

Joking aside, this was a good comment and I appreciate the time you spent writing it.

It tangentially reminds me of something I was reading recently about how Western Buddhism functions. The piece argued that Buddhists in Western countries engage with Buddhism in a manner that often involves trying hard to be scholarly in relation to reading canon — that there's an instinct to cling to a sense of traditionalism as a source of legitimacy, which felt ironic to me. The result is that the practice of Buddhism in places like the United States looks super different to how it looks in places with a longer history and larger population of lay Buddhists.

I found it super interesting because it made me reflect on how the interpretation of Buddhism has had to change over the years to adapt to changing times, and how part of that ongoing change includes the interactions of Western Buddhism with more traditional sects of Buddhism. For example, I always used to find secular Buddhists odd because it felt like they were trying to pick and choose parts of a religion in a manner that was incompatible with how I viewed religion at the time. However, nowadays, I think it's more practical to see these strands of secular Buddhist thought as being as legitimately Buddhist as anything else, because ultimately they're a part of the conversation. It helps that since that time, I've seen many examples of people across many religions picking and choosing elements of their religion to adapt it to their particular cultural context — there's far more nuance to it than I realised.