Repackaging samsara

I really dont think secularized Buddhism of the West (which I like to call pop Buddhism) has been at all consistent with its aim of stripping away Buddhisms cultural trappings while at the same time preserving its essence. While this sounds like a noble mission its demon opposite appears to have won the day. Buddhism, in the West, proudly displays the thin veneer of a number of Asian cultural trappings, including Western ones, but will have none of Buddhisms profound essence.

Oh sure we can argue about this till the cows come home but if there is an essence to secular Buddhism it is showing itself as secularizing the raw moment or now of individual things and experiences, all which serve to bind us to the ever changing natural world and our temporal bodies. Thus, we have no alternative but to accept ordinary reality giving our acceptance of it an almost divine status. But cutting through this empty rhetoric, at bottom we only manage to find in secularisms essence, a repackaging of samsara along with desire which keeps suffering going. Secular Buddhism is, in fact, only ennobling samsaranot transcending it.

On another, somewhat related note, Westerners who embrace the secularizing of Buddhism have never been comfortable with Buddhisms deathless and imperishable nirvana; nor have they been happy campers with the fact that the Buddha did not deny the self, which if he did, would clearly amount to annihilationism which naturally he rejected. To be more precise, the Buddha only rejected two forms of self: a self based on the Five Aggregates, called view of self and no self which in Pali is, nattha atta, which is the no self of the annihilationists or the same, the materialists.