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1 results

  • Epilogue

  • Philip C. Almond, University of Queensland
  • Book:
    The Buddha
    Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023, pp 324-329

  • Summary

    The Epilogue argues that, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Buddha has become part of Western popular culture, on occasion little more than a commodity on the shelf in the modern supermarket of individual spiritualities. Thus, whether the story of the Buddha is history or legend, fact or fiction, he remains an exemplary human figure, whose life provides a ‘romantic’ ideal to be followed. As the Oriental ‘other’, now acceptably disenchanted, the Buddha is a symbolic antidote to the ills of modernity in the West. The disenchanted Buddha is thus able to serve as the foundation of a new Western naturalised Buddhism. Naturalised Buddhism provides technologies of self-formation for everyday life in this world. Here, the Buddha is a this-worldly sage and the philosopher of a new form of human consciousness focused upon the practices of meditation and mindfulness.