No offence, but that’s the sort of “fortune cookie” Eastern philosophy I see a lot of in the West. There are 65 million Thais here who will readily tell you “I am a Buddhist,” today or any other day. Well, 65 million minus the 3% or so who are other religions.
There is another aspect I feel I should mention, since there seems to be some question here of being a Buddhist versus adopting certain Buddhist practices like meditation and points of view. Actually being a Buddhist is not all spirituality. I can act like a good Christian without actually being a Christian. Much of acting like a good Christian – or a good Buddhist or a good Muslim or what have you – is nothing more than basic common sense. But to be a Christian, I’d have to buy into, say, the whole son-of-God schtick if nothing else.
Similarly, the Buddhist religion over here comes with a wholle passel of mythology that is quite frankly as unbelieveable as what comes with Christianity or Islam or any other religion, if not more so. For instance, the moment the Buddha was born, he supposedly did something like take seven giant strides across the land, turn and announce in a loud, booming voice to his mother and the midwife that he was destined to be some sort of big, badass personage, or some such nonsense. And you thought the Virgin Birth or Muhammad climbing to Heaven was hokey?
A personal example: There’s a religious relic of the Buddha in central Thailand. His footprint. Me being a newbie here, an acquaintance took me to see it way back when. Never mind that there’s no record of the Buddha ever having actually traveled this far. This footprint was huge! 12 feet? 30 feet? It’s literally been decades since I saw it, so its size may be exaggerated in my memory, but I could definitely have crawled in and used it as a campsite. And it was not just shaped like a footprint; all sorts of nature scenes were imprinted into the sole. I looked at my friend and said something like: “Um, this doesn’t seem like a real footprint.” And he told me in all seriousness: “You must understand that the Buddha was not an ordinary person.” Oka-a-a-a-y. Well, what can you say to that? It would be like telling a child there is no Santa Claus. So it’s not all meditation and David Carradine. There’s some baggage that comes with it, like any religion. I mean, there are people over here swearing that the Buddha is appearing in their dreams and giving them winning lottery-ticket numbers. I’m betting no Buddhist-meditation center in the West is teaching any of this stuff.
And also, many Buddhists here never meditate. I would say most Buddhists here never meditate, but I have no actual statistics to throw at you. They will pray, but often they pray for things like a new motorcycle or a bigger end-of-year bonus at work. Hardly spiritual. My wife certainly never meditates, and she is a Buddhist, born and bred. She also does not buy into a lot of the mythology, but then she is highly educated. But most people here take it as gospel fact, just like there are educated Creationists who believe Moses parted the Red Sea. They also believe fortune-tellers have a place in Buddhism, and on any given night in many parks and even shopping centers and sidewalks, the tarot-card eaders are doing a booming business. Again, my wife turns her nose up at that, but most people here do not. For instance, she has two cousins, both with master’s degrees in business administration from a local Catholic university (but they are Buddhist, not Catholic), who regulate their diets according to what their favorite fortune-teller tells them to eat.
So anyway, my whole point here is that you really need to think about what it means to say “I am a Buddhist” or “I want to be a Buddhist.” ARE you a dyed-in-the-wool Buddhist, or do you simply get some benefit from certain practices that are traditionally associated with the Buddhist religion?