@lalah the secularized and materialist/scientific presentation of Buddhism to the west is kind of a historical artifact of how it was introduced and the material interests of the ppl who introduced it. I think. idk its been a minute since I read abt it so apologies for the lack of specifics
what I read a while ago was a couple books "Secularizing Buddhism" and "The Making of Buddhist Modernism," which kind of tied two strains into how europeans and Americans learned about Buddhism in the late 19th early 20th century:
- first of all a lot of what we (meaning westerners) learned came from Nietzsche and like Voltaire and enlightenment era philosophers who were challenging christian norms in certain ways and so they were pointing to Buddhism as an example
- secondly there was a keen interest by some of the missionaries of Buddhism from east asia to represent themselves as uniquely "civilized" in response to the dogmatic scientific racism of the time. so a lot of the folks who brought Buddhism to the west syncretically tried to merge more scientific, secular traditions with Buddhist ones to show that countries like what would be called Thailand, Japan, China were not to be colonial subjects but instead were on the same "level" as the western powers. so it could be said that certain missionaries from Asian countries were inclined to make Buddhism look more aligned with modernism and scientific rationality. which isn't to say that those elements were not already there, but it was more like "don't look at the devas and magic, look at the rational inquiry part"
