[dosyrotsbop]

I thought the article brought up some good points as well. I'm not so much worried about the consumerism as the liability of Buddhism's powerful meditative exercises becoming tools of "the system" so to speak. I think practicing Buddhism without the contemplative and ethical aspect can be quite dangerous: it essentially becomes easy to make the meditative practices a vehicle to more easily assent to the maladies of our society. I saw a video on Youtube a few years ago about a marine who said he had practiced Buddhist meditation as a way of shutting off the aspect of his mind that was capable of humanizing his enemy. He talked about how meditation put him in "the zone" to accomplish his missions. This is evidence of how powerful meditation can be, but also how dangerous it can be without the right orientation.

On a much less violent scale, but just as insidious, people can be using meditation as a means of shutting off their critical thinking. As a result, they never really see their own motivations clearly: they don't see how much of of what drives this is internalized from their society, their upbringing, their physiology, and their reactions to all that. They simply use meditation to more easily facilitate their drives: to more easily crank away at the office (at a job they are only pursuing to make their parents happy or because they feel like it would make them more socially accepted), or they could use it to de-sensitize themselves from abuse from their partners, or shut off feelings of grief or anger or fear. Without a conscientious examination of who we really are (which is all the teaching of anatta is meant to facilitate), we will be driving on auto-pilot, and our practice will indeed become merely an opiate to numb ourselves from seeing things clearly.

However, I think the core of Buddhism resists this sort of commodification because it's nearly impossible to escape the stringent ethical and psychological "hygiene" that is part-and-parcel of the Eightfold Path. A practice without these vital elements will shrivel. For instance, if a person's interaction with Buddhism consists only of a daily anapanasati, what he gains is simply a transitory stress-relief exercise. Stress -relief has many benefits, but will never be life-changing or transformative without the accompanying orientation to living a life of simplicity and compassion. In fact, meditation in a vacuum (without the framework of the Buddha's entire life-path) may become just another venue in which we perpetuate the habits of greed, aversion, and confusion. The aforementioned meditator may use meditation for stress-relief, only to find it doesn't work (meditation with an agenda is self-defeating) and eventually become disillusioned with the practice.