Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

This isn't strictly limited to the West: at least two of Taiwan's Four Great Mountains (i.e. schools of Buddhism) are similarly inclined, with additional cultish elements thrown in for good measure.

The cultish elements had already developed independently within corporate cultures, but adding Buddhist slogans and techniques (rather than the philosophical and devotional elements), has given it a new edge.

Buddhist cults focus on fate, inevitability, acceptance, detachment. You are helpless against the world, which by the way, works the way we say, because we are the enlightened bearers of the great tradition. And because of this helplessness, here's a set of doctrines you should follow. Corporate Buddhism additionally tries to appropriate mindfulness as "focusing on work".

And, yes, that stuff is historically there, in Buddhism. It's present in many many of the fractally complex historical branches of the Buddhist taxonomic tree. But too many people only ever see one leaf on that tree, and think "oh so this is Buddhism".

Except Buddhism is also a philosophy of action, and a set of guides for correct action. Acting rightly entails seeing rightly, and so Buddhism includes an appreciation for and guide towards empirical inquiry. This was always terrifying to authority figures, and Asia only didn't develop modern science first because Buddhist logic and experimentation were among the casualties of The Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars.

And here, in the 21st century culture of global megacorporations, we see this pattern again; the pleasant, passive parts of Buddhism are allowed in, while pretending the other parts don't exist.

But Buddhism did have rebellious warrior monks. Ashoka, the greatest Buddhist King, made it clear that the law would be enforced, and his borders protected. Acting correctly always requires brutality towards oppressors, but this part of Buddhism is unpalatable within corporate culture.

That said, since you asked, no, it's never occurred to me that jazz is appropriation.

[1] Amusingly, the folks who admit to not actually, you know, reading the thing they are debating, are the ones who claim to be defending the free exchange of ideas. I think. Or maybe they're just angry online.

Sounds like you’ve had some bad run-ins with Christian fundamentalists. Sure the world is broken, but most Christians realize the world is inherently beautiful (not to be confused with ‘good’).

If the God of the universe died to save it, there’s got to be fundamental value there. Therefore if someone thinks the world is ugly and can’t enjoy it, that’s an internal thing they gotta fix, not an immutable, self-evident truth about the world… again it’s precisely because of the Bible that I believe these things.

She says that meditation is for some monastic elites, but that is far from the truth. Who even chose to publish her book?

Buddha himself said to Ananda that several thousand of his household desciples attained Nirvana. Not only did these "laymen" did meditation, they even attained Nirvana.

I was referring more to the sort of people who, for example, see homosexuals having gay pride and start worrying it’s the end times and they must cleanse the world through adherence to their religion or something like that.

Let me re-write the comment I was responding as a fundamentalist would write it.

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Only sinners and heathens are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness."

Because that's what it takes to ignore abusive levels of homosexuality and systemic threats to the continued survival of the church.

The point is not about what happened in the past, it's about what is still happening now - and how the narratives from the past continue to be used to justify it.

Ignoring this is neither compassionate nor realistic - although it is heretical, pretty much by definition.

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I am 100% percent convinced that there are fundamentalist christians or islamists or whatever who would read that re-written comment as go “oh yeah, that makes complete sense”.