Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

Pretty much any introductory guide to Buddhism from any of the major schools will explicitly say "karma is not a deterministic system of merit and demerit". I'm not sure how the author came to that understanding of karma, but it's radically at odds with what the vast majority of Buddhist traditions actually teach.

https://tricycle.org/magazine/thanissaro-bhikkhu-karma/

The author is projecting his Catholic upbringing on the religion. Buddhism is not a singular hierarchical institution in the way Catholicism is. It has evolved and changed as it migrated from India through Tibet, China, Japan, then the USA. Does it have people that take bad actions - yes. Every human institution does.

The selling point for the kind of people who read HN is probably this - the similarities between what Buddhism has been teaching for 2,500 years and the state of the art in evidence-based psychotherapies are uncanny. Long before the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn were explicitly making the connection, Beck, Adler, Low and Ellis independently rediscovered an awful lot of Buddhist principles, with only a little help from the Stoics. It's one of those weird apparent anachronisms like the Antikythera mechanism.

"Meditation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people."

If the author had put enough serious time in meditation, he would notice that meditation doesn't exacerbate negative emotions, it just makes you aware of the negative emotions that were already there and that you were ignoring by social media, alcohol, drugs, tiktok, etc. Meditation makes you aware of where the problem is and why the negative emotions come up. Think of it like a very good debugger. It's no substitution for solving the problem. It gives you the tools to solve the problem. Imagine your boss gave you a buggy code but seemingly it seems to compile and work but he keeps saying the code has errors, it's not supposed to work that way. You will go nuts if you don't know where the problem is. You don't even need the solution, just knowing the problem is enough to save you a lot of trouble. Meditation on the initial stages works that way. Later, you'll figure out as you go. Buddha said just do it, don't analyze l, just do it. The author here didn't have the patience to just do it and see it for himself, instead he focussed on the philosophy too much.

Meditating on a cushion for hours everyday is no substitution for being kind to strangers. Meditation brings you clarity even if the clarity is something you don't like. Hell, even Buddha was enlightened when he actually left meditation and gave up meditation altogether (which the author seems to have completely miss it here). Buddhism may not be perfect(what's perfect anyway?) but as George Box put it "All models are wrong, some are useful" Buddhism tries the best to be the most right and the useful model of the world.

Anything can be done terribly wrong and misused while formally correct if approached without reason and measure.

Instead of judging Buddhism, just practicing the simplest form of it by just meditating daily and consciously trying to be mindful and kind throughout every day usually does a great job. The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.