Or so it seems.

 Buddhism is a religion. Meditation is a practice. You  can have one without the other. Meditation is present in most of the major religious traditions. I think it was the Dalai Lama who said: "Don't become a Buddhist. The world doesn't need any more Buddhists" Yet people are out there hawking Buddhism and making money off it and spreading misinformation. I think we have to separate Buddhism from its Asian cultural accretions and develop a new, Western Buddhism based on the sutras and not on the various Asian traditions (not that there's anything wrong with them, they just don't fit our culture.) I feel that Western Buddhists wearing robes and other costumes, using foreign-language texts, and taking on funny-sounding names are rather silly. If they were really enlightened, they would know that these things are just cultural trappings and not essential to Buddhism. If Buddhism is about anything, it is about clarity and seeing things as they really are. It's about seeing myself as I really am. Or so it seems.