When it comes to Buddhist practice, it’s worth noting that practicing techniques by the book is not how Buddhism was practiced for most of the time in the last 2500 years. It was mostly an oral tradition and as such the knowledge that’s passed down from teacher to student evolves over time in various ways.
Many modern Buddhist tradition put much more emphasis on meditation in contrast to ritualized behavior.
In Buddhism (and in Christanity for that matter) for thousands of years meditation was largely done in monasteries and not by lay-people. In many Buddhist communities “lay-people aren’t supposed to meditate” is something you could call “ancient wisdom”.
In someone convinces you in a Western context that following some practice is ancient wisdom, they are likely doing a lot of picking and choosing in a way that does not make it clear how ancient the thing they are promoting actually happens to be.
This is a great point! Generally, whenever someone says “let’s do this traditional thing”, you might want to check whether the thing actually is traditional… before getting distracted by the endless debates about whether “traditional things” are better than “modern things” (often too unspecific to be useful).
Adding my own too-unspecific-to-be-useful statement, I suspect that most things advertised as traditional are in fact not. Or that the tradition claiming to be millennia old actually started like hundred years ago, so kinda traditional, just not in the way the proponents claim.
When it comes to Buddhist practice, it’s worth noting that practicing techniques by the book is not how Buddhism was practiced for most of the time in the last 2500 years. It was mostly an oral tradition and as such the knowledge that’s passed down from teacher to student evolves over time in various ways.
Many modern Buddhist tradition put much more emphasis on meditation in contrast to ritualized behavior.
In Buddhism (and in Christanity for that matter) for thousands of years meditation was largely done in monasteries and not by lay-people. In many Buddhist communities “lay-people aren’t supposed to meditate” is something you could call “ancient wisdom”.
In someone convinces you in a Western context that following some practice is ancient wisdom, they are likely doing a lot of picking and choosing in a way that does not make it clear how ancient the thing they are promoting actually happens to be.
This is a great point! Generally, whenever someone says “let’s do this traditional thing”, you might want to check whether the thing actually is traditional… before getting distracted by the endless debates about whether “traditional things” are better than “modern things” (often too unspecific to be useful).
Adding my own too-unspecific-to-be-useful statement, I suspect that most things advertised as traditional are in fact not. Or that the tradition claiming to be millennia old actually started like hundred years ago, so kinda traditional, just not in the way the proponents claim.