Consider for example the broad stream of Buddhism usually called (in the west) Pure Lands Buddhism or Amidism. Like most forms of eastern religion, it seems to play well with others, so there are many combinations and permutations. Still, if you take a step back and squint, it looks like Pure Lands Buddhism may be the most popular form of Buddhism in the east.

One of the core concepts of Pure Lands is that a Buddha named Amitabha (there are several other renderings) provides an alternative path to enlightenment. The idea is that this current age, with its temptations and hardships, makes it extremely difficult for the commoner to engage in the meditative pursuits that lead to enlightenment. By exhibiting devotion to Amitabha, the believer may be reborn in the Pure Lands at a future time.

The Buddha Amitabha has created the Pure Lands as a place of peace and repose, where the (literally) born-again believer may be instructed by Bodhisattvas and attain enlightenment with relative ease.

Which, is you squint some more, looks quite a bit like heaven. And Amitabha sounds an awful lot like a messiah figure, with whom we are saved. My understanding is that the various Pure Lands groups occasionally have the same arguments that reformed Protestants do: saved by grace alone or saved by grace through faith?

I’ve also heard that the same arguments take place in certain Hindu sects, where they are known as the “cat school” and the “monkey school.” The cat school says that we are saved by grace alone, like a mother cat yanking up a straying child by the scruff of its neck. The monkey school says that we are saved by grace through faith, like a baby monkey who is lifted by mother, but then must cling on to her back.

I’d just like to echo what I said before: we’re all humans, and all faced with many of the same problems and failings. It shouldn’t be surprising that our religions end up sharing many of the same traits.

Some observations are shallow, like noting the garish colors of the temple. One culture’s garish may be another culture’s favorite palate, though I imagine that the bright colors would startle those people who think of Buddhism as a religion in earth tones.

But I think the real point to be made is that Tibetan Buddhism shares a lot of the same problems as middle American Christianity. Sects and sectarianism, for example:

I excitedly lined up an interview with one of the monks and asked if he’s looking forward to the day when the Dalai Lama returns from exile in northern India. He patiently told me—dumb Westerner that I am—that he doesn’t worship the Dalai Lama, because he is a member of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism while the Dalai Lama is head of the Gelug school. Then there’s the Kagyu school and the Sakya school—making four in total—which have hot-headed disagreements and have even come to blows in recent years over which deities should be worshipped and which should not.

I don’t know why so many westerners idealize Buddhism so much. Maybe it’s because the bits that reach us are the good stuff. Maybe it’s just the magic of distance. But if the people involved are still human, then the religion will probably suffer the same problems that we see in more familiar religions.

As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him.

Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha.

Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden – except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. “I never felt like that boy,” he said.

He is now studying film in Madrid and has denounced the Buddhist order that elevated him to guru status. “They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal,” said Torres, 24, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India. “It was like living a lie,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Despite his rebelliousness, he is still known as Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche and revered by the Buddhist community. A prayer for his “long life” still adorns the website of the Foundation to Preserve the Mahayana Tradition, which has 130 centres around the world. The website features a biography of the renegade guru that gushes about his peaceful, meditative countenance as a baby. In Tibetan Buddhism, a lama is one of a lineage of reincarnated spiritual leaders, the most famous of which is the Dalai Lama….

At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere’s cabin.

By 18, he had never seen couples kiss.

How utterly stupid. That might be even stupider than Christianity. (Or if you’re a Christian, please replace “Christianity” with “Islam” or any of the thousands of religions you think are stupid.)

Four years ago, I joined a Buddhist meditation class and began talking to (and reading books by) intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism. Eventually, and regretfully, I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism I lapsed from in my youth; Buddhism’s moral and metaphysical worldview cannot easily be reconciled with science—or, more generally, with modern humanistic values.

I sympathize with his concern about detachment, a doctrine I’ve always found absurd:

But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. Buddha’s first step toward enlightenment was his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual.

From this perspective, the very concept of enlightenment begins to look anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that can be solved, a cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.

In the end, Buddhism is just another religion to be scrapped:

All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d’être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way.

This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science’s disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.

I’ve never found Eastern religions attractive, even when I went through my anti-Western culture phase. Doctrines of reincarnation, detachment, karma and the like have always struck me as ridiculous or wishful/dreadful thinking.

But I know we have some Buddhist readers here. What do you find attractive about Buddhism?