F. Zoe Blackheart

It shouldn't be a surprise to any PoC that the Western media loves to co-opt and exploit things that don't belong to them for the sake of profit or coolness. But I don't think we talk enough about how the West adores anything 'Buddhist'

There's already a great video about 'McMindfulness' - how Buddhism is being weaponized by corporations to shift the responsibility of mental health to an individual level instead of a community level. So I'm not gonna talk about that.

What I don't see being talked about often is how casual it is to appropriate religious terms and absorb it into the everyday lexicon. Incorporating foreign languages into one's own is fine by itself, it happens with every language and with cultural exchange. What I'm not okay with but it's decoupling those words from their context, stripping it off its cultural and religious meanings and just throw it around casually, creating more misunderstanding about religion. None of these words exist in a vacuum and the West is too comfortable in erasing that context.

Taylor's swift karma is one huge example of this.

Girl, what?

There's this implication that karma is Taylor Swift's to control--it's her boyfriend, her bestie, and they vibe together. As if she too isn't free from karma, when karma is a universal law of cause and effect. It's also not free from other Buddhist concepts like rebirth in the Saṃsara.

You can say 'booooo you're a party pooper' because hey, it's Taylor Swift, right? Imagine me using a Christian concept in a song like this. I would either be pelted with harassment from the Evangelicals or labelled cringe by most. But when a white girlie does that to Buddhism it's super cool?

I've read some erotica that likens orgasm to 'Nirvana' and as a Buddhist that takes me out of the text because how can orgasm be likened to freedom from Saṃsara and dukkha? Is the English vocabulary so bereft of other metaphors and flowery language to describe orgasms?

Using these words outside of the original context robs them of their meanings especially when they already have gone through a lot of exotification (cough cough Westerners thinking all Tantra is sex cough cough). There are plenty of other words to describe things, like even the Western's idea of karma exists in Christianity as 'you reap what you sow'. Like, you already have so many words and so many ways to explain a concept, why steal and destroy someone else's culture?

What really exhausts me is how people just seem so... casual about all of this. Like yeah, my religion teaches me peace but that doesn't mean I should keep my anger to myself and not to speak up about it. So now I'm speaking up ig.