Why Is Buddhism so Popular in the West now?

Table of Contents

1. Facts Why Is Buddhism so Popular
2. Results
3. Celebrity Buddhists
4. Steven Seagal
5. Richard Gere
6. Tina Turner
7. Kate Bosworth
8. Orlando Bloom

Buddhism is one of the most ancient and peaceful religions on the planet. A lot of people don’t know anything about Buddhism except the Buddha himself.

However, this faith holds many interesting secrets and legends that we will get acquainted with today. India, although it is a third-world country, is actually not so far behind everyone else.

Facts Why Is Buddhism so Popular

1. Buddhism is fundamentally different from everything that we have known since childhood and allows us to look at the world in a different way. His key idea is the transitory nature of all phenomena and states. There is nothing permanent, absolute, and timeless in the world, except the very law of annihilation and rebirth: many worlds inhabiting Samsara appear and die, and this is a constant process. Samsara is the world of suffering in which all beings are. In turn, it is divided into worlds, each of which has its own life forms. Man is also in an endless cycle of rebirth, just like any other being of Samsara.
2. Buddhism is the only religion in which God is not the creator of the world. Buddhists, in principle, have a different attitude to the world and the gods. The world is not eternal, it appears and is destroyed. God is as much a part of Samsara as a man. Gods in Buddhism also suffer, die, and are born. And an important clarification: Buddha is not God. He is an enlightened one who has gone into parinirvana – the ultimate nirvana. There are countless others like him, he is not the only one. It is interesting that you cannot turn to the Buddha as to a Christian god, or tell him about your requests, because he has left the world of suffering, and we do not have access to him.
3. The European spirit is a spirit seeking and knowing. Let’s remember the main characters of our culture: This is Odysseus, Faust, Dante. Europeans always strive for knowledge and understanding of the world, without this they do not see the meaning of life. Buddhism, on the other hand, seeks to completely get rid of this world. He already understands everything with him, and nothing will ever change. This is the key difference between the two cultures. Maybe that’s why we are so interested in Buddhism. Because it gives a new, opposite view of the usual structure of the world.
4. European people are tired of Christianity and its symbols, which have become part of popular culture and have lost their sacred meaning. Buddhism still has the magic of new knowledge, its truths have not had time to get boring, so they continue to excite our minds, and this trend will stay with us for some time.

Results

Studying different religions allows you to understand other cultures better: for example, without understanding Christianity, you cannot study European art, and without understanding Shintoism, Miyazaki’s work.

Celebrity Buddhists

Many of us know that Richard Gere is a Buddhist as he has always been outspoken about it. However, there are quite a few other celebrity Buddhists:

Steven Seagal

As a result of Steven Seagal’s announcement in 1997 that he is the Tibetan incarnation of the lama or tulku, the Buddhist world was deeply bemused. A respected Lama, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, acknowledged publicly that Seagal was a tulku.

After studying martial arts, acupuncture, and Zen in Japan, Segal returned to the United States in 1980, spending 15 years there. In Asia, he treated torture-induced traumas of Tibetan lamas fleeing China with acupuncture, which he learned while in China. According to Seagal, he has been doing serious meditation in his own pitiful way for nearly 27 years.

Richard Gere

Richard Gere, who starred in the hit movie Pretty Woman and Chicago and is a close friend of the Dalai Lama, doesn’t even make the top five when it comes to Buddhist celebrities.

His accomplishments are founding the Tibet House, creating The Gere Foundation, and being head of the International Campaign for Tibet. As a result of his support for Tibet, he was banned from entering the People’s Republic of China. He has also been banned from presenting awards at the Academy Awards because he denounced the Chinese government on stage.

The sincerity of Gere’s practice is astounding, and he meditates daily. “It puts me in the right frame of mind for the day,” he says.

Tina Turner

Her voice is instantly recognizable; she has a career dating back to 1960, has unbelievable legs, and practices Buddhism religiously. Turner’s Buddhist practice enabled her to leave Ike Turner in the ’70s, and she became an icon for abused women everywhere; the biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It shows this. Among Turner’s contributions to Nichiren Buddhism is Nam Moho Rengye Kyo’s chanting on Larry King Live.

Rather than going to meetings or waiting for others to come to me, Turner had to teach herself, which changed her life.

Kate Bosworth

Could we be unfair by thinking Bosworth only got into Nichiren Buddhism because she was dating Orlando Bloom? Maybe.

Despite this, Bosworth’s affair with the Buddhadharma was really meaningful for a short period of time: “It’s just an amazing state of mind.” she stated, “Basically, it’s about constantly improving yourself and making yourself a better person as well as putting out what you want for yourself and the world.”

Orlando Bloom

As the dashing star of The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean explained to CNN, he became a Buddhist for two reasons: the philosophies behind it are contemporary and are a way of finding peace, but also to steer clear of the destructive path he was always in danger of going down.

According to Bloom, practicing Nichiren is a very reasonable practice: “I don’t sit under a tree and meditate on my navel. I study what is going on in my daily life and use that as fuel to live a fuller life.”

Thank you for reading!