YOU CAN OFTEN hear Western meditation-based convert circles use the term “cultural baggage” to refer to the ritualized acts, cosmological ideas, and devotional practices associated with “heritage” Buddhist communities. This is in contrast to the idea of a more “authentic” or “true” Buddhism that is consonant with a modern rationalized worldview. In my research among meditation-centric convert Buddhist communities, I consistently observe a reluctance to take “heritage Buddhist” practices and cosmologies seriously, with many of my interlocutors often commenting on these ideas’ incompatibility with their own interpretation of Buddhism.
For diasporic Asian Buddhists like myself in the United States, where immigrants are expected to assimilate and to “leave their cultural baggage at the door,” the term “cultural baggage” is of course laced with a pejorative sentiment. After all, the “baggage” imagery implies something one carries at all times, a burdensome hindrance that interferes in one’s freedom of movement. If to be American is to idealize freedom and hyper-individualism, having cultural baggage suggests a sense of being weighted and burdened, being held down by one’s inheritance and the cultural specificities of ancestral heritages. Indeed, in the context of Anglophone understandings of Buddhism in the United States, where claims over what is “authentic Buddhism” depend upon disentangling and freeing the “true” teachings of the dharma from its perceived “religious” or “traditional” features, the weight of cultural baggage for Asian diaspora Buddhists can be uncomfortable, to
