In this month’s podcast:

A French Buddhist scholar and Buddhist said that Westerners are formidable colonisers. He was afraid that the West will do to Buddhism what was done to other parts of the world and their religions. Reading recently an article about the British Police adopting "mindfulness to beat burnout" and knowing that mindfulness ‘without the Buddhism’ is already a reality at schools, work, hospitals, the army etc, one can ask if this process, isn't happening faster than even the French scholar realises? It's true that everything is subject to change and Buddhism isn't an exception to the law of impermanence. But the colonisation of Buddhism (cherry picking what is considered as useful in Buddhism and ignoring The Buddha’s teachings) is it the most dangerous change for Buddhism and Buddhists in more than 2500 years ?

Can one be a Buddhist and a Christian?

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In this podcast:

A potted history of the Western contact with Buddhism in its Eastern forms.

Why Western science has a mistrust of religion?

The tendency for us to look at the new through the lens of what we already know?

How this approach can exclude new ways of interacting with the world and different forms of truth.

How perspective can change the way we experience the world and the questions we ask about it?

The role of Christianity in uniting disparate groups and the assimilation by Buddhism of other religions and deities.

The Delhi Durbar of 1877: the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India… By Illustrated London News, 1877 - http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1600_1699/shahjahanabad/clocktower/clocktower.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19903917