Tricycle | Awake in the World

What is Western Buddhism and why is it so damn popular—and important?  Pop culture critical theorist Slavoj Žižek offers some possible answers in his article "Revenge of Global Finance" in In These Times.  The article was published in 2005, but the bank failures of '08 and the following recession have imbued the insights presented in the article with a palpable potency.  Filtering both the Star Wars and global capitalist universes through Buddhist thought, Žižek explores how Western Buddhism might serve as the perfect ideological supplement to our current, distinctly Western predicament—for better or worse. More »