Mindfulness Girl: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!
This is the inside cover ad from Tricycle, Winter 2014. It is the apotheosis of western Buddhist materialism, classism, and capitalism.
The ad script at the bottom reads:
“BuDhaGirl is a story of awareness and new beginnings—beautiful objects and jewelry for bringing the mind into balance and focus.
Our story and our legacy is simply — MINDFUL GLAMOUR. pause. be aware of it.”
Tricycle Media can’t seem to make up it’s mind whether to promote an authentic and ethical Buddhism that’s anti-materialist, or a western Buddhism that’s materialist and capitalistic, built around consumer society.
Or is it that Tricycle Media IS consumer society of a Buddhist kind? And perhaps the issue is that “the money has to come from somewhere, so we need to keep the rich on board or we won’t have enough revenue from ad copy.”
Another possible explanation is that the shift from Eastern to Western Buddhism is a shift from a collective Buddhist wealth that amasses wealth in the temple and its arts (Eastern) to an individualistic Buddhist wealth that taps into the amassed wealth of the individual Buddhist practitioner (Western). If anyone would like to know the major cultural differences between Eastern and Western forms, that is surely one of them.
Engage! 
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