[moth-fuzz]

> a major element of the original Buddhist scriptures is life-denying, anti-emotional asceticism

Maybe OP and I have been reading different Buddhist texts, but for me the whole point of anattā is that you affirm your life and emotions as part of a greater interconnected whole. You lose the transcendent conception of yourself, get rid of the whole 'soul' thing, you relax fully into the immanent, you realize that you're dirt - but you're dirt that breathes and thinks and feels.

You don't ignore your anger and sadness and hurt, as much of Western meditation teaches for some reason, you let it pass through you, appreciated and unharmed, as you realize that our species and many others ultimately developed those emotions because they were beneficial in some way. You don't ignore suffering, as that behaviour is itself an attachment - an attachment to happiness! You have to 'challenge the question' per se. Get rid of the root problem by realizing that life is suffering.

We along with many species developed the ability to realize and to feel suffering because we evolved to deal with life, not to cast ourselves away from it, physically or spiritually. This process of development ties you into the larger part of nature, and the earth in general, as a system of indefinite change in which you are a small part, like a drop in a coursing river. You're a living example of nature in action, and every time you're angry or sad or hungry or hurting or even happy or excited, that's nature working. That's not life-denying, that's affirming what it truly means to be alive.

To provide a more pragmatic and less flowery note, my friends and colleagues often sow an incredible amount of dismay and frustration into their lives trying to avoid anger or avoid pain, when they could just allow themselves to feel the feelings that are already in their bodies in the first place. Oftentimes sadness is less sadness-in-itself and more like a frustration at an unmet desire to not feel sad. This desire, this attachment, is ultimately misguided. It's like seeing your check engine light flashing and thinking "I really need to stop that light" instead of "I need to check my engine". Do away with all that attachment and then feeling one's feelings simply becomes being mindful of those emotional 'indicators' and realizing that they're impermanent. The feelings are still there, there's just no attachment.

[SpicyLemonZest]

As he mentions later, you've been reading the narrow subset of Buddhist texts that make it into Western-facing pop Buddhism. The Amitabha Sutra, one of the most well-known and well-recited texts in the East Asian canon, explains that the solution to suffering is being reborn in a Pure Land and suggests a method for getting into Amitabha's particularly pleasant one.

[moth-fuzz]

I read the whole article. The midsection on mindfulness reached the non-conclusion of "but the world and people in it are still imperfect, despite the existence of Buddhism", and like, yeah? It's supposed to be? That's the whole point.

Following that, I don't think the OP's list of individual contradictions which vary by culture and belief system constitutes a meaningful critique of the whole idea (insofar as there even is a 'whole idea', which, maybe there isn't). "Someone somewhere else thinks differently than you, so what you think sucks", like, what? That obviously doesn't follow. I'm not and have not been talking about Pure Land Buddhism, so any critique of Pure Land Buddhism, is not a critique I'm responding to.

The final part of the article criticizes the form of 'western meditation' I was talking about, where you simply try and make yourself not feel things, rather than accepting those emotions as a part of life and let them flow in and out of you while acknowledging them for what they are. I agree with the author that 'self-scolding' is a terrible approach to meditation, but this is something I see more commonly in Buddhist-appropriation rather than actual Buddhist teachings. So, to my original point, I think OP and I are simply reading different texts.

I don't think OP is wrong in any capacity, I just think they've misidentified the target and are scoping a bit too broad - OP has gripes with certain schools of Buddhism and the way certain people practice it. But the whole article doesn't really contain a criticism of like, the whole thing.