Buddhism is both religion and not religion. Most of the core ideas are not metaphysical, and most modern (certainly western) practitioners don’t engage with the metaphysical (what most would consider to be “religious”) aspects at all.
Having come from a conservative Christian religious background (and finding I was wholly incompatible with it), I avoided anything even remotely resembling religion for most of my 20s.
It wasn’t until my mid 30s that I went down the Buddhism rabbit hole and what I found was entirely unlike what I expected based on my former experience with western religion.
There are also many forms of a Buddhism with varying positions e.g. Zen Buddhism is explicitly non-religious, tapping into the core insights without asking the practitioner to believe anything.
This is almost exactly the path I went down as well, except on a shorter timeline.
However, I believe Zen Buddhism is one of the more ritualistic versions, as opposed to 'Secular Buddhism', which removes the spiritual aspect for a more personal philosophical take on some of the core principals.
A couple of the principals of Secular Buddhism resonate with me in particular:
- Karma is not some metaphysical storage of actions, but instead just consequences. If you constantly speed everywhere, eventually you'll probably end up with a ticket - Thats your "karma" (consequences) of your own actions you chose to take.
- Rebirth is instead interpreted as the rebirth of the self, in that each living moment you are not the same person you were a moment ago. The idea is that in striving to be a better person, you are 'reborn' as a better version of yourself in each moment which compounds over time. Almost like the "1% rule" where your goal is to be 1% better in some aspect than you were yesterday.
Asking whether Buddhism is a religion is like asking if Christianity is homophobic. You can point to parts of the scriptural canon where it indubitably is, and you can point to practitioners who clearly subscribe to a version of it that is, but not everybody who practices it or makes it a part of their lives subscribes to every part of it indiscriminately. Anybody who engages with it as an influence on their own lives, as opposed to keeping it at an academic arm's length, inevitably starts to make their own version(s) of it, even if they don't intend to, because any two people's understanding will be conditioned by two different cultural backgrounds, two different personal histories, two different ongoing experiences, and two different sets of relationships to other people.
Funny that you mention this definition straight from the book, this is one of the themes that are quite intertwined in the book as well. My impression is that humans in the search of enlightenment (for the lack of other word, i.e the reason you get into a religion in the first place) get too attached to their -ism and forget about what exactly were the actions of the person that created it and what were they trying to solve.
For a book with similar tongue in cheek philosophical take on the theme "religion on a first person account" I recommend "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" by Jose Saramago.
Having come from a conservative Christian religious background (and finding I was wholly incompatible with it), I avoided anything even remotely resembling religion for most of my 20s.
It wasn’t until my mid 30s that I went down the Buddhism rabbit hole and what I found was entirely unlike what I expected based on my former experience with western religion.
There are also many forms of a Buddhism with varying positions e.g. Zen Buddhism is explicitly non-religious, tapping into the core insights without asking the practitioner to believe anything.