[dkarl]

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.