The Michael Stipe liberal hippie Buddhism is okay, not a big fan of "real" Buddhism.
This is almost the precise opposite of my opinion. Michael Stipe liberal hippie Buddhists are absolutely
insufferable to me--and not uniquely so; they're a specific subset of the general world of New Age-y individual-fulfillment hippie spirituality that I find really irritating--whereas among real Buddhists and real Buddhist sects there is both profound good and profound bad. Even within Japanese Buddhism, which I know far better than Buddhism in most other places, developments like Tendai and Pure Land have been really fascinating, ingeniously constructed and situated movements, whereas for example Nichiren Buddhism and certain types of Zen are a lot more disconcerting (though not entirely without merit--Miyazawa Kenji, for one, was a Nichiren Buddhist). I would say that I have on balance a positive view of Mahayana and a slightly negative view of Theravada, and a slightly positive view of the religion as a whole.
Poll
