@SeanOakes Thanks so much for joining in the conversation. It’s great to get a perspective from the inside of the movement being discussed.
But this is a result of a selective reading of the Pali texts, no? If your focus is almost exclusively the Satipatthana sutta and the Metta sutta (which is what the Insight community did for the first decades of its existence), you get a very distorted idea of what the Pali texts contain.
I don’t disagree that the Insight movement was never Theravada in any meaningful sense. For me the switch to “Early Buddhist” is just one more step to claim legitimacy.
I am not hopeful. The Buddha’s teachings as they are have always been relevant. The blame lies on the teachers who are not willing to show this and instead settle for a distorted teaching to appeal to a larger audience. And with that I’m not targeting only the IMS+ community. Monastics can be no less guilty of this.
The problem with the argument of “Well, we’ll give them this distorted thing and then maybe some day some people will be curious to learn the real thing” is that once distortion has been legitimized, then it is used to de-legitimize the authentic teachings. And we know that once people form an initial idea about something it’s very hard to change it. So many times I hear people confidently declare “That doesn’t sound like Buddhism to me!” simply because they have been lied to about what the Buddha actually taught, as we have it in the EBTs.
It’s important to remember that this was in many ways a defense against colonialism. That leaders had to justify to the colonizers that Buddhism deserved not only respect, but deserved to exist. It was not, to my knowledge, a reaction to local Buddhists dissatisfaction with the way they lived Buddhism.