Beyond me -that article on Western Buddhi

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surdThe article I mentioned a week or so back on western Buddhism which was in Third Way has been made available online: 
Beyond me - Philosophy and Life

One of the reasons I find it interesting (apart from flirting with Buddhism myself in the past) is that it articulates well some things I have occasionally jotted down in this blog. Here's a bit that intersects nicely with my interest in what the western interest in Buddhism may signify in terms of culture and plausibility structures:

The growing appeal of western Buddhism highlights a massive issue for contemporary Christianity, at least in the UK. Theism has stopped speaking to many people. Christianity’s symbols and voice, its understanding of the divine and what it is to be human, have not been refuted, just increasingly ignored. It’s a predicament observed by Carl Jung, who died 50 years ago this year. Human individuals are in spiritual crisis today, he wrote, because they are in search of themselves and their soul. He also noted that psychology has emerged over precisely the same timeframe as Christianity has declined, for the reason that though religion has ceased to speak to people, those same people still need a means to understand themselves. That is why western Buddhism is clever when it presents itself as a practical psychology free of beliefs.

However, there is a critique to be made. Western Buddhism offers a model of the self that is, in fact, complicit with modern individualism. Christianity, though, can claim to be radically different. Its discovery is that we are who we are in relationship, with others and with God. To be human is to be the creature for whom our own existence is too small for us. That, it seems to me, is both true and avoids the narcissism and the nihilism with which western Buddhism flirts.

I would have said that the kind of view of reincarnation that many westerners have corroborates that analysis. It does seem to me that (in the Buddhisms I've encountered) what is 'reincarnated' is a knot of  karma rather than the personality (in some way) that westerners crave (! -interesting thing to find myself writing in this context) to find.

What is important to realise is that the intuition that  if personality/personhood matters, then ultimate reality has to, in some way, encompass personhood ... if what is ultimate is not in some dimension, personal, then our intuition is a surd.