Random notes on:
Is Buddhism a religion, or a cultural technology.

"You Don't Look Like A Buddhist."

When one first comes to Buddhism, one is often put off, both by the strange language, and the fact that everyone seems to be talking to each other like "insiders". As if they already know this stuff, and are repeating some inside joke.

When one studies the history of Buddhism, this story is repeated over and over. Buddhism has always been in a tension between older texts and newer teaching. Between local beliefs, practices, imagery, and the "Coming of the Dharma" to a new land. It has been subsumed into the local culture, and its language. Because, (as I contend) Buddhism is not a religion, but a personal and cultural technique, a science of logic, and a phycology, free from the dogma of an outside central authority. 

See: https://dpr.info/articles/the-buddha-was-not-a-buddhist/

On the other hand there has always been an endosymbiosis relationship between the native religious practices, and the “new dharma” as it arrived,  So in practice, in most if not all Buddhist cultures, Buddhism acts and serves all the functions of a religion. Complete with supernatural mythos, ritual, and a mass shared belief system. Even a rigid system of knowledge transfer. In all respects Buddhism is a religion, and is recognized as such.

“What’s a meta-for”

In searching for a metaphor, too try and shed some light on all this, the story of how mitochondria came to be the producers of energy in all our cells is informative. In the endosymbiosis theory of mitochondria, now taken by most biologists as fact, early in the history of protoeukaryotes (this thing happened), that is, a certain bacteria came along just trying to survive, and over many thousands of years came to be inside some protoeukaryotes, and yet remained totally separate. They made a trade, the now eukaryotes, said if you keep supplying me with useful energy, I will not destroy you. but allow you to use my reproduction system. 

Now one can take this metaphor too far, so don’t. Yet it does illustrate one thing, Buddhism as a separate technology operating inside the culture, and feeding it, without taking it over. So you find huge cultural differences between say, Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and, Vajrayāna schools. When looked at from the outside. But inside the central core driving the cultural values, morals, and ethics are pretty much the same.