Media Representations of Buddhism

In this episode, Scott complains about the media! Seriously, though, bouncing from the last episode that dealt with the commodification and commercialization of Buddhism, we now deal with the related issue of media representations of Buddhism and Buddhists. How is Buddhism represented in the media, and what we can learn about Buddhism via these representations? Are they helpful to people in actually understanding what Buddhism about? Similarly, how are individual Buddhists represented? Who isn’t represented in the media and what are the consequences of these representations or lack thereof? We reference Jane Naomi Iwamura’s book, Virtual Orientalism, in this episode which can be found here. And Harry makes reference to a weird Ikea ad that can be found here (and talked about by the Angry Asian Man here).