In the American imagination, Buddhism has long been associated with counterculture drop-outs—Beat generation iconoclasts, Age of Aquarius hippies, woo-woo New Agers. This unfortunate stereotype identifies Western Buddhism with the 1960s-era and later converts who popularized it, and ignores the actual people who brought Buddhism to the West—Asian immigrants. It reinforces the idea that Buddhism is not to be taken seriously. At best, Buddhism is seen as something esoteric and disconnected from the world, and at worst, as something flighty and faddish.
On the other side of the coin, proponents of mindfulness meditation and other Buddhist-inspired practices have positioned themselves as level-headed advocates of practices whose benefits, they claim, are proven by science. It's not hard to imagine that this secular–scientific turn is in part an attempt not to be tarred by the popular stereotype of Buddhism as cultish and downright weird.
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