While recent scholarship has shown that such framings of Buddhist tradition were in large part rhetorical, and that teachers such as Goenka retained their traditional religious commitments in enacting their teachings and disseminating their meditation practices, such rhetorical reframing had a powerful impact on how Buddhism was repackaged in the context of the emergent globalities of the latter part of the twentieth century.
Rather, it interprets the early canonical teachings in a way that draws out their meaning in the Buddha's own historical context (the culture of the Gangetic plains in the fifth century BCE) while demonstrating their value and relevance to people living in our own time.
This culture saw human life as an irredeemable realm of suffering, from which one should seek transcendence in an enduring beyond-human condition – a stance that virtually all Buddhist schools, as well as Hinduism and Jainism, perpetuate.
Instead, it aligns itself with today's post-metaphysical philosophy, not least phenomenology, so finding itself on a convergent path with similar movements in radical Christian theology, found in the work of thinkers such as Don Cupitt[12] and Gianni Vattimo.
[15][16] Instead, secular Buddhism emphasizes a praxis, encouraging autonomy and equally encompassing every aspect of one's humanity, as modeled by the noble eight-fold path (appropriate view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration).
Such an approach is open to generating a wide range of responses to specific individual and communal needs, rather than insisting on there being "one true way" to "enlightenment" valid for all times and places.