Buddhism is both religion and not religion. Most of the core ideas are not metaphysical, and most modern (certainly western) practitioners don’t engage with the metaphysical (what most would consider to be “religious”) aspects at all.

Having come from a conservative Christian religious background (and finding I was wholly incompatible with it), I avoided anything even remotely resembling religion for most of my 20s.

It wasn’t until my mid 30s that I went down the Buddhism rabbit hole and what I found was entirely unlike what I expected based on my former experience with western religion.

There are also many forms of a Buddhism with varying positions e.g. Zen Buddhism is explicitly non-religious, tapping into the core insights without asking the practitioner to believe anything.

Funny that you mention this definition straight from the book, this is one of the themes that are quite intertwined in the book as well. My impression is that humans in the search of enlightenment (for the lack of other word, i.e the reason you get into a religion in the first place) get too attached to their -ism and forget about what exactly were the actions of the person that created it and what were they trying to solve.

For a book with similar tongue in cheek philosophical take on the theme "religion on a first person account" I recommend "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" by Jose Saramago.

Asking whether Buddhism is a religion is like asking if Christianity is homophobic. You can point to parts of the scriptural canon where it indubitably is, and you can point to practitioners who clearly subscribe to a version of it that is, but not everybody who practices it or makes it a part of their lives subscribes to every part of it indiscriminately. Anybody who engages with it as an influence on their own lives, as opposed to keeping it at an academic arm's length, inevitably starts to make their own version(s) of it, even if they don't intend to, because any two people's understanding will be conditioned by two different cultural backgrounds, two different personal histories, two different ongoing experiences, and two different sets of relationships to other people.

I don't think it's common for Christians not to consider Christianity a religion. At least not where I grew up, in the American bible belt.

Although I can see how calling Christianity a religion implicitly makes it equal to other religions, which Christians might be opposed to, but that doesn't seem like a mainstream point of view.

As a former Christian, I never experienced anyone avoiding the idea that we were participating in a religious system. In fact, it was a matter of pride, and part of how the church encouraged its members to differentiate themselves from the world.

> Years later when I was exploring Buddhism, no Buddhist I met wanted to refer to Buddhism as a religion.

Having spent hundreds of hours exploring this topic over the last few years, I have to point out that this is because many forms of Buddhism aren't religious at all.

The differences between Christianity and Buddhism in both the underlying philosophical ideas and the manner in which most people practice those ideas could not be more stark.

And as I mentioned in a sibling comment, Zen is a good example of an explicitly non-religious form of Buddhism.

Hinduism is similarly often described by practitioners as a "way of life" to avoid the religion label.