Buddhism vs New Age: Where They Meet and Part

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 28 October 2026

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Buddhism is not a New Age religion, and Buddhism vs New Age is mostly a story about borrowed words. Buddhism comes from ancient India, with its own scriptures, monastic orders and schools. New Age, in Wouter Hanegraaff’s account, is a modern Western movement grown from esoteric traditions, which rose sharply in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of their shared vocabulary (karma, reincarnation, chakra) reached New Age through nineteenth-century Theosophy, which changed the meanings. They meet in meditation, Tibetan imagery and rebirth, and part on self, karma, desire and refuge.

What does “New Age” mean?

New Age has no single church or creed, so the definitions come from scholars and surveys. Wouter Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture (Brill 1996; SUNY 1998) traces its “original foundations” to Western esoteric traditions of the Renaissance and says the modern movement “emerged from the increasing secularisation of those esoteric traditions during the nineteenth century”; the 1970s and 1980s, his book page adds, “saw a spectacular rise”. Paul Heelas named its centre of gravity in the subtitle of his 1996 study: The Celebration of the Self. A University of California, Santa Barbara summary of Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007) places Theosophy, New Thought, “reinvented versions of Asian ideas and practices” and the New Age within an American “metaphysical religion” whose beliefs, Albanese says, “are especially combinative”.

Surveys measure it by belief. In an online survey of 4,729 American adults in December 2017, published in 2018, Pew Research Center grouped as “New Age” belief in psychics, astrology, reincarnation and spiritual energy in physical objects. Roughly six in ten accepted at least one, including about six in ten Christians and 22% of atheists, and a third (33%) believed in reincarnation. Pew puts “New Age” in quotation marks and calls these beliefs ones “sometimes characterized as” New Age. One caution: Pew’s reincarnation item reads “people will be reborn again and again in this world”, which also fits the rebirth most Buddhist traditions teach. That is a label for counting Americans, not a finding that Buddhists are New Age (on the two words, see rebirth vs reincarnation).

How Buddhist words reached New Age: Theosophy

The Theosophical Society’s history is told in Buddhism in the West; this page is about what it did to the words. Denise Cush’s 1996 study of Buddhism and the New Age in Britain, drawing on literary sources and mainly on interviews and correspondence from 1993/4, suggests that “the common ancestor in Theosophy” is an important influence on the relationship.

The leading Theosophists admired Buddhism. Henry Steel Olcott, “a declared Buddhist” in his own words, wrote a Buddhist Catechism that H. Sumangala of Vidyodaya College, Colombo, certified in 1881 as “in agreement with the Canon of the Southern Buddhist Church”. Its main text is plain: Buddhism considers “soul” to be “a word used by the ignorant to express a false idea” (his footnote limits the “soul” criticised to “the equivalent of the Greek psuche”). Yet another of Olcott’s footnotes describes “an individual vital undulation” running through a string of lives, and says everything he found in Buddhism “accords with the theory of a gradual evolution of the perfected man”. By 1915 the Catechism reported that “Karma and Reincarnation” were the two ideas “chiefly taking hold upon the western mind.”

Helena Blavatsky went further in The Key to Theosophy (1889). She insisted that “Theosophy is not Buddhism”, yet read the Catechism’s answer on rebirth (“In one sense it is a new being, in another it is not”) as one that “plainly does not express disbelief in Soul by any means”, adding that “every learned Buddhist believes in the individual or divine Ego.” In her scheme of the person the “Higher Self” is Ātma, which “is neither your Spirit nor mine, but like sunlight shines on all.” (Theosophy and New Age are not the same thing either. Reviewing Heelas in the Theosophical Society in America’s Quest, John Algeo granted that “there are clearly links between Theosophy and the New Age movement”, and that New Age’s core ideas, in so far as it has any, are “largely compatible with and indeed derived from Theosophy”, but wrote that the “self” to be known in Theosophy “is something radically different from that of pop self-culture”.)

The sharpest borrowing was a Buddhist word for a world. Blavatsky called kāma-loka “an astral locality”, and C. W. Leadbeater’s manual The Astral Plane (1895) opens with “the astral plane, or Kâmaloka as it is called in Sanskrit”. That sentence is the conflation in its plainest form.

Did the Buddha keep a secret teaching?

This one is contested. Blavatsky claimed the real doctrine lay in “esoteric teachings that Gautama imparted to his chosen Arhats only”. The Sanskrit scholar F. Max Müller replied in 1893 that “if there is any religion entirely free from esoteric doctrines it is Buddhism”, and called her version “Buddhism misunderstood, distorted, caricatured.” The Pali Buddha, near death, seems to agree:

But Sujato’s own note calls this “a principle not followed by some contemporary Buddhist schools that harbor ‘secret teachings’”, and Lotsawa House, which publishes Tibetan texts in translation, notes that “Vajrayāna Buddhism places restrictions on the reading and practice of certain texts”, meant for those with “the requisite empowerments, transmissions and instructions”. Restricted practice texts are a different claim from Blavatsky’s, which made Buddhism one face of an ancient secret “Wisdom-Religion”.

The self: not-self and the “Higher Self”

The Buddhist side of this argument is not-self. In SN 22.59 the Buddha goes through each part of a person and ends with “Consciousness is not-self”, leaving, on this discourse’s account, nothing to play a travelling soul. The Simile of the Snake (MN 22) goes further. After the untrained person takes each thing as “my self”, the Buddha turns to the learned noble disciple, and even a self that is one with the cosmos, the view in that discourse nearest to a “Higher Self”, is set aside:

It would be wrong, though, to say no Buddhist text sounds self-like. Some Mahāyāna sūtras call buddha-nature a “true self”; that page sets out how the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra explains the language, and notes that traditions still read these texts differently.

Karma: intention, not an upward escalator

“It is intention that I call deeds,” the Buddha says in AN 6.63, and the same discourse names “the practice that leads to the cessation of deeds”: the eightfold path. Karma here is something the path brings to an end, not a ladder of progress. Theosophical writing read it as evolution, as in Olcott’s “perfected man”. Roger Jackson, reviewing Donald Lopez’s history of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, notes that the Tibetan traditions its editor invoked “sound suspiciously like Theosophy”, including the assertion that sophisticated Tibetans hold “an evolutionary rather than a cyclical view of rebirth”; in Jackson’s gloss, “you can’t go down, only up.” Buddhist cosmology says beings can go down; in Access to Insight’s summary of the realms, “unwholesome actions lead to an unfavorable” rebirth.

That karma does not explain every misfortune, and whether it can be known at all, are taken up in karma in Buddhism and is karma real?

Desire: craving and the law of attraction

New Thought, another current in Albanese’s metaphysical religion, gave popular spirituality a famous phrase. William Walker Atkinson’s Thought Vibration (copyright 1906) is prefaced by a creed whose beliefs, the book’s preface says, he first set out in the magazine New Thought in December 1901: “I believe that ‘thoughts are things,’ and that the Law of Attraction in the thought world will draw to one just what he desires or fears.” In fairness, the same creed believes “in the gospel of work” and “in being Kind”. The Buddha’s first teaching puts desire somewhere else:

The next truth is “the fading away and cessation of that very same craving”. Not every wish counts as craving: Sujato’s note on this passage says “not all desire causes suffering, for some kinds of desire lead out of suffering”. Atkinson’s creed trains thought to bring what one wants; the Pali first teaching treats craving itself as the thing to understand and let go (see craving).

The law of attraction comes from one current, New Thought, not from New Age as a whole, and not every Buddhist school puts the point so starkly. Interviewing Daisaku Ikeda, then president of Soka Gakkai International, for Tricycle (Winter 2008), Clark Strand put it that “Nichiren Buddhists chant the daimoku to get what they want—a successful career, better health, a good marriage, even world peace.” Ikeda answered that “the Lotus Sutra doesn’t deny the value of worldly benefit”, and also that the chant “is not some kind of magic formula to be recited to fulfill desires.” The Soka Gakkai’s own study material teaches that “earthly desires lead to enlightenment” (see Nichiren Buddhism).

A line that blends the two, “What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.”, circulates as the Buddha’s. It is in no canon as a sentence, and quotes the Buddha never said shows that only its first clause comes close to anything he taught.

Realms, bardo and chakras: not “astral planes”

Kāma-loka. Access to Insight’s summary of Theravāda cosmology describes the sense-sphere world as “eleven realms in which experience — both pleasurable and not — is dominated by the five senses”. They include our own human realm and realms of devas, and also the animal and hell realms; beings are born into them by past kamma, and “Existence in every realm is temporary.” So kāma-loka is a whole sphere of rebirth that includes the world we are in now, not Blavatsky’s “astral locality” entered at death (see Buddhist cosmology and are the realms literal or psychological?).

The bardo. In Karma Lingpa’s Nyingma cycle the bardos, or intermediate states, number six, and three of them (this life, dreams and samādhi) are states of the living, so the bardo is not a region of the dead. The six are set out in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and rebirth vs reincarnation. The 1927 English book was Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s translation, edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, whom Jackson calls a “Theosophist”. His footnote calls the “shining illusory-body” of the bardo “the ethereal counterpart of the physical body of the earth-plane, the ‘astral-body’ of Theosophy” (Book I, p. 100).

Chakras. In many higher tantras, as our guide to visualization meditation explains, completion-stage practice works with a subtle body of channels, winds and drops, and the maps differ by system. On a Kalachakra scroll at the Rubin Museum, six centres branch from the central channel of a “cosmic man”: “space, located at the crown; water, at the forehead; fire, at the throat; wind, at the heart; earth, at the navel; and awareness, at the genitals.” The exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation, which opened at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in 2013, called Leadbeater “a leading proponent of Theosophy” and said the glowing vortex in his book The Chakras (1927) “is echoed in recent New Age imagery”. Same Sanskrit word, different maps.

Where they genuinely meet

Cush’s abstract notes that “some significant similarities and differences can be observed” between Buddhism and the New Age. On the evidence set out above, the overlaps include belief in rebirth, whatever its mechanism; chakra language; and Tibetan imagery, above all the Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose Western readers, from Carl Jung to Timothy Leary, are traced on its own page.

Meditation is shared too. In a 2009 article in Etnolog, the Slovene Ethnographic Museum’s journal, Maja Korun set the Buddhist vipassanā method “in a New Age context”, drawing on the recollections of a group of practitioners. Her abstract says that in its original context vipassanā helps individuals function within society, but that in Europe “it is reinterpreted and leads to an estrangement from duties imposed and expected of us.” On what the practice is for in its own traditions, see Buddhist meditation.

Buddhism is not simply the “rational” one

It is tempting to cast Buddhism as the sober philosophy and New Age as the superstition. The texts and temples do not allow it. The Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1) does list augury, “interpreting dreams”, predictions that “the sun, moon, and stars will be in conjunction or in opposition” and even “chanting for protection” as “low lore” and “wrong livelihood” for ascetics and brahmins “enjoying food given in faith”. The sutta presents the Buddha’s refraining from all of this as basic conduct, the “trivial, trifling details of mere ethics” that an ordinary person praises him for, before it turns to matters “deep, hard to see”. And the list concerns how ascetics and brahmins earn a living. Protective chanting itself is another matter in Theravāda practice: Kariyawasam describes pirit (Pali paritta) as “a set of protective chants or runes sanctioned by the Buddha for the use of both laymen and bhikkhus”, and writes that pirit chanting “is a very popular ceremony among the Buddhists of Sri Lanka”.

Lived Buddhism is another matter. In Thailand, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker told the Siam Society in 2008 that “a very high proportion of the services that Buddhist monks supply” is saiyasat, “including blessing such amulets” and “matching horoscopes of lovers” (more from the same lecture on monk astrologers in Buddhist baby naming). In Sri Lanka, A. G. S. Kariyawasam writes that “the first thing done at the birth of a child is to cast the horoscope”, and calls the bali planetary ritual “a mixture of Buddhism and folk religion”, now part of “the popular living Buddhism of the island”; he warns votaries of a “pristine pure Buddhism” not to dismiss devotion as “an alien encroachment”. Men-Tsee-Khang’s Astro-Science Department recommends “auspicious dates for various activities of the Tibetan Government in Exile”. In one case, Lama Zopa Rinpoche advised a veterinary nurse to choose among an animal’s possible treatments by a Green Tara divination, while saying his advice might differ from other lamas’ (the story is in can Buddhists have pets?). And the Rubin’s Kalachakra scroll depicts chakras at the joints that “correlate to the twelve signs of the zodiac”. On lucky dates in practice, see Buddhist weddings.

So the line between Buddhism and New Age is not reason against magic. It runs through what each treats as the point.

Refuge or a combination?

The Pali refuge formula is a commitment, recited three times: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Teaching, I take refuge in the Saṅgha” (Kp 1). That is what taking refuge in the Three Jewels means. Tibetan refuge instructions spell out what the commitment excludes. In Adam Pearcey’s translation of Patrul Rinpoche’s Essential Instruction on Refuge and Bodhichitta: “Having taken refuge in the Buddha, you should not worship any gods who are still bound within the cycle of saṃsāra.”

The metaphysical religion Albanese traces, New Age included, is in her word “combinative”. Lived Buddhism has combined too: Kariyawasam calls the Sri Lankan bali “a mixture of Buddhism and folk religion”. But the refuge formula itself names three objects, not an open list. This page does not try to settle whether one person can hold both; what kind of thing Buddhism is belongs to is Buddhism a religion?