There is something very cultish about it. An indication of it being a cult is the tendency to get caught up in definitions of new words. It is easy to think that once you learn the vocabulary (like "vipassana", "sati", or whatever), you are have achieved something, when all you are doing is reciting new words but the thinking is done for you.
Well… it's literally a religion. And those are just foreign words.
McMindfulness (the stuff you'd get corporate trainings about) doesn't teach you any of those words, uses several different techniques at once, gives regular people little bits of the techniques used for monks to develop revulsion for all earthly things, etc.
Seems like having revulsion for all earthly things can backfire in unpredictable ways. I have a suspicion that the early Buddhist may have been onto something, but something vital was lost a long time ago.
It's good if you're a monk. It's not good if you're a lay person.
Ancient (Pali canon) Buddhism is different from Asian Buddhism, but modernist American Buddhism is pretty different from that too.
(Although, a lot of Asian Buddhism is basically copied from European philosophy; when the Europeans showed up, Asia had to cook up something they'd count as a religion in a hurry so they wouldn't count as savages and get colonized.)
