A couple of interesting observations from a book review of "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World," by Pankaj Mishra.

"the Buddha, as Mishra describes him, was not a prophet -- not a religious figure, but a secular one. Indeed, 'he had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity; he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgment.' He likewise ignored the question of why sin and evil exist in the world, which has obsessed nearly every major religion. The Buddha's concern was purely practical: to relieve suffering, both material and existential."

...

"But Buddhism ... is 'not easily practiced in the modern world,' where almost everything is 'predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha had warned against.' In the United States, particularly, 'as Alexis de Tocqueville had noticed in the early 1830's, individual self-interest was the very basis of the brand-new commercial and industrial society that Europeans had created in the seemingly unlimited spaces of the New World.'"