June 2009 UTC You have to be careful about meanings of words A word can have more than 1 meaning When 1 source says x is y another source says x is z they re not necessarily disagreeing with each other They may be talking about different senses of x That s what seems to be happening here A bit more detail When a Buddhist talks about Buddhism they often usually mean whatever that particular Buddhist thinks is true Buddhism When scholars talk about Buddhism they mean the totality of what all different Buddhists think is true Buddhism WP neutrality policy forbids it to take sides in disputes between Buddhists about what true Buddhism is Instead the policy is to cover all significant bodies of opinion among Buddhists about what true Buddhism is To avoid confusion the article would have to stick to 1 particular meaning of the word Buddhism If the article were to use Buddhism in the sense of true Buddhism then a lot of things would have to be rephrased You couldn t say for example there are 2 or 3 main forms of Buddhism You d have to say instead there are 2 or 3 main different views about what Buddhism is And so on It seems more sensible to use the term Buddhism in the scholarly sense which is also probably the way most ordinary people use the term as referring to the totality of all the different ideas different Buddhists have about what true Buddhism is So it seems to me that the appropriate way of stating the facts you refer to would be to say that some forms of Buddhism are philosophies or claim to be I m not sure whether all such claims would be recognized by philosophers What you say about weasel words has some validity The actual words of the sources here are given in a section near the bottom of this page 10 21 15