‘Buddhism is for people that want to suppress, in life. They’re afraid. Don’t get attached. Don’t have desires. Don’t even try. Just sit there in the lotus position with a thumb up your ass.’

Thus speaks the sage of North Carolina. Saxon Ratliff, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, is not the most likely of candidates for a week at a Thai wellness resort. He doesn’t need a break, he assures one of the staff when he arrives: he loves work. He also loves women, and sees this holiday with his family – a businessman father played by Jason Isaacs, pill-popping mother (Parker Posey) plus younger brother and sister – as a chance to show off his abs and play a ‘numbers game’ with the women he meets around the pool.

The Ratliff family are one of three groups of tourists arriving for a week at the luxury White Lotus resort. This is season three of Mike White’s beloved satire, skewering the lives and neuroses of the super-rich but owing its enormous success to its exploration of more universal themes: race, sex, capitalism and digital overload.

As with seasons one and two, we begin at the end. We witness paradise abruptly pulled apart in short, chaotic scenes of violence and death before we cut to a boatload of wealthy, mixed-up tourists arriving one week earlier. Which of them will die? Why? And who will the guilty party be? Paradise in season one was the Hawaiian island of Maui. In series two, it was Sicily. Season three is set on the island of Koh Samui, where eventual tragedy is foreshadowed by the presence of monitor lizards, shrieking monkeys and poisonous fruit.

Joining the Ratcliff family on the boat to the island are three middle-aged friends on a girls’ trip and an odd couple: balding, brooding Rick Hatchett (Fallout’s Walton Goggins) and his much-younger Mancunian girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Chelsea, we learn, had wanted a holiday in Australia but is prepared to make the best of Thailand. Rick chose this resort but appears to be hating every minute. There is nothing on the menu that he wants – not the food, not the spa treatments, not even Chelsea.

Fans of The White Lotus who are still in mourning for Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) – standout star of season one and two, whose pampered but confused existence came to a sudden, watery end – can take comfort in the return of the ever-optimistic Belinda. By far the sanest member of staff at the White Lotus resort in Maui, Belinda is back. Still hoping one day to become a wellness entrepreneur in her own right, she seems more than content to spend three months at the Thai resort, learning how this branch of the White Lotus business gets things done.

Television critics have complained that the new iteration of the show takes a while to get going and doesn’t make enough use of its Thai setting. It’s true that staff at the resort are given less of a role in the proceedings than in previous editions. But we should credit Mike White for avoiding the low-hanging fruit of wellness woo as a target for his satire. If Saxon’s mini-speech on Buddhism is anything to go by, White is prepared to let his viewers join the dots for themselves. Desire is, after all, the beating heart of The White Lotus: wanting the wrong thing, wanting a dangerous thing or not knowing what – or who – you want.

Fifteen years have passed since Julia Roberts stopped off in an Indian ashram on her global journey of self-discovery, in the film version of Eat Pray Love. In that time, and with the help of a whole host of wellness and ‘self-care’ gurus – prime among them Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop empire – we have learned first to value and then to feel a little suspicious about people offering to improve some combination of our physical, mental and spiritual health. A mindfulness boom has come and gone, benefitting many but leaving others wondering why large corporations took to it quite as enthusiastically as they did. Was it purely about concern for workers’ wellbeing? Or, as some claimed, was it mainly about equipping those workers to handle more stress and longer working hours?

One might, after all this, have expected western interest in Asian religion and spirituality to have played itself out. The making of self-improving journeys to Asia has been a staple of western life since at least as far back as the 1960s, when generations of young people began heading out to places like India in search of alternatives to the worldviews and ways of living with which they had been raised. The hippy trail was followed by the gap-year and then by the week-long wellness retreat, promising a reset for mind, body and spirit. So why hasn’t it played itself out – either by fading away or by succeeding so profoundly that the associated ideas and values became fully domesticated and the ‘Asian’ adjective no longer made any sense? The answer may lie in Saxon Ratcliff’s casual critique of Buddhism, offered while searching for pornography on his tablet and aimed at his sister, who is writing a thesis on it for her religious studies course at university.

‘Don’t get attached. Don’t have desires. Don’t even try.’ This was very much the view that westerners in the early nineteenth century took of a religion about which they knew precious little – save that where Christians hoped for a happy hereafter, the goal of Buddhist practice seemed to be self-annihilation: an end, at last, to the cycle of death and rebirth. It appeared shockingly dark and grim, and it helped to feed the contrasting stereotypes – whose roots can be traced back to the Greco-Persian wars – of the energetic, thrusting westerner versus languid, fatalistic Asians.

Had this been the extent of western interest in Buddhism, it would not reveal much about the West beyond the racism and sense of cultural superiority that marked attitudes to much of the non-western world in the nineteenth century. But something deeper and more interesting was at work. More and more western intellectuals – writers, linguists, philosophers and poets – were developing doubts, across the nineteenth century, about the basis for and ultimate destination of modern western life. Faith in Christianity was ebbing away and human achievements in science and technology proved inadequate as recompense: impressive though they were, they threw up disappointments of their own – from polluted and unequal cities to a vision of a universe seemingly bereft of purpose.

Into this space stepped a handful of people who found in Buddhism the key to unlocking western desperation. Most famous amongst them was Edwin Arnold, a poet and journalist with The Telegraph. He had worked for a while in India, could read Sanskrit, and though he remained a Christian he found in the figure of the Buddha a fresh source of inspiration for his countrymen in England and across the western world. Working in spare moments – scribbling lines on restaurant menus and even his own shirt-cuffs – he composed an epic poem, The Light of Asia, about the life and philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha.

The Light of Asia was a canny bit of marketing. Arnold pitched the Buddha to his Victorian readers not as the shifty Asiatic of racist cliché but as a man on a mission. Here was a prince who grew up amidst great wealth and comfort in northern India but who was troubled by fleeting glimpses of poverty, illness and death. Any self-respecting social reformer of the nineteenth century would recognise immediately a kindred spirit. Determined to treat suffering at its source, and not content with the ministrations of priests, Siddhartha set out in search of wisdom. For western readers who appreciated the self-made man and the man of science – testing this or that truth-claim for himself – here again was someone whose story they could get behind. Even more so when Siddhartha found his answers: the scourge of uncontrolled desire and the need for heroic self-sacrifice. Here was Asia’s Martin Luther – Asia’s Jesus, even.

So successful was Arnold’s portrayal of Buddhism and the Buddha that sales for his poem ended up equalling those of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you prefer to measure a book’s impact in terms of angry rebuttals then here, too, Arnold’s work was an extraordinary success. Christian missionaries out evangelising in Asia were particularly keen to stamp on the idea that Buddhism might be just what Europe and North America needed. If Buddhism were so elevated a creed, they asked, where in Asia could one find the successful civilization built on its tenets? The reality of Buddhist life for the great masses of South and South-East Asia, they claimed, was one of ignorance and squalor. Arnold pointed to Japan as a Buddhist society which, by the early twentieth century, was doing rather well for itself. Critics responded that this was not because of but rather in spite of its Buddhist past – a legacy that its modernising leaders were seeking assiduously to undo.

Edwin Arnold was far from the only figure in this era to offer up Asian solutions to western problems. The linguist William Jones, who worked for the East India Company in Calcutta, helped to translate both sacred Indian literature and some of the country’s great poetry. His work, in turn, inspired in the likes of Goethe an appreciation of Indian drama. Goethe was particularly moved by the work of the poet Kalidasa, whose subtlety brought home to Goethe the extent to which his fellow Europeans seemed to have run out of creative steam of late – relying, in their fiction, on ‘caricature and stupid priests.’ A short sequence in the first episode of The White Lotus, showing a performance by firelight of Thai puppetry, conjures this sense of western fascination with new and powerful forms of drama.

Amongst the most successful Asian religious and spiritual teachers of the time was Swami Vivekananda: a Hindu monk from the Advaita Vedanta tradition, who diagnosed westerners’ malaise and prescribed Eastern wisdom as the answer. He may well have been the first person to teach yoga in the West. Other teachers followed, notably D.T. Suzuki, who helped to introduce Japanese Zen to western audiences as a direct and intuitive approach to truth – ideal for anyone weighed down by religious dogma and dodgy doctrine. What all these teachers had in common was an ability to ‘sell’ Asian wisdom to the West as not just a cure for westerners’ ills but as a clear-sighted and much-needed critique of what western life had become.

Mike White captures Buddhism’s critical potential beautifully in The White Lotus, when we find Saxon’s younger sister, Piper, listening to an audio recording by a Thai monk. We haven’t yet met this monk. Maybe he will turn out to be wise and sincere, or maybe he’ll be the dodgy guru of western caricature: taking payment in cash and fast cars in return for gnomic utterances and spiritual pixie-dust. Nor have we yet discovered whether Piper has arrived in Thailand with big questions on her mind or simply a need to complete her thesis. However things turn out, White helps to set the tone for the rest of the season via a few short lines from this Buddhist monk:

Identity is a prison. No-one is spared this prison. Rich man, poor man, success or failure. We build the prison, lock ourselves inside, then throw away the key.

It is impossible not to read the lives of the White Lotus guests in this light, not least the three women who are there on a girls’ trip: longtime friends Michelle, Leslie and Carrie. Michelle is a famous actress and the other two, we soon discover, have become used to living in her shadow – and on her dime: Michelle is paying for the holiday. Their early conversations have a brittle confidence to them, from talk about how they are all ‘winning at life’ to hilarious attempts to one-up each other on how young and fabulous they still look – culminating in a truly absurd compliment: ‘you look like you just got pushed out of a birth canal.’ All this quickly gives way to assuring one another that, really, this isn’t a mid-life crisis trip. Watching one of the women go off on her own and quietly burst into tears brought to mind a line from Alan Watts, an English philosopher of the counter-culture era who did much to bring ‘Eastern wisdom’ to the West. You spend your whole life climbing a ladder, he said, only to find that you have set it against the wrong wall.

We have yet to find out quite what White will do with his Thai setting and its interwoven themes of Buddhism and wellness. We have had a hint already that bald white men of a certain age who make their lives in Thailand may feature in an unflattering light – so-called LBHs, according to one character: ‘Losers Back Home.’ But those lines from the unseen monk, about the dangers of making do with a narrow, narrative sense of ourselves, reveal him as something of a kindred spirit for White: a specialist in the timely critical prod, who then sits back and lets his audience do the rest.

Perhaps even more provocative is Saxon Ratliff’s off-hand assessment of Buddhism: ‘Don’t get attached. Don’t have desires. Don’t even try.’ Yes, this is a silly, reductive view, which has much in common with the earliest western misunderstandings of Buddhism. Still, there is something in it that might apply not just to Buddhism but to many sorts of religious or spiritual approaches to life. The Buddhist scholar and clinical psychologist Jack Engler once warned that ‘you have to be somebody before you can be nobody.’ In other words, religion, and perhaps Buddhism especially given its teachings about the ultimate unreality of our everyday sense of self, may become a refuge for people who really are afraid to engage with life – its terrors and pleasures and threat of failure. In the end, that won’t work. Serious religious or spiritual commitment will always bring you face to face with who you are, and demand of you that you do something about it.

With that in mind, it is perhaps no surprise that many of us are content to be tourists in the spiritual life: a nice place to visit but hard to make a life there. Unsettling though it may be to take advice from a man like Saxon, who early on in The White Lotus exhibits an unsettling degree of interest in how ‘hot’ his own sister is, the question of what we do with our own desire is actually a very good one – and a very difficult one. If spirituality or wellness become a means of denying or even quashing it, then don’t we end up only half alive? And yet any number of the characters in season three appear poised to teach us just how ruinous desire can be. Fans of the series will already be expecting disaster, deceit and eventually blood. Might we also find a little wisdom, too?