Traditional sutric Buddhism was definitely about detachment (or “renunciation”); you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.

The presentation of Buddhism as chill and peaceful and all about meditation is a modernization to keep it alive after the white people found it.

> you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.

Possibly as an instrumental practice on the way to full buddhahood (and that would come after even the very advanced stage of arahantship, which basically means guaranteed complete enlightenment after your lifetime!). Surely not as mere penance or mortification of the flesh shorn of any contemplative practice, because that was very clearly criticized by the Buddha as misleading and useless when the Hinduists were doing it.

(Then again, IIRC, the Stoics talk about doing something very similar. The idea itself would not have been unfamiliar in the West.)