pure buddhist cultivation like vajra body and elightenment like the buddhist sect in Martial World Edit: Even an mc with the temperament of a monk will be fine
I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, the MC is a monk who wanted to decend the mountain but was bound to a system which forces him to become "Buddah". He also gets buddhistic cultivation skills. https://www.novelupdates.com/series/the-monk-that-wanted-to-renounce-asceticism/
I've been looking for one too. Closest I've found is The Sage Who Transcended Samsara but even then it's not really.
I think it's because most cultivation novels are from China and they probably would get censored if things got religious
there's a novel called Martial Arts Master in which mc fights against many enemies that practice Buddhist martial arts. I found those extremely interesting. That's what i was going for
Dragon Marked War God, one of the MCs close friends is a monk and uses Dharma skills and ofc some enemies aswell in Cultivation Chat Group are also some buddhist people, though this is a mix of many schools of thought there is also one whose name i cant recall, where people awakaned bloodlines which where presented as tattos and the mc had a silver dragons one because of a necklace his father left him and his sister was a phoenix, DP twins but she was taken away so he had to go to the mainland and there was a big Dharma faction
This is not true. ALL "normal" cultivation stories are based off daoism. Chinese fantasy novels in general is based off Chinese folk religion. Buddhism is probably just less popular to write about, especially when you can't really have female characters/ any romance building for the main character.