[Buddha-l] Re: Will new the pope verify Buddhist doctrine?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 00:00 +0100, Mike Austin wrote:

> When he referred to meditation as 'spiritual autoeroticism', a colleague 
> of mine thought he was being called a Buddhist wanker. Ratzinger's words 
> were humorous, but I also heard a useful warning.

What I hear is a continuation of a very old and persistent way of
characterizing Buddhism as a form of narcissism, a preoccupation with
nothing but one's own well-being. One of my graduate students here is
working on Buddhist ethics, and she reports that one of my colleagues
can't see anything in Buddhism but egocentric hedonism. This colleague
is not a Christian. He's pretty antagonistic toward all religion. But
whether one is a complete secularist or a doctrinaire Christian, one can
find plenty of references in Western literature to Buddhism as a
hopeless, pessimistic, narcissistic, weak-minded, hedonistic enterprise.
That view seems to have prevailed in the 19th century, but it has by no
means died out. It gets a bit discouraging after a while to see it keep
popping up, and it gets even more discouraging when it popes up.  

> It is so easy to enjoy myself in my meditation - and do nothing else.

Lucky you. I always pretty much hate sitting meditation, because I'm
always chomping at the bit to read, write, think, potter around the
garden and so forth. Walking meditation is about all I can do these
days, and it is never so pleasurable as to tempt me into spiritual
autoeroticism.

> Ratzinger has certainly encouraged me to check this a bit more avidly.

I'm glad the man has done something useful after all.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico