[Buddha-l] Re: Spread of Buddhism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 00:08 +0200, Michel Clasquin wrote:

> My own conclusion on that was that interest in Buddhism is directly 
> proportional to the level of education (relative to a given society) and 
> the leisure to investigate cultural alternatives.

Thomas Tweed has made a similar observation about Buddhism in America.
In the 19th century only the most wealthy could learn about Buddhism,
since books and travel were both expensive, and one could not learn much
about Buddhism without buying prohibitively expensive academic books or
traveling to Asia. 

Moreover, in the 1850s and later, it was considered alien and somehow
un-American to take an interest in Buddhism; this was the time of the
"nativist" movement in American religion, when any religious traditions
that were associated with exotic places like Rome and Asia were regarded
with deep suspicion. (Of course religions associated with native
American peoples were also somehow deemed un-American, but that's
another whole story.) So when Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State took
a fancy in Buddhism, he kept it secret from everyone but his most
intimate friends. Even many members in his family did not know that he
secretly considered himself a Buddhist. Tweed's account of all this is
quite fascinating.

> /pace/ Richard Hayes, the *dharma* may be easy to understand, but
> *Buddhism* is rich and complicated, and it takes a certain level of
> intercultural nous to get a grip on it (only to have that grip
> loosened by Buddhism itself, of course).

No <i>pace</i> needed on that. It states my position exactly. There is
hardly anything in the teachings of the Buddha that puts a strain on the
intellect, but once intellectuals got their talons into the Dharma, it
became dead meat. Some of the writings of Buddhist intellectuals became
so abstruse that hardly anyone could make heads of tails of them. And
then the measure of how well someone "understood" Dharma was not how
kind they were, but how well they could explain the subtle differences
between Devendrabuddhi and Manorathanandin, or between mKhas-grub and
rGyal-msthan, or between Xianzang and Fazang.

> This implies that Buddhism in its initial stage of transference from one 
> culture to another will inevitably have an elitist air about it.

Its elitism is inevitable only if what is transmitted is the works of
scholastics. If someone insists that the epitome of Dharma is Fazang or
Tsong ha pa or Dogen, then only highly specialized scholars will be
qualified to study Dharma. But it needn't be that way, even if it almost
always is that way.

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence."  -- William Clifford