[Buddha-l] On being unarmed and compassionate

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 10:03 -0700, Michael Paris wrote:

> Very selective group, eh? I wonder what other entrance requirements
> they have. So one has to justify one's beliefs, or even hobbies, in
> order to belong to this bunch. But, of course, that's their privilege.
> Many groups practice their version of right-think.

The group I was describing, the Western Buddhist Order, has a pretty
definite version of right-do. It is a little less interested in right-
think. The kinds of actions it wants its members to avoid are eating
meat, having abortions and owning guns. As far as I know, those are
considered guidelines only for those who wish to "belong" (in some
sense) to the outfit. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has taken the
step of suggesting that McDonald's franchises, abortion clinics and
sporting goods stores be bombed or that the constitution of the United
States be rewritten with new laws banning carnivorism, abortion and gun
ownership. (I seem to be the only one crazy enough to advocate banning
guns loudly and incessantly, and I am careful not to identify myself as
a Buddhist when I do it, lest Buddhism be the target the next
Crusades.) 

What is interesting, I think, about the way some Buddhism has taken
shape in the USA is that it has followed the footsteps of Puritanism in
so many ways. There were, of course, no such people as the Puritans.
That is, nobody seems to have called themselves by that name. It was a
label given to them by outsiders at first. Whatever the origins of the
name, Puritanism seems to have been a movement that cut across many
denominations of Christianity. What most of them had in common was a
tendency not to be very much concerned at all with orthodoxy (right
thinking). They rejected creeds. Some of them even saw revelation as
useless unless it was informed by reason, and some went so far as to say
that if one's reason is operating properly, then one needs no revelation
at all. But whatever fervor some Christians put into reciting creeds and
weeding out unbelievers, the Puritans put into acting reasonably and
weeding out (or shunning) miscreants.

The WBO strikes me as Puritanical in its emphasis on putting wisdom and
compassion into action by avoiding violence to animals (hence the
vegetarianism) and to fetuses (hence the stance against abortion) and to
people and animals (hence the ban on owning weapons of minor
destruction). It bases its Puritanical ethic not so much on reason (as
some Congregationalists and the Universalists, for example, did) as on
Romanticism. (I am too ignorant of Romanticism to say more about this; I
just know that one hears a lot about the Romantics in the WBO, so I
gather they are important.)

None of these claims I am making are in any way original. The accusation
that the WBO is a Protestant form of Buddhism has been made (rightly, I
think), and it has also been vehemently denied (wrongly, I think) by
some people within the WBO. I myself see nothing at all wrong in
Protestant Buddhism. Indeed, it seems an improvement, and I think it is
inevitable that Westerners will develop forms of Buddhism that are
hybrids of bits and bobs of Asian Buddhism and dribs and drabs of
Western culture.

As for myself, I stay in the WBO by staying out of all those silly
debates among my fellow groupies. There are lots of ways I think the WBO
has gone seriously astray and wandered off into being a self-parodying
cult in which the principle practice is a kind of ritualized denial of
its own mistakes. But that's pretty much the story of all organized
religion, n'est-ce pas? Despite its many failings, I applaud what the
WBO was trying to do at the beginning, namely, have an organization that
embraced all of Buddhism, rather than following any one tradition, and
made no distinction between monks and laity or between men and women. (I
used to think of them as a a Buddhist group who had learned some
important lessons from the Quakers about how to run an outfit.) To this
day, I think that is the right direction for Buddhism in the West to
take. In fact, I think much of Western Buddhism has in fact taken pretty
much that direction, although their have been some major hiccoughs (and
not a small amount of belching) along the way.

I apologize for making a bad joke in a previous message. I sometimes
make the wrong assumption that when I write a message arguing stridently
for a position and then end the message by saying something that is
obviously diametrically opposed to what I have been stridently arguing,
this ham-fisted attempt at corny humor will make someone smile. But I
keep forgetting we belong to a culture that has come to take itself so
seriously that it can no longer smile at anything---even badly crafted
jokes. So I apologize not so much for myself, but for what the society I
live in has become. And I apologize not only to Michael Paris but to the
universe for the humourlessness of our times.

-- 
Richard (alias Dayamati)