[Buddha-l] On being unarmed and compassionate

[Joy Vriens]

Richard wrote:

> 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.

As is often the case. For a very pertinent exemple, my name was given to 
me by total strangers, before they even knew anything about me.

> 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).

Or speaking more positively, to be concerned with purity. People in that 
time felt an intense need for purity, a return to the sources of their 
religion and for some even to the sources of what they thought was the 
religious experience that gave birth to it (e.g. the mystics and their 
methods of no thinking). Everybody knows what happens when you live for 
a long time in the same house. More and more junk gets accumulated in 
every corner of that house, some pieces of junk supporting others etc. 
Restoring purity by moving house and getting rid of junk or simply by 
having an intensive spring cleaning session can be most salutary.

> 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.

Of course one can bring over some ornements from one's previous house 
for the sake of nostalgia or out of respect for predecessors. One may 
even wonder in how far what constitutes the essence of the Buddhist 
religious experience, destruction of kilesa and dukkha, and the 
essence/mechanism of its methods is Buddhism?

> (I
> used to think of them [WBO] 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.

That's a normal part of the digestion process. Not everything is equally 
digestible in the lovely panaché called Buddhism.