[Buddha-l] On being unarmed and compassionate

[Gad Horowitz]

How does the WBO deal with homosexuality?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard P. Hayes" <rhayes at unm.edu>
To: "Buddhist discussion forum" <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 1:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] On being unarmed and compassionate


> 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)
> 
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