[Buddha-l] Mere mereness

[Piya Tan]

Dayamati,

You sound a fam'liar song
That I too have pondered long
Let us then mere Buddhists be
As long as we look to see

Piya

On 8/29/06, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:
>
> Dear denizens of buddha-l,
>
> Years ago I descended into the hell realms of news groups
> (talk.religion.buddhism and the like) and clanged swords with all
> matter of opinionated folks claiming to be Buddhists and experts in
> Buddhism. Most of the regular contributors were so rude and
> mean-spirited that I could only stand about three years of their
> virtual company. Or maybe it was five years. I forget. All I know
> is that I was much too thin-skinned for their rough manner of
> discourse.
>
> One of the regular contributors loved to dismiss everything I said
> by calling my brand of Buddhism "mere Stoicism" or "mere
> psychotherapy" or "mere Marxism" or "mere humanism." (Wasn't it
> Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the dean of the discipline known as
> comparative religion, who said that there is no quicker way
> demonstrate one's own smallness than to put the adjective "mere" in
> front of the name of someone else's belief?)
>
> So what does "mere" mean? What did it mean to C.S. Lewis when he
> gave his impassioned defense of Christianity the title <cite>Mere
> Christianity</cite>? Lewis explains that his aim was to articulate
> the essence of Christianity. He knew---for he was a man of
> letters---that "mere" means "pure, complete, total." So he was
> trying to get at something like a pure Christianity, a set of
> beliefs and practices that were basic and primitive, perhaps the
> Christianity that existed before all the scholars and exegetes and
> hermeneuticists got their dirty hands on it.
>
> Oddly enough, what Lewis was doing for Christianity comes close to
> what I have spent my life doing for Buddhism. I have wanted to get
> to mere Buddhism. How odd that in trying to get at that which was
> fully and completely Buddha-dharma, with no admixture of anything
> extraneous or unnecessary, I should come to be seen by some as
> trying to advocate doctrines that I have never found satisfactory
> or complete as they are---things like Marxism, for example.
>
> What I have found in Buddhism is a form of psychotherapy that is
> surpassed by none, a truly mere psychotherapy, a truly mere
> humanism, a truly mere political theory, and a truly mere
> philosophy. So I stand guilty as charged, but not quite in the way
> my various detractors thought.
>
> Yours in mere friendship,
> Dayamati
> http://home.comcast.net/~dayamati/
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