[Buddha-l] Political views of Buddhists

[Franz Metcalf]

Richard et al.,

> I know from my own experience that Asian Buddhists tend to have
> social and political views that make their Western co-religionists 
> cringe.

This reminds me of the first time I taught a course on the life cycle 
and religion at the university on Saturdays. That course attracted (and 
has continued to attract), for unknown reasons, an enormous number of 
Vietnamese American students. That first year I babbled on (with some 
connection to Buddhist practice) about the stupid Americans and the 
corrupt South Vietnamese government and oppression of the sangha 
and--somehow--I just didn't get a good response from my students. Only 
later did it occur to me that 95% of them were the children of boat 
people who had been part of that government and its army. Um, oops. As 
Richard notes, they fall into a very different quadrant from their 
American convert Buddhist compatriots.

Franz Metcalf