[Buddha-l] American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard P. Hayes schreef:

>On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 18:18 +0100, Stefan Detrez wrote:
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>I think this trend of Americans specializing in American Buddhism will
>catch on for two reasons: 1) Americans, as a rule, have almost no real
>interest in any culture except their own, and 2) most Americans have
>such poor training in languages (including English) that they lack the
>intellectual equipment to study Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan,
>Tokharian, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese texts. So if they
>want to study Buddhism they read Alan Ginsberg, Ken Wilber and Elizabeth
>Claire Prophet. (At my university, undergraduates are required to take
>only ONE SEMESTER of a foreign language. And for most of them, this will
>be their first exposure to a foreign language. Can you believe it? What
>do you think the odds are for getting an American student who has never
>studied any foreign language before the age of 18 up to speed in
>classical Sanskrit or Pali or Tibetan?)
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What happened to John Reynolds (Vajranatha)? Did he have some influence?
Another cause might have been the fact that many Zen Sensei's and 
Tibetan lama's liked to live in the U.S. Even those, like Trungpa, who 
had been living in Europe before.

-- 

Erik


www.xs4all.nl/~jehms