[Buddha-l] Sense and sensibility was: American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[Joy Vriens]

Richard P. Hayes wrote:

> [Emerson] would surely have hated the
> tone of much of the Mahayana. Even his Transcendentalism is remarkably
> spare in contrast to the wild flights of fancy one finds in much of the
> Mahayana.

Sense versus sensibility eh? Mahayana let its wild flights of fancy, 
knowing them to be just that, freely flap about and is thus spared of 
sphincter cramps and shadow boxing, at least in theory.

> Even when he later admired
> the Upanishads (or some caricature of them), he had no enthusiasm for
> either their ritual implications or for the scholasticism associated
> with them. I think he would have felt much the same about much of
> Mahayana, had he known anything about it. (Knowledge of Buddhism was
> pretty scanty in the 19th century. Henry David Thoreau thought the
> Bhagavad-gita was a Buddhist classic!) 

I hardly notice the difference myself!!! <blush> I expect some people 
won't even know the difference between writings by Dignaga and 
Dharmakirti! Inuits could probably tell you that one sort of snow isn't 
the other. And how right they probably are! And can one compare the 
extasis of refined monks to that of overexcited savages?! Some people 
have no eye for detail!

BTW nice piece of humour on your website. The picture where you (?) are 
standing in front of a closed (not even half open) door with "sage" 
written on it. And next to it, it reads "Doubt is the key to the door of 
knowledge." Does that mean you perhaps have too many certainties? ;-)

Joy