[Buddha-l] Re:American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 15:48 -0500, curt wrote:

> Cooper's novels, in turn, represent one of the more insidiously 
> fascinating aspects of cultural imperialism - romanticizing the very 
> people you are doing your level best to wipe off the face of the earth. 

The next step, after the people have been wiped off the face of the
earth, is to write novels or make movies portraying the wipers as
slobbering bloodthirsty unscrupulous villains and the wipees as angelic
beings who might have saved the planet, if only we hadn't destroyed
them. Roland Joffé's "The Mission" is an example of that genre. A step
beyond that is Bruce Beresford's "Blackrobe", which shows the absolutely
everybody--the Huron, the Mohawk, the Innu, the French and the English--
as slobbering, bloodthirsty, unscrupulous villains who laugh at
everybody different from themselves (thus white men laugh at Indian men
for mounting women from behind, like dogs, and Indian men laugh at white
men for mounting women while facing them, and Catholic priests laugh at
all men who mount women instead of young boys). The distinction between
wiper and wipee vanishes altogether, thus achieving an admirable non-
dualism. All is one, and the one stinks to high heaven.

> But don't get me wrong - the guy could write a good book, that's for sure!

I've never read Cooper's novels, but I'll take your word for it, while
asking you not to get me wrong--Joffé and Beresford could crank out good
movies. And Robert De Niro and Lothaire Bluteau did excellent jobs of
portraying sympathetic, almost admirable, Jesuits in their respective
movies.

What we now need is a movie called Orange Robe about Indian Buddhist
monks acting as dupes for the Emperor Asoka, going into Dravidian lands
and justifying genocide in the name of spreading the Dharma. (We could
show the Buddhist monks laughing at everybody who mounts anyone at all.)
Then we could have a sequel about Buddhist monks from Nalanda going into
Tibet and laying waste to the indigenous Tibetan religions. I see Robert
De Niro playing Padmasambhava.

-- 
Richard