[Buddha-l] Dissent or Service?

[Richard Hayes]

On Friday 06 October 2006 02:11, Joy Vriens wrote:

> I expect that since Quakers were present right from the founding of
> America, when everything still needed to be built, together with other
> Christian sanghas that left the European continent for similar reasons,
> there weren't any autochtones to befriend first, there simply was a
> promised land to be implemented.

It's not clear to me what you are expecting.  Quakers were among those who 
opposed war with the native peoples who got to the Americas  before the 
Europeans. John Woolman and other Quakers made attempts to befriend the 
native Americans and to discourage other Christians from feeling justified in 
taking their ands away from them. 

Quakers also opposed the unseemly series of armed uprisings against the 
British that led to the independence of the United States. My guess is that 
if any Buddhists had been on hand, they would have endorsed the Quaker 
dictum: "We cannot be instrumental in the setting up or pulling down of any 
government."

>  guess that when Buddhism (Asian Buddhist masters, not those
> damn hippies ) came to America it had to prove first that it had friendly
> intentions, that it wasn't a weird sect etc. and that it would fit in
> perfectly with other American values.

I assume you are referring now to the Japanese Buddhists in the 19th century 
who realized that if they appeared too strange to European Americans, they 
would face not only the usual racial discrimination that blemishes 
America's "classless" society but also religious persecution. They could do 
nothing about their race, but they did adopt the institutional forms and 
religious nomenclature of Protestant Christianity. Not that their efforts to 
blend in saved them from being rounded up and put into concentration camps 
during the second world war. The Japanese, like the Quakers, were 
incarcerated "for their own protection" in a society that was (and to a large 
degree still is) generally intolerant of cultural differences and political 
dissidence. 

The American habit of imprisoning people who might be harmed by dangerously 
intolerant Americans is not much different in principle from the Taliban's 
putting women in purdah to protect them from the unwanted attentions of 
undisciplined males. The difference is that when Muslims do such things it's 
backwards and evil, but when Americans do such things it's promoting 
democracy and freedom. 

- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico