[Buddha-l] anti

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 25 September 2006 09:03, Nichts wrote:

> Zionism was the realization that there is no chunk of turf in this
> whole world where a particular tribe can live in peace.

I thought that was a teaching in Buddhism. In fact I recall doing a Buddhist 
retreat about twelve years ago where we studied some prajnaparamita 
literature. One of the texts we read had a line to the effect that a person 
is ready to be a bodhisattva when he or she realizes, without fear, that 
there is no place in the universe even the size of an atom that anyone can 
call home and on which anyone can live in peace. I firmly believe that the 
Buddhist got this one right.

I suppose the great Jewish mystical poet Bobby Zimmerman (who tried to hide 
his ethnicity by stealing a Welsh name) might have said something like this 
to just about any person, or any tribe, who complained about not finding 
peace: "I know you'vre suffered much, but in this you are not so unique."

> So they wanted 
> to get their own chunk of turf where they once owned it anyway. 

I reckon the reasoning went something like this: Once upon a time we 
brutalized the original occupants of this land, demonized them, and justified 
our ill treatment of them by claiming that God was giving us this land. So 
why not try it again? Again, this line of rationalizing imperialism is not 
unique to any tribe or nation. It is pretty much the story of human history.

I think you need a new motherboard Dr Fink. Your logic circuits have evidently 
been fried by a state of panic carefully manufactured by power-hungry 
politicians bent on expanding their empire. (I refer here to the armed and 
dangerous thugs who currently reside in some white house in a country that I 
am not at liberty to mention.)

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes