[Buddha-l] Protestant Buddhists

[Richard Hayes]

On Sunday 28 January 2007 14:56, Sally McAra wrote:
 
> You might be interested to know that Goenka's followers are building a
> massive stupa/pagoda near Mumbai.

Trying to make it tall enough to rise out of the thick cloud of exhaust fumes?

> I'd be interested to know what you think - does building such a big, golden
> stupa make them seem less "protestant"-like?

In that one respect, perhaps. One of the many ways in which I tend to be 
temperamentally Protestant is that when the world is filled with sick, 
starving, uneducated, impoverished, wounded orphans, and when the planet is 
being devastated by wars and by readiness for war and eroded by the effects 
of collective greed and lust for power, building big, golden stupas strikes 
me as obscene. I think we live in times in which it it is long past due for 
Buddhism to stop being such a stupaed religion. 

After sending off my list of attributes that might attract the P-word as a 
label, I remembered an incident when I was still on the board of directors of 
what was then called the Zen Lotus Society. We were revising our 
constitution, and the society's founder, Samu Sunim, was adamant that we 
include a clause making him president and spiritual director for life. His 
justification was  "We don't want this society to be like a Protestant 
congregation, in which the congregation can fire the minister if they become 
dissatisfied." In Sunim's mind, as he explained his stance, there is 
something anti-spiritual about a system that allows one to fire one's 
spiritual director. I resigned from the board of directors shortly after that 
meeting. To me the very essence of spirituality is the freedom to fire a 
spiritual guide who turns bad. Not to be able to rid oneself of a 
dysfunctional guru, swami, lama or master is to be a character in a very bad 
joke. This conviction, I realize, makes me deeply Protestant. (Maybe I would 
have been more comfortable with Devadatta than with his cousin Gotama.)

> For me it affirms Richard's remark that applying labels from Christianity
> to Buddhism has some severe limitations.

I would want to add that applying labels from Buddhism to Buddhism is often 
not much less limited. A lot of mischief can hide in the glue on the backside 
of a label!

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico