[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 05 July 2007 06:38, Espen S. Ore wrote:

> Richard Hayes skrev:

I don't recall screving anyone. Perhaps the Bush administration is wearing off 
on me. They don't recall anything they have done or said either, especially 
when testifying under oath (if one can even get them to do that). But even 
before beginning, I seem to have digressed.

> So does this Japanese clone-style work? For me it does. There are other
> zen groups in Oslo which explicitely wish to follow Western (or
> Northern) European customes and languages, and I believe that people
> join the group which works for them.

That really seems the only sensible way to do things, namely, to have a 
healthy variety of styles and to let people find the styles that work best 
for them at any particular phase of their development.

In the 1980s, I was a representative of Samu Sunim's outfit to the Buddhist 
Council of Canada. (Actually, it was just a Buddhist council of Toronto, but 
Toronto mistakenly thinks it IS Canada. Again, I digress.) The Buddhist 
Council comprised all the Buddhist outfits in the greater Toronto 
metropolitan area and therefore had a wonderful variety of lokas (ethnic 
groups), yanas and nikayas. Every year there was a Wesak celebration (a major 
part of which was a ritual hand-wringing discussion of whether calling it 
Wesak instead of Buddha's birthday was privileging Theravadins and offending 
Mahayanis). The best part of Wesak for me was watching and listening to all 
the monks, nuns and lay practitioners chanting or droning or singing in 
Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Burmese, Sinhala, Pali, 
Sanskrit, Tibetan, English and French and doing prostrations in more ways 
than I ever dreamed possible. It always filled my heart with joy to see that 
so many people had obviously found something that spoke to their particular 
condition and were so obviously flourishing in their style. It never seems to 
have occurred to anyone in those days to look at anyone else's practice as 
deficient or substandard.

Alas, everything is impermanent, even good things. The Buddhist Council 
underwent a series of crises in the 1990s. Some monks became unhappy with the 
Council because too many lay people were helping make important decisions. 
Some monks were outraged that lay people in some groups were leading the 
chanting. One particularly aggressive monk felt it was inappropriate for 
women to have full representation on the Council (although he didn't seem to 
mind all the wonderful food they prepared for Buddhist fiestas). This 
discomfort with women was ostensibly part of the monk-lay issue, since the 
excuse given for barring women was that women in some traditions could not be 
fully ordained and were therefore nothing much better than laity in drag. It 
was so disheartening to see a once-beautiful celebration of Buddhist 
ecumenism and pluralism turn into a battleground over authority and proper 
protocol. It was disheartening in all the same ways it is disheartening to be 
a human being or an American or perhaps even a Norwegian.

Thanks for your message, Espen S. Ore. It inspired me, as a result of which I 
screv my heart out.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes