[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Espen S. Ore]

Richard Hayes skrev:
> 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.
>   
This is similar to the ways things are here in Norway now. The Buddhist 
Federation of Norway, an umbrella organization, is registered as a 
church (or whatever) and so receives funding from the government. The 
money is then divided between the member organizations in proprtion to 
the number of members. I have been on the Board in this Federation for 
some years and meeting and working with people from the different 
Buddhist schools - and with different ethnic backgrounds - is an 
experience I am very grateful for.
> 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.
>
>   
Yes, we may still be in the honeymoon period (even if the Federation is 
27 years old), and there are symptoms which show that things could go 
that way here as well.

Espen Ore
Oslo/Holmestrand