[Buddha-l] Pure Land

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 07:34 -0700, Gary Gach wrote:

> Seems to me as if resemblances between Pure Land and what's now known as
> Christianity may not be accidental, but rather due to Buddhists hearing
> about followers of Jesus during travels along the Silk Route.

That seems possible, but what I would consider more likely is that the
cult of Amitabha and the cult of Jesus have a common ancestral influence
in the cult of Mithra, which was prominent in Persia and in the
Hellenistic world at about the time that the Jesus cult evolved and that
the Amitabha cult evolved.

According to one theory that I have read about, the Jesus cult borrowed
several important elements from the cult of Mithra. For example,
December 25 was the birthdate of Mithra, and the most prominent symbol
of Mithraism was the cross. Some Hellenists have claimed that it was an
accident of history that Christianity nudged out Mithraism as the cult
of choice in the 3rd or 4th century of what eventually came to be called
the Christian era.

In all these speculations, of course, it is important to know
speculation from well-grounded historical evidence, and to be wary of
what logicians call the genetic fallacy, namely, the fallacy of
dismissing an idea because of its origins rather than dealing with the
idea on its own terms. 

As Gregory Schopen and others have rightly pointed out, Western
Buddhists and buddhologists betray their Protestant biases when they
dismiss a doctrine or a practice on the grounds that it did not
originate with Gotama (or when they uphold a doctrine or practice as
valid on the grounds that it did originate with Gotama).

While on this topic of "pure land," do any of the Sinologists on this
list have any insights into why the happy region (sukhavatii bhuumii)
was translated into Chinese as the pure earth? (Since the concept of
pure land did not originate in India, it is obviously false.)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
Universiy of New Mexico