[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Vicente Gonzalez]

Richard wrote:

RH> I guess we must run with very different crowds. I can't think of anyone I know
RH> well enough to call a friend who assumes, even unconsciously, that Western
RH> culture is superior to other cultures. No doubt such people exist in enough
RH> abundance in the United States to keep our government filled with xenophobic
RH> war-mongers, but I really do not encounter such xenophobia in my daily life
RH> of hanging out with academics and Western Buddhists. (But then I also don't
RH> know any Republicans or people who watch Fox News.)

sounds quite innocent. Sense of superiority exists everywhere despite
our public showers. When it is not politically correct, it can be
replaced with preventions or callings to protect the own culture.
That's normal at all. The point is when he thing called Culture is
understood like an static thing because we are perceiving our own
fraction of the film. Note nobody remember the many foreign things 
which today are our own culture and they were assimilated time ago
from other places. 

Even when we wish to protect the Amazon tribes, in depth we are
not wishing their right to live in their own way but our own right to
assimilate something of them. There is something interesting to us
and we wish preserve them because we expect the assimilation.
This perennial hunger is culture not an isolated picture in some place.
And there is a natural selection in all that. Nobody wants to preserve
cannibalism or assimilate the clitoris ablation. In the same way,
there is not need to protect westerners of new eastern things to
conceive Religions because those western trends needed to us will be
preserved in a natural way. And those things perceived as needed will
be assimilated. In example, we know that throwing coins to Buddha 
figures is a rooted practice in Japan but it doesn't have any future
here. So also many westerners are attracted by things which probably
other people don't like  (guru, ritual). But our opinion here is not
relevant. Reality shows that there is something in these adoptions
which people demands. 

Although it is the history of the human kind, we prefer defend our
actual fix photo devoid of risks. It would be more intelligent
improving knowledge about those new things instead attacking them
in a useless way. In this way, they would be polished to our demands
to have a better thing. Kant said in a Taoist style that Destiny can
guide us when we submit to him but he drags us when we resist to him.

Actually I know a boy which was inside a bad group who take profit of
Tibetan Buddhist things. What betrayed this man was his own lack of
information. This lack of information arises because little knowledge
in society and bad organization of authentic Buddhist groups. In such
conditions any message or Religious appearance can be manipulated,
even a protestant one.
There are international networks selling University accreditations
and many dentists and economists working with that. Nobody talks
about changing the education system.

(By the way, if you have a JSTOR pass I can send you some gift...)


best regards.