[Buddha-l] Shamatha book--clarification

[Christopher Fynn]

curt wrote:

> Piya Tan wrote:
>> Although I admire Batchelor's agnostic courage

> There is nothing "courageous" about Batchelor's agnosticism. He himself 
> characterizes it explicitly as an ethnocentric retreat from the 
> rebellious and defiant idealism of his youth - as an admission that, for 
> him, it is impossible (and "unsustainable" as he puts it) to embrace 
> anything so fundamentally foreign to "our own culture" as Buddhism. 
> Check out Batchelor's essay "Deep Agnosticism" ( 
> http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/deepagnosticism.htm )

> "I discover as I grow older a reconnection with the roots of my own 
> culture. Maybe many of us of my generation were drawn to Buddhism as a 
> kind of act of defiance, a kind of rebelliousness against what we 
> viscerally disliked—often for rather naive, adolescent, and idealistic 
> reasons—in our own culture and we saw Buddhism, or at least I saw 
> Buddhism, as a kind of vindication of that dissent.

> But as the years have gone by I’ve found that this denial of one’s 
> roots, this denial of one’s cultural upbringing, is not actually 
> possible to sustain. If one seeks to sustain it, one often ends up as a 
> kind of mock Tibetan or pseudo-Japanese. Although I have tried to do 
> that on occasion, dressing up in all of the appropriate regalia, more 
> than that I feel it to be still seeking to find an identity outside that 
> of my own culture. It’s, as Freud might say, impossible to repress these 
> things. They simply come out in other ways."

IMO *deliberately* trying to create a "Western Buddhism", "American Buddhism", 
"Agnostic Buddhism" or whatever (and especially thinking or claiming that this 
is somehow "superior" or more rational) is just as delusional as dressing up "in 
all of the appropriate regalia" and trying to become a "mock Tibetan or 
pseudo-Japanese".

- Chris