[Buddha-l] A really good & provocative book

[curt]

jkirk wrote:
> Speaking of the cooky Mahayana sutras, y'all have GOT to get this book--I
> got it via ILL--it's a fantastically good critique of 4 Mahayana sutras as
> literature, of their rhetorical hankypanky--I am so impressed:
>
> Alan Cole. _Text As Father : Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist
> Literature_. UCPress, 2005.  He takes on the Lotus, the Tathagata, the
> Diamond, and Vimalakirti's Nirdesa. [how they got rid of the old Buddha and
> made a new one: the texts! + their tricks of the trade] 
>
> My only quibble is the same as with some other scholarly books--he overdoes
> the writing, it's often prolix and a repetitive, he could have eliminated at
> least 25% of it. Still a brilliant contribution to undoing the smug Mahayana
> mainstays.
>
>   

 From Amazon: "Alan Cole argues that these writings were carefully 
sculpted to undermine traditional monastic Buddhism and to gain 
legitimacy and authority for Mahayana Buddhism as it was veering away 
from Buddhism's older oral and institutional forms."

Yet another book perpetuating the 19th century Orientalist 
romanticization of so-called "early-Buddhism" (which is really nothing 
but a Calvinist fantasy). Why not just read Siddhartha instead? At least 
Hesse admitted that he wasn't really taking about Buddhism.

Curt Steinmetz