[Buddha-l] The mess at Bodh Gaya

[Curt Steinmetz]

Even the worst case scenario at Bodhgaya doesn't amount to anything like 
the kind of vicious in-your-face desecration that has occurred at some 
other sacred sites. We should distinguish between the following scenarios:

(1) the people in charge of a sacred site are involved in corruption.
(2) an ancient site that has fallen into disuse is taken over completely 
by another religion.
(3) an ancient site that might still be in active use is taken over by a 
new religion - but the new religion accommodates the previous "owners" 
of the site in some meaningful way.
(4) an ancient site in active use is seized by the followers of another 
religion - who then kill all the people who used to worship at this site 
(possibly giving them the "choice" to convert), destroy the previous 
structures, build their own structure on the ruins, and brag about it.

One can speculate that perhaps Bodhgaya had previously been a site where 
various Deities were worshiped? Maybe it was a place sacred to the Earth 
Goddess, as well as Deities associated with trees and the planet Venus.

Curt Steinmetz

Dan Lusthaus wrote:
>
> I'm not surprised everyone chooses to single out one country as the
> scapegoat for a ubiquitous activity that no one wants to own up to (that's
> got a 2000 year tradition of its own). To do proper historical (and current
> political) analysis of these sorts of things, one has to take account of the
> political hegemony issue. Who is in control of a region? Who legally owns
> religious "property"? When the ruler is himself a partisan, how does that
> affect the identity of a property (e.g., if belonging to a rival tradition)?
> Is there a difference between being a minority religion and a majority
> religion? How did the fortunes of temples in China or Japan change over the
> centuries as leadership loyalties changed? Messy, ugly story.
>
>