[Buddha-l] The mess at Bodh Gaya

[Piya Tan]

Guys,

The shadow is darkest where the light is brightest.

Piya

On Feb 7, 2008 10:51 PM, Curt Steinmetz <curt at cola.iges.org> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> >
>
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