[Buddha-l] modern buddhist teachers

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard Hayes schreef:
> people than in the independence of countries. He is not by any means  
> indifferent to the well-being of Tibetans, wherever they happen to  
> live. Wanting to liberate India from the colonial administrative of a  
> much smaller nation, as some 19th and 20th century Hindu leaders  
> wanted to do, is a much more reasonable enterprise than wanting to  
> liberate a country with a population of 2.6 megapeople from a nation  
> that has a population of 1.3 Gigapeople. If he does, then  
> he is every bit the progressive visionary that Vivekananda was (and I  
> don't say that lightly, since I regard Vivekananda as the most  
> inspiring visionary of the 19th and 20th centuries put together). Like  
> Vivekananda, the Dalai Lama thinks people are much better off staying  
> with the religion of their childhood rather than trying to convert as  
> adults to an essentially alien way of thinking and acting. What  
> Western Buddhist or neo-Vedantin could possibly disagree with that?
>   
>
Vivekananda is very much overestimated. His Ramakrishna and Oxford 
inspired inclusivism has been a hype for a while, but he never achieved 
much for the poor. Most of the time he was holding lectures for 
theosophists. Gandhi was a conservative who wanted to be more Hindu then 
the Hindus, but he was stubborn and resourcefull and that came in handy 
at the time. He was not very practical, his grameemproject was a joke. 
Leaders who really meant something for the Dahlits were not religious, 
it were Ambedkar and Periyar (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.V.Ramasami_Naicker).


Erik

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