[Buddha-l] women & , er, religion

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 28, 2009, at 9:47 PM, Kdorje at aol.com wrote:

> One suspects that perhaps our fellow denizens are applying
> Judeo-Christian-Islamic or other paradigms of competition to a  
> system that  is more likely
> to incorporate and synthesize than to vanquish differing  views.

No need to suspect that. The denizens who are wary of the term  
hīnayāna have gotten their paradigm directly from Mahāyāna sutras  
that declare that teachers will go to hell (admittedly only for a few  
incalculable aeons) for presenting the hīnayāna. It is simply  
undeniable that the Mahāyāna began as a triumphalist movement.  
Eventually, when attitudes softened and Buddhists decided to stop  
their internal bickering so they could take on non-Buddhist enemies,  
the connotations of certain words changed.

I suspect the dynamic of rivalry between the sectarian Buddhists was  
similar in important ways to the bitter divisions that existed between  
pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States after the  
civil war. There was no chance they could ever agree on whether it is  
moral for a Christian to own another human being, but they could (and  
did) agree that it was perfectly acceptable to try to exterminate non- 
Christian indigenous peoples.

> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above.

I'll bear that in mind.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu