[Buddha-l] Time to call it a day?

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Op 16-05-10 03:37, Richard Hayes schreef:
> Dear denizens,
>
> David Loy was in New Mexico this week and made several appearances in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. At a talk he gave at University of New Mexico, he said (somewhat casually) that perhaps the time has come to stop using labels such as Buddhism and to talk instead of human transformation or something like that. Perhaps focusing too much on Buddhism just gets in the way of the important task before us.
>
> I think Loy's comment may have been the fourth or fifth time in the past month or so I have heard someone say something very much along those lines. I've heard Buddhists say it may be time to drop the label "Buddhism," and I've heard Vedantins say much the same about "Vedanta", and Christians say much the same thing about "Christianity" and Quakers say the same thing about "Quakerism". Dropping labels that keep sticking to our fingers and gumming up the workings of our minds seems to be in the air these days. As a fan of Candrakīrti, of course, I am perfectly delighted by all these label-shedding intentions. The only thing about this trend I find a little disturbing is that people keep wanting to call it something. But why?
>
>    
First of all it's facilitates conversation if you call something by a 
name. I find wordless discussions very boring. Secondly I don't see why 
anyone would call 'it' a day, I'm not sure what 'it' is, but calling it 
a day seems to be quite useless.
I also don't understand why people should stop calling 'Buddhism' 
'Buddhism'. For me the current practice is quite convenient. It's like 
changing your e-mail address if you change it, you only create 
confusion. Meanings of words change by themselves, which creates enough 
problems as it is. Politicians call things by different names to sneak 
in their bias in their audience, it's called ' framing' another word for 
it is ' rhetorics'. The reason for this forced name changing is that 
some people seem to think that history is just for high-school and not 
part of our life world. So in order to avoid discussions they hide their 
own musings into a new invented word, thinking themselves to be creative 
genii. This thought is in my experience usually based on ignorance and 
narcissism.

erik also called soenam wangchuk