[Buddha-l] Unpopular Buddhism

[JKirkpatrick]

Well, here are some excerpts from this article that indicate to
me anyway that he was not making invidious distinctions between
'Asiatiks and the West', that he was in fact concerned more about
western romantic ideas of Buddhism contrary to the Buddhist
rational perspective, etc. That in fact he recognises Buddhism as
basically rational. What Batchelor decided as a personal leaning
to avoid above all was to practice Buddhism 'as a religion':
	
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Excerpts:
I certainly don't see it as some kind of position, certainly not
a final or dogmatic position, but, in a purely personal sense, a
step along the way to trying to understand what my own
relationship is with the teachings of the Buddha as a
European/Westerner. 

What I reconnect with, therefore, is not what we would call the
religious traditions of the West, but rather the humanistic,
secular, agnostic culture, which I feel a very, very deep
sympathy with. And I feel that this attempt to create dialogues
between Buddhism and the West often seems to assume the
essentially religious nature of such a dialogue. So we have
Christian-Buddhist dialogs and so on. So in recovering my roots,
I'm also recovering, as it were, a non-religious identity which
finds itself at odds with much of how Buddhism is implicitly or
explicitly presented as a religion. 

 When I was training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, my practice was
actually very much about the cultivation of rational inquiry One
of the great sort of unacknowledged riches in the Buddhist
tradition is that tradition of rational investigation, the
tradition of logic, of epistemology, which, for many Buddhists,
immediately evokes, "Uuaah!"[Pedantic 2 cents dept: Usually
spelled wah! Only a Bengali would spell it as uuaah because they
can't say the 'w' sound as we or Hindi-speakers say it.Mahbe
Tibetans can't either?]

Bennett left for Burma, where he became a bhikkhu in 1901, and
then he took the name Ananda Metleya. Bennett was the first
European to take the robe in the whole of Buddhist history.
Remember that that's 2,450 years, at that point, to actually
engage with a non-European or let's say non-Middle East-based
tradition. That is a very very important break with this
conviction of Europe to embody the supreme philosophical,
rational, and cultural tradition of the world;

It seems to me that as we look at Buddhism historically we find
that it continuously loses its agnostic dimension by becoming
institutionalized as a religion, with all the usual dogmatic
systems of belief that religions have.

But I think the often rather romantic, anti-intellectual
perception of Buddhism is one that then conceals from us the
richness of its own rational traditions..

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  Batchelor first began to reveal his New Dispensation in a talk
he gave in 1997 at a conference in Boston, which he has published
on his website under the title "Deep Agnosticism":
http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/deepagnosticism.htm

Wherein he claims that a westerner who attempts to believe in
Buddhism is involved in "a denial of one's roots" & a "denial of
one's cultural upbringing", which, according to Batchelor, "is
not actually possible to sustain".

This is because westerners are deeply rational and, therefore,
incapable of the kind of self-deception that comes naturally to
the superstitious Asiatic mind, and which is necessary to believe
in stuff like reincarnation and karma.

Batchelor continued to reveal his pseudo-Nietzschean Eurocentric
bio-cultural determinism in his best-seller "Buddhism Without
Beliefs" 
in 1998, followed up this year by his "Confessions of a Buddhist
Atheist."

Curt