[Buddha-l] Denigrating Buddhism

[Margaret Gouin]

On 19 August 2011 03:18, andy <stroble at hawaii.edu> wrote:

>
> Contempt?  Well, yes, if it is deserved.  And there is much in the
> tradition
> called Buddhism to be contemptible of. But of course we can save the
> tradition
> by identifying those contemptible things as "not real Buddhism".  The
> problem
> is, as western selves, we have no right to do so.  Or so I am lead to
> believe.
>

When I was doing my PhD on Tibetan Buddhist funeral rituals, I kept coming
across elements of the rituals which were firmly declared (by Western
writers) to be 'not real Buddhism'. I was in almost every case able to trace
the behaviour in question back to impeccable Buddhist roots. What the term
'not real Buddhism' appears to mean is 'not consistent with my idea of what
Buddhism should be' and is (I believe) heavily coloured by the desire of
many Westerners to see in Buddhism (or in the various forms of Buddhism)
something totally removed from the Christianity they are so anxious to
reject. In other words, don't let the realities of Buddhist practice by
others interfere with my dreams of what Buddhism 'should' be.

I think this passage is apposite:

'In the West the tendency to degrade the mundane level of religious faith
became increasingly manifest since the inception of the modern era. This
peculiarity of our own way of thinking, so we may speculate, caused us to
see a tension where the insider and faithful follower of a tradition would
see a range of values, one blending into the other, one complementing the
other. The increasing secularization of this world and the tendency to
restrict the sacred to the other world, so characteristic of the Occident in
the post-Reformation era, provides a conceptual framework that is not truly
suitable for understanding religious expressions outside of its own cultural
context.
'The ethnographic details reported here should caution us against rushing to
label one or the other activities or ideas as “truly Buddhist” or
“non-Buddhist.” This would not only distort the facts, as such labels were
never used by the people involved, but it would also jeopardize the validity
of our findings. It is not the researcher’s business to define what
constitutes true Buddhism and what constitutes a less authentic form of this
religion if the Buddhists themselves feel they are genuine followers of
their faith. The interaction between scripture and live practice of a
religion is multilayered and multivalued. This interaction is not always
governed by logic and rational thinking but is equally dependent on the
unconscious and conscious needs of the individual, the family, and other
societal units. Religious belief is an inherent part of human existence and
thus it has to address the entirety of human life—the sublime as well as the
trivial and earthly.'

(Eva Dargyay, 1988. ‘Buddhism in Adaptation: ancestor gods and their tantric
counterparts in the religious life of Zanskar’, *History of Religions*,
28.2: 123-34, pp. 133-34)


The idea that we in the West could 'save' Buddhism from its 'contemptible'
practices (if only we were allowed to) is one which baffles me completely.
However, I do wonder whether Western converts to Buddhism, as Buddhist
practitioners in their own cultural context, do not have the right to adapt
their beliefs and practices as they see fit, without reference to the
'parent' tradition in another and completely alien culture? I see this as a
different issue from 'saving' Buddhism in its allegedly 'pure' form
(whatever that may be).

-- 
Margaret Gouin
http://independent.academia.edu/ad3b
Author, Tibetan Rituals of Death : Buddhist funerary
practices<http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415566360/>