[Buddha-l] An "eastern" unquiet example

[Jo]

Meanwhile, as I await evidence that I posted the below citation on Buddha-L,
I'd like to respond to Chris's remark about possible Muslim or Christian
origins of Hindu intolerance, as follows:

History shows that denizens of India before the arrival of the Muslims and
Christians nevertheless were intolerant of difference of various sorts:
caste differences, sect differences, imperial ruler differences.  There are
signs of this in the Pali texts when competing sectarians came to argue with
the Buddha; if they did not convert, they went away mad. (Of course, in
those days there was no such thing as what we call Hinduism, today. But
there was plenty of non-benign sectarianism going on.)

Since then, with more documentation, there is zero evidence that Hindus were
ever consistently 'tolerant'. See the Manushashtras, for a start.  It just
depended on which side bread was buttered in any given case, or on how much
power the intolerants possessed to wreak their intolerance on others. 

Best,
Joanna


On 11 November 2011 03:58, Jo <jkirk at spro.net> wrote:
> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MK10Df01.html
>
> ..The rich diversity in the various tellings of the Ramayana that 
> Ramanujan wrote about raised the hackles of the Hindu right in 2008, 
> when activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the 
> student wing of the Sangh Parivar (a family of Hindu right-wing 
> organizations) vandalized Delhi University's history department to 
> protest against the teaching of this essay, describing it as a 
> "blasphemous" essay that was "malicious, capricious, fallacious and
offensive to the beliefs of millions of Hindus".

I sometimes wonder how much of the intolerance of these contemporary Hindu
groups is due to India's long exposure to intolerant Muslim and Christian
regimes - from whom they seem to have to have learned a lot.
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