[Buddha-l] Rice & Dragons

[Richard Hayes]

On Apr 14, 2012, at 14:29 , Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Enough revisionist whitewashing. I get it. You can't handle the truth.

I've never had a problem handling truth. I'm not particularly given to to admiring oversimplification. To say that Buddhism disappeared because of Islam is a pretty good example of gross oversimplification. I see little merit in such a theory.

It is interesting to note in present-day social and political discourse that pretty much everyone is using the same general strategy of identifying someone or other as the single cause of most of the malaise of the world. Anyone who does not buy into the one-cause-of-all-evil theory is quickly accused of being in denial, not being able to handle the truth, being an ideologue and so forth. People who say "wait, not so fast. The story is a bit more complex than that" are quickly sidelined and accused of committing the hideous sin of Nuance.

I am pretty much in agreement with something Paul Tillich wrote in 1958. In the context of discussing how religion in America had lost much of its credibility, he said that it was not science that killed religion. Rather, it was religion that killed religion by losing sight of complexity and metaphor and interpreting traditional narratives as literal stories capable of only one conclusion. American Christianity pretty much killed itself off by gravitating more and more to simple-mindedness. All science had to do to emerge victorious was show up.

A similar analysis can be given of Buddhism. As Joanna has rightly said, institutional Buddhism had grown rotten to the core and was pretty much on its way out long before the Muslims arrived. What was worthwhile in Buddhism had been slowly absorbed into Hinduism and is in fact still very much to be found in India to this very day. So it would not be an exaggeration at all to say that the teachings of the Buddha never died out in India. What died out was a cumbersome monastic structure that required far more governmental resources to survive that were available. Buddhists have found it more convenient to blame outsiders than to take responsibility for their own institutional failures. (That of course is also a gross oversimplification. I offer it simply for the sake of variety. It's not a bad idea to switch from one gross oversimplification to another about twice a week.)

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico