[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 4, 2012, at 6:23 PM, James A Stroble <stroble at hawaii.edu> wrote:

> Destruction of
> physical objects is not directly an attack on the Dharma, is it?

That seems exactly the right rhetorical question to ask. I also find something bizarre in the claim that the destruction of a symbol is the same as the destruction of what the symbol represents. Statues, buildings, sacred objects and so on simply are not the Dharma. (Mind you, I live in a country in which some deeply confused people wanted to make burning the national flag a felonious offense.)

> (Though you have me at texts:  I am still traumatized by Umberto Eco's
> "Name of the Rose", where the library burns.)

I have always taken the attitude that anything that is necessary to know will very quickly be rediscovered. You could burn every Buddhist text in the Milky Way, and whatever of the Buddha's teachings that are truly of importance would immediately be rediscovered, if indeed they were lost at all. 

Some years ago I bought a copy of my outrageously overpriced book on Dignāga and gave it to my university's library. A few days later, an arsonist set fire to the library, and many books and journals were destroyed, nearly all of them on philosophy and religion. I was informed mine was among them. When I heard that, I realized that if every copy of my book in the universe were burned, and all the works on and by Dignāga were also destroyed, the loss would be not be worth so much as a sniffle. About a year later, I learned the book on Dignāga had survived after all. Oh well, I suppose a few more years of the book's survival will do no more good or harm than would have been done by its destruction. 

I feel exactly the same about nations as I feel about books. Pick any one you like. Destroy it. No harm done. It is impossible, I think, to care both about any nation and to care about Dharma at the same time. 

Sorry to waste everybody's time stating the obvious and uncontroversial and distracting you all from saying silly things about Islām.

Richard