[Buddha-l] Was Mr. Pol Pot a Buddhist?

[Andy Stroble]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Jo <ugg-5 at spro.net> wrote:

> Erik
> I did not write this. Andy Stroble wrote it. You keep on doing this!
> Please take note of who signs, not who is recorded as sending something.
>
> What I WROTE was:
> Good point.
> Where I find it excessively untrue to its foundations is where Buddhism
> has been overtaken by consumerism: buy your Buddha stuff here---take this
> retreat-- no, that one is better because it has a bigger more lama-smiley
> ad in Tricycle and other mags. The totalism of consumerism, folks.
> -------------------------
>
> Op 16-10-12 18:41, Jo schreef:
> > (And I have to add, that I find Buddhism in general, across a half a
> > dozen different sources, to be more or less outrageously contrarian,
> > so maybe, in a sort of Post-marxist Marxian way, Žižek is a Buddhist.)
> >
> >
> I don't understand this. Do you mean the Buddhist doctrines or the
> movement and if the latter: the present or the historical one? Must a
> contrarian person always be a member of a contrarian movement or religion?
> How can a contrarian religion be establishment like in many Asian
> countries? Is there a new refuge formula  'I am contrarian in the Buddha,
> dharma and sangha'?
> I'm not sure that the best response to a comment is just to say that the
> author is contrarian. Isn't this an ad hominem?
>
> Erik
> _
>

Yes, I wrote the part before the part that Jo wrote.  But rather than an ad
hominem, it was intended as a reductio ad absurdum, and a facietious one at
that.   I really don't think that Slajov Žižek is much of an authority on
any form of Buddhism.  But then, he was not the target of my contrarianism.

Andy Stroble