[Buddha-l] buddha-l Digest, Vol 103, Issue 6

[Dan Lusthaus]

> Not one of my examples deals with the former.

In a view of the world that sees only "fanatics", "extremists," etc. on one 
side -- i.e. everyone who does things with which one disapproves or wants to 
dismiss as unseemly -- and all the good normal folks on the other, there 
would be a tendency to have such a cartoon, bifurcational view. The Spanish 
Inquisition, to take just one of your examples, was not about hard-core 
Abrahamists persecuting multi-religionists. Generally the persecuted also 
belonged to a single religion -- Catholicism -- which has many sects. Those, 
like the conversos (derogatorily called Marranos in much literature), who 
remained closet Jews, were duplicitously maintaining two religions -- one 
publicly and the other in secret, so secret that it was forgotten even 
within the family after a few generations. Jews who did not convert were 
expelled from Spain, and then Portugal, but not subjected to the Inquisition 
as such, which only applied to Catholics (in terms of conversos, its purpose 
was to ferret out those still secretly practicing Judaism). Conversos were 
not publically practicing Catholicism out of an ecumenical or eclectic 
impulse, but under compulsion and threat of death or expulsion. There was 
one religion to a customer in terms of actual adherence, though adverse 
circumstances FORCED some to take on a double albeit duplicitous approach. 
This is the inverse of your claim.

Note that the Inquisition did not only target converted Jews, but various 
"heresies," members of "deviant" sects, etc. The Christian assumption --  
rarely if ever shared by the other Abrahamic traditions -- is that one must 
not only belong to the one and only "true" religion, but there is only one 
way to think, believe and behave once one does. The other religions have 
their sects, some which will disapprove and disagree with the others, some 
even occasionally looking for ways to make the lives of the other groups 
miserable -- you find the same in office and academic politics! -- but that 
doesn't annul membership in the larger religious identity. As Catholics 
themselves say, there are Catholics and "fallen Catholics," never 
"ex-Catholics."

Unlike most medieval and even renaissance christianity, which was driven at 
least since the days of Tertullian to zealously find, prosecute, and execute 
deviant ideas and beliefs, Jewish and Muslim traditions, lacking e.g. a Pope 
or single authoritative voice, always embraced diversity and difference of 
opinion (anyone who has dipped into the Talmud and related rabbinic 
literature knows it is all about competing and conflicting opinions on 
everything under the sun; Muslim jurisprudential literature, until recent 
times, has largely been of a similar genre and approach, though certain 
ideologies hardened into the four main schools of sharia interpretation with 
their subschools, in recent times the more vocal and prominent becoming 
quite extreme and intolerant.

>They all deal with problems that arise when fanatics react to individuals 
>practicing a multiplicity of religions, which indicates that it is quite 
>common...

That is NOT what your examples involve or show. See above.

> It is only the Abrahamic religions that have had people who insist that 
> individuals practice only one religion (one to a customer).

Well, this is the myth that we've been telling undergrads at least since the 
last quarter of the 20th c. Turns out, under closer examination, this is not 
so. When the Buddhists arrive in town and find the locals worshipping the 
local lake or mountain kami, they do a ceremony to convert the kami to 
Buddhism and install him in the pantheon, so that the kami's worshippers 
naturally follow suit. There is (to the surprise of many) lots of fire and 
brimstone preaching in Buddhism (Asanga uses it, Hakuin was raised on it). 
Hinayanists, deviant Buddhists, and all sorts of malefactors will burn in 
hell and suffer a smorgesbord of tortures (the Buddhist imagination 
envisioned a plethora of types of hells, and there are plenty of artistic 
representations in literature and visual arts, illustrating them in gory and 
terrifying detail). The saying: Born Shinto, Marry Christian, Die Buddhist, 
which is supposed to characterize the Japanese attitude toward religion, 
i.e., different approaches for different life-altering occasions, is 
somewhat true superficially (Christians weddings got included because 
neither Shinto nor Buddhism had devised elaborate ceremonies, so there was a 
ritual "vacancy" that could be seized), but when one scratches below the 
surface it turns out that families and individuals basically follow family 
traditions when there is religious identification, but, in the rush to be 
"modern", most Japanese mistakenly consider themselves secular(ized), which, 
it turns out, they really aren't.

Supposedly, Chinese religion was/is magnanimous -- so that one might 
honestly say: Externally I am Confucian, internally I am a Daoist. Turns 
out, that is never really the case, either historically or in the present.

And so on.

One mark of the despised mentality labeled "orientalism" is that it likes to 
imagine the "mystical" east as the opposite of the "materialist" west, 
condoning and embracing all the wonderful and healthy things condemned and 
persecuted by the sick west. The 'east' as the compensatory mirror twin 
(everything in reverse). So if "we" have hard-core delineations of 
religious, sectarian, etc. identities, "they" are much more fluid, realizing 
the "spiritual" transcends all such petty boundaries. The closer one looks 
at the actual (rather than imaginal) "east," the less that fantasy holds up.

The Indian Sants were less a movement than an iconoclastic admixture of 
Hindu and Muslim ideas, captured in poetry and local ministering. Tolerated, 
and even influential, when it remained largely inchoate, once it concretizes 
in the form of Sikhism (which has many affinities), it becomes a third, not 
transcendent, tradition, and gets persecuted, with a religious identity that 
is different from the others. Various 19th-20th Indian movements have either 
identified themselves or been identified by Western academics as 
repositories, continuations of Sant traditions, but this is like calling 
Turkish Sunnis in western China "uighurs," something done out of an urge for 
identity and continuity, precisely what Buddhism warns about. Often the 
identification, particularly with groups long gone in the past, is an 
appropriation for tactical and strategic motives, as well as enlarging one's 
sense of self and belonging.

>what Harvey Cox has called cafeteria-style religion.

Yes and no. There has been a lot of experimentation, and eclectic 
configurations do emerge, but in most cases with a baseline tradition to 
which aspects -- rarely if ever the full deal -- of other religions are 
sampled and incorporated or rejected. As, e.g., some Quakers might do with 
Buddhism. That is still one baseline religion to a customer.

Dan