Beware of Buddhist side-effects: Peace, Love, and Understanding…
Like a new drug, when trying out a new religion, philosophy or belief system, it’s probably wise to ask about any potential side-effects. Of course sometimes those ‘side-effects’ turn out to be something not anticipated, or imagined, and maybe even far better than what was intended. The history of pharmacopeia is full of such examples, when the ‘side-effects’ of a drug led to new usages that yielded great benefits to the healing processes—and perversions—of human beings..
This also happens in the case of new ideas. Who knew that John Stuart Mills’ evocation of the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace would yield not only an Industrial Revolution of textiles and iron, but a digital revolution of gigabytes and live streaming, the former populated by skyscrapers and fashion, the latter by instant worldwide communication and virtual realities intrinsically internal… (More …)
Okay, so I admit it: I’m going through a crisis of confidence with my newfound love of Buddhism, and all that entails. The devil is in the details, of course, as even the ever-tricky Buddha himself well knew, just like Jesus after him, that you pick and choose what to tell the initiates and laypeople at any one time, subject to their capacity to comprehend, assimilate, or even fathom, concepts which may just be a bit difficult to swallow at first, or maybe forever…
Beyond all the fibs and fantasies, behind all the lies we tell ourselves, is the l-DNA we create for ourselves in language, a trail to our past and an arrow to our future, and pretty much the only thing we had before y-DNA and mt-DNA, revealed now to be something like a parallel universe to those more precise measurements, yet far more analogous to the largely hypothetical cultural tracks and traces, like c-DNA, full of long lonely nights and broken promises, frightened misgivings and belated thanksgivings…
If there’s anything more annoying, as a Buddhist Studies MA student, than having to memorize lists of lists after lists full of lists from the annals of the ancients, it’s having to plow through the re-definitions of all those terms from the mouths of the moderns (is ‘anals’ a word?). This is not high scholarship. This is the business of busy-work, the intellectual equivalent of keeping that shovel moving to justify your union job, or to keep your position as the arbiter of privilege in the fan-boy chat-pages of Facebook…
I’m not trying to win any popularity contests, but if I were I’d be telling you things like: “You are the masterpiece! You are connected to every molecule, every atom, and every quark that has ever existed and ever will exist in this or any other universe! You are the dharma! You are the Christ! You are the reason that the sun rises in the morning and goes to bed at night…
It has long been predicted that Buddhism’s future is in the West, and for better or worse, that may very well be true. So the question then becomes: what kind of Buddhism would that be? For purposes of dialog and dialectic, I see the two chief protagonists to be the Thai Forest Tradition and Zen, both of which have numerous and faithful adherents in the West, and both of which can claim some purity of faith and doctrine…
The loneliness of travel should be crushing sometimes, but it’s not, not really, and I seem to attract it, by design, as if to do otherwise would mean I’m lazy, and corrupt, too weary in my old age to do the right thing, stay true to my principles, those principles of non-possession, non-attachment and non-consumption…
quantumpreceptor 3:22 am on June 4, 2018 Permalink |
Well said my friend, well said. It is really easy to see and to judge whether something is beneficial or not. Plant the seed and watch it grow. If you grow weeds, start again. If you grow flowers and fruit you have really done something.
QP
hardie karges 3:52 am on June 4, 2018 Permalink |
Exactly, my friend, exactly. Thanks for your kind words…
Dave Kingsbury 3:37 pm on June 12, 2018 Permalink |
You make a very good case here. And provide a useful, well-balanced summary of the differences:
“Bottom line: the current outcome of Christianity is chaos, consumption and aggression, even if its best days were all about love, growth, and creativity. On the other hand Buddhism is all about silence, adaptation and harmony, even if the bad old days included much too much renunciation, stasis and denial… ”
All about outcomes indeed!
hardie karges 8:56 pm on June 12, 2018 Permalink |
Thanx, Dave…