Buddhism is not Superior to Christianity, but…
I only know that it is more appropriate for these self-engorged capitalistic end-times than the prevailing paradigm, which is probably the cause of this effect. The original teachings of JC and the Buddha are almost superfluous at this point, anyway, what with so much cultural baggage added on over all the years, much of it far from the original teachings…
And in short, those original teachings consist briefly of Jesus’s ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and the Buddha’s ‘cure for suffering in the cessation of craving’, and from those two starting points evolves the history of much of the world, the traditional west largely ambitious, aggressive, individualistic, loud and consuming, while the traditional East is largely passive, shy, conforming, quiet and retiring. Note that those two traditional paradigms largely parallel the traditional paradigms of male vis a vis female… (More …)
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…
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…
Theravada Buddhism has it easy, when it comes to dhamma (dharma) talks, just pull out the old mind-kilesa-breath-nose-navel-‘Buddho Buddho Buddho’ playbook, rinse and repeat, hard to screw up unless you want to get into the murky afterbirth of past lives and kamma (karma), doing Yogic headstands and plotting Ptolemaic cosmic epicycles, trying to explain how anatta (non-self) somehow gets reborn, when there really is nothing there to begin with. But still they do. It’s embarrassing, especially when some of the same ones…
streaming consciousness... 
Esther S. Fabbricante 5:44 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink |
Deep!
modernhadassah 5:59 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink |
Interesting. “Womanly wiles” came about from having no other recourse. That’s the only way oppressed womanhood could effect change. I guess, when I follow the logic through of how religion effects change it’s on the manipulated and oppressed. What do you think? You have started a good conversation, I suspect.
hardie karges 6:53 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink |
Yes, I suspect that there’s an inversely proportional relationship between worldly success and religio-philosophical adherence…
Alex 2:27 pm on September 3, 2018 Permalink |
“frankly I wash dishes to clean them, for purposes of health, and sanitation, and aesthetic compatibility”
Sounds to me like you are washing the dishes mindfully… That’s a good meditation!
hardie karges 4:39 pm on September 3, 2018 Permalink |
Exactly!