a couple of comments from someone who calls himself a buddhist:
the passage that louis posted was interesting. but the way you interpret the last of the two noble truths depends heavily on the tradition you come from/ work in. it seems to me that the whole bit about nirvana has to be put in the context of the definition in both some zen and tibeten traditions of "freedom" from suffering and death. as my teacher always said, such freedom as a personal goal is a destructive fiction: freedom is only "achieved" by digging into personal and collective suffering, rather than trying to avoid it, etc. likewise, there's a whole language of "warriorship" developed by trungpa rinpoche and his students that puts questions of violence in some sort of dialectical relation to its opposite, often fetishized as "non-violence" or "passivity," etc. in short, the text louis cited and mike's friend's story are pretty culturally specific receptions of buddhism, particular to the classes to which buddhism has appealed in the u.s. (mostly white, very well educated suburbanites with vestigial nostalgia for beat aesthetics) and to american's residual moralism. anyone the claims that buddhism or non-violence is as simple as not being aggressive or opinionated doesn't know the history of lineages--which are full of wacked out guys burning people's houses and killing them, etc.
then again, this could be all due to my teacher's coming from an orthodox jewish family with a history of leftie and commie political activity.
best christian