[...]
>In its
>best and true version (where best and true are defined by me) Buddhism is
>atheistic, radically egalitarian, and inseparable from commitment to social
>justice. There is tremendous evidence for this. But as others point out
>there is evidence for whatever you want.
Exactly. All successful religions share this property: you can always find there something to prove anything and its opposite.
> What has to be remembered is that the
>historical Buddha (Guatama, Siddhartha, or Sakyamuni) taught for over 50
years,
>and changed his mind many times during his life, tried different
approaches.
>Different sects of Buddhism correspond to teachings from different parts of
his
>life. This is additionally complicated by the usual later preversions and
>misinterpretations by others. So authoritarian priests or states have
commited
>acts in the name of Buddhism that are anything but Buddhist in spirit. But
I
>think we should take care in reducing the view of the "individual" in
Buddhism
>to anything like modern western notions. Mat
I'm afraid that projecting past views of the world onto our contemporary coordinate axes, with the consequent loss of information, is an unavoidable part of learning - and often the translation from a language to another adds further damage to the accuracy of representation. When we translate, e.g., "chi" as "spirit" or "tien" as "heaven" (sorry Henry, I'd like to use pinyin but I don't really know it!) we necessarily evoke to a contemporary western listener a number of associated concepts that may not have been intended by the original speaker, located on another spot of time-space, and at the same time we miss other possible meanings. "Tien", for example, also means "nature" or "cosmos", i.e. the world "outside" the sentient self. Hence the expression "the other half of heaven", whose literal translation sounds otherwise a little incongruous.
Besides, to be perfectly honest, we don't really know what Buddha, or Christ, or Socrates, or Lao Tzu really said, let alone how many times they changed their mind, due to the fact even their "original" books were written by third parties. On the other hand, why should that really matter? Ideas are more important than identities, and luckily are not encumbered by patents.
Cheers --
Enzo