> ** And I'll wager that not all of these people believe and do the same
> things.
Of course not, but, also of course, there are enough similarities so that they all consider themselves Buddhists. There are Zen folks, Vajrayana folks, insight meditation folks, Nichiren folks, Pure Land folks, and back in the "old countries" some of these differences were considered quite important. Western Buddhists, though, tend to regard themselves as one happy family -- there's practically none of the internecine strife you find among Christians. (Well, the Nichiren folks sometimes get a bit intolerant of the others, but I've encountered some very accepting people in their ranks, also.)
> My point is that 'modern' Buddhists infuse their Buddhism with a
> modern worldview and modern assumptions. This transformed the
> tradition...
> and probably made Buddhism in the 'west' possible.
Naturally. There have been developments in the way the Dharma was expressed as it spread from India/Sri Lanka to Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Burma, etc., etc., and finally to North America, Europe, Australia/NZ, etc. All of these are different cultures and different historical periods. But you have this rather strange way of speaking of something called "Buddhism" into which various foreign things get "infused," as though there were some eternal "essence of Buddhism." Not a very pomo way to talk, I would have thought.
> ** That's what I mean. And yes, it is true of Marxism, quantum
> mechanics,
> and pomo literary criticism. So when people do write summaries they are
> engaging in an ideological exercise which *creates* a new versions of
> the
> theory itself. In religion this insantiated by thinkers like Eliade
> and W.C.
> Smith... So... this kind of summarising is bad and should be avoided,
> although is probably inevitable for introductory purposes
Again -- "the theory itself." Where the Dharma is concerned, there just *ain't* no "theory itself." You may be familiar with the traditional analogy of the finger pointing at the moon. All of the zillions of pages of suttas, sutras, commentaries on them, and commentaries on those commentaries, including all of the stuff written in English and other Western languages in recent decades -- all of that is just a collection of various fingers of different sizes, shapes, colors, etc., pointing at the moon. To Buddhist practitioners, such as Brian and I, the important thing is learning how to use them to see the moon.
The Mahayana term, which you may also be familiar with, is "expedient means." The texts are not important themselves, they're just tools. Another analogy I like to use sometimes, which is not as poetic as the finger-moon one, is that of auto service manuals. The Dharma basically says: "Hey, human! Your mind is broken. Here's how to fix it." To an auto mechanic faced with, say a '98 Toyota Corolla with a busted transmission, the important thing is not the literary quality, "genre," male or female "gaze," or whatever, of the service manual -- the important thing is whether it can provide useful information for getting the damned car back on the road. While the mechanic is fixing the car, the literary scholar is sitting in the waiting room, examining the literary qualities, genre, etc., of the manual. Fine, if that's how the scholar wants to spend her or his life as a human being. But to the Dharma practictioner, it's not a particularly valuable way to spend the limited time between birth and death.
Given this practical purpose, introductory materials are vitally important. The Buddha was a teacher, as (I gather) you are. As such, he spent his whole career teaching folks how to fix their broken minds. He started off right after his "enlightenment" experience, teaching a few of his former fellow ascetics he met on the road the so-called "4 noble truths." He kept on doing that, over and over, for something like 40 years, by the traditional account. Sort of like a university professor teaching Dharma 101, again and again. Of course, he had advanced students and graduate students, Ph. D. candidates, too, if you will. But he was never engaging in an "ideological exercise" which he should have avoided, and he didn't have a "theory" that he was creating new versions of. He was just trying to explain to folks what he had learned under the pipa tree.
As a dedicated teacher, he didn't just brush off the beginners as idiots who could only understand summaries, "are bad and should be avoided, although [they are] probably inevitable for introductory purposes." He didn't take that patronizing, "how trying it is to have to deal with these stupid undergraduates over and over, year after year" sort of attitude that North American university professors frequently take. (I know, I was one myself long ago.) He was a real, dedicated teacher, who met each person he encountered at that person's level, and presented them with whatever "expedient means" they needed to learn how to fix what was busted with their particular mind.
The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki was fond of the expression "Zen mind -- beginner's mind." The point at which you really reach "enlightenment" is when you realize that you are always a beginner, and a beginner is the best thing to be.
> . You listed off
> some basic believes... are these creeds from the local monastery? To
> them
> emcompass collective or personal ritual meditation? (and so on).
You're getting a little incoherent here. "Believes," "To them emcompass" ...? I suggest you slow down, take a few breaths, and concentrate on the experience of your fingers hitting the keys. Mindfulness ... "Be here now." :-)
Anyway, you're making the common non-Buddhist's mistake of talking about "beliefs" and "creeds." As Brian tried to tell and I shall repeat, there ain't ... no ... such ... thing in Buddhism. They're expedient means; that's all. Not divinely inspired truths, as in Christianity.
Pali suttas, Zen koan, "Form is not different from emptiness, Emptiness is not different from form" -- none of these things are "beliefs" or "creeds" that "Buddhist believers" are supposed to accept because God revealed them. They're like the mechanic's wrench or grease gun -- the mechanic doesn't "believe in them," he/she uses them if they work for fixing a specific problem. If they're not, she/he grabs a hammer or a screwdriver.
> I just wanted to call you on a general claim you made about
> Buddhism which I think is false
Which was what, again? I got a little confused reading your message.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt