Christian writes:
Sure, but you can't expect anyone to take seriously that you have overcome the belief in the self--or even that you advocate it--when you toss off dilapidated categories like "Western religion."
As dilapidated as it is, it was convenient to use as shorthand for those religions that dominate Western thought and believe in the self. Next time I will write them out.
> Not only does this imply a view of a coherent self-- a body of
knowledge or practice, Eastern v. Western religion, etc--but it also
ignores the history of "Eastern" religions.
How does it imply a view of a coherent self?
> As has been demonstrated over and over, Eastern religions--and
Buddhism in particular--have not secured any high ground from which
to judge others.
I am not claiming any high ground; I am saying that clinging to a false sense of self leads to suffering, and that this can be/has been proven empirically.
> Zen was and is profoundly conservative in Japan; its practitioners aided
(or didn't stop) the advent of Japanese fascism, to say nothing of its views
of women, etc. Many of Tibet's teachers before the invasion were charlatans
or brutes or both.
Buddhism is strange that way. It tends to pick up the local coloring of the society/community where it is practiced (not so odd now that I think about it: Buddhism does not believe in the inherent existence of anything).
Also, how would you describe the rule of Asoka in India?
> Even those who have realized that there are no central headquarters have to
operate in a world which believes in the bureaucracy of ego.
Agreed. I also have to operate in world which believes in racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. That does not mean I have to agree with the follies of the world or not try to correct them.
> At the end of the day, the realization itself counts for nothing--else it just becomes
credential (Look ma, I'm enlightened!), more paperwork for the thing you're
saying you want to rid yourself of.
I think realizing that the self does not exist counts for a lot. I do not claim to be enlightened (I am far from that stage), but maybe I can claim to have access to a small amount of wisdom on ocassion.
> What matters is what comes of it.
Agreed. And only suffering comes of believing in the self.
As one teacher put it:
"So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence... Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction... The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist.
"(The ego's greatest triumph) is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us."
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister