Random Buddhist Rant
Sep. 21st, 2006 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusSometimes as a Tibetan Buddhist I heartily sick of the anti-religious attitudes I encounter in the gay, slash, and feminist community. (It's particularly bad when I'm talking to someone who's all three.)
You know, I realize that the religious Christian right has taken over this country -- okay, been callously used by cynical politicians -- who've attacked things I believe in, like gay marriage, separation of church and state (hello? the point is to allow a pluralism of religion, a Muslim shouldn't be forced to read a Christian prayer in school). But I'm looking at it from another perspective here.
The freedom to practice your religion as you see fit is fragile. So when I see that snide dismissive arrogance towards religion, I don't think of Jerry Falwell. I think of Tibet.
My monastery is still in the process of being rebuilt from when it was leveled. You see, Communist China used artillery against the monastery, and the several thousand monks inside at the time. I have friends who had to leave other friends who were wounded and dying, because they couldn't get to them over the machine-gun fire.
Why was China shelling a monastery and gunning monks down with machine guns? Because religion is "the opium of the people," according to them.
My Tibetan friends who grew up under Chinese rule... one can barely walk because he was a monk and sentenced -- for that alone -- to spend most of his life in a work camp. He was tortured repeatedly and Communist China's soldiers broke the bones in his feet so many times they didn't set right. Another was taken from his family as a kid and raised at a Communist boarding school in an effort to stamp out Tibetan culture -- mostly his religion. (He's only found one uncle since then, and they don't know what happened to the rest of his family.)
It hasn't stopped. It's been forty years and it's still going on. It's perpetual and subtle, the attempt to erase Buddhism from both Tibet and China's history. Communist China is revising its history to emphasize the secular Confucianism and ignore that it was ever Buddhist (or Taoist for that matter).
The effort of Communist China to erase religion extends far outside China and Tibet.
It's invaded academia. I just took a class on Ancient Asian Civilizations with a professor who studied for years in China, whose husband is Chinese. She skipped Buddhism entirely. She gerrymandered the course content so that Ancient China ended just before Buddhism began in that country (100 C.E.), Ancient Korean studies started after the reassertion of Confucianism (1600 C.E., no shit), we studied Japan through secular literature, ignoring Buddhist references, then studied only Hinduism in India. As if Buddhism never existed in the region.
A Korean scholar told me this was typical of people trained in Communist China, that there is a massive amount of historical revisionism pouring out of China right now.
Meanwhile, colleges with Tibetan Buddhist programs have moved to an ecumenical approach. Those accepting Chinese grants have moved the Tibetan programs under their China studies and pretty much squelched them. Columbia's program is now under Chinese studies, which only makes sense for post-1959 Tibet.
The Library of Congress has been pressured by China. I worked with the U.S. Library of Congress, and Communist China kept pushing us to include the Tibetan archive under the Chinese section, despite the fact that the languages you have to master to read that stuff are Sanskrit and Tibetan, not Chinese. Tibet is linguistically and culturally part of the India/Nepal/Bhutan region.
Last I heard, the librarians stood up against this, but they told me it was only a matter of time.
The monasticism is being erased from American Buddhism. The positive side of Tibetan Buddhism is its popularity worldwide, but the drawback is that this came out of the 60s and the beat poets. Not to say that having Kerouac write Dharma Bums and Ginsberg die with a Tibetan Lama at his side isn't too-cool-for-school. Not that having women across the U.S. become Buddhist (and join New Age religions) largely due to the feminist movement isn't a-okay with me, because, hey, rare to have a religion dominated by women, right?
But the staggering amount of Tantric bullshit is… staggering. Ladies, "I want you to be my tantric consort" is a pick-up line, not a religious message. You want to practice tantra? Wonderful! It begins with 100,000 prostrations, and you have at least ten years of other spiritual disciplines ahead of you, no kidding. There's a reason why people who've done Indian sweat lodges, advanced yoga, and kung-fu are the ones who seem to stick it out in tantra.
And guess what? Buddhism doesn't believe in killing anything, so while you put away the bug-zapper, toss out the pro-abortion literature, too. Don't worry, you won't be required to bomb any abortion clinics. We don't do that either. But keep the birth control for Pete's sake. As the Dalai Lama put it, "we only believe in non-violent forms of birth control."
To the woman who told me (as a former Buddhist nun) that "monastic vows are abusive to women" because of all the feminist "goddess" crap she learned, rethink your logic: you just defined your purpose and worth as a human being by the use of your sexual organs. That sounds pretty sexist to me. Believe what you want, but don't call it Buddhist.
All the American Buddhists who take tantric initiation and then run away when the genyen lay ordination vows are offered: You need them. They're not that hard, it's just no killing, no lying, no stealing, no adultery, and no getting completely plastered (you can drink a little). If you're a soldier you can take just the no lying, no stealing, etc., and take the no killing vow when you can keep it. Without such simple discipline, how can possibly hope to accomplish anything? Is the tantric stuff just for show, just because it's cool?
I could say more. But this is what I think of when I read that quasi-tantric goddess-based "sex on an altar" story *eyeroll*, or the rant against "religion!" as if all religion were embodied in George Bush and his shoe-phone conversations with God. /exasperation
I told you this was a rant.
You know, I realize that the religious Christian right has taken over this country -- okay, been callously used by cynical politicians -- who've attacked things I believe in, like gay marriage, separation of church and state (hello? the point is to allow a pluralism of religion, a Muslim shouldn't be forced to read a Christian prayer in school). But I'm looking at it from another perspective here.
The freedom to practice your religion as you see fit is fragile. So when I see that snide dismissive arrogance towards religion, I don't think of Jerry Falwell. I think of Tibet.
My monastery is still in the process of being rebuilt from when it was leveled. You see, Communist China used artillery against the monastery, and the several thousand monks inside at the time. I have friends who had to leave other friends who were wounded and dying, because they couldn't get to them over the machine-gun fire.
Why was China shelling a monastery and gunning monks down with machine guns? Because religion is "the opium of the people," according to them.
My Tibetan friends who grew up under Chinese rule... one can barely walk because he was a monk and sentenced -- for that alone -- to spend most of his life in a work camp. He was tortured repeatedly and Communist China's soldiers broke the bones in his feet so many times they didn't set right. Another was taken from his family as a kid and raised at a Communist boarding school in an effort to stamp out Tibetan culture -- mostly his religion. (He's only found one uncle since then, and they don't know what happened to the rest of his family.)
It hasn't stopped. It's been forty years and it's still going on. It's perpetual and subtle, the attempt to erase Buddhism from both Tibet and China's history. Communist China is revising its history to emphasize the secular Confucianism and ignore that it was ever Buddhist (or Taoist for that matter).
The effort of Communist China to erase religion extends far outside China and Tibet.
It's invaded academia. I just took a class on Ancient Asian Civilizations with a professor who studied for years in China, whose husband is Chinese. She skipped Buddhism entirely. She gerrymandered the course content so that Ancient China ended just before Buddhism began in that country (100 C.E.), Ancient Korean studies started after the reassertion of Confucianism (1600 C.E., no shit), we studied Japan through secular literature, ignoring Buddhist references, then studied only Hinduism in India. As if Buddhism never existed in the region.
A Korean scholar told me this was typical of people trained in Communist China, that there is a massive amount of historical revisionism pouring out of China right now.
Meanwhile, colleges with Tibetan Buddhist programs have moved to an ecumenical approach. Those accepting Chinese grants have moved the Tibetan programs under their China studies and pretty much squelched them. Columbia's program is now under Chinese studies, which only makes sense for post-1959 Tibet.
The Library of Congress has been pressured by China. I worked with the U.S. Library of Congress, and Communist China kept pushing us to include the Tibetan archive under the Chinese section, despite the fact that the languages you have to master to read that stuff are Sanskrit and Tibetan, not Chinese. Tibet is linguistically and culturally part of the India/Nepal/Bhutan region.
Last I heard, the librarians stood up against this, but they told me it was only a matter of time.
The monasticism is being erased from American Buddhism. The positive side of Tibetan Buddhism is its popularity worldwide, but the drawback is that this came out of the 60s and the beat poets. Not to say that having Kerouac write Dharma Bums and Ginsberg die with a Tibetan Lama at his side isn't too-cool-for-school. Not that having women across the U.S. become Buddhist (and join New Age religions) largely due to the feminist movement isn't a-okay with me, because, hey, rare to have a religion dominated by women, right?
But the staggering amount of Tantric bullshit is… staggering. Ladies, "I want you to be my tantric consort" is a pick-up line, not a religious message. You want to practice tantra? Wonderful! It begins with 100,000 prostrations, and you have at least ten years of other spiritual disciplines ahead of you, no kidding. There's a reason why people who've done Indian sweat lodges, advanced yoga, and kung-fu are the ones who seem to stick it out in tantra.
And guess what? Buddhism doesn't believe in killing anything, so while you put away the bug-zapper, toss out the pro-abortion literature, too. Don't worry, you won't be required to bomb any abortion clinics. We don't do that either. But keep the birth control for Pete's sake. As the Dalai Lama put it, "we only believe in non-violent forms of birth control."
To the woman who told me (as a former Buddhist nun) that "monastic vows are abusive to women" because of all the feminist "goddess" crap she learned, rethink your logic: you just defined your purpose and worth as a human being by the use of your sexual organs. That sounds pretty sexist to me. Believe what you want, but don't call it Buddhist.
All the American Buddhists who take tantric initiation and then run away when the genyen lay ordination vows are offered: You need them. They're not that hard, it's just no killing, no lying, no stealing, no adultery, and no getting completely plastered (you can drink a little). If you're a soldier you can take just the no lying, no stealing, etc., and take the no killing vow when you can keep it. Without such simple discipline, how can possibly hope to accomplish anything? Is the tantric stuff just for show, just because it's cool?
I could say more. But this is what I think of when I read that quasi-tantric goddess-based "sex on an altar" story *eyeroll*, or the rant against "religion!" as if all religion were embodied in George Bush and his shoe-phone conversations with God. /exasperation
I told you this was a rant.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 03:08 am (UTC)I grew up vaguely Christian, but my family wasn't one that talked about it much. My parents never really mentioned God in everyday speech, so now when I see faith discussed publicly, I have a slightly negative gut reaction. But when I think about it, I really don't agree that it should be that way. I don't think that freedom of religion should mean that people have to keep it locked up inside for private times. Religion has so much to offer, and it's not right that people look down on it or feel that they have to keep it hidden.
On the other hand, it can be a touchy subject, and sometimes overwhelming majorities can, well, overwhelm.
I'm a pantheist who doesn't know if I'll ever decide to join an organized religion or not, but that doesn't mean I don't find them really interesting. I haven't considered myself Christian for a long time, because I feel like . . . if it's something I'm going to be, I don't think I can be half-assed about it. I know a lot of people are, and hey, if that works, go them, but I couldn't.
A lot of the New Age stuff looks cool, but at the same time I get the impression that it lacks depth. There's a lot of "ooh, shiny!" and I like shiny things as much as the next person, but I want more out of a religion than a playground, too.
So I feel like religion should be a huge serious commitment, but at the same time I don't know if I can do that. It scares me a little. Plus I'm old enough to have worked out some spiritual ideas of my own, and I'd find it really difficult to give those up.
And now that I've rambled waayy too much . . .
Oh! I really liked the Out of Bounds chapter, too. Somehow the idea of John cooking for Rodney is making me grin.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 09:00 pm (UTC)*nods* I think this is one of the downsides of the postmodernist movement & the effect it's had upon the way that many people think and live.