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'The Trouble with Buddhism' Chapter 12
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The door of wisdom is locked
Some Buddhist readers may be wondering how much of Buddhism is left standing after all the criticism of the tradition in the previous chapters. The answer is actually quite a lot. Not just the
The trouble with Buddhism is predominantly one of presentation and language. Very often Buddhists just don’t seem to realise, or perhaps don’t care about, the hugely off-putting effect their language may be having on non-Buddhists, when the language has only been unthinkingly adopted out of tradition and they could perfectly well put things in a way which is both more acceptable and more coherent.
As an example of this lack of regard for presentation and language, I recently attended the funeral of a friend, a Buddhist and a member of the Western Buddhist Order who died prematurely, so that although the funeral was Buddhist, there were many non-Buddhist members of his family there as well. The words spoken about my friend by many, mainly Buddhists, were moving and sincere and obviously created a good impression on the non-Buddhists present. At the end, at the committal in the crematorium, however, all this goodwill may well have been thrown away at a stroke. The leader said that he didn’t know where my friend was now, leaving an appropriate openness about afterlife beliefs that all present could probably share in. Then, finally, he announced a reading from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Suddenly, it seemed, not only did Buddhism know exactly where my friend would be, it knew exactly what he should be doing as well, as the text offered definite claims about his situation and definite advice for dealing with it. If this was intended to be taken symbolically (symbolically of what?), not a word was said on the subject. One was left with a strong impression both that Buddhists contradicted themselves, and that their regard for those who did not share their traditional ways of understanding things was less than one might have been led to expect.
This is an example of the blare of traditional Buddhism miscommunicating itself and putting people off from its insights in the modern world. In the sections of this chapter below, I am going to look at five particular aspects of the way traditional Buddhism miscommunicates itself and creates barriers to its wisdom.
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