[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 27 June 2007 12:18, curt wrote:
 
> To accuse people of smugly assuming that their culture is superior to
> others is not the same as calling them racists.

That distinction is a bit too subtle for me, but let's go with what you claim 
you are accusing American Buddhists of. What I am asking is that you produce 
evidence that Western Buddhists smugly assume that their culture is superior 
to others. Your experience is perhaps a lot different from mine, for it has 
been my experience (both in classes on Asian philosophy in the university and 
in Dharma centres) that most people who take an interest in Asian thoughts 
and practices are convinced that Western society has a great deal to learn 
from Asia. If anyone is making any smug assumptions at all, it tends to be 
that Western culture has nothing much of value to offer anyone and that the 
only place to turn for wisdom is to non-Western cultures. I think some form 
of neurotic cultural self-loathing is much more common among Western 
Buddhists than smug assumptions of cultural superiority. 

> It is very difficult to 
> find anyone anywhere who does not, consciously or unconsciously, make
> such assumptions.

I guess we must run with very different crowds. I can't think of anyone I know 
well enough to call a friend who assumes, even unconsciously, that Western 
culture is superior to other cultures. No doubt such people exist in enough 
abundance in the United States to keep our government filled with xenophobic 
war-mongers, but I really do not encounter such xenophobia in my daily life 
of hanging out with academics and Western Buddhists. (But then I also don't 
know any Republicans or people who watch Fox News.)

>  It is
> easy for a Westerner to see the assumption of superiority that Tibetans
> and Japanese, for example, have toward westerners (and our money
> grubbing materialism) - and it is also painfully obvious to Tibetans and
> Japanese how we assume our superiority to them (and their silly
> superstitions).

I should hope that one of the effects of steady Dharma practice would be a 
significant reduction in the impulse to make sweeping generalizations. Surely 
money-grubbing materialism is nothing on which the West has a monopoly, and 
surely it is not by any means universally approved in the West. One can find 
practitioners of money-grubbing materialism pretty much anywhere where there 
is money to grub, and perhaps one can find it even more where there is no 
money to grub. But wherever one can find money-grubbing materialists, one can 
find a significant number of individuals who disparage it. The same thing 
could be said about "superstition" (the difference being that, unlike money, 
there is no such thing as superstition in any objective sense of the word, 
for it is a value judgment pure and simple).

When I lived in Japan, I was struck by how many Japanese people I met in 
various walks of life who chastised themselves for their own assumptions of 
cultural superiority. I felt quite at home, coming as I did from a culture in 
which the favourite sport seems to be finding flaws in one's own culture and 
lavishing romantic praise on everything exotic. (I did, after all, study in 
an Asian studies program where xenophilia was the norm.)

> As a westerner I feel far more comfortable chastising other westerners
> for the mote in our eye, than I do mocking Asians for the speck in theirs.

Well, of course. In that I think you are very much like the vast majority of 
Western Buddhists. I simply do not see any evidence anywhere of Western 
Buddhists mocking Asians. Please show some evidence if you have some. Making 
these reckless and frankly stupid characterizations of Western and American 
Buddhists (and American cheese) is getting tiresome. If you feel a need to 
set fire to straw men, please do so in the privacy of your own bedroom. We 
don't need your pyrotechnics on buddha-l.

Yours in praise of Velveeta ( a real man's cheese),
Dayamati