[Buddha-l] Conze's Memoirs

[Zelders.YH]

Joanna wrote :
>It's time I read something by the great man

And I hope it gives you as great a pleasure as it gave me.  A 
pleasure by the way that - sadly - Richard denied himself.

Being a Conze fan as well as a Hayes adept I remember the stroke of 
cognitive dissonance when I read what Richard wrote about Conze on 
Buddha-l in February 2004. This for instance on February 17th :

"There is probably nothing that makes me question Conze's credentials 
more than his failure to master the speech precepts. Even in his 
scholarly writings, the anger and contempt are much in evidence. It's 
as if his view of Buddhism was that if one gets the gnostic vision, 
then one wins the right to go around calling everyone else fools. The 
whole tone of his writing is so offensive that I can barely bear to 
read it. I have therefore never been tempted to open his autohagiography."

Funny, because untill that moment I had thought about them as kindred 
souls of some sort. Still do, in fact.

Two days earlier Richard had written :  "Look, the guy [Conze] was an 
unrepentant mystic. Mystics are constitutionally incapable of 
grasping the first thing about Buddhism".    Rereading that sentence 
I wonder ; aren't enneagram type nine Unitarian Universalist Quakers 
some kind of mystics ?  And what is "the first thing about Buddhism" 
that mystics can't grasp ?

You asked what kind of a commie Conze was ?  He describes himself as 
"a Tolstoyan religious socialist". Something like the European 
Thirties equivalent of a Unitarian Universalist Quaker, I guess.

You will find the link to the published parts of his autobiography, 
'Memoirs of a Gnostic', right on the page for which Bruce Burrill 
provided the adress : 
http://dharma.org.ru/board/topic1221.html.  Both are djvu-files. 
Bruce also gave this adress ; http://djvu.org/resources/  where you 
can download the necessary stand-alone djvu-viewer and the browser 
plug-in. It's all well worth the trouble.

Be happy,
Herman Zelders