[Buddha-l] Buddhist warfare

[andy]

On Saturday 31 July 2010 04:00:33 pm Richard Hayes wrote:

> 
> While I have not yet encountered anything at all that has made me feel that
>  reading Jerryson's work would be a valuable use of time, I am too ignorant
>  of D.T. Suzuki's work to be able to think for myself. Would you mind
>  explaining what exactly makes Jerryson's claim about Suzuki ludicrous?
> 
> Richard
 
I can't think of anything in Suzuki off hand, other than that sword of no-
sword stuff.  But here is the entire paragraph that Curt was refering to:

>Buddhist Propaganda
>
>It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form
> of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such
> as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai
> Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and
> traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist
> traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in
> this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have
> poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S
> popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as
> mystical.
<http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/2158/monks_with_guns%3A_discovering_buddhist_violence.>

Appears there is a century-long conspiracy, and academics have been useful 
idiots or fellow-travellers!  Or is this just another case of disillusionment 
turned into a crusade?  
-- 
James Andy Stroble