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Their own sami.(God).

TandaTanda Explorer
edited June 2012 in Faith & Religion
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article3500325.ece
This link is about an obscure village in Tamilnadu,India with Buddhist statues and forgotten connection with Buddhism. The local 'worship' Buddha the Hindu way.

Comments

  • ToshTosh Veteran
    Interesting, but not surprising.

    If we look at Christianity it's been cross-fertilised with other religious practises, such as the Christmas tree, the date Christmas falls on, Easter eggs, Yule logs, wedding rings, mistletoe, and probably lots of other stuff; these are all pagan symbols (or dates) that've found their way into Christianity.

  • TandaTanda Explorer
    Yes In India too Christianity is 'Hindu'-ised a lot. They call Bible as Christian 'Veda'and Church as Christian 'Temple' ( But that is for marketing purpose, making Christianity more palatable for the locals.)
  • PrairieGhostPrairieGhost Veteran
    edited June 2012
    Tosh
    If we look at Christianity it's been cross-fertilised with other religious practises, such as the Christmas tree, the date Christmas falls on, Easter eggs, Yule logs, wedding rings, mistletoe, and probably lots of other stuff; these are all pagan symbols (or dates) that've found their way into Christianity.
    I wonder if the Nicene Creed has anything to do with this - due to the perception of widespread heresies, e.g. the Cathars, Christianity was distilled into a set of core beliefs, thus it was relatively simple to convert other religions, because the core was not cultural but dogmatic. It would have been much more difficult to convert people to Judaism, for instance, which is culturally specific in most of its forms.

    We're seeing something similar but perhaps on an even deeper level today with zen, which is practical rather than dogmatic - so it doesn't even have to challenge peoples' beliefs to be effective.

    A lot of Christians might be nervous about trying 'Buddhist meditation' because it still has a Vedic flavour, and they would see it as a gateway to worshipping gods and goddesses with lots of arms. Whereas zen was expressed by the minimalist Japanese in such a subtle way that people tend to recognise it on some level just upon hearing of it.

    Even to the point where you can write about zen without using a capital Z.
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