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Monks with Guns
Thao
Veteran
This is a new book out on Buddhism that is rather shocking:
"One day after teaching an English class for Buddhist novices at a monastery a young monk came over and pulled back the folds of his robe to reveal a Smith & Wesson. I later learned that he was a military monk—one of many covert, fully ordained soldiers placed in monasteries throughout Thailand. To these monks, peacemaking requires militancy.
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:_discovering_buddhist_violence/
"One day after teaching an English class for Buddhist novices at a monastery a young monk came over and pulled back the folds of his robe to reveal a Smith & Wesson. I later learned that he was a military monk—one of many covert, fully ordained soldiers placed in monasteries throughout Thailand. To these monks, peacemaking requires militancy.
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:_discovering_buddhist_violence/
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Comments
Are these people teaching us about Buddhism or are they teaching us about the cultures they come from? Obviously the culture different traditions come from colors them but I think the main motivation of these teachers who teach to westerners has been to teach us how to be Buddhists not Tibetan or Japanese or Thai or whatever.
Its good to point out some of these cultural flaws in order to seperate them from the Dharma, but we have our own cultural flaws and am sure we'll be able to warp Buddhism in our own special way. I don't think we should consider ourselves above it all.