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Dirty-laundry Dharma wars
fivebells
Veteran
Point
Counter-pointIf any newcomers exploring an interest in Zen had stumbled upon the fray, they wouldn’t have been inspired. With Buddhist virtues like compassion and right speech in short supply, the whole affair looked more like a schoolyard brawl than enlightened discourse between experienced dharma teachers and students. Unfortunately, the Sitting Frog squabble was hardly unique. In the era of Internet blogging and online forums with their unfiltered, rapidfire exchanges, disagreements among Buddhist teachers and practitioners seem to erupt out of nowhere.
<center>Awash with expectations and subsequent disappointments that others don’t live up to an unrealistic “standard” these views expose one of the prevailing problems with much that is Corporate American Buddhism. That is transcendental egotism. The spiritual realm or anything with a whiff of spirituality attached to it, is so ridiculously idealized that followers meekly bleat out the statements of a particular canon without understanding their context, origin, relationship to the entire canon, historical perspective and often even their meaning. How many blogs do you see of any religion that are just cut-and-paste of quotes from a canon or spiritual leaders? It’s easier than thinking about them. And it looks like good spiritual study. But it is only pablum.
These articles are a bit light-on, but I think they raise some interesting issues which have come up here, recently, particularly in Richard Herman's concerns.
</center>“People say and do things online that they wouldn’t ordinarily say and do in person,” says John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, who has studied computer users’ behavior for years. Buddhist or not, Internet users readily fall prey to what Suler calls the “online disinhibition effect.” The medium itself drives much of this acting out, he says. “People experience their computers and online environments as an extension of their selves—even as an extension of their minds—and therefore feel free to project their inner dialogues, transferences, and conflicts into their exchanges with others in cyberspace.”
One might suppose that Buddhists, with their mandate to realize no-self and manifest lovingkindness, would be able to navigate such pitfalls a bit more skillfully than most Internet users. But Suler, who has some familiarity with Buddhism—in 1993, he published a book titled “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought”—isn’t surprised that teachers and students get carried away online.
“There’s a lot more narcissism in the community than we would expect or hope,” he says. “It’s a bit paradoxical that in a philosophy emphasizing the transcendence of self, some people are very preoccupied with self.”
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Comments
lol just today I was cussing some guy out online at my bank...via online instant messaging to my bank..
and then I had to call them 24 hours later and I was like shy and an angel,
The thing is for people like me who are naturally very shy, the internet gives us a mask or two or THREE you know what I mean...
I don't need to be shy, when it's just faceless words..
anyway since I am a buddhist, I say a lot of things and opinions that I've already held back in normal conversations with peoples- LIVE...
you know, I tend to hold back LIVE, because of fear,ego etc etc ,
If we are just exchanging words on the net, then whatever lets do it
I can be more open, less worried..
And I could only imagine the same effect on thousands of Buddhists, trying to cross culturally show and..
learn/show off ..what they've learned and help other people..ETC ETC
I think we will have 9/10 posts that are misses,(not mine of course
I think my signature sums up my thoughts on the topic.
That is very true about the blogs. What a shame, given a free medium people opt out.
I like your posts :^)
I personally might be to blame for some useless arguments, I admit it, or the continuation of some. I get carried away, you know (but I edited the vitriol out of this before posting, so it's a start
I thank you for your post fivebells, I'll try to be more careful with what I post, and even though I think you should use the popcorn cat as an object of meditation I will restrain from using animations in my posts, okay?
You're gonna burn in hell for that rabbit, though.
I don't see the first 2 quotes as point and counter-point but rather complimentary. They could've been from the same essay.
The situations described by Richard Herman are exactly what we strive to avoid here.