Forum: Zen and West
After meeting Adrian and discussing the previous "And so?" thread, I think I might just be about to see what you are all staring at so fixedly. Wow!
I didn't participate in the previous thread because I simply didn't see any particular problem: "Powerful people exploiting gullible believers? People disappointed because their holy scriptures were not in fact written down verbatim by the founder of their religion? Astonishment that one's unrealistic models / wishful thinking about enlightened role models crumbles under the pressure of observable facts? Either I don't get it, or you people are awfully naive!" (pleas note the quotes - that's what I was thinking all these months while following the previous thread).
Anyway, after telling Adrian my opinion on the matter, during the subsequent discussion I realized:
1) I'm not a Zennie - so I naturally abstracted the situation to the well-known points about power, gullibility and delusion, and missed how it's about real people actually suffering under the situation,
2) I'm a solitary practitioner, do not have a particular teacher or congregation of real flesh-and-blood people to belong to, so again I just stripped away all the stuff I was unfamiliar with and was left with some obvious general truths about people,
3) The tradition I most closely studies was Theravada, and that there might just be some truth to the image of the "selfish" nature perceived in its principles from a Mahayana point of view - I reacted along the lines of "who cares if the stories are made up, if the institutions are corrupt, if the models are wildly off the mark - all that counts in a teaching is whether it works, and all that I want of a teacher is that they know what they are talking about concerning the teaching, and I don't trust titles and positions anyway".
(cont.)
