I've been driving a lot the past few days. Yesterday was five hours. Today I have another four. Tomorrow I got five or six more. Then I'll be cloistered away from all this Internet noise for a while.Anyway, to keep me awake while driving I downloaded some podcasts including one called Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I had to download it just for the title alone. But it turns out it's really good.
The two podcasts I listened to yesterday got me thinking about the Buddhist view of its own ancient writings. As I've said more times than I can count, Buddhists do not view their ancient philosophical writings the way most religions do. We don't even view our scriptures (for want of a better word) the way Americans view the Constitution.
I saw a thing about the Second Amendment lately where someone was trying to say we had to be true to what the Founding Fathers intended. Why? That's the religious view of scripture right there. The Founding Fathers were not infallible. Their intentions may have been completely wrong. Or, more pointedly, their intentions may have been right but right for their time, not ours.
Religions tend to view their scriptures as infallible and their writers as perfect. Buddhists do not take that view. The ancient Buddhist masters were often brilliant, perhaps in many cases more brilliant than anyone alive today. But they were also people of different times and different places. We must never forget that.
The Hardcore History episodes I listened to yesterday concerned what we would today call child abuse and substance abuse in earlier periods of history. Listening to these, I was reminded how different our world is today form the world of the past. It's not just that there was no Internet, TV or flush toilets in ancient India or Japan or wherever. We may be dealing with a profoundly different kind of human being today than existed in the past. Possibly.
A guy in the comments section of this blog recently said that said Zen is not Buddhism because Gotama Buddha did not allow his sangha to have sex and in Zen even monks and nuns can fuck. I pointed out that he was mistaken. In Gotama Buddha's time the monks and nuns were forbidden to have sex, but the sangha in general was allowed to screw all they wanted as long as their behavior didn't cause problems. Buddha gave a formula for how to judge if your sexual activity would create trouble for society.
In his typically homophobic, chauvinistic, male-centric way, he said:
He avoids unlawful sexual intercourse, abstains from it. He has no intercourse with girls who are still under the protection of father or mother, brother, sister, or relative; nor with married women, nor female convicts; nor lastly with betrothed girls.
You gals and gays out there will need to make your own revisions. But you get the point.
In any case, one of the reasons the Japanese Zen tradition allows sex for monks these days is that it recognizes that we live in very different times.
In the Hardcore History podcasts I listened to yesterday Dan Carlin pointed out that what we would today call child abuse and substance abuse was rampant in the past. It was considered normal. And society was profoundly affected by this. People were different because of it. They were raised in a very different way. They made key decisions under utterly different circumstances. It's hard to imagine the kinds of things that were considered perfectly normal even as recently as 100 years ago. Go listen to the podcasts yourself if you want details. They're two of the "Blitz" episodes. The downloads are free.
In many significant ways we are very different people from the people Buddha was talking to when the earliest Buddhist scriptures were recorded. Yet in other deeper ways we are very much the same. It's our duty as contemporary Buddhists to understand this and to find the differences and similarities.
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OK. That was a quick, off the cuff post to last you for the next week at least, if not the next six weeks. I'll have about four days between Great Sky and Tassajara. There's no telling if I'll be able to post during those days or not. At least two days will be devoted entirely to travel. Maybe more. I need to work on my intenerary.
Anyway, see ya later!
