Excerpt from an article by Robin of Berkeley..."Now that I think about it, I started becoming a conservative the moment I picked up that book by Trungpa. The Buddha's teachings are deeply conservative.
Given that Buddhism got me started on the straight and narrow, I was puzzled when Brit Hume urged Tiger Woods to switch from Buddhism to Christianity. As a Christian, Hume reasoned, Woods would find a path to forgiveness and redemption.
As a spiritual seeker, I'm a big fan of Christianity. I've attended two services -- one Catholic, and the other primarily black and evangelical. I loved them both.
But Buddhism is a fiercely moral path too, even though it is not God-centered. There are severe consequences in the next life for sins this time around. Act like a snake, and come back as one. (Tiger, are you listening?)
Whether a person calls himself a Buddhist or a Christian doesn't matter anyway if he doesn't walk the walk. Obama's bio states that he's a Christian. But his administration doesn't exactly exude Christian brotherhood.
The Buddha would never excuse Tiger's lying and cheating ways. But the problem is that Buddhism, like everything else, has been co-opted by political correctness and leftist dogma. Contemporary Buddhism resembles little of what the master taught.
Today's teachers communicate a don't-worry-be-happy kind of a vibe. Curiously missing is the number-one principle of Buddhism: that life is suffering."
"In Berkeley, for instance, the latest craze is a Joy class, taught by a popular Buddhist teacher. Thousands have already attended the course, where Joy Buddies are assigned to make sure you're on the happy trail.The Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun likes to mix leftist ideology with ads for pricey yoga retreats. Right before the election, the Sun published an article entitled "The Meaning of Barack Obama," which declared that if you didn't vote for Obama, then you were in essence an unenlightened boob.
In the magazine's next issue, liberal icon Alice Walker blamed the U.S. for all the bad karma in the world. Left out of the equation were countries like Uganda, Sudan, Cambodia, China, and Cuba, which have some serious explaining to do in the karma department."
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As the Buddha lay dying, he uttered these final words:
'Be a lamp to yourself. Be an island. Learn to look after yourself; do not wait for outside help. Only truth can save you. Work out your salvation with diligence.'
The Buddha stood for hard work, restraint, and honor. Sounds like a conservative manifesto to me."
'A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist.'
Full article at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/tiger_the_buddha_and_me.html
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6 comments:
The writer says they are a big fan of Christianity. The problem with this being that when Christians die they will blindly call out to a being that they believe will protect them. Anything could happen to them.
Bravo on this post. Real religion is conservative; liberalism only serves to weaken religious tradition and morality, watering doctrine down to something that promises everything but demands nothing. Then it doesn't matter what religion you belong to or if you follow its precepts faithfully. One only needs to look at what is happening in the Anglican/Episcopalian church to see what happens when a religious tradition abandons its natural conservativism.
Nice Blog Sean....keep up the good work!
Michael Travis
thelastcrusade.org
No, Buddha saw politics as an ego-disease
Buddha would have seen all political identities as posturing and full of emptiness. It is true that he preached reliance on the self, yet he also preached universal welfare and compassion, and the collectivist structure of the sangha.
Thank you so much for this article. It's only in the last few years that I've realized how much I've been influenced by leftist ideology that seems to be part of many Western Buddhist communities. I was also raised by liberals, and am so happy to be finally fully embracing my real conservative values that I've shied away from expressing because they run counter to the social circles I've been in. Luckily my teacher is also conservative. Conservativism is about taking responsibility for our own actions which is a theme throughout Buddhism and other religions as well, whereas leftist ideology is about getting other people to be responsible for us, which entails a very outward focus rather than looking within.
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