{"id":32782,"date":"2015-09-20T02:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T06:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32782"},"modified":"2015-09-18T22:39:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T02:39:09","slug":"what-kind-of-buddhism-is-this-otto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/09\/20\/what-kind-of-buddhism-is-this-otto\/","title":{"rendered":"“What kind of Buddhism is this, Otto?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kathy Shaidle<\/a> explains why using a movie’s worldview (even something as funny as A Fish Called Wanda<\/em>) is not the best way to develop your own philosophy of the world:<\/p>\n

From William James and Herman Hesse to the Beats and the Beastie Boys, Buddhism has long appealed to a certain type of post-Enlightenment Westerner \u2014 the one who yearns to fill his \u201cGod-shaped hole\u201d with anything but God, that uptight, bossy old guy with all the boring rules and hang-ups (man.)<\/p>\n

Buddhism \u2014 which looks from the outside like agnosticism but with cooler tchotchkes \u2014 is the obvious choice.<\/p>\n

Now, Americans in particular take a lot of guff (see: \u201cI forgot my mantra\u2026\u201d) for seeming to prefer trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em> religion \u2014 what Flannery O\u2019Connor had her Hazel Motes concoct: a \u201cHoly Church of Christ Without Christ.\u201d That\u2019s probably not surprising considering you\u2019re a country cofounded by deists.<\/p>\n

But while it\u2019s funny to witness lily-white lapsed Catholics, still supposedly stinging from Sister\u2019s ruler, sitting in Zen meditation classes where they\u2019re sure to be slapped with an even bigger stick, let\u2019s remember that Buddhism was an Eastern religion first. It\u2019s like Pearl Harbor: They started it.<\/p>\n

And \u201cthey\u201d aren\u2019t all the unadulterated egalitarian Klaatus of our Big Sur wind-chime fantasies. Buddhist scandals \u2014 both sexual and fiduciary \u2014 receive only a slender sliver of the media attention and resulting popular scorn that, say, Catholic ones do. (Oddly enough!) Stand-up comics don\u2019t crack jokes about perverted Theravada monks.<\/p>\n

Yet lists of Buddhist big-shot malfeasance include such karma-killers as spreading AIDS and drinking oneself to death. And that\u2019s just in America.<\/p>\n

Over in Thailand, the \u201ctop Buddhist authority bars women from becoming monks,\u201d but some are now insisting (stop me if you\u2019ve heard this one) that female ordination is just the enema the nation\u2019s corrupt and constipated religious authority needs most.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kathy Shaidle explains why using a movie’s worldview (even something as funny as A Fish Called Wanda) is not the best way to develop your own philosophy of the world: From William James and Herman Hesse to the Beats and the Beastie Boys, Buddhism has long appealed to a certain type of post-Enlightenment Westerner \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1039,343,262,413],"class_list":["post-32782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-buddhism","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-culture","tag-scandal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8wK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32783,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32782\/revisions\/32783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}