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Old 03-05-2011, 05:18 AM   #1
Xavier_Spinner_Wheels

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Default It's Time - Ajahn Sujato
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I was wondering if anyone had any comments about this article --'It's Time' by Ajahn Sujato (of Santi Forest Monastery Australia)


IT’S TIME -A NEW PARADIGM FOR READING BUDDHISM

It’s time. We need a new paradigm. Buddhism is suffering from schizophrenia; there is a split in consciousness between the historical and the mythic conceptions of the origin of the Dhamma. For 2500 years Buddhism has been constantly changing, adapting, evolving; yet the myths of the schools insist that the Dhamma remains the same.

All existing schools of Buddhism justify their idiosyncratic doctrines mythologically; this is what all religions do. Thus the Theravada insists that the Abhidhamma was taught by the Buddha in Tāvatiṁsa heaven during his seventh rains retreat. The Mahayana claims that the Mahayana sutras were written down in the time of the Buddha, preserved in the dragon world under the sea, then retreived by Nagarjuna 500 years later. Zen claims authority from an esoteric oral transmission outside the scriptures descended from Maha Kassapa, symbolized by the smile of Maha Kassapa when the Buddha held up a lotus.

All of these are myths, and do not deserve serious consideration as explanations of historical truth. Their purpose, as myths, is not to elucidate facts, but to authorize religious convictions.
What is myth? In my opinion, all the old myths – and here I’m speaking primarily of those originating before the 1st millenium BCE – were originally inspired by true events.

They were the news, the gossip, the family sagas of the day. They came to life in the hands of the storytellers and bards. The stories that survived were those that struck a chord in consciousness. Each time they were retold, the tellers would embellish or alter a little; and when the changes resonated with the audience they would be passed on, and so the myths evolved by a sort of natural selection of thought, a little bird of story soaring in the sky of the mind. There was no question of any individual deliberately creating their own stories. The myths were communal creations. This is why they offer such wonderfully direct insight into the consciousness of the times.

There seems to not yet have been the idea of an objective standard of truth; no distiction between how things could be, or should be, and how they really are. There was, therefore, no question of the myths being taken as literal, objective truth – the tellers of the stories would not have understood what that meant. The myths were projections of the people’s fears, desires, hopes, joys, and anguishes into the world outside.

But in the ‘axial age’ around the middle of the 1st millenium BCE a new idea began to be born. Knowledge became something that was not just inherited, but reflected upon and consciously revised. A new rational consciousness emerged, supplanting the old mythic consciousness. The most brilliant of the rational cultures were the Greeks, specializing in external science, and the Indians, specializing in inner science.

Both realized that truth is an elusive thing and so they devised special techniques for its apprehension; in Greece, reason and logic; and in India the science of meditative insight. Either way, myth would never be the same again. continued :

http://santifm.org/santipada/2010/its-time/

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