With my first entry (please see archive; and don't miss the great comments), I posed a simple question, namely: is Buddhism an anything-goes affair? That is, are there, or should there be, any constraints on what counts as "Buddhist"?
This entry continues in the same direction, asking what a Buddhist practice that has been stripped of all that is superfluous might look like.
I hope you'll offer some views on the matter. To stimulate some thoughts, I'm including an excerpt of a piece that I wrote called "Touching the Earth." (It's from the same piece for the first entry. It's called milking it; but with a purpose!) The complete article can be found here (scroll down to: "Is Buddhism an anything-goes affair? Here are some thoughts on the matter") .
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David Snellgrove, one of the most respected Buddhist studies scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, makes this astute observation: “There is no reference in the earliest known traditions to staid philosophically-minded disciples simply honoring the tomb [of the recently deceased Gotama/Buddha].” Now, there are many such references to devotionally-minded disciples doing so. Snellgrove offers the startling suggestion that if it were not for these devotionally-minded disciples, we would not even know of Gotama today!
That we do, in fact, know of Gotama, is obvious. Less noticeable is that we know only, or mainly, the devotees’ Gotama — the Buddha. The figure of Gotama that emerges from many pages of the canon is of a miracle-working omniscient sage that only a religious enthusiast could appreciate. But what if we start from the premises given above [in the article, found here]? I think that, doing so, a figure will emerge that resonates more with a more meditationally-minded and psychologically-oriented reader. The figure of that Buddha is not only more plausibly and realistically human; it is also infinitely more valuable to us.
Isn't he?
