"To Know One Religion is to Know None"
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/08/bg ... know-none/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
You can read or listen to the interview.
Here's a brief quote to consider:
While the main examples she gives are Mahayana ones, I think that this caution can also be applied to the central Pali texts. Did the "camcorder" really capture the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta or the Anapanasati Sutta?In fact, you’ll be a much weaker practitioner if you have to be a fundamentalist because that’s a very brittle kind of point of view that gets defensive very easily and fractures very easily in the line of any kind of serious study or questioning. That’s when people start to lose their confidence in religious traditions is when they start to see that “no this couldn’t have been something the camcorder recorded.” But what the camcorder would have recorded isn’t as important as the meanings encoded in this text. That’s what counts.
I liked this part (though some of it seems to have become garbled...):And if people don’t understand the difference between imagery and empirical language, you can lose your confidence in the tradition very easily at that point. So I think it’s very important to be full up honest about what history shows us and then to say and “So what difference does that make to our religious practice.” I think it only strengthens a deep practice.
The study of history can show how much the Buddhist tradition has changed over the years and in what ways. But it can also shows up that deep thread of continuity, from the very earliest text up to Dzogchen and Zen and Chan what they call the highest teaching, a tremendous continuity, which is something that I, has a bit of surprise to me to find that if you really go into those early texts almost everything that was later taught as advanced highest teachings is already there. It’s just that it was repackaged in new language with merely slightly different practices around it. So the study of history shows you both how much change has happened but how much there is a basic golden thread that seems to run through almost all of Buddhism. Egoless-ness, impermanence, compassion. It’s there wherever you look in Buddhism.
Mike