Removing The Sheen From Buddhism

[Husky]

2/2



3. HK had an article on Bali Hinduism where some Indian swami (from somewhere in the Himalayas?) visiting Bali decided to commend the way the extant religions in Bali live in harmony.

The relevant statement was this:

In the year 1011 AD, at a place which is now known as Purasamantiga… there was the first interreligious conference of three religions: Shaiva Agama, Bauddha Agama and Baliyaga, the traditional pre-Buddhist, pre-Hindu, Balinese religion. The scholars and the leaders sat down and worked out a system by which the three religions should work together and exchange forms with each other and that is the religion of Bali today.

(Buddhism plagiarised the word Agama from Hindus' religion too, as others had done. Eventualy they will invert the direction of travel of this too and declare Hindus copied the concept of Agamas from Buddhism/Jainism and that anything deemed "Agamic culture" must "therefore" be originally Jain/Buddhist instead. I shouldn't wonder. <- And if that sounded far fetched, it's nothing compared to the far more absurd claims getting peddled about, which forms a rather unpleasant topic that still needs to be posted on, because all the lying is becoming too much, especially as Hindus now have imbibed these claims and are peddling the same about ignorantly too. It's embarrassing. But that's for another day. Ugh. Yuck.)





Anyway.

I've not bothered (yet) to look at the history of Buddhism in Bali. But I do note that:



* in Bali - where Buddhism failed to eclipse Hindu religion (compare with how Buddhism succeeded in overriding Hindu religion in most every other SE Asian nation) - the native Balinese religion survived. This is because of Hindu religion being a majority and not Buddhism. It's because Hinduism - like Greek and Daoist religion - co-exists with native religions and the native heathens merely expand their pantheons to include Greek/Daoist/Hindu Gods and practices (depending on the country in question). Everywhere else in SE Asia where Buddhism overtook Hindu religion, Buddhism merely wiped out pre-existing religion else bauddhified the remnants (it had already Bauddhified Hindu religion there). Quite like Tibet actually.



* surely the fact that an interreligious conference on “working togeether” was even necessary in Bali in 1011 CE implies that there must have been some religious strife that resulted in a need for such a meeting on such a topic in the first place? I wouldn't be surprised if it was owing to Buddhism encroaching on native Balinese religion. I mean, where were such conferences in Thailand or Cambodia (or Tibet) etc to preserve the native religions or even the pre-Buddhist Hindu religion? Buddhism lost in Bali to Hinduism and hence was no doubt ready to come to the table for a compromise that would allow it to survive in *any* capacity rather than none: it got to keep something, rather than walk away with nothing. (Whereas, where Buddhism won, it left barely anything untouched/unbauddhified of the Hindu religion that preceded it, nor a trace of the native religions of the converted geographies.)



Despite the examples of other countries where Buddhism was victorious, one could argue my uneducated take on the "interreligious conference" amounts to no more than speculation (but then, why be so uneven-handed? others speculate with far less data and even less common-sense not to mention 0 logic). *But* the fact that, as most Indian Hindus would know, Bali consists of the 4 varnas of Vedic society and Buddhists clearly happily slinked in here under the special (oxymoronic and elsewhere non-existent) category "Buddhist Brahmins" shows that they were willing to settle for a good deal and were forced into a situation they don’t choose to get into when the odds are in their favour. I mean, most everywhere else they hissed at Brahmins, not to mention continue to project themselves as the bringers of a casteless egalitarian society, though some did that in early centuries too. (As a famous example of Buddhism hissing at Brahmins, even carrying this outside India for as far as it can travel: the earliest Buddhists that invaded I mean entered China left behind graffiti/"wall paintings" of Buddhist dawaganda - self-professedly fictitious - against Brahmanas. To this day, the Chinese - being innocent of this Buddhist concoction - have no idea how to read those wall paintings and merely carefully reproduce it in art work, without even knowing who the villains represent. The Chinese had remained clueless even when Buddhism later - briefly and unsuccessfully - tried to retell the same dawaganda fictions locally with IIRC *Daoist* priests as the main villains replacing the Hindu brahmanas. In Thailand however, centuries later when the Buddhist fable made its way here and is known as a sutra, Buddhists couldn't badmouth the Hindu class that crowned the king, and the villain is therefore made into some native unspecified but lay Indian instead. Sort of sounds like the evolving Thomas fable of christianism, except that Buddhists never pretended that their own fable had any historical truth. They merely intended it to be perceived by society as possessing allegorical "truth": not only as to the moral of Buddhist "compassion" etc, but - at one point in time - quite as much about who the good guys and who the bad guys of society were: who all are not to be trusted by "lay Indian society", a point quite lost on the Chinese. It was originally a missionising fable, a PR promotion for the "compassion of Buddhism" explicitly meant to be contrasted with the villains, the greed of wily brahmoons. It's one of many such Buddhist fables. Like I said, christianism didn't invent anti-brahminism. Or anti-Daoist-priesthood. Let alone anti-native-heathenism in general. It's a feature of all missionary religions. They compete with the status quo, with extant religion. There will be no takers unless people are brainwashed into dissatisfaction with the status quo. Hence the need for propaganda.



For all too obvious reasons, I choose not mention the name of the primary fable mentioned above. Wouldn't want daft Buddhism-peddling loonies getting a whiff of it and then trying to pretend that the "Chinese of old disliked brahmins (or even Hindu religion) too". The fact is actually the opposite: no E Asian heathen - nor even SE Asian heathen as far as I'm aware - has registered any complaint about Hindu religion encroaching on their native religion. Whereas Chinese and Japanese had long documented Buddhist encroachment and attempts to wipe out their native religions and had long-standing fights with Buddhism. Not to mention that a specific subset of Japanese Shinto heathens exasperated Buddhism in not allowing Buddhism to confiscate said Shintos' so-called "brahminical" [=Buddhist word for Hindu] literature for bauddhification. But no amount of propaganda and sneaking and then threatening by the Buddhists would convince said Shintos, whose response remained that it was their duty to not let this powerful literature nor their own Shinto Ritual Practices fall into Buddhist hands and get Bauddified (and hence subverted). Clearly these Shintos knew Hindu religion to be anything but swindle - from practice. They rather knew enough about Buddhism to suspect foul-play on behalf of Buddhism (which eventually followed/was attempted, BTW, so it merely proved the Shintos right).



Also, add to this the fact that even as late as the 1960s or so, there was still a remnant of this ongoing identification with Hindu religion among Shintos: when IIRC a Japanese scholar even declared, after stating the well known fact that Shinto was the pre-Buddhist religion of Japan (Shintos don't confuse their religion with Buddhism after all), that "Shintoism was brahminism". Though said scholar was -from memory- a student of advaitam (ooh, that gives me a lead on tracking down the quote), I still think he actually means Sanatana Dharma/Vedic religion, since "brahminism" is what Buddhism calls Hindu religion in E Asian countries. (It's also how Hindus' religion gets projected in India, in order to pretend there's no such thing as Hindu laity, and so that missionary religions can claim all the other Vedic varnas as "unaligned" to any religion and hence open to conversion.) To be fair, Buddhism doesn't just do this to brahmanas but also attempted this against the priesthoods of Daoists and against the preservers of Shinto religion, and other such cases. It's a feature of missionary religion: they try to convert the heathen priestly classes first; and whenever they fail, they get angry and try to console themselves with trying to convert the rest of the populace next and do so by badmouthing the priestly classes and by projecting the native religion as an unnatural edifice of the priests and the priests alone. But heathenism, not being a missionary religion, is by definition the [native, ethnic] religion of all of heathen society.