Sanatana Dharma - Aka Hinduism (3rd Bin)

[Husky]

An example to illustrate my comments in post 157, in particular these statements:

Daoists are also clear among their kind to resist the modern trends in China etc to invent and join new religions that are a mix of Daoism + Buddhism + Islam + Christianism (and sometimes Confucianism too), because Daoism cannot be mixed with these other religions.

[...]

(C.f. some people in China dabbling in the aforementioned modern 5-religion-ideology combining Daoism+Buddhism+islam+christianism+Confucianism aren't Daoists.)

Just like in India, where you can see <insert many a popular Indian cult> trying to turn Hindus' religion into an "Everything Goes" buffet, by installing un-Hindus and anti-Hindus and other direct competitors in Hindus' temples, here you see a similar case happening in Taiwan.



There are some funny points too: an idol of Mohammed installed in a new, new-agey "Taoist" temple in Taiwan. Not sure that these Taiwanese are aware that islam absolutely forbids *anyone* - including islamics - from making images of mohammed, but it's good the ISIS don't have nukes yet, else they'd be aiming for this temple.

Clearly, the people who thought constructing this temple was a "good idea" didn't read about the Danish cartoon hysteria. And that wasn't even an idol of mohammed.





Taiwanese news, early 2010.



taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2010/02/17/2003466084

FEATURE: Some Taoist temples prove all-embracing

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE Pingtung County’s Tiantai Baogong has a statue of Jesus Christ and the founders of other major world religions, along with Taioist deities

By Loa Iok-sin / STAFF REPORTER





Statues of the “founders of five religions” stand in front of a large statue of the Jade Emperor, the Taoist ruler of the Heaven, at Tiantai Baogong in Chaojhou Township, Pingtung County — from left to right: Mohammed, Laozi, Buddha, Confucius and Jesus — in this undated photograph.

PHOTO: LOA IOK-SIN, TAIPEI TIMESWalking into the three-story Glorious Pantheons (光正萬教宮) in Chiayi City, the temple looks similar to most other Taoist temples in the nation, with elaborately decorated pillars, a traditional roof and numerous statues of deities on the altars. However, upon taking a closer look at the altar, one difference becomes clear — there are two statues of Jesus, one with a cross and one without.



The temple was built in 1976 by a Taoist master, Huang Chin-ching (黃進卿), who believed that teachings of all religions are positive and righteous, hence one should think out of the box and learn the wisdom of all religions.

(Note that some groups are Taoist-Buddhists: they call themselves Taoists but are actually Buddhists, worship Guan Yin as the Bodhidharma and speak of Bodhisattvas and teach Buddhism not Taoism. Those groups also have masters.

Not sure what this Taoist master is. Then again, Hindus have many well-meaning but sadly-wrong swamis who have unwittingly peddled jeebus-ism and islam about among the masses. E.g. RK/M. Time will demonstrate how lethal all the aggregated mistakes of Hindus will be to Hindus and their heathenism.)



Huang’s idea became so popular that he had to build a larger temple in Jhongpu Township (中埔), Chiayi County, which was completed in 1998, the year before he died.



“Most followers of different religions — Taoists, Muslims, or Christians — believe only in the teachings of their own religions. However, they may miss the good things in other religions or become so narrow-minded that they are hostile toward other religions,” a Glorious Pantheons staffer Chen Yun-ying (陳雲英) told the Taipei Times.



“Our objective is to break the division between religions and to promote religious tolerance,” Chen said.



“We’re a Taoist temple, but we welcome people of any religion to come here,” she said.



The Glorious Pantheons, however, is not the only Taoist temple that honors Jesus.



At Tiantai Baogong (天台寶宮), a Taoist temple in Chaojhou Township (潮州), Pingtung County, a large statue of Jesus stands in the main hall, titled “Founder of Christianity” — right next to a statue of the Prophet Mohammed, titled “Founder of Islam.”



Mohammed is depicted as holding a saif — an Arab sword — in one hand and a Koran in the other.



In the same hall are statues of Laozi (老子), the “Founder of Taoism,” Siddhartha Gautama as “Founder of Buddhism” and Confucius as “Founder of Confucianism.”

(Laozu is NOT regarded as the "founder" of Taoism by Taoists, just as a forerunner, and not even the first human forerunner. According to Taoists, IIRC the Yellow Emperor - considered an avataaram of a Daoist God, from what I recall - is regarded the first human-class forerunner and cultivator of Taoism. Though not regarded as the "founder" of Taoism either, since Tao is eternal and co-eval with the Gods (the Gods are the Tao, and the cosmos is brought into being from this in stages). But oryanism has of course dismissed all of the Xia dynasty as "mythical": since the west is unable to claim the Xia dynasty as having oryan origins/influence, it needs to declare the first Chinese dynasty of kings as mythical in order to claim Chinese civilisation as an oryan aka white/western by-product upon claiming the China's 2nd dynasty, the Shang dynasty for oryanism using Iranians and Indians as a catspaw.)



Chairman of Tiantai Baogong’s Board of Administrators, Wu Hsu-ho (巫許河), said he doesn’t know why the founder of the temple decided to worship the founders of different religions at the temple, but he did not think it was inappropriate.



“All five major religions represented here — Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam — serve similar purposes,” Wu said.



“They all teach people to be good, they all try to show the righteous way to do things for this world, so they’re not that much different if you look at the core of each religion,” Wu said.



However, some clergy and academics said they weren’t sure about such inclusivity.



“If you really look at the core of each religion, you wouldn’t think such a practice was appropriate,” said Sakinu Tepiq, a pastor at a Presbyterian church in Taitung County.



“For example, Christianity is against idolatry, so how is it appropriate to carve a statue of Jesus and worship it along with statues of other deities from other religions?” Sakinu said, adding that worshipping a statue of Jesus could be seen as downgrading Christianity.



People of different religions should engage in dialogue instead of conflict, but “what causes religious conflicts are humans, not Jesus Christ or Buddha, so simply putting their statues together wouldn’t help to create harmony among religions,” he said.



Tung Fang-yuan (董芳苑), a professor at Chang Jung Christian University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies who specializes in religious studies, agreed.





“I wonder if the templegoers actually understand and agree with the humanitarian spirit and actions of Jesus Christ? It would be a humiliation to Christ if the Jesus statue was simply placed there as just another deity that templegoers worship in exchange for peace and good luck,” Tung said.



“Only by truly understanding the meaning of other religions can a meaningful dialogue between believers of different religions be possible,” Tung said.



Cheng Chih-ming (鄭志明), a religious studies professor at Fu Jen Catholic University, however, thinks that when Jesus is worshipped at a temple, he no longer represents Christianity, but is simply another deity in Taiwanese folk religion.



“Christianity and Taiwanese folk religion are two unrelated religions, and no one should try to stop others from worshipping anyone in particular,” he said in a telephone interview. “Worshipping a figure from another religion shows the tolerance of Taiwanese folk religion.”

(But not vice-versa, see?)



Although both Glorious Pantheons and Tiantai Baogong claim to be Taoist temples, Tien Wei-li (田偉力), executive director of the Taoist Society of the Republic of China, said that the worship of Jesus and the Prophet Mohammed was not a Taoist practice.



“Taoists worship natural forces or phenomena, as well as people who lived strictly according to a set of guidelines or did good things when they were alive, or showed miracles afterwards,” Tien said. “In addition to Jesus and Mohammed, I’ve also seen worship of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) — but we would not consider them ‘deities’ in Taoism because they do not meet the criteria.”



The chief executive director of the Wenhua Mosque in Taipei, Musa Ma (馬子誠), said Muslims do not worship Mohammed, because they do not worship anyone but Allah.



“The Prophet Mohammed is respected as a prophet, but he is not God,” Ma said. “Not to mention that we are against idolatry.”



However, Ma said that he fully respects the freedom of the temples to worship whomever they want.



“Some radical Muslims may protest, but as for Muslims in Taiwan, we would respect other people’s religious freedom — as long as they do not humiliate the Prophet Mohammed,” Ma said.

Muslims in Taiwan are just waiting for the ummah to back them up, at which point they too will suddenly "remember" that islamania bans idols of Mohammed.





Note the above is NOT posted to further inflame the sense of complacency among Hindus (i.e. not to invoke the "oh phew, we're not the only ones to descend to such detrimental depths"). It's already known that Hindus are not the only heathen population who are prone to this behaviour. E.g., to the west and backwards in time, the new-agey heathen Roman emperor Alexander Severus kept a bust of jeebus along with busts of deified emperors and I think Epicurus as well as of the Greek Gods and heroes. New-agey jeebus etc worship alongside the worship of the Gods - which was not tolerated by the church/christianism/bible but which behaviour was conspicuous only among heathens, as usual - didn't just occur among the emperors, but like in India, where jeebus and mohammed etc have been included by some lay Hindus who don't know better, the ancient Roman empire also saw some of its laity become unguarded and trivialise their religion.

And the lesson was clear: mass descent into stupidity is a sign of worse things to come. But it points to a fault/weakness in heathenism: the tendency to accumulate the unrelated and nonsense, and place this alongside the meaningful. That's why regular purging of unrelated elements that have accumulated or been insinuated into a heathenism is important: it returns the heathenism religion to its pristine state which strengthens the heathenism once more.





Posted the above article as an example of the forcible-merging of Daoism with unTaoist and alien and anti-heathen religions into the "5 religion" mess. Such a merger is vehemently opposed by traditional Taoists.



On the surface it looks like Daoists fell into the same pothole that so many Hindus like to fall in, but there's 2 differences: 1. the scale of stupidity, not just in terms of numbers of susceptible entities but also modern Hindus being several orders of magnitude stupider than their Taoist counterparts and 2. the effort of traditional Taoist experts in fighting off such subversions of their religion combined with - the all-important difference - how much better-received the judicious arguments and conclusions of the traditional Taoist experts are by the Taoist laity. In contrast, among Hindu masses, everyone appoints itself the expert and is ready to renounce learned acharyas and/or tradition (in favour of new-ageism or Bauddhification or Elst class argumentation, etc). As seen in the example of how easily "Hindus" ganged up on poor Swami Swaroopananda - whose great "crime" was to state mere facts ** - and how easily "Hindu" readers at Rediff ganged up against the Dharma Sansad, asking what the Dharma Sansad's "qualifications" were to make declarations on what is and isn't Hindooism and wondering how the DS "dared" to make declarations on behalf of all Hindoo-dom.



In contrast, the Taoist laity - being heathens a.o.t. self-satisfied new-ageists - has humility, the sense to recognise the limitations of what they know, and has respect for the expertise of knowledgeable Taoists (Taoist Experts) and are willing to listen to their arguments and consequently realise the sense in what they're trying to say.



[** And I noticed that VV hasn't retracted a single bit of their massive libel campaign against Swami Swaroopanadanda or against traditional Hindoo-ism on the matter of Shirdi Sai Baba. When they were so quick to learn of his "evil" statements and condemn it all with sweeping melodramatic filler, how come they did not come by the widely-visible announcements of the Dharma Sansad yet? Instead they're pretending nothing has happened. No matter. Backpeddling and "apologising" after such criminal behaviour is unforgivable. Hindus should smack them hard on the gob if they ever even *attempt* to backpeddle. They knew - or should have known - the magnitude and gravity of their allegations and the cost of being wrong. Do the crime, do the time, after all: the VV detractors' only option is to linger/wallow perpetually in their wrong. Mwahahaha. I'm getting way too much satisfaction from this. But I find I'm liking being petty. Plus someone needs to compensate for how the maligned acharya and the Dharma Sansad are not.]







It is impossible - in the "unforgivable" sense - to paste Taoist traditionalists' rebuttals of the subversive 3/4/5-religions-in-1 trends (such as is seen in the above article), because the links invariably lead to deep discussions among Taoists of highly private Taoist practices. Things that do not concern outsiders (including not just outsiders like well-meaning Hindus, but especially Buddhists/Bauddhified and also terrorists such as alien dabblers aka "converts" to Taoism).



Will just say the Taoists argue their point forcefully (more absolute than Swami Swaroopananda or the Dharma Sansad were in declaring theirs) with supporting arguments, making it unmistakably clear - even to me - that there can be NO mixing Buddhism (or even Confucianism) let alone jeebusism and mohammedanism with Taoism, and that the modern trends of 3-religion ideology (Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism) to 5-religion variants (T, C, B plus christianism and islam) is 1. not Taoism and 2. is a subversion of Taoism and 3. is a threat and must be resisted.





But good grief. There was squabbling between Taoists and Confucianists (Confucianism is a Sinic religion and was competing with the ancestral native Taoism, like Buddhism/Jainism/Sikhism etc are Indic religions that compete with the ancestral native Hindu religion). But alien missionary ideologies/unheathenisms like Buddhism and christianism and islam (and zoroastrianism etc) were recognised as a serious threat in Chinese history, and Taoist emperors understandably made it a priority to take serious measures to clear them off from Chinese territory/from the Chinese heathen homeland. So the attempt to re-introduce the evil christoislamism and unwanted Buddhisms in what should be a Taoist temple makes even less sense.



And while the islamic threat in Taiwan is comparably less than what it was in history or what it is elsewhere, the christian threat is growing by the day. Here's an example of how eastern Asian christian missionaries that are infesting Taiwan are conspiring against Taoism and Buddhism there:



raykliu.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/a-new-mission/

As we walked one block around the mission house, we counted 5 temples of various sizes. The enemy had blinded the eyes of our fellow Chinese who live in spiritual darkness. Pray that their eyes will be opened to the gospel.



[Image caption:] Temple around the block

raykliu.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/our-mission-house/

A garage converted into a temple near the mission house

The Enemy had blinded the eyes of the people to the gospel with idolatry. There are 18,000 Taoists and 4,000 Buddhist temples in Taiwan. This one used to be an auto repair shop, but business was not very good so the owner converted it into a Taoist temple to increase revenues!

Note again the numbers: 18,000 Taoist temples - just in Taiwan - and 4,000 Buddhist temples.

Ethnic Indians (not just Buddhists) are always ready to label E Asia as Buddhist. Uh, no.

I expect that Indian neo-Buddhists and Sri Lankan Buddhist monks will write pamphlets declaring that the "evil Taoists" had stolen Taiwan's Buddhist temples and "converted" them to Taoist temples. You know, the way these Buddhists - quite like the Jain Minority Forum types - declared that the "evil Hindus" had stolen India's "Buddhist, no Jain, no Buddhist" temples and "converted" them to Hindu temples. (Never mind that Buddhism and Jainism copied temple building from heathens - even their hopeless arguments to make their case accidentally reveal this - and never mind that temple-building ONLY makes sense in religions with Gods and where the Gods are central. Plus Buddha was originally never even depicted. Only his relics and feet/imprints were worshipped and early Buddhists specifically disallowed imagery of the Buddha.) In reality, many of the "Buddhist" temples in E and SE Asia were built - without invitation, and with Bauddhified-government force - within heathen temple sites and complexes, and often Buddhas and buddhisms were forcibly installed within the heathen temples proper, so that such complexes were over time dubbed "Buddhist-Daoist"/"Buddhist-Shinto"/"Buddhist-Hindu" and some have since been magically dubbed "Buddhist" and even been taken over wholesale for Buddhism and become advertisements for Buddhism: "look how beautiful Buddhist temples are" and "see how Buddhism includes all those other religion's Gods, look at all those vigrahas" (except those were the temple's original vigrahas and the Buddhas/Buddhist tokens were installed/tattooed much later). Sort of like how everything Taoist is gifted to Buddhism as a crowning achievement of Buddhis, merely for Buddhism inculturating on Taoism in China.





Anyway, it's not just Hindu temple spaces that christians invade, and where christians pray that the heathens will convert and will destroy their own temples/idols or convert their temples to christian churches. Christians - foreign and local - inflict such "prayers" regularly to Taoist temples all over E and SE Asia too.



And although christians similarly assemble to howl christian "songs" in front of Buddhist temples too, or will even invade Buddhist temples to leave christian dawanganda there, as in the next example below, Buddhism should learn to stomach this as it's quite the same as the more palatable tactics that Buddhism employed against Taoism and Shinto. (Buddhists in Japan, standing in front of Shinto shrines, meaninglessly chanted their sutras at the Shinto Gods, with the intent that the shrines' Kami could thereby be declared to have got "nirvana" - by which process these Shinto Kami were then magically declared "Bodhisattvas" and were proclaimed as part of Buddhism/in the Buddhist hierarchy. <- Bauddhification of Shinto shrine complete, no matter the heathen Shintos' protestations. And Buddhists regularly snuck in unwanted meaningless Buddhist items and Buddha statues into Taoist and Shinto temples and then declared the site all "Buddhist therefore". Buddhists wrote long propaganda tracts denouncing Taoism and Taoists, and even wrote lame fictions dubbed "classics" demoting Taoist Gods. It wasn't just Hindus who got that glorious treatment. The important difference is that Buddhism is NOT native to other Asian nations.)



first-thoughts.org/on/Buddhist+Temple/

I wonder how SA's Mr. Short. 75yrs, is today, arrested and in a North Korean prison, for putting his Christian pamphlets in the Buddhist Temple. Seems he was quite purposive. Possibly facing 15 yrs in prison.

Wasn't aware that the "poor" alien famously "unfairly" stuck in N Korean prison was a missionary pulling the usual christian terrorism in a Buddhist temple. International christo-media only reported how a western man was imprisoned and made it all seem random and unprovoked in order to win international sympathy for the christian terrorist.