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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
also, "eastern spirituality" as such doesn't exist-- there more theoretical disputes in hinduism and buddhism than there ever were in the christian middle ages. it's fucking mind-boggling. sect upon sect upon sect.
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I'd question that - only because I've struggled massively to put Christian middle-ages Theology into anything like a consistent context; you'll get a general trend - say, millenarianism, Joachimism - which gets massively complicated by what Marxists and Hegelians would call a historical material dialectic, often focussed around (Aristotelian) Techne. There's also the ongoing, long-standing dialogue with other faiths - Judaism and Islam - which doesn't really stop until towards the end of the middle ages. Something that fascinates and frustrates me is you'll get people of the same or contemporaneous cloisters - say, Richard and Hugh of St Victor, Abelard - who are capable of enormous gulfs between their thoughts. Plus, the perigrinatorial nature of their writing means that our received notions of 'academic consistency' are well off. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin for me represent not just a change in Theological orientation but also a seismic shift in Theo-academic writing - in a sense, what we understand as analytical and academic now is inherited from their style. I don't know if you've tried, say, John Chrysostum, but he's an absolute fucker to approach from a modern perspective.
This very much depends on how you interpret differences in the writers. For the non-Theologian (and I'd include myself in that category), the differences between, say, Duns Scotus and Eriugena are fairly minimal, but within the temporal context, read in a 'properly' Theological way, the differences are enormous.
Otherwise, I agree entirely with what you're saying.
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Originally Posted by Ned
sorry, i didn't get your meaning here. who does this?
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It's those people who say that 'Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion' but who've never come across the 'life is suffering' idea. There's a tendency amongst them to say that Buddhism reflects good actions, being kind to each other, without having the imperial, stratified dogmatic terrorism of the Catholic church. For me, I don't think Buddhism necessarily means the sort of analytical study we associate with the protestant traditions (that is, the absolute, fundamental centrality of a single text), but that by no means means taht Buddhism is a religion absolved of its problems. I wouldn't criticise Buddhism
per se, but I think a very glib, cursory awareness of it can quite quickly reveal a very self-centred (though ego-less) absolution of the practitioner from her or his involvement in society; further, there's a minimal emphasis on love, which is a concept that appears elsewhere, and diffusely, while it operates square at the centre of most Christian thought.
That's what I mean by 'mourning for lost Christianity', because naif-Buddhists do tend to make assumptions about 'orthodox' Buddhism that reflect more a failure of Christianity's epistemology to be consistent with itself more than a necessary strength to Buddhist thought.
I don't want this to come across anti-Buddhist (the contrary, in fact) but it's one of those cultural paradigms of 'positive stereotypes' that don't really reflect the 'truth' of a culture (even though I've had minimal personal experience with that culture). It's like that thing of 'oh, black people all dance well, don't they?'