I dont know the status of informed debate on whether there was a real person corresponding to Buddha at the start of Buddhism, but if there was, telling the mythology as if Buddha stood up from under a tree containing the entire idea, and furthermore woke up with *the ability to explain it* using parables that people needed to have faith in and would only fully appreciate years later, did a tremendous disservice to Buddhism. Like this is not something you can just do without any development process for finding out which parables work. It is not just a freebie in the Enlightenment Package Deal. Telling the story like this did a tremendous disservice to everyone later on who wanted to be able to explain Buddhism, and thought that explanation ability just magically came along with True Mastery, which in turn was a functioning of trusting properly in people who knew more, all the way back to Buddha getting the complete skill set out of nowhere. This is not a realistic model of where cognitive skill is originally created, nor where you create the cultural ability to transmit it even using delayed parables and trust. The stuff has to *come from* somewhere, and at least the Buddhism Ive seen seems remarkably silent about there being an incremental development process when these skills and teaching methods are happening *for the first time* and not just being acquired from a master.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 18:18:30 +0000
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