Yesterday, I imagined The Onion, which does news satire, doing a satire on Buddhism. It would be about an upcoming conference for soul-denying Western Buddhists who are also interested in getting rid of the Buddhist tenets of rebirth and karma in an attempt to bring Buddhism into the 21st century.
The conference would also host Buddhists who are secular humanists, physicalists, anti-religionists, atheists, agnostics, anarchists, and nihilists. The conference would be led by Stephen Batchelor and Sam Harris both of whom are persuaded that the Buddha is trapped in the religion of Buddhism and needs some help escaping from its superstitious, and Hindu past.
The conference could begin with two minutes of hate (remember the scene in the film, Nineteen Eighty-Four?). Hatred would be directed towards Buddhists in the past such as the Pali translator Mrs. Rhys Davids who proposed, to the contrary, that the Buddha did not deny the soul.
“Ignorant Buddhists to-day uphold the ‘no-self’ doctrine, largely because they see in self, ‘selfishness’. Historically they are utterly wrong.”
Members of the conference would chant, "No soul! No soul! No soul!" while watching a picture of the bespectacled Mrs. Davids appear on a large screen followed by the picture of another Pali translator, I.B. Horner, George Grimm, and many others such as the great Japanese Buddhist scholar Hajime Nakamura.
The conference might continue with bright and colorful fMRI scans of the brain showing that there is no soul. Just clumps of biological matter. This is where the soul and consciousness come from. When the biological system shuts down because of some incurable disease or ceases to function because of old age, nothing continues. All one's sins and crimes go unpunished. There is no karma or rebirth.
I still haven't figured out a name for this conference.
David Loy has already scribed the keynote: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/towards-a-new-buddhist-st_b_2545120.html
Posted by: 100PercentProle | February 27, 2015 at 02:21 PM