Yesterday I was looking through my old somewhat dusty stack of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. I said, What the heck—I’ll do a blog on it.
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review touts itself as an independent, nonsectarian Buddhist quarterly. Its main goal in its own words, “is introduce fresh views and attainable methods for enlightened living to the culture at large”—I would add a culture in the eyes of Tricycle that is left of the political spectrum which is rubbing up against cultural Marxism.
In this light, Tricycle is not really introducing Buddhism to the culture at large but, instead, is trying to make Buddhism appeal to those who have bought into cultural Marxism’s ideology, for example, political correctness, identity politics, multiculturalism, transgenderism, etc. Such people have no sincere intention of changing, that is, adapting to Buddhism. Tricyle is really trying to meet their needs.
Analogous to Tricycle's endeavors, if I wanted to start a Buddhist review that would mainly appeal to members of motorcycle gangs calling it Aryan Riders my context would have to somehow relate the life of bikers with Buddhist monks. My first article might be about how Adolf Hitler lived almost the life of a Buddhist monk. He did not eat meat, drink alcoholic beverages, or smoke. Nazis were ardent supporters of animal rights and believed in environmentalism.
I realize that this is quite an extreme analogy. Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate an important point: that making Buddhism appeal to a particular non-Buddhist group or culture has often the unintended consequence of making members of this particular group or culture believe that this is the essential teaching of Buddhism when, in fact, it is not. In a nutshell this is not Buddhism.
"The dharma [is] taught by the Blessed One for the sake of final nirvana without clinging" (S. iv. 48).
Overall, Tricycle’s treatment of Buddhism is not so much about Buddhism but, instead, an attempt at putting Buddhism into an ideological box to fit alongside various sociopolitical views of the world. I can understand this, because most people today are unaware how much ideological thinking has impacted their lives. In this regard, they are unable to see that reason has given way to sociopolitical views of the world in which truth becomes problematic.
But Buddhism it not unreasonable because it is truth-oriented in the highest sense of the word. In fact, we expect it to be reasonable for us but not given to an ideological reshaping employing a kind of cloudy metaphysics which makes the attainment of truth about myself impossible.
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