> In orthodox Buddhism, like that in Sri Lanka, the path to understanding Buddhism is uncontroversial, difficult but uncontroversial.
After reading the memoirs of Bhante Henepola Gunaratana (the author of Mindfulness in Plain English) I get the impression that Sri Lankan Buddhism was degraded into pointless rote learning and empty rituals. When Bhante G. became a monk in 1940's monks didn't even practice meditation.
When religion becomes so ingrained into culture like it has in Asia, it seems that it becomes just empty conservative power structure, not different form Catholic Church in the west.
Sri Lanka and Burma have supremacist monks who advocate hate. Western Buddhists go to Burma and Asia to train with those few meditation teachers who know their stuff and learn from them while most Asians just see Buddhism as cultural tradition.
Sri Lanka, as well as most of SE Asia (but notably unlike the rest of the world), practice Theravada Buddhism, which is the oldest and most ritualized form of Buddhism. A really rough analogy in Christianity would be Orthodoxy or Catholicism.
But most Buddhism taught in the West descends from the Mahayana school, which teaches that enlightenment is possible in a single lifetime, and thus has a much heavier focus on individual practice and understanding. Again, as a crude analogy, thinks Protestants and printing the Bible in the vernacular so everybody, not just priests, can understand it.
And particularly popular in the West is the most austere branch of them all, Zen (Chan) Buddhism, which aims to strip away as much frippery as possible; again, roughly analogous to Lutheranism.
The person who wrote this article is a well-established Buddhist scholar who has actually spent years studying in schools, as you say one must, to study the history of Buddhism. Why wouldn't you say they were in a credible position to tell the world what is mythical about Buddhism?
Becoming an orthodox Buddhist even feels like it would be counterproductive if one's purpose is to investigate what is mythical about Buddhism.
In any case, what is being discussed here is the historical person known as the Buddha, not the experience of being raised as an orthodox Buddhist.
The issue I had with the original article is the way it starts by shedding what the author considers as myths.
As I mentioned, to understand Buddha's story, it should be done in the context of the most important teachings of Buddhism which I'm not going to go into here. Its almost like axioms in Mathematics. You don't pick the results you understand, and she'd the axioms that don't make sense to you. You can do it, but you are going to run into contradictions.
Buddhism is highly internally consistent despite the story being so old and informal in the sense of western philosophies. The danger of what she is trying to do here is that after you shed all the "myths", what you are going to end up with is mindful exercises for corporate events.
I still don't understand why one needs to know the teachings of Buddhism to understand the biographical details of Siddhattha Gotama. What sort of contradictions could arise?
The article does not discuss any kind of mindfulness exercises at all, or any other kind of meditation practice.
"In orthodox Buddhism, like that in Sri Lanka, the path to understanding Buddhism is uncontroversial, difficult but uncontroversial."
Nice.
"First of all drop your arrogance."
Not nice.
"Of course when you attach a loaded word like "myth" to anything that you can't experience from when and where you are now, none of that matters anymore."
It was time to start listening instead of speaking before this paragraph was typed.
I think you've misunderstood the nature of article.
The article is about the historical Buddha i.e. the person whom people believe existed, as a human.
It's not about 'understanding Buddhism'.
There is nothing 'Western' about objective historical investigation, and neither is the term 'myth' highly overloaded; if people believe strongly in a narrative that is not based in reality, we call that 'myth' and it's a fair term.
