Word: buddhism
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...reputation as "the touchy-feely school" was a recruitment plus. As Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer puts it, "The image developed that Santa Cruz was a place to come and sort of 'lay back' in the redwoods." Today, though, the most popular undergraduate major at U.C.S.C. is not Zen Buddhism or cosmic consciousness but biology. Only 4% of the students have opted for do-it-themselves interdisciplinary majors...
Because it has neither dogma nor Pope, and lacks both the promise of immortality and the threat implied in sin, Buddhism is often dismissed as a weak religion. In reality it offers one of the few elements of cohesion in the ethnographic jigsaw that is Southeast Asia. On the plains, the Buddha's concepts of the "flood" (travail in the material world) and "further shore" (the search for nirvana) are apt metaphors for peasant lives constantly subjected to natural disasters. In mountain societies, which are often driven by a lust for Lebensraum, Buddhism's "middle way" tempers excesses...
...state. In Laos, over the past five years, one-fourth of the peasant population of 3 million have swum or rafted across the Mekong River to Thailand. One of the most famous of these waterborne refugees is Laos' 88-year-old Supreme Patriarch, Pra Yodkaw Vachirorods, who sighs, "Buddhism is alienated and separate from the people. Religion is dying in Laos...
Scholars in Thailand disagree. They are sanguine about Buddhism's long-range prospects in Indochina, since they feel the Gautama's ideas are not incompatible with Communism. Observes Thai Scholar Sulak Sivaraksa: "Christianity and Communism have a lot of ideological conflicts, but this is not the case with traditional Buddhism, which is socialistic in that it champions the equality...
...government of Heng Samrin has spent no money rebuilding temples. For now, Kampuchea's impoverished peasants seem prepared to accept the financial burden of maintaining Buddhism by themselves. The 100 families in the tiny hamlet of Damrak Ampil, 12½ miles west of Phnom-Penh, recently contributed enough money to cast a new bronze Buddha and begin restoring their roofless temple. "Lord Buddha sustained us during our darkest hours," explains Village Committeeman Chea Non. "Our village is poor, but our faith is strong...