Word: buddhistically
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...city from Boston to Seattle, from Detroit to New Orleans; there is a 50-member cabal in, of all places, Austin, Texas. There are outposts in Paris and London, New Delhi and Katmandu, where American hippies trek the "hashish trail" to get cheap but potent hallucinogens and lessons in Buddhist love. Though hippies*consider any sort of arithmetic a "down trip," or boring, their own estimate of their nationwide number runs to some 300,000. Disinterested officials generally reduce that figure, but even the most skeptical admit that there are countless thousands of part-time, or "plastic," hippies...
Headed Off at the Pass. If in Japan, Ceylon and Viet Nam the Buddhists are on the march, in Communist China and Burma they have been headed off at the pass. Peking has assiduously emasculated Buddhism in China, emptying it of its religious content while retaining its temples as shrines to the "cultural creativity of the Chinese people under the feudal empires of the past." General Ne Win of Burma has used arrest and intimidation to undercut the young monks who crave political power, at the same time borrowing Buddhist principles to shape his "Burmese Way to Socialism...
Buddhism in Viet Nam is accorded Schecter's closest scrutiny and lengthiest appraisal. From the last days of President Diem, who fatally underestimated the power of the political monks, to the past year's Buddhist uprisings, which Premier Nguyen Cao Ky expertly quelled with a combination of "tenacity and guile," the book reconstructs the sorties to the barricades in Viet Nam. There, as elsewhere in Asia, the Buddhists' problem is to resolve "the conflict between tradition and transition in Asian life...
...Buddhism has for so long been "the ultimate source of Asian values," says Schecter, it was inevitable that the pressures of colonialism and modernization would stretch the faith into new shapes. One of the strangest shapes may some day emerge from the confrontation between Buddhism and science; the Vietnamese Buddhists hope eventually to create a Buddhist university whose curriculum would include engineering, mathematics and medicine, but today that prospect seems close to fantasy. At present, Buddhism is less concerned with adopting Western ways than with providing a kind of "cultural defense" against them. Part of that defense rests...
Essence & Integrity. The better the defense, the crueler the dilemma for Buddhists and the more awkward the questions that arise. Can Buddhism accommodate itself to nationalism and the modern desires for material advancement, which are seemingly the very opposite of Buddhist doctrine? The author's answer: "If Buddhism does not adapt, it will become a cultural fossil. If it adapts too much, it becomes adulterated and loses its essence and integrity." It is the search for the middle way between these two alternatives, suggests Schecter, that causes the painful grimace so often discernible today on the new face...