Word: faithful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Buddha posited no creator God; no Jehovah, Jesus or Allah. His Truths are so distinct from the primary concerns of other faiths that some Western observers see Buddhism as a philosophy or even a psychology. By the same logic, employed optimistically by Jewish, Protestant and Catholic Buddhists of the late 20th century, Buddhist practice can be maintained without leaving one's faith of birth...
...Different branches practice different varieties, but each begins with a simple awareness of breath drawn in and let out. Fields notes that a near mechanical process that allows each individual to look inside him- or herself for the divine fits in particularly well with the democratic tendency of the faith here: "Americans have always been a do-it-yourself culture, and this is a do-it-yourself philosophy." Benedictine Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of the International Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, goes considerably further. "Christianity and Judaism don't go deep enough in helping people live [spiritually] every...
...generous response, but one understandably more concerned with the fate of faith in general than the integrity of Buddhism. Most American Buddhists do not see themselves as proselytizers. The Dalai Lama has stated that the age of useful religious competition is past; people should stay with their birth faiths while profiting from other traditions. But some of Western Buddhism's more influential thinkers believe that it has far more to offer than meditation and may lose its essential core if it strives to Americanize too fully. Tworkov, who balances all sides nicely in Tricycle, believes many practitioners of engaged Buddhism...
...states baldly that those like Batchelor who prefer their Buddhism karma free "are non-Buddhists...they want to live as American humanists and call it Buddhism, [but] it's not really solid." He is only slightly less disdainful of Vipassana seminars that de-emphasize the supernatural side of the faith for the mechanics of meditation, or who, as Thurman puts it, "teach laypeople and rationalize their own departures from the traditional view. I did so for 15 years myself." For Thurman, "Euro-American Buddhism doesn't exist yet," nor can it do so until it can furnish the true motors...
Among those of us who have resisted growing up, it's an article of faith that we can put off growing old. We work out, we eat poached salmon, we devour alternative-medicine nostrums while gobbling antioxidant vitamin supplements, just in case. We don't ask the first baby-boomer President for much--not for universal health care, not for campaign-finance purity, not even for a tax cut. But we do count on him, as the emblem of our age, not to give in to the ravages of time. He was re-elected in part because he complied...