That little bit aside, as I dive back into readings\/writings for my thesis, one theme keeps\u00a0reappearing. That theme is, as Dr. Sponberg described in his course, the Assimilation & Revalorization of \u201ccurrent popular culture\u201d for its own uses<\/b>. The theme came up in his class in the last week or so, as we thought about what Buddhism was becoming in the contemporary world. But it actually seems to be a hermeneutic that should be utilised throughout Buddhist<\/a> history.<\/p>\n Gombrich elucidates this at length in much of How Buddhism Began<\/a> All of this points to something that the Buddha and early Buddhists, and indeed all great religious figures, were doing: stealing ideas, changing them, and putting them back out there<\/b>. Or, in terms fit for the classroom: assimilating and revalorizing aspects of the culture around them.<\/p>\n And all\u00a0of this<\/i>\u00a0suggests that we must not, cannot, should not essentialize Buddhism. What does that mean? Well, it means we have to be very careful when we try to say \u2018so and so got this or that wrong<\/i>.\u2019 Yes the \u0100bhidhammikas seem to be creating a metaphysical system when the Buddha seemed to eschew such things. But how often do we come across new or naive students of Buddhism dismissing Abhidhamma as some misguided misadventure? Too often, in my experience. A better approach would be to say that they were doing something different<\/i>, and there is likely a reason<\/i>\u00a0why they did it<\/b>. It takes some time first of all to understand just what the difference is<\/i>\u00a0to begin with, and it takes even more patience to look into the context of those changes to try to decipher the reasons<\/i>\u00a0for them.<\/p>\n The same goes for the numerous strands of development which coalesced, over a period of centuries, into what we now know as Mah\u0101y\u0101na.<\/p>\n But getting back to the early stuff, which is my main area of interest, we have today in the West largely a phenomenon of Buffet Buddhism, people picking and choosing which aspects they like, from whichever tradition, and leaving the rest. Now in a sense this just follows the trend of how Buddhism began and evolved. \u00a0But in another sense it is not. It actually evolved through intense debates regarding doctrine and practice, not to mention bits of political underhandedness\u2026 It has generally had a very top-down transmission, and thus a relative uniformity from place to place. Buddhism in the West is kind of a mess in this regard \u2013 which, if you\u2019re a scholar of it, can be fun.<\/p>\n But I digress once again\u2026<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-H_97iVkQ1xU\/Tg3oACP1mjI\/AAAAAAAABkQ\/k-ZoIPSu3lQ\/s400\/IMG_1007.JPG\")
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