DNS wrote: ↑Fri Nov 03, 2017 4:05 pmAll roads lead to Everest base camp, but from there, Buddhism is the only route to the summit.
Excellent point.
Some paths are going in the opposite direction, for example, those that advocate violence, especially against innocent ones.
Agreed. I am aware of no major world religion which so advocates, although ancient texts can be interpreted and/or misunderstood in a corrupting manner, and adherents of some faiths may misconstrue the religion which they purport to follow, even to the point of harming others.
From
this page:
An identical account appears in Buddhism:
The blind of this world bear a heavy burden for past failure to tell the way clearly to travelers. Some people's mouths are very misshapen. They blew out lamps on the Buddhas' altars. To be deaf and mute is a dreary existence. Reward appropriate for scolding one's parents. How do people get to be hunchbacks? They berated and laughed at those bowing to Buddhas" (Buddhist Text Translation Society, n.d.).
Having been exposed to such texts, many Buddhists have a negative attitude toward the disabled. According to one survey of Japanese Buddhists, "68% of people with disability say they have experienced discrimination," and "the vast majority of people without disability feel that individuals who have a disability are treated like second-class citizens" (Stevens, 2013, p. 32). Sallie B. King reached a similar conclusion:
Popular understanding based on the idea of karma has provided a rationalization for people to turn their backs on the disabled.... This interpretation of karma has been so common that modern reformers in countries like Japan bitterly blame Buddhism for much of the super-added suffering of disabled people beyond the physical suffering directly caused by their disabilities—their rejection by society, their treatment as pariahs, and the lack of interest in helping them. (2009, p. 163)
Contemporary Buddhists feel embarrassed by the cruelty of the karmic doctrine and the subsequent ill-treatment of the disabled. Richard Louis Bruno, a disabled Buddhist psychotherapist, solved this dilemma by doing two quite different things. First, he disassociated himself from the basic concept of "karmic punishment" by writing that some Buddhists (unlike himself) "believe in reincarnation and say that what happens to you in this life results from the circling back of your own actions from previous lives" (Bruno, n.d.). Second, he collected quotes from a few disabled persons, some of whom share his opinion:
"I believe my accident (and its consequences) is a result of something I'd done (or didn't do), or because of something I didn't handle properly, in a past life. I now get another chance to 'do it right.'" (Bruno, n.d.)
"It is really unproductive to think about past lives.... We have more than enough to handle dealing with this one." (Bruno, n.d.)
"When we accept that everything animate and inanimate is 'already broken,' a physical disability—even a terminal illness—loses its abnormality. Actually, anything that is not broken, not 'disabled,' is really abnormal." (Bruno, n.d.)
Khun Kampol Thongbunnum expressed an attitude similar to these in a short poem:
Most people
Live in suffering
Without knowing
Only when happiness
Gradually fades away
That suffering
Shows its face
Then and there
Not perceiving suffering
One consequently fails
To find the way out
And to get rid of suffering
Once and for all.
(Thongbunnum, 2010)
I empathize with the pain and desperation of the disabled, and I applaud their use of a wide variety of psychological defense mechanisms to make their lives easier. The disturbing aspect of these statements concerns not the disabled, but the able-bodied, who learn to blame the victims for their plight and to feel not only physically but morally superior to them.
Even the most noble path can be twisted into something it it not.