In his June 5 letter,"Where East could meet West," Peter Link says returning to the Middle Ages is not an option, as if that's somehow a great loss. What he seems to fail to realize -- and what a host of romantic, historically uninformed books on Buddhism fail to point out (deliberately or otherwise) -- is that the Middle Ages were a far more dogmatic time than the present.
Buddhist sects regularly forced mass conversions until Japan's shogunate put a stop to them in the Momoyama and Edo periods. And tolerant Zen Buddhists were quite happy to cooperate with the authorities in denouncing Christians to be crucified.
What Link also seems to be unaware of is that, in East Asia, the vast majority of lay Buddhists have always used Buddhism as a kind of magic to get material blessings. Spiritual concerns have throughout history been largely the preserve of monks.
The very basis on which Buddhism was permitted (yes, permitted) to enter China and Japan was to use its magic to pray for the well-being of the government; spiritual matters were considered quite secondary. There never was a golden age of Buddhism, and there is no place where the whole of life and thought is pervaded by the spirituality of Zen Buddhism. The Buddha's teaching is to accept reality as it is -- science included -- not to seek romantic visions of a past that never existed.
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