Oh, I've even thought that perhaps "Marin County" isn't a geographic locale, as much as it is a state of mind. I live in Oakland, a half-hour away and a world apart in attitude from this ghastly-expensive wooded enclave at the forefront of the New Age movement. It seems even here I cannot escape the "Free Tibet" bumper-stickers that dot every other car. Or the malas hanging from rear-view mirrors.

I don't have anything against Eastern spiritual practices, per se. I just want to see followers disillusioned slightly--divested of the childlike credulity I finding so irritating. I want to see beliefs questioned. That's why I was thrilled to come across Authoritarianism in Buddhism.

The writings indexed at the site, which I mentioned in my last entry, are sometimes soberly critical, other times irreverent--always original and startling. If you only read one piece, I recommend Michael Parenti's monograph, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, about the idealization of Tibet in the West, and the weight of hard evidence to show local monks' oppression of peasants before the Chinese invasion. I also recommend Buddhist Modernism and the American Buddhist Lineage, by Laurence O. McKinney. The piece argues the existence of a distinctively American Buddhism, or "Yankee Doodle Dharma," without which Asian Buddhism would not have taken the form we recognize it in today.
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