by Tang Huyen

"Buddhism seeks to transcend the world, but has to rely on the world to do so, and this reliance puts it on a perpetual balancing act, how much to concede to the world whilst seeking to transcend the world. This tension perpetually stretches the Buddhist community."

That's pretty much the fate of many organisations,
not just churches. Orchestras and theatres regularly
schedule war horses that the public likes and pays
for in order to have the resources, financial and
otherwise, to produce lesser known, less popular
works. The latter can be slipped in almost stealthily
on the profit pulled in by the former, and otherwise
would have little chance of being produced at all.
Orchestras and theatres thus whore themselves to
the unwashed masses just to have the chance to
engage in elite works of serious artistic merit but
with little popular appeal.

If the Buddha had been purist, if he had adhered
strictly to his core message, he would have just a few
disciples and his message would have disappeared
in the teeming miasma of the Indian spiritual scene
within a few generations.

But to adhere strictly to something, be it his core
message, would have violated his spirit of openness
to the real and adaptation to circumstances, and to
be purist again would have violated his flexibility
and flowingness. The awakened lets himself be acted
by his situation. He effaces himself in favour of his
situation. So the Buddha concedes much to his
social, economic and political reality, especially since
he wants to leave an establishment behind.

The Buddhist tradition consecrates this adaptation to
circumstances as loka-anuvartana (bending with the
world), and this adaptation to multifarious circumstances
is personified in Avalokiteśvara, who appears in
whatever form to save whatever being — it doesn't
matter whether Avalokiteśvara exists for real out there
or not, what matters is the idea of adaptation to
circumstances to save beings according to their
circumstances, and not adhering strictly to some ideal
form of purism in a Platonic heaven. The entire question
is how much to concede without conceding the very thing
that makes Buddhism worth conceding to.

Otherwise the Buddha would have delivered his
austere core message in a "true" and unadulterated
manner, like Krishnamurti. Stoicism suffers from
its elite attitude, in that it is little inclined to condescend
to adapting its message and institution to the unwashed
masses — it always remains a "boutique" institution,
regardless (or because) of the sublimity of its message.

Yet after two millennia and a half, the Buddha's
message is still available to us (which is his intention),
in however diluted and corrupted a form, but from the
bits and pieces floating around, however mutually
contradictory, the discerning mind can locate the core
and work from it, even without institutional support.

The shamanistic element is indeed mostly a concession
to popular credulity and demand, and it is by no means
from the core, but it keeps the institution funded and
running, and thus keeps the core more or less accessible
to those who want to access the core. It is perfectly
legitimate to support the institution on a conditional basis:
it keeps the core available, but one ignores the
hocus-pocus and goes directly to the core. It's like
paying the janitor to keep the library clean and
accessible. One doesn't need to pretend that the
janitor's cleaning materials are great literature.

Buddhism seeks to transcend the world, but has to rely
on the world to do so, and this reliance puts it on a
perpetual balancing act, how much to concede to the
world whilst seeking to transcend the world. This
tension perpetually stretches the Buddhist community.
Any practitioner runs into the same precarious tradeoff,
even from moment to moment.

Every moment is a good moment for release, but the
opportunity to work for release has to be secured first,
if the chance to get release can be perpetuated and
propagated. Of course release occurs without work,
but not everybody knows that ...

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 8 January 2007, in the "Spooks and Ghosts" thread, in reply to Noah Sombrero on the institutional fate of churches. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A precise statement of the structural tension in Buddhist institutionalisation. The orchestra analogy gives the argument a secular frame: conceding to popular taste (war horses, hocus-pocus) is the price of keeping the more serious work (the core message) accessible at all. The Krishnamurti counter-example shows what principled purity costs: a boutique institution that leaves no establishment behind. The Stoic parallel makes the same point. Loka-anuvartana, which appears in the "Conformity to the World" post (<[email protected]>) in a slightly different framing, is here embedded in the larger argument about institutional survival. The post should be read alongside "Conformity to the World" as companion pieces on Buddhism's necessary compromise.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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