Buddhism and Self

[Gregory Goode]

At 11:20 AM 9/17/97 -0700, Vidyasankar Sundaresan wrote:

>There are more than 100 such centers in India. Some are more famous than
>the others. And yes, they constitute some kind of an orthodoxy. However,
>they have never organized themselves the way the Christian Churches have,
>although it is becoming popular to compare the contemporary SankarAcAryas
>to the pope.
>
>There is an account of the contemporary state of this tradition at
>
>http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~vidya/advaita/ad-today.html

Thanks for the URL.


>I would modify this statement to say that there is a current assumption
>that *all* religious traditions ultimately teach a non-dual
>metaphysics/ontology.

I haven't ecountered non-dualism in Judaism, even in Kabbala.  Mysticism
and esotericism yes, but the metaphysics seem to me to be intransigently
not non-dual...


> To some extent, the impetus for this feeling
>originates in 19th-century India, and is an Indian way of responding to
>the claims of Christian missionaries. Thus, when the missionary tells us
>that Christ is the only way to salvation, we respond by saying that
>vedAnta is the only true/universal religion.

In the West, there was a reflection of this in the Theosophical movement,
which also began in the 19th century.  All religions would be explained
by Theosophy, which took most of its material from Vedanta.

--Greg