antinomian.com

For those of you who might be interested in such a thing, there is a a new book out, called Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, compiled by the editors of a similarly titled website. Looking at the website, it occurs to me that the implications of electronic publishing are quite interesting w/r/t Buddhism. The idea (as I understand it anyway) behind a lot of Buddhist thinking is that no two people should follow the same teaching and expect the same results (upaya). This is why Buddhists (or some of them, anyhow) are inclined to be so cranky about dogma and written texts, even going so far as to “burn them” or “kill the buddha,” so to speak. The internet, being perpetually incomplete and (for now) collectively authored, would seem to be the ideal medium for an upaya-driven model (pardon the buzz-speak) of teaching and sharing information. Or would it? Because since day one of electronic speech, people have been frantically searching for a way to rectify its transient nature. Witness the Wayback Machine, the Concurrent Versioning System, and etc. And while it’s fun to look back once in awhile, at some point you really just have to take a look at your surroundings, and throw out the raft. (ps. Apologies, this post started as a simple link to a neat book and rapidly spiraled out of control. Too much coffee. -ed).