Whether it is Americans misrepresenting the history of Black enslavement and public discrimination or Dogenists claiming that Zen is Japanese, there is an attempted erasure of history at stake in both.
For the former, it is overwhelmingly done in the attempt to justify White Christian Nationalism; while in the latter it is done to promote the religious narrative of a Japanese meditation cult that spread to the United States in the 1960's, whose evangelization efforts depended on the illiteracy of followers in the 1000 year Chinese history of texts.
What the Yale blog says regarding White Christian Nationalism is common equally to Dogen-Buddhism in that "the internet allows people to adopt and share false beliefs."
When it comes to reddit.com/r/zen, vote brigading of on-topic content discussing this history and current practice of misrepresentation is itself an attempt to censor critical thinking.
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Zen texts are historical records of conversation, and attempts by Dogenists to mythologize them as 'stories' is where the racist element comes out since, after all, for them the standard of what constitutes 'reliable-historical' narrative includes Dogen but excludes the tradition he claimed affiliation with.
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Non-sectarian scholarship acknowledges that 'zazen' was invented in Japan, by Dogen.
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Japanese history of xenophobia and racism towards China in particular fostered the narrative that Japanese Dogenism, fraudulently called Soto, "preserved" something that was lost in China.
Each of the above underline the most controversy when stated publicly on /r/zen.
Submitted February 15, 2023 at 01:20AM by ThatKir https://ift.tt/S3oh2mV
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