There is no "Soto Tradition"; Dogen Buddhism has tradition of lying which produces sex predators, content brigaders, and hate.

1. We've established that Dogen was a fraud.

   • Dogen didn't learn Zazen prayer-meditation from the Buddha-Bodhidharma-Rujing lineage
   • Dogen plagiarized and committed other acts of fraud throughout his short career.

2. We've established that Dogen's church has a history of feeding hatred and discrimination, not just toward Zen Masters

   • Dogen Buddhism and WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_at_War, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuun_Yasutani
   • Machida Muneo, president of Buddhist federation of Japan and secretary general of the largest Dogen Buddhist denomination of Japan, in 1979 admitted he had convinced the Fourth World Conference on Religion and Peace's Human Rights Commision to remove any mention of the plight of outcastes in Japan from the text of their final report. He would later be forced to apologize.
   • The Bloodbowl Sutra, which came to Japan from China but is supposedly Buddhist in origin, says that because of women’s defilement of nature through blood, they are doomed to fall into a “Bloodbowl Pond” after death (Kurihara, 105). [Dogen Buddhist] monks used this scripture to convince women that the only way to save themselves from this Buddhist Blood Hell was to receive salvation from a monk (Bodiford, 15).

3. We've established that Dogen's church has a history of sex predator "masters" that continue to influence the tradition.

   • https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/wiki/sexpredators, who use to be quoted daily in this forum
   • It is worth noting that the vast majority of "Zen centers" in the West trace their lineage back to these four "sex predator lineages"... such is their influence that even Dogen Buddhists from other lineages "teach" at churches established by these lineages.

This isn't simply a matter of "religions make mistakes" or "institutions can be evil". My argument is that Dogen Buddhism, like other religions in that category (Scientology, Mormonism) actively encourage a mindset which is rooted in dishonesty... and that we see this dishonesty in r/zen, in terms of stalking/harassment, content brigading, and reactions to criticism.

Submitted March 01, 2019 at 04:34AM by ewk https://ift.tt/2GPJZdT