All religions of brotherly love imply a circle of unbrotherly hate. They spread fastest in times of general war. What makes doctrines of universal love appealing is not that they’re actually universal, but that they can be expanded to include people excluded by the older definitions of universal love. This expansion of sympathy tends to go along with a diminution in some other direction. One example comes form the liberal Christians at the moment, who are convulsed with loathing of evangelicals who won’t forgive gays. Another, shorter example is in Norman Maclean’s
A River Runs Through it.
Painted on one side of our Sunday school were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
Does that work with the Buddhist idea of compassion to all living things? Perhaps it boils down to the difference between ‘love him, because God is in him’ and ‘God is in you, so love whom you love’.
Was there — is there — ever a Buddhist equivalent of Calvinism?
R (can you tell I’m actively displacing?)
I think that the Buddhist equivalent of Calvinism would be something like the Tibetan cult of Dorje Shugden. A study of Tibetan politics will show you pretty quickly that compassion for all sentient beings stops pretty abruptly at factional boundaries. I’ll try and dig up what I wrote about it when I get the cuttings blog working.