next article in this issue  |
Preview first page |
Document Details : Title: On Some Features of Buddhist Missionary Work and Double Standards in Religious Studies Author(s): SHOKHIN, Vladimir K. Journal: Studies in Interreligious Dialogue Volume: 15 Issue: 2 Date: 2005 Pages: 133-154 DOI: 10.2143/SID.15.2.2004101 Abstract : This article deals with the history of Buddhist missionary activity in the USA in the context of different factors instrumental to its success beginning in the 1950s. Among those most influential at present the author singles out the literature on interreligious correlations dominated by the so-called religious pluralists. Testing the latter’s utterances on Buddhism and Christianity from the point of view of Buddhology, he examines many passages in the original Pali Buddhist texts dealing with the Buddhists’ attitude to non-Buddhists to make clear that both one-sided disparaging of Christian exclusivism and extolling of Buddhist tolerance, in the writings of the “pluralists” and some theologians of religions close to them seem out of line in the epoch of highly developed Asian studies. Given that all religions claim absoluteness (religious mentality is by nature inseparable from the conviction of the superiority of one’s faith and, correspondingly, the falsehood or at least insufficiency of all others), the task of current interreligious studies is much more to differentiate among the various subtleties of such claims than to promote double standards in their estimations which contradict any scientific rationality. |
|
