Cady Goldfield

Thank you for that expansion. It may be fair to say that, given the subjectivity of the human mind, and the variability of human experience and conditions, no religious or philosophic concept remains in its original vehicle as established by its founder. The core message stays constant, but it gets dressed under layers of other people's and cultures' traditions and political agendas.

Even more interesting to me, was digging a little into some info on the Homa/Goma fire ritual, which made it from those pre-Buddhist Vedic, Brahmin practices you cited, all the way into Japanese esoteric Buddhism. It becomes apparent that while some individuals might take the ritual literally as an act of purification that actually drives out evil or invites in "positive energy," or as totally symbolic gestures that serve to remind the practitioner to make good things happen and to prevent and avoid the non-productive and deleterious through his own will and actions. And, the ritual itself seems to serve as a form of meditative catharsis, too. It's up to the practitioner to interpret for him/herself how to intepret it. Perhaps this is also true of other rituals and in determining whether deities and cosmic entities truly exist or are likewise symbols for deeper concepts of Buddhist thought.

RE: 20th-century Buddhism, it is fascinating that a bunch of self-important, self-made scholars ("jackleg Theosophists" is a great take-away; I am going to find some way to use that it somehow, somewhere, someday...) named themselves the arbitors of what constitutes "legitimate" Buddhism. The Dalai Lama of the Galug-pa likely didn't give a rodent's hindside what their conclusions were, I'll wager.

Now, to look into Nagarjuna's tetralemma. As if having a dilemma weren't enough.