Bhutan 4 Christ and a potential backlash

Bhutan 4 Christ and a potential backlash

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This is just in from "a darned Buddhist fundamentalist, this just seems wrong. Declaring a state religion - even if it's Buddhism - and restricting the activities of others is a recipe for disaster. Brian Victoria, an ordained Soto Zen priest and scholar of Japanese Buddhist Militarism, has lectured and written widely about this. Those who have followed the war in Sri Lanka, too, know the price of nationalized religion and the demonization of "outsiders." Tibet, too, was hampered by excessive suspicion of outside forces; as H.H. the 13th Dalai Lama foresaw the rise of China and sought to modernize and reach out to other powers, he was blocked by conservative forces in his own government.

Bhutan stands as perhaps the only "Buddhist" country yet to fall completely to outside forces, military rule, or resort to internal violence. What, ideally, should they do? For the most part, they've done great. The king instituted democratic government and voluntarily abdicated his throne. At the same time he's carefully balanced maintaining sovereignty and cultural integrity with opening to the outside world for "progress."

On of my old professors, a philosopher of technology, Albert Borgmann, predicted that the country would fall the way so many indigenous populations have when exposed to the corrosive effects of technology. He gave the example of Inuits who had begun to use GPS and within years were completely dependent on them - no longer able to navigate by landscape and the stars as they had for generations. Will Nepal soon find itself dependent on outside forces and technologies, never to return to the "Shangri-la" ways of its past? Is this necessarily a bad thing?

While we can think about Nepal in this larger context, it is wise not to lose sight of the specific is