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| Criticism of religion |
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Criticism of Buddhism has taken numerous different forms, including philosophical and rational criticisms, but also criticism of praxis, such as that its practitioners act in ways contrary to Buddhist principles or that those principles systemically marginalize women. There are many sources of criticism, both ancient and modern, stemming from other religions, the non-religious, and other Buddhists.
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See also: Karma § Free will and destiny |
Buddhist karma and karmic reincarnation are feared to potentially lead to fatalism and victim blaming. Paul Edwards says that karma does not provide a guide to action. Whitley Kaufman, in his recent book, cross-examines that there is a very tense relationship between karma and free will, and that if karma existed, then evil would not exist, because all victims of evil just get "deserved".[1]
Whitley Kaufman offers five criticisms of karma. He points out that people have never found reliable evidence for the existence of reincarnation, and therefore people have no way of knowing the specifics of the evils they have done in their past lives, and naturally they cannot atone for them, which brings the whole theory closer to the theory of vengeance. Additionally, Kaufman points out that karma leads to the problem of infinite regression, and that one cannot know how the earliest karma was created.[2]
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See also: Women in Buddhism |
Women are often depicted in traditional Buddhist texts as deceitful and lustful. The Buddha himself said in an early text[a] that a woman's body is "a vessel of impurity, full of stinking filth. It is like a rotten pit ... like a toilet, with nine holes pouring all sorts of filth."[3] Isaline Blew Horner and Diana Mary Paul are worried about the discrimination against almswomen and laywomen in Indian Buddhism.[4] Kawahashi Noriko observes that the contemporary Buddhist community in Japan is rife with two views, one that women are inherently incompetent and the other that women need to be dependent on men for their liberation; and that the Japanese Buddhist community has consistently ignored women themselves, as well as feminist critique.[5]
