Today's Salon.com article: "Real Gone Guy" about the book "Buddha" by Karen Armstrong

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/04/18/armstrong/index.html

QUOTE: …Buddhism is at heart a do-it-yourself religion, and one that was founded by a confirmed skeptic. "He always refused to take anything on trust," Armstrong writes of her subject, "and later, when he had his own sangha [order], he insistently warned his disciples not to take anything at all on hearsay." END QUOTE

MY COMMENTS: So Buddha himself is telling humanity, including Scientologists, not to accept anything as truth just because somebody else said it. Even his own teachings were to be applied with skepticism. He also opposed the cult of personality that many religions embraced, and said stories of his own life and personality were irrelevant to seekers of truth.

Buddha freely admitted his own earlier experiences of enlightenment were always disappointingly temporary. The demands of ordinary life would return, and the bliss would disappear. Rather than pretending he had a lock on eternal bliss, he honestly probed and questioned his own ideas on how to escape from the wheel of birth, death, and re-birth. He presented his philosophy with no copyrights, and no dark warnings about "suppressive persons."

Buddha would have ripped apart the idea that scented laundry soap was bad because "Ron said so" or that asbestos (and smoking!) were never criticzed by Ron and therefore must be safe. Scientology copied some of the words and ideas of Buddhism, like the reincarnation theme and the sad depravity of ordinary life, but used those ideas to glorify and enrich L. Ron. This is so opposite to Buddha's real teachings that one must assume Ron just read his own narcissism into Buddha's life, ignoring the main message. I won't repeat my earlier posts proving that Buddha never said he would reincarnate as a red-haired guy from the West, but I will say that any mystical links to ancient Buddhism in Scientology came from Ron hacking and dumbing down paragraphs from "Our Oriental Heritage" by Will Durant.

A good and interesting post, Don Carlo.

However I politely disagree with your point as follows: "Scientology copied some of the words and ideas of Buddhism, like the reincarnation theme..."

I'm not sure what Buddhism believes on this subject, but Scientology's belief in past lives and passage of the soul (thetan) from one body to another was not, in my opinion, copied from Buddhism. Actually what happened was that people having Book One auditing spontaneously started recalling engrams and incidents which were plainly not from their present life. This occurred shortly after DMSMH was published. At the time, there was no Church of Scientology (pre-1954), so there was no connection to Buddhism until Ron did further research into the area.
I agree with most of your post, particularly the idea that Scientology is opposite to most of Buddha's teachings.

It was interesting that the Taliban, a militant Islamic group in Afghanistan, recently blew up two giant statues of Buddha in that country. Everyone in the West said how terrible it was, but one person who would have been very glad to see the back of the statues was, you've guessed it, Buddha himself!

Big Bill Robinson

Thanks, Big Bill.
Reincarnation was popularized by David-Neel's books about Tibet in the 1930's.

It's not surprising that if auditors "lead" one back to the moment of conception, auditees would just keep going backward, "remembering" previous lives. The sequence could have gone like this:

POSSIBLE TIMELINE FOR ELRON'S REINCARNATION SQUIRRELING

1. David-Neel writes popular books about Tibetan Mysticism:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/j/origins6.html
START OF DAVID-NEEL QUOTE: David-Neel's first book, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, was published in the U.S. in 1932. This was followed by Initiations and Initiates in Tibet, first published in French in 1931, and Buddhism - its doctrines and methods, first published in English in 1939.
SUMMARY: Scientology holds much in common with popular books about Tibetan mysticism published in the 1930s by Alexandra David-Neel. The following ideas are held in common:
Escape from the "cycle of birth and death"
The definition of the spirit
"Exteriorization" or "astral travel"
Reincarnation
The "between-lives area" or "bardo"
"Implanting" in the bardo
That the individual is actually a "composite being"
Visualization techniques
Belief in telepathy
The use of techniques to bring about telepathic control of others
The use of the triangle as a symbol
The "process" of "clearing"
The capacity of the spirit to emit energy beams
The notion that reality is a halluciantion held in common
"Serenity" as the highest human state
The assertion that belief is self-created
That "being" is senior to "doing"
The distinction between "being" and "becoming"
Ideas about "absolute" and "relative" truth
The recollection of experiences in former lives
The notion of surrounding oneself with like-minded individuals
The significance of the interplay between the static and the kinetic
"Postulates" or "wishes"
That neither good nor evil exist
The "overt-motivator sequence" - a simplified version of the "karma-vipaka" concept of Buddhism.
IDEAS COMMON TO DAVID-NEEL AND HUBBARD:
As with Scientology, the Tibetans believe that they can escape the "wheel of rebirth", and the outcome of their previous actions (karma-vipaka, called the "overt-motivator sequence" in Scientology), by applying a set of techniques ("he may cause himself to be reborn in the most agreeable conditions possible" (66)). To quote from Hubbard "Not the least of the qualities of O.T. is personal and knowing immortality and freedom from the cycle of birth and death" (Auditor 19). The "cycle of birth and death" is a Buddhist concept, more usually expressed as the "cycle of death and rebirth" or the "wheel of suffering". END OF DAVID-NEEL QUOTE

2. Dianetics came out in 1950, featuring many of David-Neel's findings. Reincarnation, however, is not addressed. The book is dedicated to Will Durant. The Science of Survival, featuing reincarnation, is published in 1951.
http://www.innernet.net/joecisar/e520000.htm

3. Scientology needed dogma about what happens after death, and what is the meaning of life, but Elron couldn't quote David-Neel without being too obviously imitative.

4. 1951: Tax and financial problems meant L. Ron had to create a new organization and name, preferably with a religious framework.

5. Our Oriental Heritage was waiting on the bookshelf. In this easy-to-read, Westernized summary, Will Durant (remember L. Ron dedicated Dianetics to Durant) depicted Buddha as a brilliant insightful man with many worthy, impressive-sounding but elusive ideas, including reincarnation. It was written in 1939 and reprinted in 1954, becoming a best-seller and Book-of-the-Month as early as 1959 - see website http://www.samizdat.com/isyn/durant.html

8. Hubbard gobbled up the chapters on the Life of Buddha, did some auditing on himself to "test" whether he was an avatar of Buddha, and squirrelled Buddha's teachings about the soul detaching from a degraded reality.

9. 1952: L. Ron creates "Scientology" with e-meters, reincarnation, and (especially) control over auditing income.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shel ... meline.htm
and
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/bfm/bfm12.htm page 202

10. L. Ron sets up Scientology as a religion in late 1952 and early 1953
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/bfm/bfm12.htm page 220
Conveniently, he can point to Buddhism and reincarnation as one of the "religious" pieces of Scientology.

My personal belief is that memories of the moment of conception and previous lives are just fantasies, encouraged by the auditor. Others may treasure them as a spiritual experience. In any event, Buddha himself did not think reincarnation was proof of being special and cool. He thought of it as a dreary reality to be escaped. The idea that his 20th century reincarnation would be a wife-beating money-grubbing con artist is pathetically unlikely.

You are right that Buddha himself would be appalled that for centuries various people have worshipped him.

Scientologists are so impressed with all the hints and implications that Saint Ron was Buddha in one of his many famous past lives. The thing is none of them ever seems to know the slightest thing about Buddhism and never show any interest in finding out about Buddhism either. Reading about it in ADVANCE magazine doesn't really count.

If Ron was Buddha in a past life; does that mean Buddha in a past life was from a galaxy far, far away and long, long ago fighting the evil Xenu in a real cool space-ship?

Here is some banality clipped from the official Scientoxic Site:

"SCIENTOLOGY ETHICS AND JUDICIAL MATTERS

Because it has long been acknowledged that spiritual progress and proper conduct are inextricably linked, all great religious philosophies contain some form of ethical, moral and/or judicial system. Most obviously, one finds the Ten Commandments aimed at outlawing those transgressions deemed most offensive to God and most injurious to the Jewish people. Similarly, the Buddhists developed the concept of Right Livelihood, while Christian notions of sin fill a thousand pages or more. But merely setting down rules has never appreciably led to improvement, and it was not until L. Ron Hubbard defined and codified the subject that there was any workable technology of ethics and justice for increased happiness, prosperity and survival. "

So, all you Jews, Christians, and Buddhists, according to Scientoxicity, your thousands of years of survival amounts to nothing more than words. How'd you ever make it to modern times? Good thing that Ron the Psychotic came along with something WORKABLE, huh?

NOT!

Better question: how did thousands of years of progress result in a) a creep like L Ron, and b) people able to blindly accept his lies?

Sorry. Like the "Thousand Year Reich" of the first half of the 20th Century, Scientology is on the way out, a quaint footnote to 5 decades of excesses of many kinds, not the least but surely one of the most ignoble.

More pathetic generality for the analytically challenged (yes, I was once one of them), from the official Scientoxic site:

"When considering the ethics and justice of Scientology, there is another, equally relevant factor that must be taken into account: to a Scientologist, it is not enough to care only for one’s own survival, to better his personal spiritual existence through Scientology, while leaving his fellows to their own devices. As Scientologists advance in their religion, they become increasingly aware of their environment and those around them, and their responsibility for the community and the world in general. The ethical and judicial systems of Scientology are therefore appropriately far more than a matter of personal concern; they are an integral part of the broader view of bettering conditions across all dynamics, of helping make a world free of the degradation, violence and suffering so common in modern culture."

So, the violence of the RPF, the hell sent to victims like Lisa, the vicious acts of Kobrin, Moxon, Rinder, Rathbun, Bashaw, Ofman, Miscavige, and all the rest of the rat pack, these are the natural outgrowth of the Scientologist's concern for his fellow man?

NOT!

"By their fruits you shall know them." "Watch what they do, not what they tell you." "A man is only as good as his word." "The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree." "Their reputation precedes them." ....all sayings of long duration, to let you know when someone is untrustworthy and you're being conned. Funny how they cut to the heart of the matter and expose Elron, $cientology, co$ and o$a for what they are.

Hans I think Scientology will not just be a quaint footnote to history. It will be studied as a textbook case in quasi-religious totalitarian mind control, and how it rots from within. It may also become famous for the first big victory of the Internet over a racketeering criminal cabal.

to hans- who are ofman and bashaw?

From Slate article Am I the Buddha? at http://www.slate.com/id/2156302/

So Hubbard isn't the "reincarnation" of Buddha. Since people still remember the previous Buddha, Hubbard doesn't qualify under the Theravada sect of Buddhism. And, under the Mahayana sect, Hubbard would have to start as a "new" Buddha and earn his way up; no "fast-track" for being reincarnated. The 32 characteristics include long earlobes, which Hubbard lacked. Since humans typically have 32 teeth, and Hubbard probably lost a few teeth from bad habits, I can't believe he'd have 40 teeth. So even by technical points Hubbard loses his claim to be Maitreya, the reincarnation of Buddha.

Were they recalling actual incidents not from their present life - or were they imagining incidents in response to the auditor's prompts?

My take: Most of us are trained from infancy to give an answer when asked a question - especially when asked by someone in authority - which is the auditor's position in the auditing session. The auditor probes the subconscious mind of the auditee (who is in light trance state) by asking a series of questions ... the auditee draws on his life experience to answer ... at some point, his imagination jumps in and provides "incidents" and "engrams" from "past lives." This continues until the auditor tells the auditee that his "needle is floating." It's about providing answers to the auditor's questions until the auditor ends the session by telling you that there's F/N.