"Artificial Buddhist Personality"
Over during Open Buddha, Al recounts this utilitarian story:
A crony of mine, declared Robert, used to own an enigmatic bookstore in Seattle. Much of his batch as well as customers were Buddhists, as opposed to a pagans which we routinely ran with. It was a single of a places where we began to confront Buddhist books as well as ideas though. Robert used to discuss which a single of a problems with Buddhists, in his experience, was ABP, or Artificial Buddhist Personality. This is a persona which so many Buddhists appear to pretence where they take up a trappings, a mental ones as most as any physical ones like statues or beads, of what they think a Buddhist should be as well as they wear them like a new skin. They arent indispensably compassionate, for example, though they know they should be so they go by a motions. The problem here is, of course, which realization is not a persona. It is not something which we take on or pretence as mask or role. It is a waking up from masks as well as roles. The compassion as well as other attributes of awakening have been a natural result, as voiced in a world, of this awakening.
There is an insidiousness to this "ABP" Al's crony pointed to. It's very easy to get in to a robe of behaving a sure approach we hold is better, as well as avoid looking during a motivations at a back of it. we think there is a little worth in a "faking it until we have it approach," for example, though it's additionally a case which as well most of it leads we divided from saying what's actually arising. You do something kind for another, though we miss a rancour or need to be favourite at a back of a surface. Or we refrain from expressing anger during your co-worker, though we destroy to express a need for support or honesty from a same co-worker. There's so most energy put in to trying to "do a right thing" which we don't have sufficient to see what's actually present.
When ! we think about it, there is a corresponding version of ABP in all eremite as well as spiritual traditions. And this tends to be a single of a things physical humanists, atheists, as well as other folks point to when vocalization about how delusional these traditions are. The approach we see it, they're totally right which these inflated personas, from which those inhabiting them contrition as well as guilt everybody else around them, have been positively delusional.
Another challenge we have gifted with ABP is which when we put on a "good front," people begin to design which from we all a time. Acting like a saint reinforces a hackneyed stereotypes about Buddhists being regularly kind, peaceful, as well as amatory individuals. Not usually is it suffocating for us practitioners to try as well as defend such ridiculous standards, though it creates it which most more formidable for others to gain any discernment in to what Buddhism is all about. Not which a little ubiquitous discernment in to Buddhism by others is all which important. But it's easier, from my experience, to be yourself when there aren't expectations of a little form of perfection inside as well as all around.
