Reginald Ray
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Reginald "Reggie" Ray is a leading Buddhist academic. Since 1974 he has been chair of the Religious Studies Department at the Naropa University. Ray is a disciple of Chögyam Trungpa.
According to Ray he and his wife Lee are considered by the Karmapa to be the mother and father of Western Buddhism - a prediction the Karmapa made to Ray in 1973 in India after Ray and his wife attended a black crown ceremony. He tells the story in a winter 05/06 interview in Elephant magazine, conducted by Waylon H. Lewis.
His scholarly work includes:
- Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, Oxford University Press
- Indestructible Truth, which describes the exoteric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.
- Secret of the Vajra World explores the esoteric and tantric aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on the Vajrayana.
Buddhist Saints in India
Buddhist Saints in India is a very significant contribution to understanding the dynamics of Buddhist groups. The book looks at paradigms of sainthood in the Buddhist tradition, and Buddhist practice and practitioners in Buddhist India. Ray uses the hagiography of the Buddha to establish a basic paradigm of sainthood. A pattern is established which includes more than thirty themes over the lifetime of the Buddha. However, one theme that stands out is his "forest renunciant" character - the paradigmatic Buddhist saint is not typically a monk living in a monastery (what Ray calls a "settled monastic"), but an ascetic living a solitary existence in some out-of-the-way place, practicing meditation. He then compares various figures (Mahakasyapa, Upagupta, Sariputra, and Devadatta for instance) with this paradigm and shows that to a large extent they do conform to the basic model. At the points where they differ, Reginald sees a monastic bias in the telling of the story.
This is established by comparing various early scriptures including the Pali Canon and what has survived of the Dharmagupta, Sarvastivadin, and Mahasamghaka canons. What emerges, Ray argues, is a picture in which the original ideal was the forest renunciant, but with the rise of settled monasticism the renunciants began to be occluded in Buddhist texts which were preserved by the settled monastics. The practice of dhyana (meditation), and therefore the realisation of nirvana, was sidelined in favour of ethical observance and scriptural study. Settled monastics provided a focus for the lay community who relied on the merit gained by supporting monks to bring about a fortunate rebirth in the next life. As such, the ethical conduct of the settled monastics is of primary importance since the merit gained is proportional to the purity of the monks. Ray even suggests that the reputation of Devadatta as an evil person, a fallen saint in the Pali Canon, may be the demonisation of a forest renunciant by a group of settled monastics.
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