Criticism
In the western understanding, dharma transmission stands solely for recognition of authentic insight, whereas in the Japanese monastery system dharma transmission is a formal notification that someone is fully qualified to take a leading role in this system. In the USA and Europe dharma transmission is linked to the unofficial title roshi, older teacher. In the Western world roshis have been given an archetypal status as wise old man, someone who has realized an infallible insight into the true self, and a perfect personality. In daily life this appears to be an idealized view, given the repeated cases of abuse of power, and financial and sexual misbehaviour.
Read more about this topic: Dharma Transmission
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)