thanks for the recommendation. I will look for that.
yes, it is what you writes. Are projections of contemporary notions to the ancient past. In a popular level this is understable, although this is reprehensible for scholar works. We cannot go 2.500 years ago thinking in pacifism, sexism, racism, ecologism, etc… These notions were absent because the human minds worked without these categories. For that same reason we cannot find equivalent words inside the Suttas or any other work of such antiquity. And this is an enough obviety, I believe
What we can find are appellations for this or that matter. We can find precursory things of what today we identify in systematized views and ideologies of our modern times. We find events or sentences to reject violence, to equate the women human condition, to deny the founament of racism, etc… However, contemporary words and notions like “pacifist”, “sexist”, “scientific”, “racist”, etc… all were non-existent because nobody thought in these terms.
Unfortunately, today we have tons of scholar papers of such style, drawing a portrait of ancient past which sometimes is closer to some Monty Python film. We are invited to identify if those ancient people were pacifist, sexist, ecologist or whatever. This is quite crazy at all. Although worse thing is an unavoidable ideological contamination from that cultural distortion, because our modern labels are also a political product of our times and managed in that way.
Nobody can expect going 2.500 years ago to see the Buddha tuned up for our 20-21th centuries according modern narratives and the cultural device. At those ancient times the Buddha equated women in transcendent terms, rejected race and caste like standards to consider human dignity, accepted ordination of homosexual people, etc. In fact we know it was too radical for those times. Shortly after, Buddhism disappeared from India with inner social confrontations because the new panorama opened by the new State Religion. However, this will never be no enough for any modern judge who is interested in modelate the present using the past. Although this is no something new in our times. Similar obsessions appeared in the last century with the spread of anarchism, nazism, socialism, etc… It depends of the place and the historical political moment.
Just to say, when somebody cannot appreciate what the Buddha (and others) said 2.500 years ago around these things, maybe there is need of some de-contamination process. Not to leave personal positions (which are free, of course) but to draw a picture of the past with enough asepsis.