ABSTRACT
‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ asked the psalmist when the Israelites were exiled in Babylon (Psalm 137). At first appearance there may not seem to be any obvious problem of continuing to practise the religion of one’s choice in an alien environment. Yet when a religion migrates from one culture to another, quite radical changes often occur. Anyone who is at all familiar with Buddhism, for example, cannot fail to observe that when Buddhism moved to countries such as Tibet, China and Japan, it assumed a form that was radically different from the traditional Theravada Buddhism which had been practised in countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Thailand. Did the first Tibetan Buddhists fail to notice the plethora of deities, esoteric rituals and supernatural beings which were introduced into Buddhism’s world view? Have the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhists who emerged in Japan and spread their message worldwide failed to notice that their version of Buddhism appears to encourage the satisfaction of material desires rather than their elimination?
