Questioner 2: …I would like to make a somewhat academic comment. When I studied Pāli Literature some years back, I was astounded to find that the early editors had meticulously expunged the word yoga from their entire corpus scriptus. This particularly awed me in light of the fact that the far older Vedic-Sanskrit heritage attributes no less than seventeen meanings to the single word "yoga." It is almost as if the Pāli editors had carried out the perfect "yoga-ectomy."

Thank you. I also found this very suspicious. You are speaking of the oldest surviving Buddhist writings, the Pāli Canon, written in the ancient Pāli language. The collection is massive and claims to be the Buddha's true utterings or Buddha vacana. I agree with you. It looks to me as if the Pāli editors embarked upon a painstaking hunt for "yoga," and every time that niggling little four-letter word popped up, … delete, delete, delete.

Exactly. But why should they want to delete it?

It is very revealing that in the Pāli Literature, yoga often appears in its negative form, ayoga. Just as in English, the Pāli prefix a- functions to negate the noun it precedes. Ayoga therefore clearly indicates "the absence of a meditative quality." All the same, it must be said that yoga probably had a very different meaning in the days of the Buddha. Yet, in modern terms it can honestly be stated that the Buddha ate, slept and breathed yoga. His ascetic training began with yoga. He studied years with yoga masters. He advocated yoga to all his disciples. But in the early Buddhist scriptures the practices of yoga are always given a negative spin. This appears in large to be the doing of Sinhalese Buddhism. 

Why would they do that?

The reasons were political, but the results pathological. I take both ancient and contemporary Sinhalese as prime illustrations of this truly global sociopathology. In other words, the disease can be traced back at least to the Hindu-phobic idée-fixe of ancient Sinhalese rulers. And if not always directly politically driven, then developed out of fear and in want to engineer and maintain at a heightened pitch, a position of conflicting theological, cultural, ethnic and political divergence between themselves and their rival non-Sinhalese speaking monarchs across the narrow Palk Strait in India. In other words, I trace the "disease" of contemporary Buddhism, particularly prevalent among the dubious "Theravāda" designation, to a Hindu-phobic idée-fixe, which if not altogether manufactured by the ancient Sinhalese, well, they certainly embody it today.

Could you point to any particular doctrinal mechanism that is key the process you allege?

By taking the core-Buddhist concept of anātman (Pāli annata) and bending it out of all sane recognition through its rearticulation in ways and idioms deemed incompatible with any sort of theistic, or simply non-Buddhist manners of thought, the so-Buddhists have essentially cursed themselves to be unendingly hung up on this after all exceedingly obvious pan-Indian doctrine of 'non-entity.'

But why? I still don't get it.

I think I've said enough. You are trusting too much in what I say. You should investigate these problems yourself. The answers are out there.

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Questioner 3: I notice you tend to avoid the term Theravāda Buddhism and replace it instead with Pāli, Sinhalese or Sri Lankan Buddhism?