Do we need to be Academic?

QUESTION: My own belief is that the Buddha that you portrait in your book The New Buddhism is actually the Buddha that you yourself want to become rather than Siddharta Gautama, the historical Buddha. Of course, there is nothing inherently "wrong" about this. Your ideal is perfectly legitimate and I share it hundred per cent, but we need to be careful at least from an "academic" point of view.

DHARMAVIDYA: I am not substantially in disagreement. My book is not academic and I do say in it, I think, that it does not present a "balanced" academic assessment. It presents my intuitive sense of what Buddha and Buddhism is about. The Amida sangha is a movement within Buddhism. We have an agenda. If you "agree with it 100%" I'm glad and I am quite happy to let the academics go be academic. Whether the Buddha was a revolutionary is a matter of interpretation, of course, but it has palpable consequence. If you go to India today you can witness the Buddhist revolution in the Ambedkarite movement in which millions of untouchables have become Buddhist in an effort to overthrow the graded inequality system of Indian society. They could have become Christians, of course, but they did not see that as the most potent route. Their chosen revolutionary ideal is Buddha and his (their) recent contemporary prophet Dr. Ambedkar. Now this is controversial in Buddhist circles and there are plenty of non-revolutionary Buddhists who will argue for a different interpretation of Buddha just as there are any number of Christians who see Jesus as a pillar of the establishment. Academia has its own agendas and looks at Buddhism and Buddhist texts "from the outside" as it were, whereas we, as Buddhists, look at them as working tools in the enterprise of turning the Dharma Wheel