BEER Ch. 4 The News from Afghanistan

[Dave Monroe]

statues of the Buddha

The Buddhas of Bamiwam were two 6th century statues of standing buddha
carved into the side of a cliff that were destroyed in 2001. Wikipedia


if the Buddha's in your way . . . it's OK to kill him?

A famous koan attributed to Zen Master Linji: "If you meet the Buddha,
kill him."

"If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!"

is also the title of a popular psychology book from the early 1970s,
written by a man with the Pynchonesque sounding name of Sheldon P.
Kopp.


Wahhabists

Wahhabism is an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam (though some
people dispute that a Wahhabi is a Sunni). It is a religious movement
among fundamentalist Islamic believers, with an aspiration to return
to the earliest fundamental Islamic sources of the Quran and Hadith,
with inspiration from the teachings of Medieval theologian Ibn
Taymiyyah and early jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal.



http://bleedingedge.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_4#Page_31
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l