Engaged Buddhist tweet of the day..it's a long one cos its too good to skim: “In the long history of Buddhism, the most prominent exegetes of the Dhamma have largely been monastic males who were most likely from the upper strata of their societies....

.Buddhist scholar Roger R. Jackson notes that, in pre-modern times, the major theorists and disseminators of the Buddhist Dhamma,…were “an elite within an elite, for they were among the very few people within their societies who were able to separate themselves from lay life ...

...to follow the monastic calling, and they were, unlike the majority of the population (and probably the majority of monastics) literate.”..

..In addition to being separated from the maj. of people & having the education and leisure to tackle the voluminous Buddhist literature, they were befriended by the political & economic elite in their societies because they were seen as “sources of spiritual power & legitimation

..This privileged group usually had been culturally conditioned to identify with the existing social orders and not to question them...

..As a result they took the existing social orders and gender roles for granted, focused on inner peace only, overemphasized isolated meditation and individualistic intellectual study and devalued social relationships.."

..Western colonialism in Asia unfortunately pushed Buddhism further down the path of social indifference and individual purification," Hsiao-Lan Hu, This Worldly Nibbana, (2011), 2-4.