I have once read, alas I forgot the reference (*), that amongst the first Westerners studying and translating Chinese Buddhist texts were quite a few lawyers. The reason for that interest is supposed to be a misunderstanding of the Chinese character 法 (Japanese pronunciation is “hou”), which usually translates “law”. The Western lawyers, versed in Roman Law, were probably hoping to discover another unknown ancient legal system.
Nowadays in Western Buddhism the Sanskrit Term “Dharma” is used to describe, for what in the Chinese writings the ambiguous character 法 was employed. I imagine the lawyers were confused, and they likely caused a certain confusion by their accidental contribution to introducing Buddhism in the West.
My experience with lawyers is: as soon as they get in the loop, things become incredibly cumbersome. Once a sufficiently easy and satisfying way to handle things is established, a lawyer can mess it all up. Legally correct, but very difficult to handle, inefficient and with loads of extra work on top.
Maybe you have heard that we got a new law in Europe which is very strictly regulating the handling of all data which can be related to a person, such as Name, Address, Email and so on. Even maintaining a simple list of subscribers to a blog like this, via a file of (self-registered) Email-Adresses stored somehow somewhere in the depth of the system, is likely against the new law. At least, as long as no difficult to handle, inefficient and with loads of extra work procedures are established.
I have simply no time and energy to learn about and implement such a procedure for this blog. Currently I count some 180+ subscribers, though I guess many, if not most of them, are bots and not a real person with a real interest to read here.
To my (maybe few) real readers I want to apologise: in order to avoid any (possibly expensive) conflict with the above mentioned law, I will erase all mail addresses from the database. In case you got a message about a new blog post every now and then, you won’t get any longer.
If you are really interested, please come here from time to time to see if there is something new …
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(*) if you happen to know the source, please let me know!