[Buddha-l] Marx and Buddhism

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Dan Lusthaus wrote,

> Marx's so called "materialism" (dialectical materialism) is not really 
> as
> materialist as is often thought, and many contemporary thinkers now 
> concede
> he never overcame Hegel's idealism, as he viewed it, but repeated it 
> in a
> modified form. Instead of nirvana, he offered a this-worldly utopia.

I read Marx in a graduate program in the history of religions, and so 
he seemed to me to owe less to Hegel than to the his own renounced 
Judaism. His "this-worldly utopia," as Dan rightly labeled it, sounded 
like nothing so much as the inevitable triumph of a righteous Israel. I 
had to wonder if he--unconsciously, of course--thought of himself as a 
kind of massiach. No doubt others have done serious work on this topic 
and I've just never read it, but it was crashingly obvious. (Other 
seminal figures in the social sciences also created their own 
secularized religions which they never acknowledged as such. Freud, 
ironically, not the least.)

Mandatory Buddhist content:
I think Dan is right to assert that Marx would have seen Buddhism (the 
religion) as an opiate of the masses, yet he would also have seen its 
roots in "the expression of real suffering and a protest against real 
suffering." The Buddha was onto something and, incomparably more than 
any other religion, Buddhism still addresses real suffering and 
protests its causes. This is why Buddhism, though not inevitably 
Marxist, opposes the central engine of capitalism.

Read Marx's words once more, thinking of Buddhism:

> /Religious/ suffering is, at one and the same time, the /expression/ 
> of real suffering and a /protest/ against real suffering. Religion is 
> the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, 
> and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the /opium/ of the people.
>
> The abolition of religion as the /illusory/ happiness of the people is 
> the demand for their /real/ happiness. To call on them to give up 
> their illusions about their condition is to call on them to /give up a 
> condition that requires illusions/. The criticism of religion is, 
> therefore, /in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears/ of which 
> religion is the /halo/.
>
> From "Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s 
> Philosophy of Right"
> see 
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

Remarkable, isn't it, how the Buddha seems to answer Marx's call for 
the abolition of religion? (I don't know what Marx wrote about 
Hinduism, but it can't have been good.)

Franz Metcalf
Little Brother Howitzer of Courteous Debate