[Buddha-l] Buddhism and the "status quo"

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 09:11, curt wrote:

> The attitude of Buddhism toward wars and militarism has historically
> been a seamless extension of Buddhism's overall approach to human
> society as a whole. 

That's right. I am fascinated by the ambivalence shown toward government of 
any kind in Buddhist literature. The attitude seems to be that government 
becomes necessary when human society has fallen into such a degenerate state 
that 1) government can barely overcome the moral degradation of the 
citizenry, and 2) government itself is done by those who are as morally 
degenerate as the citizenry. It seems very much a version of the old "who 
will guard the guardians" problem from Greek philosophy,

> Buddhism has never promoted radical, much less 
> revolutionary, changes in society (with one important exception that
> I'll get to in a moment). 

I don't think that's true. It seems to me that a number of people in Western 
Buddhism have been pretty radical. In fact, it's almost axiomatic that a 
Western Buddhist will have a leftist orientation. (I imagine more than a few 
of us cheered wildly as we listened to the speeches by Ahmadinejad and Chavez 
in the UN. We love it when people speak truth to power.) What is one to make 
of that? That Western Buddhists aren't Buddhist after all? That Western 
Buddhists are somehow unique in the history of Buddhism for their penchant 
for reinventing Buddhism to suit their own psychological needs? 

On another list, Dan Lusthaus speaks of how many Westerners are drawn to 
Buddhism because of a "carefully crafted" image of Buddhism as non-violent. I 
think that's an example of bovine feces. It's not that crafty Buddhists made 
up an image of Buddhism to draw gullible Westerners in. Rather, I think, it's 
that Westerners who were sick of wars turned to a contemplative tradition and 
thought of that tradition as they wished to think about it. That was 
certainly true of a lot of Buddhists I knew back in the 1960s and 1970s. Many 
of us were pacifists and wanted our Buddhism to be pacifistic, so we made it 
that way. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there is a name for any tradition 
that isn't constantly reinventing itself to meet new conditions; extinct.

> And being "well-disposed toward Buddhism" generally means what it meant
> to good old Emperor Wu: material support for Temples and monastic
> communities. 

Let's not forget the systematic persecution of Nestorian Christians. Being the 
perverse son-of-an-atheist that I am, I love to tell my classes about the 
Buddhist persecution of Christians. Invariably, some student comes up after 
class and says "I think you made a mistake in today's lecture, sir. You said 
the Buddhists persecuted Christians. But surely it was the Christians who 
persecuted the Buddhists. Then I tell them about Amnesty International's 
reports on how Buddhists in Myanmar have been persecuting Muslims. When 
students learn that, they need to be taken to the hospital.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes