11.29.11

Article at Huffpost: Occupy Buddha: Reflections on Occupy Wall Street

Posted in General at 12:26 pm by nemo

Occupy Buddha: Reflections on Occupy Wall Street
Perhaps this should be ‘Occupy reactionary buddhism, or Tibetan buddhism…
I am glad for this article, agree or not. Read… It is good to point out that Buddha was one of the 1%. This ambiguity pervades Buddhism, even as it, at least originally, was a revolutionary movement in India, the reason perhaps for its traditionalist condemnation there. Buddhist revolution took over India for several centuries, but lost out finally to the neo-Brahmin reaction with its creepy distorted Hinduism that has corrupted the great legacy of Indian religion.
The history here is charmingly told in this book, often discussed here and at The Gurdjieff Con, which has most of the text scanned for the web:
The role of Bhagavad Gita in Indian history–Prem Nath Bazaz
Buddhism attempted to take over India and rationalize Hinduism. It’s failure has left such monstrosities as the law of caste intact. Bazaz’s account needs some further scholarly work, and I often wonder why this type of analysis never finds any venue in the sterile world of conservatized New Age Buddhism, with its sweet smiling Dalai Lama fronting for a reactionary fascist occultism (now mostly defunct).
We have to wonder, not so much that Buddha was from the 1% (after enlightenment that was no longer the case!!), but why Buddhism conservatized in its last phase into an occult conspiracy against modernism, democracy, and spiritual autonomy.
We need a new Buddhist Reformation, yielding a post-Buddhism, and even a movement that can recover Buddhism’s revolutionary fire. OWS!

Many of my Buddhist friends are sympathetic to this movement, and want to help. Many of them, like me, were themselves youthful demonstrators once, long ago when the issues were civil rights and the Vietnam war. Just as now, that awakening in the 1960s was to perennial truths to which we had up to then been oblivious. “Black people in the South can’t vote! They are oppressed!” Yes, as they had been forever. “This war is unjust. It’s horrible! The innocent die!”–another perennial truth. In those days it was television, rather than the internet, that broadcast these truths into everyone’s living rooms and woke us up.

I was once one of those youthful anti-war protestors, linking hands and facing down riot police armed with batons and guns. We self-righteously referred to the police in those days as “pigs,” ignoring the unwiseness of hurling such insults at a phalanx of heavily armed men. We too were beaten, bloodied, and in a few cases killed. When I look back through the lens of my own youth at today’s protestors and their pithy slogans (“We are the 99%”) I see myself.

However, we Buddhists all need to remember that Gautama was in his time a one-percenter or worse–he was, after all, a prince. He had his own awakening from unknowing (or so the accounts of his life tell) when he walked out of the palace as though for the first time and saw what was really happening — “People are old and poor! People are sick! They die! Look, a monk!” This is an archetypal moment (referred to in Buddhist literature as the “four sightings”); I think it happens in some fashion for each generation–an onrush of awakening that keeps societies from sinking totally into the quicksand of their own corruption.

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