Buddhism: Life’s Great Mysteries Solved...by the Exploiting Classes

Greetings RCP,

Recently, particularly with comrade Sunsara Taylor’s speaking tour, I have seen the party—and only the party, with the goal of all-the-way liberation that is its calling card—raise and grapple with one of the greatest chains shackling humanity to this system and all its horrors: religion. In this world where human rights are ripped away in the name of preserving “holy” matrimony and the fascists that promote this outrage are rewarded by speaking at the inauguration of the holder of the highest office in the land, I am very inspired by your work. The Christian “faith-based initiative” is monstrous repression that must be confronted. But any religion is a poison that spreads even to the minds of those living “alternative” lifestyles. I know this because I was one such person.

Up until very recently, I was a devout Buddhist layperson with prospects of becoming a monk. Every day at four a.m. I would rise with the rest of the small temple, (a house with a garage that we led religious services in and used as a meditation hall) wash up, put on my ceremonial clothes, and report to the garage for prostrations to Buddha and morning meditation. It would last two hours and conclude with a six o’clock bell, at which point I would either go to school or work, or if I had nothing scheduled, report to the basement for twelve hours of manual labor; cooking, cleaning, sewing, carpentry—anything you can think of. After my return or the work period was over, it was time for two more hours of meditating. The day would conclude with closing chanting at nine. On special days known as yangmaengchungjin (specifically, I was in the Jogye Order of Korean Zen Buddhism) the meditation would be lengthened to ten, maybe even fifteen hours if the Peng Jong Sunim (the Zen Master, the highest authority of the temple) was feeling virile. On those days, no one was allowed to leave the temple, and absolute silence was maintained. Breaking the silence or leaving was punishable by a beating with a stick of bamboo taken sixteen times to the back. So was falling asleep in the meditation hall. This practice is commonplace in Buddhism.

I came to Buddhism because I was becoming increasingly disconcerted with the blind devotion and static dogmatism of Christianity. Buddhism asserted that all things in the universe were originally Buddha, the “One True Nature” that was perfection and encompassed all of our highest human ideals. Because oneself was a part of the universe, through meditation and hard work, one had only to discover this “True Nature” that was the real them, and then they would be Buddhas, which literally means “enlightened ones” that are free from the incessant causes of human suffering. What this said to me was that there was a religion that had answers that were verifiable—if I came to this enlightenment of which they spoke through hard work and meditation, Buddhism was right!

But there was an ugly side to the Buddhist ideology that was clear to those reading in-between the lines. That was why I was told not to read once I became more deeply committed to the Dharma, as it is called. In fact, I was told not to get “too involved with the human world and its affairs,” especially not political affairs because they were so apt at “getting people upset” and “creating opposing activity”—whatever that meant.

Why all the secrecy? Well, Buddhism, like any other religion, is a faith founded on the bodies of the masses of people it backs up the ruling classes in exploiting and oppressing, as well as the carcasses of those who refused the faith. China, Japan and Korea have all had historical periods in which Buddhism was the state religion and non-adherents were persecuted or worse. From the brutal feudal system from which no one was safe presided over by the 14th Dalai Lama and his predecessors to the many people—including Buddhist monks—murdered by Burmese caravans of death serving a military junta that promoted Buddhism to the people, this can be seen in the histories of numerous Southeast Asian countries.

And along with that, Buddhism ideologically backs up the rule of exploiting classes. The now widely-publicized concepts of karma—the rule of “reaping what you sow”—and reincarnation hold a deadly reality for the oppressed majority that has become a widely accepted notion of social hierarchy in Asia: those born in poverty, destitution, or other conditions of exploitation and oppression by the system are there because they deserve to be; they accumulated bad karma in their previous life, which resulted in rebirth as a peasant, commoner, proletarian etc. Another major tenet of Buddhism that serves to reinforce all this is the Buddhist belief that perception and reality are one. “All that we are is made up of our thoughts,” as Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha called the Bon-sa (“Founder/Father” in Korea) said in the Dhammapala, and because of that, even if we are oppressed and humiliated by the system, to perceive of it as not being such is to make it not so—Tibetan peasants, however, were probably hard-pressed to perceive food being there when they couldn’t kill their oxen due to Buddhist laws prohibiting the slaughter of animals and thus starved to death—whether they thought they would or not.

My first glimpse beyond this convoluted thinking was given to me by Avakian’s [book] Away with All Gods!, in which the Chairman refuted apriorism—reality conforming to one’s perception—and asserted the objectivity of the material world and its independence from individual will. As these things became more and more apparent to me, I eventually left the temple. The people there are now told to ignore me if they and I should come into contact—I am no longer human because I stopped being a Buddhist.

As we enter into a future where the line between church and state is increasingly blurred, we have a responsibility to do what we’ve been doing—TAKING THIS ON, and refusing complicity in the face of this silent juggernaut of fundamentalism. And this challenge is one that must be brought even to those seeking alternatives to Christianity. The alternative is revolution—getting up and getting free. The only answers Buddhism provides are those of the exploiting classes.

With Solidarity and Rebel Love...

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