Marx and Buddhism
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In my time I have encountered a number of adherents of Buddhism who were socialists. In my view Buddhism is something we can cherry-pick positives out of and ignore the many of the unwelcomed realities.
Perhaps someone can clarify this though. I always thought it was Tussy (Eleanor) who got her dad to fill a questionnaire. The article implies it was his cousin, Antoinette Philips.
The fact that the author thinks Margate is in Holland leads me to question the level of research he has actually carried out!
It’s a bit like the poem about Scotland that Boris has got himself in trouble with, which talks about refortifying Hadrian’s Wall (which is entirely in England, by the way). It is a bit worrying that a former foreign secretary hasn’t got the basic geographical facts right about the country he lives in.
There so many different types of Buddhism.
I sort of dipped into a while ago.
Not all them are the cranky type like the re incarnation ones and the more familiar ‘Tibetan’ Buddhism for example.
Some of them are quite sensible and insist there is or are no metaphysical or supernatural forces.
And quote Buddha himself on it.
A lot of it can look quite ‘dialectical’ with loads interacting effects and affects and looks at the universe as an interactive whole.
And stuff like butterflies and hurricane type thing with as with one of chomskys friend about radical change not being about special individuals but a composite of many people doing little apparently insignificant things etc.
There is a lot of psychoanalytical stuff in it and the ‘Marxist’ Fromm got very interested in them or the Zen school anyway.
And it seems to be now entering into mainstream clinical psychoanalytical practice.
It sort of arrived in Western Europe as something for study really late as in late 19<sup>th</sup> century.
Thus nothing from Karl or Fred on it.
There is this that I have filed away.
Not read it in years must have saved for some reason.
I think I spent some time on it on the old Forum years ago.
http://www.vgweb.org/bsq/marxbud.htm
Just briefly skimmed thro it now and remember.
There is Buddhism and Marxist/ Hegelian dialectics in there.
I went from Karen Horney to Fromm to Buddhism and then thought this looks a little bit like dialectics.
Then found that link which agreed a bit with me?
Hence I ‘liked’ it a bit?
In fact, the Indian emperor Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries to Greece. King Milinda, known well to Buddhists, was Menander, king of the Greek-Indian state bordering India. Buddha stone heads have been found in Greece, grafted on to statues of Apollo, and vice versa. Apollonius, the Greek/Roman “pagan” version of Jesus, but who was, unlike Jesus, real, visited India.
When Buddhists say they reject materialism, they are not au fait with western philosophy. What they actually reject is reductionism.
Reincarnation is not part of Buddhist philosophy, but of the religion, which was the only way of appealing to princes and commoners across Asia if original Buddhism was not to fade into oblivion. Humans desperately cling to perpetuity of self, and a philosophy which denies self is even now hardly one the majority could embrace.
It was the philosopher Nagarjuna, principal of Nalanda University in the 3rd century (?) who further elaborated Buddhism as a philosophy, perfectly consistent with materialism. The turn of the 20th century gave us Lafcadio Hearn, whose Buddhist essays will familiarise you with this real Buddhism. See my article in http://www.sapiencia.eu , “Las Doas vertats”, the Two Truths.
All that can be said is that it was the absence of an ethical norm even remotely resembling the Buddha’s vinaya and sîla which was responsible for the transformation of Marxism from the humane, rationalistic and liberating system which Marx sought to create, and the dreary materialistic and authoritarian system it ultimately became in those countries where it was adopted as the official ideology in the twentieth century.
Dave, The conclusion is nonsense though.
Primitive Christianism is the only religion with certain advance social and humanist principles, and it was a working class movement of the poor peoples of Rome and it was an anti-slavery movement
You should read Joachim Kahl, THE MISERY OF CHRISTIANITY.
Protestantism pretended it was re-establishing some early Christianity which had been lost.
After Gentile Christianity spurned Jewish, there was no uniform Christianity. They were fighting from the go.
This is a very good description of the early Christians
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/index.htm Fed Engels on the History of the Early Christians
Protestantism came from Catholicism which is the negation of early Christians, and it served as the ideological vehicle of capitalism.
I think Max Weber has made a much better description of Protestantism. The only one who has tried to bring the old principles of Primitive Christianity is the Liberation Theology
https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2013/SOC571E/um/_Routledge_Classics___Max_Weber-The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism__Routledge_Classics_-Routledge__2001_.pdf. Max Weber and the Ethic of Protestantism and capitalism
The Second Vatican tried to bring back some of the principles of the primitive Christians but they were eliminated by the reactionaries popes and cardinals.
I have met more advanced catholic priests than protestants pastors, many have been part of the working class movement, and they have been taken to jail and they have been killed by taking sides with the cause of the working class
Christianity did not come from Judaism, it came from an old religion from Egypt which emerged in Rome, there is a good book named: “Jesus 3000 years bef0re Christ”, it should have been called Jesusism instead and there is not the relationship between the New Testament and the primitive Christians.
The book that you mention sound like Miguel de Unamuno which is known as The agony of Christianity
We did early Christian communism pre 250AD ish on this forum not long ago and had an author of a book on the subject who collected a load of material or quotes on the subject covering that period.
Even an anti Christian pagan author from circa 180AD said they were communists ; as a criticism.
One of the earliest splits from present day orthodoxy was Marcionism 100-200AD which was a major current perhaps even the dominant one it the east.
We probably know more about them than we know about what became the orthodox position as much of the early surviving written material spent more time criticising the Marcion position than putting their own.
Marcionist rejected the old testament as a load evil shit and the ‘God’ in it was war criminal who broke his own commandments, and took the view that Satan ruled the world rather than Jesus’s dad.
That is a long way from the protestant notions of ‘providence’.
I so happen to think and share the idea with some that there is some Buddhism and Greek cynicism in early Christianity.
Christianity sprang from Judaism.
Orthodox Christianity is that of Athanasius, whose credo emerged victorious. Its beliefs have not changed re: the Greek Churches, and are well known.
It was some time, though, before even the Orthodox Fathers accepted John’s Gospel.
What you reveal of the Marcionites is what the Cathars later believed: two Gods, one good one evil, the OT one the evil God.
Cathar beliefs remained as the Church of Bosnia, the state church of that land which survived in peace until the Turkish conquest.I am very familiar with the Cathars eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
Which had similarities with Marcionism.
As these things go the theology of stuff fragmented into various related strands.
As with the Cathars some of the basic ideas continued.
By the time of anti-Cathar holocaust; the established Christian church or organised state religion with its bishops living in palaces and becoming the Mainstream media and talking heads of the ruling class with its divine rights of autocratic dictators.
Were not happy with the idea that the rich and powerful were the agents of Satan and contemporary or neo Pharisees’and Sadducees of the ruling elite etc.
So Christianity by that point became what it was originally opposed to; just as Marxism became Stalinism?
Although that only took 50 years rather than 500.
Saint John Chrysostom was probably the last advocate of a leftist anti rich Christianity a sort Kautsky to 19<sup>th</sup> century Marxism.
There had been a concern that the attacks and descriptions by 3<sup>rd</sup> century Christians of Marcionism and related forms of Gnosticism had been sensationalised.
Until written hidden ‘heretical’ stuff was recently dug up in the Egyptian desert from the 5<sup>th</sup> century?
So it turned out the 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup> century christian intellectuals ‘anti-marcionist and anti gnosticists were describing them fairly accurately.
So for instance Tertullian went overnight from a bulll-shitter to an accurate honest ‘historian’.
I made a contribution to this kind of thing with as below.
I did the Apion and Origen thing; egotistical plug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito
Sad git!
It shouldn’t be overlooked that there was quite a evolving spectrum of ideas by that stage.
Since the ‘Essene’ dead sea scroll and other stuff; there is a growing body of evidence the JC and his palls were part a splinter group from the Essenes who were cryto communists.
There are two independent texts on communist essenes from the period which is a dead cert when it comes to stuff like that.
Philo and Josephus.
Rosa quoted one of them
[as inccorrectly being of christian origin but is in fact extremely close translation of Josephus describing Essenes]
I asked MIA to footnote it but they wouldn’t.
…..It was indeed in this way that the first Christian communities were organized. A contemporary wrote,….
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churches.htm
that is worth a read.
It is fairly interesting and important as;
The Essenes did passover on a different date following the lunar calender rather than the solar or the other away around.
They can do stuff now with that kind of stuff and work it all out with the moon was etc.
Went to an astronomy lecture by the guy who wrote the programme in the 1980’s I think.
So in AD 29 I think essene passover fell a couple of days before the orthodox non essene one and then all the past problems with dates and time scales of his last days fall away and make sense.
They are noramaly weeks apart , apart from that year.
Not only that but the John narrative that had looked the worst and the most flawed and impossible then looked disturbingly accurate.
The catholic church has surprisingly recently accepted that theory.
The communist theologian and the atheist christian scholars/historians don’t like Jesus as a Essene as the Essenes didn’t hang out with the ‘impure’[deseased] and prostitutes and they were misogynists.
The Jewish religion then was in general was a bit ‘Calvinistic’.
People were ill and poor because they were sinners and God was punishing them for stuff that they had done or what they were, or what the ancestors had done.
Eg sins of the fathers etc.
Jesus according to the ‘narrative’, going around and ‘healing’ these kind of ‘cursed’ unclean people would have been theologically outrageous.
People can miss the ‘narrative’ or contemporary theological context of that.
I would advise caution in too readily identifying with early Christians as “revolutionaries.”
I think a more accurate comparison can be made between them and the populist anti-science, conspiracist, trash-all-received-knowledge-and-learning movement of today.
The film AGORA gives an accurate picture, I think, with the onslaught on the libraries.
ISIS and AL QAEDA better approximate the early Christian character!
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