This three-year-long exhibition, part of a rehanging of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler galleries’ permanent collection, shows what magic can be worked with a clear objective and access to some of the world’s most beautiful Buddhist art. Comprising some 250 objects, all drawn from the Freer/Sackler’s holdings, the show grew out of a 2013 meeting among scholars, curators, designers, and representatives of the lead sponsor of the exhibition, the Robert H. N. Ho foundation, a Hong Kong–based organization dedicated to promoting a deeper public understanding of Buddhism and Chinese culture.

As cocurated by Debra Diamond, the Freer/Sackler’s curator of South and Southeast Asian art; Robert DeCaroli, an art historian specializing in the early history of Buddhism; and Freer Fellow Rebecca Bloom, the exhibition presents an overview of Buddhist thought that spans two millennia and the three major schools of Buddhism—Nikaya, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. When a museum holding a premier collection of Asian art turns its attention to a show about Buddhism, the results are bound to be engaging; but what truly sets this exhibition apart is its emphasis on the original purposes and meanings of the objects on view. Rather than organize the artworks by style, region, or period, as is usual in museum displays, Diamond and her collaborators have created thematic groupings of objects, accompanied by lively wall texts and labels, that lay out Buddhism’s core principles; interactive kiosks for the curious that provide more specific information about individual pieces; and several immersive environments that bring the rituals behind the objects to vivid life.

This is an exhibition with a difference, presenting through art the myriad ways Buddhism may be practiced, from solitary meditation to communal celebrations, and the myriad forms its iconography can take, from immense stupas to tiny clay images carried by pilgrims. “We wanted to create contexts by which people could understand the objects as something more than artworks,” Diamond told me last spring. “Why were they made? How did Buddhists engage with them? And what does it mean for them to now be in a museum? So we created this exhibition about art and practice.” 

The show opens with images of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, who more than 2,500 years ago renounced a princely life to seek an answer to the pain of existence. After his death, his teachings spread across Asia and are common to all forms of Buddhism. 

Four stylistically different Buddha heads greet visitors at the door—including a delicate 2nd- or 3rd-century Indian portrait in red sandstone from the northern Indian city of Mathura, as minimal as a Matisse drawing, and a more folkish 18th-century bronze from Thailand; nevertheless, each one incorporates many of the signs and marks that traditionally identify the historical Buddha, such as long earlobes, a cranial bump, and a dot between the eyes. A touchscreen kiosk allows visitors to pose more questions about the display, including asking the sculpture how it got there—the answer to which touches on looting and the often illegal ways whereby such objects end up mutilated and in museums. 

From here, the show moves on to the idea of multiple buddhas, which all schools believe in, though the Nikaya schools believe that only one Buddha is living at any particular time. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhism, a later outgrowth, believes that multiple buddhas can exist in the world simultaneously. A small bronze altarpiece, commissioned in 609 by a daughter for her father and mother, vividly articulates this new idea, depicting a scene from the Lotus Sutra in which the Buddha of the Past comes to hear the historical Buddha at the moment he begins to teach. 

One of the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism is that all sentient beings have the potential to become buddhas. As the number of buddhas grew under Mahayana’s influence, so did the number of specific practices devoted to them. The Buddha Amitabha, for instance, depicted here as a wasp-waisted, muscular youth in a patched robe, took a vow to create a Pure Land, into which those who call on him can be reborn and there become buddhas themselves. An exuberant Chinese stone stele, carved with a pattern of 1,000 buddhas, commemorates the Buddha Maitreya, the Future Buddha, who waits, pensive, for the next age to arrive.

Two immersive environments bring the practice of Buddhism into the immediate present. A vitrine of small objects shaped like stupas—structures built to contain Buddhist relics—is a lead-in to a hypnotic three-channel video showing a single day, from dawn to dusk, at the Ruwanwelisaya stupa in Sri Lanka. Shot this year, the footage shows groups of Sinhalese Buddhists making communal offerings of bolts of cloth—which are wrapped around the structure before being donated to the monks for new robes—as well as gifts of flowers, light, incense, and prayers. The movie ends with an extraordinary shot of the stupa glittering with thousands of butter lamps in the encroaching darkness. 

A second immersive environment is an approximation of the kind of traditional Buddhist shrine that would have belonged to an aristocratic Tibetan family [see p. 89]. Created from a gift of 243 pieces of Tibetan sacred art by the collector Alice S. Kandell, the shrine—with help from Tibetan lamas and Western scholars—has been arranged as it would have appeared in an important lama’s home, with sculptures arranged hierarchically on stands and flanked by thangkas [scroll paintings]. 

Pride of place just outside the shrine goes to an 18th-century copper sculpture of Padmasambhava, the semilegendary master venerated for bringing Vajrayana teachings from India to Tibet in the 700s, as well as for converting demons (i.e., gods of other religions) into protectors of Buddhism. Some of the most engaging exhibits in the show are vitrines containing images of these enlisted guardians, including one containing a sculptural depiction of a saucy, plump-rumped, and beribboned Jambhala (originally the Hindu god Kubera), who grants riches and wishes, accompanied by his gem-spitting mongoose. 

Bodhisattvas—future buddhas who have chosen to stay in the world to help other beings—are also given their day, with extra attention paid to their polymorphous guises. And although buddhas were generally depicted in monk’s robes while bodhisattvas were shown in luxurious clothing and jewels, one modest 7th-century tin figure of a bodhisattva, part of a hoard of such figures discovered in Thailand, has the matted hair and simple loincloth of an ascetic—perhaps the form in which he could do the most good.

Near the end of the show, a map depicts the scope of the Buddhist world, from Afghanistan to Japan and from Mongolia to Indonesia, while yet another kiosk traces the journeys of Hyecho, a young 8th-century Korean monk who set out to see the birthplace of Buddhism in India and eventually traveled as far as Iran. The Silk Road brought pilgrims like Hyecho, along with monks, migrants, and merchants, to such remote sites as Kizil, an oasis town in northwestern China. Fragments of brightly pigmented 6th-century Buddhist paintings from the walls of the caves at Kizil testify to the cosmopolitan makeup of its visitors by showing personages, of different colors and wearing a variety of costumes, all listening to the words of the Buddha.

The final room in the exhibition is modest in the extreme, containing little more than an 8th- or 9th-century Indianstyle Javanese Medicine Buddha and a 13th-century Cambodian statue of Prajnaparamita, who embodies the perfection of wisdom. The little Buddha’s back is inscribed with a mantra, or sacred passage; a film nearby translates its meaning for visitors. At a time when the world desperately needs both healing and wisdom, these small, clear-cut figures make a fitting conclusion to the show. 

But they also might make an intriguing beginning—visitors are free to take in this exhibition following their own path and at their own pace. Its quiet exhibits, organized concentrically, can be navigated in any order while still making sense, and will change over time in response to feedback from visitors. (My own wish would be for a slightly less moody design—while soothing, the dark maroon walls also reminded me of Robert Wright’s caution in the New York Times of November 6 not to make Buddhism too exotic.) If you are at all interested in Buddhism, try to make it to Washington to see this show. You’ve got three years.

The post The Buddhas Go to Washington appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

 The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong
By Gyalo Thondup and Anne Thurston
PublicAffairs; April 2015
301 pp.; $27.99 (Cloth)

In the winter of 2001, I lived in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling District of India, while studying under the Kagyu lama Bokar Rinpoche. Every night I looked out across the valley, with my one-year-old son and his father, to the town of Kalimpong as its electricity cut out. With so little to measure or mark our days, this became a kind of event, something we anticipated. The only thing I knew then about Kalimpong was that its egg noodles were fresh, delicious, and famous. But just how famous, I had no idea.

As it turns out, most residents of Kalimpong were also unaware of their noodles’ origins. Only when Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s older brother, took up a more permanent residence there in 1999, did his identity as the noodle maker become known. And yet even with the publication of his memoirs, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, Thondup remains a fiercely private man. Given his position as a political attaché, it’s evident that his skillful tact has been exactly what’s allowed him to serve the people of Tibet for so many decades.

It is a sense of duty and honor that has inspired Thondup to put his experience in pursuing Tibetan visibility and diplomacy to the page. He does so despite his anticipation of controversy and criticism from all sides—“Tibetans, Chinese, Indians, Americans, the CIA.” But, as he claims throughout the book, in the face of impossible decisions, he has always made those he thinks best for Tibet.

Thondup, who was born in in Amdo in 1929, has led a rich and intriguing life. The resulting memoir is part cosmopolitan spy novel and part heartbreaking tale of an uprooted, often-betrayed refugee.

“Of the five male siblings who lived to adulthood, Gyalo Thondup alone did not become a monk,” writes coauthor Anne F. Thurston in the introduction. “Instead . . . he was groomed to serve his brother on matters of the state.” This education began in earnest in 1945, when Thondup was sent to China to study, but not before making his way to India first. At the twilight of British rule, Calcutta was a thriving, modern city, in which the teenage Thondup, coming from rural, religious, and insulated Tibet, was exposed to not only Charlie Chaplin movies and five-star hotels but also paved streets, telephones, and steam engines. Thondup’s travels convinced him that secular education was essential for Tibet’s survival.

He went on to live in China for the next several years, where he learned the language, befriended then-president Chiang Kai-shek, and immersed himself in 5,000 years of Chinese history, which verified that Tibet had never been considered part of the “motherland,” as the communists would soon claim. From there, Thondup and his Chinese wife, Zhu Dan, would live, among other places, in Taiwan, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Darjeeling, where his wife eventually established the still-operating Tibetan Refugee Self Help Center. In 1952, they bought a small plot of land in Kalimpong, just outside of Darjeeling and not far from the Tibetan border, and in 1980, the couple opened the noodle factory that’s been running ever since, throughout Thondup’s extensive work abroad and even after Zhu Dan’s death in 1986.

After the Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959, the two brothers collaborated on what became their first press conference, one that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru never wanted to happen. Their goal had been to publicly refute Chinese propaganda and to declare Tibet a sovereign nation. It was then that the Dalai Lama stated, “wherever I am, accompanied by my government, the Tibetan people recognize us as the government of Tibet.” With this establishment of the Government-in-Exile, Thondup was formally appointed foreign minister, and he began seeking international support.

Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to his younger brother, Thondup coordinated with the CIA, doing so well into the 1960s. The clandestine organization trained a small but steady stream of Tibetans—volunteer resistance fighters—in Colorado, the Western Pacific, and eventually in Mustang, Nepal. At the time, Thondup believed that the US wanted to help the Tibetan people. It was this work, however, that would become one of Thondup’s biggest regrets. In later years, he came to realize the US was more concerned with “stirring up trouble” between India and China. Thondup now thinks that the uprisings, given “paltry support” by the CIA, only caused more deaths.

A diplomat to the end, Thondup recalls his life as a series of political events—an understandable impulse, but one that often results in less of a story than a history lesson. More often than not, Thondup’s determination to “set the record straight” insulates his account from more heartfelt, subjective truths—the complicated kind wrought with emotion and tricks of memory, but blessed with the details and insights that resonate with meaning.

Recognizing that “setting the record straight” is not so simple, Thurston, who coauthored the best-selling The Private Life of Chairman Mao, notes how her point of view occasionally differs from Thondup’s. For instance, Thondup maintains that his father was poisoned in 1947, in a power struggle among Lhasa aristocracy. In her afterword, Thurston casts some doubt on this version of the story, noting that the Dalai Lama himself remains unconvinced of any foul play. Yet precisely because Thurston expresses her skepticism only in the afterword, the logic and lucidity of Thondup’s voice are preserved. The combination of their perspectives makes for a compelling metanarrative on the inherent paradoxes of autobiography, one that ultimately enhances Thondup’s exploration of Tibet’s history.

In the final paragraph of this autobiography, one of the most poignant moments of the book, Gyalo Thondup recounts a recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, who implores him to stay healthy—and alive. “We have to return home together,” the spiritual leader, soon to turn 80, tells his big brother. The implication is that if they keep holding out, they will accomplish what everyone knows is unlikely, at least in their lifetime: a return to Tibet, together.

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Founded in 2011, Longquan Comic and Animation Group shoots its Buddhist-themed, stop-motion animation shorts in a mountain cave in Beijing’s Fenghuangling Nature Park. 

Longquan Monastery‘s abbot, Venerated Master Xueching, who is also Vice Chairman and Secretary-General of the Buddhist Association of China, first started using social media several years prior. Now, with a crew composed solely of monks and volunteers, the 1,500-year-old monastery produces enormously popular short films to make Buddhist precepts and teachings understandable and relevant to daily life, which it shares on Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter.

Some of the group’s most popular shorts—each a standalone parable—comprise a series featuring the monk Xian’er, a callow novice under the tutelage of a learned master (trailer below).

Longquan is one of several institutions exploring new channels to convey Buddhist teachings to a contemporary Chinese audience that has demonstrated a resurgent interest in Buddhism. Although monasticism remains in general decline in much of Asia (a theme explored in the animation above), in recent years increasing numbers of Chinese have taken temporary ordination, Nanfang Daily reported in 2012.

Pejoratively dubbed “chicken soup for the soul,” pithy and often spurious inspirational aphorisms have become commonplace on Chinese Buddhist social media, according to China’s Global Times. But Longquan’s films and the seriousness of its engagement with its online followers present a more substantive “new media” Buddhism. 

“There are advantages and disadvantages to the Internet, and we are trying to use it for good,” Xueching told Global Times.

“Promoting Buddhism is not limited in forms,” Liu Fen, one of the creators of Longquan’s new viral ad to recruit new media staff, told Want China Times. “We need to use the language and approach that [young people] can accept, otherwise we will lose them.”

Consulting the abbot of Longquan, which in the past would require a pilgrimage to the temple, is now often done over Weibo, where Xueching happily fields questions from followers every morning.

Alex Caring-Lobel is Tricycle‘s associate editor.

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According to the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), once characterized religion as “poison.” The modern CCP maintains official atheism to this day, but that hasn’t stopped officials from claiming control over the intricacies of Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation.

Angered by recent comments by the 14th Dalai Lama, 79, that he might not have a successor, Chinese officials have lashed out at the exiled spiritual leader and reasserted long-standing policies that grant them control over the recognition of reincarnate lamas.

“It’s none of their business,” Tenzin Dolkar, executive director of the New York–based Students for a Free Tibet, said in a statement to Tricycle. “The Chinese government needs first and foremost to prioritize addressing the grievances of the Tibetan people which have led to at least 137 self-immolations in Tibet, end its repressive policies, respect the rights of the Tibetan people, and end its illegal colonial occupation of Tibet.”

The overwhelming majority of last words or written statements by Tibetans who have self-immolated since 2009 have called for the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet or included wishes for his long life. But the current Dalai Lama’s popularity inside Tibet has not kept CCP officials from taking a hardline position on the man they consider to be a dangerous separatist.

That hard line extends into the afterlife.

“Whether we’re talking about the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation or the continuation of his lineage, accepting or rejecting it is in the hands of the Chinese government—not other people, and certainly not the Dalai Lama himself,” Zhu Weiqun, who heads the Chinese government committee that handles ethnic and political affairs, told reporters earlier this month.

Zhu went on to accuse the Dalai Lama of adjusting his public statements about his future reincarnation based on donations and of using his religious title as “a lever, a tool of separatist doctrine.” Padma Choling, the appointed governor of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, made similar comments a day earlier.

Those comments came on the heels of separate interviews by the BBC and Die Welt late last year in which the Dalai Lama commented that it might be best to end the institution, which began with Gedun Drup in the 15th century, while it is still in good repute.

“This man-made institution will cease. There’s no guarantee that some stupid Dalai Lama [won’t] come along that disgraces himself or herself. That’s very sad. So [it’s] much better that the centuries-old tradition cease at the time of a quite popular Dalai Lama,” he told the BBC, before breaking into laughter.

The aging leader also made some serious points, telling Die Welt that since he devolved his political authority to an elected government in 2011, the institution of the Dalai Lama may have “had its day.” In the end, he told the BBC, the institution’s future will be up to the Tibetan people.

Yet China has long claimed authority over the reincarnation process. In the 18th century, the Qing Emperor imposed a system for confirming Tibetan reincarnations by lottery, which was then only used a handful of times. In 1995, however, Chinese officials revived the system to install their own candidate as the 11th Panchen Lama, detaining a young boy whom the Dalai Lama had recognized. His whereabouts remain unknown.

Reincarnation has reemerged as a political issue with the approach of the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday next July and his recent comments about his successor.

“Zhu Weiqun’s comments represent the strong opinions of the majority of upper-level Party officials,” Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan writer and journalist who lives in Beijing, told Tricycle in an online message. “They have the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard, and the Kuomintang behind them—domineering, dumb attitudes. So, it’s futile to consider the issue of Tibet or whether His Holiness the Dalai Lama will or will not return to Tibet under such power grabbers. . . . This proves once again that the CCP lacks sincerity and has no plans whatsoever to work with the Tibetan people to address what they’re hoping for with regard to the Tibet issue.”

The matter of whether or not it is possible to negotiate with the Chinese government in good faith is controversial within the Tibetan community, with some arguing for the necessity of nonviolent protests to pressure the Chinese government into negotiations and others arguing for an exclusively diplomatic approach.

Recent comments by Zhu, Padma Choling, and other Chinese officials are likely to aggravate that disagreement, which is tied up in larger questions of whether Tibetans should seek full independence or simply greater autonomy within China. The Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration adopted a policy of seeking autonomy rather than independence around 1974.

“The Chinese leadership are pragmatic,” said Kaydor Aukatsang, the Dalai Lama’s representative to the Americas. “They know they will never find someone more moderate or easier to deal with than the current Dalai Lama. . . . So while His Holiness is still healthy and active, the Chinese government should seriously reevaluate their positions and seriously consider reaching out to His Holiness.”

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The incomparable loftiness of the monk figure—placid and disinterested, having renounced desire—leads many to think of Buddhism as a religion detached from all worldly concerns, especially those of economy. But Buddhism has always addressed a continuum of human flourishing and good, creating what has been referred to as an “economy of salvation.” Metaphors of economy—even of debt—abound in Buddhist texts, and in many ways Buddhism came to be fundamentally shaped by economic conditions and considerations of the era in which it originated.

Depending on material support from moneylenders, the Buddhist establishment from its outset did not seek to hamper the business that made it possible. Devout merchants (setthi) and householders (gahapatis)—controllers of property, moneylenders, often even usurers—were the primary supporters of the early monastic community. Giving material support (amisa dana) to the monkhood thus ranks in Buddhist doctrine as the most effective way for laypeople to generate positive karma, even above following the five moral precepts that define the Buddhist way of life. Out of a concern for its own survival, Buddhism could not condemn the acquisition of wealth, but it could provide principles for its dispensation—namely, giving and generosity (dana). To these ends, the Buddha celebrated wealth creation alongside a call for its redistribution.

The New Market Economy

In order to understand the subtleties of Buddhism’s approach to wealth accumulation, poverty, and debt, we must first have some understanding of the market economy from which it arose. The introduction of the widespread use of coinage to India just a few decades prior to the Buddha’s birth around 500 BCE disrupted existing social orders and also inspired a philosophical renaissance driven by spiritual dropouts like the Buddha, who sought to respond to the new economy.

One of the Buddha’s most poignant accounts of worldly life speaks to the social alienation inherent to economic competition and the accumulation of private property. It remains pertinent to this day:

Seeing people floundering
     like fish in small puddles,
     competing with one another —
               as I saw this,
               fear came into me.
     The world was entirely
               without substance.
     All the directions
                                    were knocked out of line.
     Wanting a haven for myself,
     I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to.
     Seeing nothing in the end
     but competition,
     I felt discontent.
              —Sutta Nipata 4.15, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Widespread use of currency led to a flattening of reality that rendered all goods and services commensurable, nourishing a tendency toward abstraction for which we owe much of our philosophical inheritance today—from Pythagoras in Greece, to Confucius in China, to the Buddha in India. The reformulation of economic relations brought about by monetization triggered previously unheard of levels of social mobility, and mobility’s attendant individualism.

The Buddha skillfully encouraged some of the new social values that emerged from these economic changes. For example, he encouraged the individualism that subverted family structures (monks were “home-leavers”). But he also sought to undermine other emerging values associated with psychological states that fuel the acquisition of capital: desire and greed. The Buddha condemned acquisitiveness at the same time he supported capital accumulation, specifically for its potential to create and multiply merit through generosity. In this way, Buddhism advocated a “Middle Way,” the simultaneous negation of the extremes of asceticism and indulgence. Spiritual health and material well-being were, in the words of economist E. F. Schumacher, natural allies.

The Buddha diverged from other religious thinkers in his embrace of the new market economy. Confucians in China and Brahmans in India strongly resisted this economy, denouncing the economic activities of businessmen and merchants as threats to the moral order of society.

Perhaps the Buddha embraced the new market economy in part because it supported his rejection of the Brahmans’ mythical justifications for the stratification of caste. Rather than speaking about caste, the Buddha spoke instead of economic class, the new social order, which was divided into six categories: very wealthy, wealthy, faring well, faring poorly, poor, and destitute. Such disparities are inevitable in a society organized by the market economy. The establishment of the monkhood, which presented a new, radical kind of freedom, enabled its constituents to stand outside caste and, in theory, outside the market economy altogether.

Can Buddhist Teachings Move Us Toward Jubilee?

The accumulation of wealth among urban merchants and moneylenders, scorned by the then dominant Brahmans, was a boon to the sangha, the Buddhist monastic community, which relied on the generosity of the laity for material support as well as the spread of Buddhist ideas along trade routes. This upwardly mobile class found in Buddhism a justification for its economic activities and new lifestyle. By giving to the monks, the laity performed acts of dana, or generosity, a fundamental tenet of Buddhism. Serving as “fields of merit,” the monks provided an opportunity for laypeople to practice generosity, the first “perfection,” and the basis of all other perfections, leading to enlightenment. Importantly, the amount of merit generated by such transactions was determined by the recipient’s level of virtue and not the benefactor’s, forming a holy alliance between the monkhood and the laity that, at least within the performance of dana, condoned the benefactor’s methods of accumulation. This alliance was furthered by the Buddha’s injunction forbidding those with debt from joining the monastic order, by which the indebted would effectively default.

So instead of challenging the accumulation of wealth, Buddhism critiques the social structures that perpetuate poverty and the unwholesome states of mind that contribute to the suffering of self and others. This is admirable enough, but still leaves quite a bit for Buddhist socialists and Buddhists committed to Jubilee to wrestle with.

Buddhism has historically taken a permissive approach to economic relations. It might be the only world religion that does not formally condemn usury. And being wealthy in and of itself has been taken as a sign of good karma. Yet there remains much in the Buddhist canon that can enrich our thoughts on debt and wealth distribution.

The Ina ­Sutta, the Buddha’s “Discourse on Debt,” praises ananasukha, the pleasure of being debtless. Conversely, it also links indebtedness directly to bondage and, ultimately, suffering, the first noble truth of Buddhism:

Poverty is suffering in the world. . . Getting into debt is suffering in the world. . . Interest payment is suffering in the world. . . Being served notice is suffering in the world. . . Being hounded is suffering in the world. . . Bondage is suffering in the world. . . . When a poor, destitute, penniless person, being hounded, does not pay, he is put into bondage. For one who partakes of sensuality [a layperson], bondage is suffering in the world.

Buddhist texts make ample use of metaphors of debt and exchange to confer spiritual advice, both a sign of the times and a winning bet made by the Buddha on the future hegemony of the monetary economy. At the end of the Ina Sutta, the Buddha goes as far as to use freedom from debt as a metaphor for nirvana (liberation from samsara, the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma):

[Knowledge in the total ending of the fetters of becoming] is the highest knowledge
that, the happiness unexcelled.
     Sorrowless,
     dustless,
     at rest,
that
          is release from debt.

For Jubilee, perhaps the most instructive concept in Buddhist thought is that of karmic debt, for which financial debt is often used as a metaphor, as it is in these final lines. Born as humans, we all have karmic debt, the first one being to our parents, who brought us into this world, raised us, fed us, and guided us. This debt extends to all our benefactors—teachers, friends, and anyone else who has acted with our well-being in mind. But this is not a debt that can be easily repaid. For such an infinite debt, no material compensation is sufficient. In fact, the only way to repay such a debt is to become enlightened ourselves and endow others with the conditions for enlightenment. Thus, according to the Kataññu Sutta, we become debtless:

But, O monks, one who . . . encourages his ignorant parents, settles and establishes them in wisdom—such a one, O monks, does enough for his parents: he repays them and more than repays them for what they have done.

In other words, recognizing our true debts establishes the basis for the discernment of contrived debts, and thus any kind of resistance against them. This old Buddhist idea is freshly relevant in the context of contemporary efforts to build a debt resistance movement. In fact, it sounds surprisingly similar to the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. “To the financial establishment of the world,” the manual reads, “we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing.” It continues:

To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we withhold from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities, to those we love and we respect.

Repaying Our Karmic Debts

In the Buddhist approach to debt, wealth can be accumulated, but only so that it can in turn be given away to those to whom we are truly, karmically indebted. Production and multiplication of merit-creating wealth is thus a noble determination. One who acquires lavish wealth, the Buddha said, should provide for the pleasure and satisfaction of himself, his loved ones, and his associates, and also for priests and contemplatives.

Buddhist monasteries for a long time accomplished a kind of redistribution of wealth, supporting mendicants who owned nothing. They also invested in local economies, providing an alternative to local moneylenders. In later years, however, some monasteries (such as in Medieval China) started making high-interest loans and meddling with debtors’ contracts. A Burmese proverb characterizes Buddhist economic excess succinctly: “The pagoda is finished and the country is ruined.”

As greed—the motor of capital accumulation and, in Buddhism, one of the three “poisons” that binds beings to the wheel of samsara—became institutionalized in the new social order, the Buddha edged out a place in society where greed’s opposite, generosity, could flourish.

While the production and multiplication of wealth creates conditions for merit in the form of virtuous giving, greed annihilates merit. The Buddha said that even if one could transform one single mountain into two mountains of solid gold, it would still not provide complete and lasting satisfaction of a single person’s wants. Such is the unlimited nature of desire. From the Buddhist view, then, capital accumulation does not find its end in capital accumulation, but in its transmutation into merit through generosity. “To have much wealth and ample gold and food, but to enjoy one’s luxuries alone is a cause of one’s downfall,” the Buddha says in the Parabhava Sutta. Wealth is not the enemy of spiritual development; it has an enormous potential to create merit—but not principally from lending, but giving.

For this reason, even to live modestly while retaining great wealth is sinful. In the Aputtaka Sutta, the Buddha speaks of a moneylender who “ate broken rice and pickle brine” and wore only “hempen cloth,” riding around in a “dilapidated little cart.” Many lives ago, the moneylender had given alms to a contemplative, leading the moneylender to be reborn seven times with great fortune. But in his subsequent lives the moneylender failed to create virtue with his fortunes, passing up many opportunities to generate merit through generosity. For this reason, after the merit generated for seven lifetimes ran out, the moneylender found himself in one of the hell realms.

The Evil of Endless Accumulation

Today’s ultra-wealthy commit this same evil of endless accumulation without redistribution. Moneylending through the financial establishment, effectively indebting others in order to create profits, does not create merit but destroys it. Such a system of debt has helped concentrate 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of 1 percent of its population, while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Debt today encourages the upward distribution of wealth, whereas the Buddha seems to have advocated its downward distribution.

In the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, the Buddha makes clear that charity, and philanthropy especially, is never enough. Giving advice to a king, he says, “Whosoever in your kingdom is poor, to him let wealth be given.” When a king comes to power and neglects this duty, he is faced with social deterioration that can be reversed neither through recourse to charity nor through justice (i.e., brutal punishments): “Thus from goods not being bestowed on the destitute, poverty, stealing, violence, murder, lying, evil-speaking, and immorality grew rife.”

Considering that Buddhist texts tend to concentrate unrelentingly on defilements of the mind as the roots of suffering, this passage is remarkable in that it focuses instead on social and economic injustice as a foundational cause. Here, the ignorance, desire, and hatred of the people—the three poisons—are traced directly back to the failure of the state rather than to their own individual moral failings. When the king attempts to correct social strife by dispensing charity, this produces only more negative results, clearly demonstrating that charity cannot stand in for economic justice. Perhaps most importantly, the Buddha places the responsibility for the material well-being of the poor on the government. There exists no other power capable of enacting any progressive economic policy, including debt forgiveness.

This gets to the problem at the heart of the massive proliferation of personal debt in the United States: the country’s long-term disinvestment in public goods such as higher education, health care, and housing. If wealth, of which there is no shortage, is not shared with the poor in such forms, inequality becomes exacerbated in the form of debt, which increases the burden of poverty in the form of interest.

Vital to Buddhist doctrine is the conviction that all people, regardless of social position, are capable of becoming enlightened, of becoming buddhas. Poverty and the stress it entails, however, can be real barriers to spiritual development. The Buddha recognized that becoming free of worries about our material welfare enables us to develop our potentials. If release from karmic debt is the goal of Buddhist thought and practice, then release from economic debt is its precondition.

“Buddhism and Debt” in Tikkun, Volume 30, no. 1, p. 35. © 2015, Tikkun Magazine. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

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In 2007, Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, announced his run for President of the United States. Now, in the midst of this week’s media frenzy regarding the question of the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso’s successor, Colbert dropped another bombshell on the Nation: he will be the 15th Dalai Lama.

Finally, a successor that both Tibetans and China can agree on.

On a more serious note, the media, at the least at first, got this story mostly wrong. Read our coverage here.

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The Dalai Lama’s likely reaction to the current media frenzy.

An interview with the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso by the Sunday edition of German paper Die Welt has caused quite a stir in the media and in Tibetan communities across the globe.

“We had a Dalai Lama for almost five centuries,” the Dalai Lama is quoted as saying in the interview. “The 14th Dalai Lama now is very popular. Let us then finish with a popular Dalai Lama.”

The German paper seems to have understood this statement to mean that the Dalai Lama wishes to discontinue the lineage, running the interview under a subtitle that includes the statement “the Dalai Lama does not want to have a successor.”

News sources like Agence France-Presse, whose version of the story has been reprinted in numerous other publications like Al Jazeera and Yahoo! News (and essentially reworded in the Huffington Post), have interpreted the Dalai Lama’s statement as a reversal of longstanding policy regarding the continuation of the Dalai Lama lineage.

These reports garnered so much attention that even China was impelled to reply. This morning, government officials called on the Dalai Lama to respect the historic practice of reincarnation in a press conference (no irony intended, we think): “China follows a policy of freedom of religion and belief, and this naturally includes having to respect and protect the ways of passing on Tibetan Buddhism.”

The transcript of the Die Welt interview, however, paints a very different picture from that taken up by most media outlets. The Dalai Lama prefaces the aforementioned statement by saying “sometimes I make a joke…” and speaks alternately about his role as a politician and as a spiritual leader.

“The institution of the Dalai Lama was important mainly because of its political power,” he says earlier in the interview. “Politically . . . the centuries of having a Dalai Lama should be over.” This statement is nothing new, as Tenzin Gyatso relinquished his political power back in 2011.

The Dalai Lama institution led Tibet politically for nearly four centuries, from 1642 until just a few years ago. But it came to represent the de facto leadership of Tibetan Buddhism only recently, beginning when the current Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959.

Speaking of his role as a spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama tells Welt am Sonntag that “Tibetan Buddhism is not dependent on one individual. We have a very good organizational structure with highly trained monks and scholars.” Asked whether the Tibetans will require a Dalai Lama in the future, he responds modestly, “No, I don’t think so.”

Robert Barnett, director of Columbia University’s Tibetan Studies program, thinks the meaning of this statement has been lost in translation.

“It is in line with the tradition whereby all lamas are expected to demonstrate diffidence about the question of their return as a kind of humility,” Barnett told Tricycle. “The convention is that they are only able to return if their followers pray intently for them to do so.”

Barnett also holds that there is a more significant issue that the Dalai Lama addresses here, which seems to escape both his German interlocutors and the American media. “He is clearly saying that his role as the leading figure in Tibetan Buddhism will not continue,” says Barnett.

The 14th Dalai Lama acquired this role due to the exigencies of exile. In the interview, he seems to say that the robust Tibetan monastic academies that have been established in India over the decades obviate the need for such an institution, and after the current Dalai Lama passes away, other Buddhist sects will likely run themselves with greater autonomy as they have in the past. Barnett points to the fact that although this has long been understood to be the case, the utterance takes on special importance because it constitutes a clear statement of intention.

Several statements of the Dalai Lama that appear later in the interview further contradict the interpretation that he intends to end the Dalai Lama lineage altogether. “I hope and pray that I may return to this world as long as sentient beings suffering remain,” he says.

He goes on to quote the first Dalai Lama: “‘I have no desire for any of these heavenly places. I want to be reborn, where I can be of use.’ This is my wish, too.”

The suggestion that the Dalai Lama line might be reaching its end seems to be the result of one big misunderstanding.

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Buddhist-led anti-Muslim violence and persecution has received unprecedented mass-media attention in the past couple weeks. Images of Wirathu—monk-leader of the “969” movement, recognized for its hate speech and for inciting violence against Burma’s Muslims—have now graced both the cover of TIME and the front page of The New York Times.

While media attention has been for the most part appreciated by human rights activists, some journalist have criticized undue emphasis on the figure—or figurehead—of Wirathu. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth countered on Twitter, “Instead of denouncing Time cover story on #Burma Buddhist extremism, why not denounce violence against Muslims?” Although the TIME feature may have had some holes, other media outlets have quickly filled them.

Burmese publication Irrawaddy reported on the largest gathering of monks in Burma in recent years. Fifteen-hundred from across Burma descended on Yangon, the country’s commercial capital, to discuss strategies to resolve tensions between the country’s Buddhist majority and Muslim minority. Senior monks urged others to rally support for a new bill “for the Protection of Race and Religion,” which includes a provision that would put restrictions on interfaith marriage. If enacted, the law would require Buddhist women to gain permission from their parents as well as local government officials in order to marry a Muslim man; Muslim men wedding Buddhists would be required to convert to Buddhism.

The Buddhist ultra-nationalist movement has received official Burmese government endorsement. Reuters reports that although 969 present itself as a grassroots movement, and boasts considerable grassroots support, its origins trace back to the former military dictatorship of “Myanmar”—the name adopted by the military junta. Many senior government officials, including President Thein Sein, were once high-ranking officers in the former military regime. The 969 movement relies on former-regime in addition to support from members of National League for Democracy, headed officially by Nobel Peace Prize leaureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

On Sunday, President Thein Sein issued a statement saying, 969 “is just a symbol of peace” and Wirathu is “a son of Lord Buddha” (via Reuters). Minister of Religious Affairs Sann Sint, a former lieutenant general in the military regime, also expressed his admiration for the extremist movement and its monk-leader.

Violence against Muslims has not only been widely condoned but also in some cases “abetted by local security forces.” The combination of strong grassroots and government support has been a deadly and terrifying combination for the country’s small Muslim population.

“I’m really frightened,” a Muslim vendor told The New York Times. “We tell the children not to go outside unless absolutely necessary.”

*

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report presenting forced relocations of Tibetans in China. The government policy of mass rehousing and relocation has affected millions of Tibetans, and radically altered their ways of life. The Chinese government asserts that these operations are entirely voluntary, but HRW contends that this is only the case in a limited instances. Because China refuses to allow independent fact-finding investigations in Tibetan areas, the report relies heavily on open source satellite imagery, which reveals the policy’s drastic physical effect on the landscape.

The report comes in the wake of China’s loosening of policies against freedom of religious expression in Tibet. Just two weeks ago, Chinese officials announced an “abrupt and unexpected reversal of policy” allowing monks in some Tibetan areas to worship the Dalai Lama as a religious leader. Furthermore, the policy document asks monks to refrain from “criticizing the Dalai Lama” and “using such labels as a wolf in a monk’s robes,” an epithet for the Dalai Lama preferred by both Chinese media and Beijing.

‘As a religious person, from now on you should respect and follow His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,’ the document continued, ‘but in terms of politics you are not allowed to do so. Politics and religion should go separate ways.’

The policy, likely a response to the more than 100 self-immolations that have been carried out inside Tibet since 2009, is being called an “experiment,” which is how the Party refers to radical policy changes before they are instituted nationwide. China is expected to announce a new, official policy in August.

In addition, Beijing has lifted the 17-year ban on displaying pictured of the Dalai Lama in homes and monasteries in Dram, a town near the Nepali border—likely another “experiment.” The news comes on the eve of China’s forthcoming tour of Tibet by foreign journalists, leading many to suspect the provisional policies nothing more than a “PR push.”

Chinese officials would at least hope to stymy the surge in self-immolations. In an interview with Hong Kong-based Asia Weekly, Jin Wei, a director of ethnic and religious affairs at the Central Party School think-tank in Beijing, suggested that China’s policy in Tibet is failing, and it requires reform. According to journalist Tsering Namgyal, reactions from Tibetan have ranged from “guarded optimism to outright skepticism.”

—Alex Caring-Lobel

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Only in Thailand: Sorrawee Nattee, the 2009 winner of the Thai “Miss Tiffany” transsexual beauty contest, has removed his breast implants and become a monk. That’s what I call getting the best of both worlds, since women in Thailand are unable to receive full ordination…

In Burma, the suffering of the Rohingya Muslims reaches Book of Job-like proportions as a tropical cyclone heads towards the makeshift camps where tens of thousands of them are now sheltering, displaced by the ongoing violence. The camps are located on low-lying land near the sea, especially vulnerable to flooding. Although various U.N. agencies are assisting in evacuating the camps, at least 50 people have drowned already, when a boat bringing about 100 Rohingya Muslims to higher land capsized three days ago.

Of course, the evacuation is not the only worry on the Burmese government’s mind. On Monday, three police officers and the police chief of the Burmese town of Maungdaw were arrested for stealing 60,000 pills of methamphetamine, which they had originally seized from a Buddhist monk harboring 120,000 pills of the stuff, worth about $4 million dollars. Sheesh!

But lest you lose your faith in Buddhist monks entirely, there are some very crafty (and eco-conscious) monks over in Thailand who I found out about for the first time today. This might be old news to some, but it’s worth the share anyway: did you know that there is a temple in Thailand, the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple, that is made of over one million recycled bottles? It’s nickname is the Million Bottle Temple, for obvious reasons, and construction on it began in 1984. Click here for more photos.

Last on the docket this week on Buddha Buzz, The Atlantic published a great mini-profile and interview with Lobsang Sangay, who became the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile when HHDL stepped down in 2011. Lobsang Sangay was the first Tibetan to receive a degree from Harvard Law School (who knew? not me…) and ran for prime minister, he says, mostly on a lark:

How did you come to win the election?

This guy launched a site—kalontripa.org [the former title for the head of the elected government]. He wanted to push candidates to come forward. Anyone could nominate a candidate, but when no candidates volunteered, it almost flopped. A friend of mine happened to visit him. He nominated me, and said, let’s see where it goes. My name was put forward to entice other candidates to come forward. My name came first, then the other candidates actually came. Then newspapers started nominating names, and they all took their cue from the site, and everyone started nominating me because I was listed first. I had no plans whatsoever. I spent 16 years at Harvard Law School. I hardly ever went to the Kennedy School [of government].

I said, “what the heck, I am just going to lose anyway.” I thought I could improve the election by pulling the other candidates along. We never had campaigns or debates of candidates before. After I was drawn in, I started drawing interest in the cause. Conventional wisdom was that I had a 1 or 2 percent chance of winning. You’re running an exile administration, filling the shoes of the Dalai Lama…how can someone parachute in and win just like that?

Then we had debates, and interest started generating. The other candidates were seen as insiders, and me as the outside candidate. And then one thing led to another and people voted for me. It became more of an election of personalities than policies.

The Dalai Lama pulled all of his authority right at the same time. Before, the job was a lot simpler because you could just get a paper signed by him and show it to Tibetans and say, “don’t criticize this.” But then, His Holiness said, “you’re on your own.” And I thought, “Oh my goodness, what did I bargain for?”

He speaks quite frankly in the rest of the interview about the Tibetan self-immolations and his hopes for the future. He also does the bad pun lovers among us a solid with a so-bad-it’s-good Buddhist joke near the end of it:

It sounds like you were subject to Chinese phishing attempts via email attachments? Does that happen often?

Yes, all the time. They try to monitor me, destroy my computer, make my life difficult.

It’s where the Buddhist philosophy comes in—don’t have attachments!

 

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Buddha Buzz will be short and sweet today, as this afternoon the Tricycle office was hosting Thai forest monk and abbot of Metta Forest Monastery Thanissaro Bhikkhu. He recently published a really excellent guide to meditation called With Each and Every Breath. Like all of his books, it is free to download. You can do so here. (And personally, I highly encourage you to do so. It’s good stuff.)

Thanissaro Bhikkhu with Editorial Assistant Alex Caring-Lobel, Associate Editor Emma Varvaloucas, Managing Editor Rachel Hiles, Editor and Publisher James Shaheen, and Digital Media Coordinator Andrew Gladstone

As I’m sure you already know, this week we saw some shakeups in world leadership. There’s a new pope, Pope Francis I, a Jesuit from Buenos Aires who, if Wikipedia is to be believed, is the first non-European pope in 1,282 years. I’m not so excited about his views on abortion and LGBTQ rights—he described the pro-choice movement as a “culture of death” and opposes same-sex marriage—but we are talking about the Catholic church, so it’s not like I can realistically feign surprise. I haven’t turned up anything about Pope Francis’ views on Buddhism or his relationship with Buddhists, but he does say that he is open to dialogue with other religious faiths, so we’ll have to wait and see about that. I bet a nice photo of him and HHDL hanging out will surface on the Internet soon.

On Thursday Xi Jinping became China’s new president, replacing Hu Jintao in a once-a-decade power shift in the Communist party. Coincidentally, last Sunday was Tibetan Uprising Day, which commemorates the 1959 Tibetan rebellion against Chinese occupation that led to HHDL’s escape into India. In honor of the occasion, Al Jazeera English has created what is known around the Tricycle office as “the most depressing infographic ever”: an interactive visualization that shows the increasing number of Tibetan self-immolations in recent years. The current count is at 112.

Number of self immolations as of January 1, 2011

Number of self immolations as of March 4, 2013

Over at Vice, Michael Muhammad Knight has written a compelling piece called “The Problem with White Converts.” (If I’m not mistaken, Knight is a white convert, so we know at least that the guy has a healthy sense of irony.) The article is partly about Henry Steel Olcott, a nineteenth century Theosophist, known as the United States’ first Buddhist convert. This isn’t entirely true, but Olcott was one of the earliest—and most talkative—Western proponents of Buddhism. Knight writes about him:

Olcott thus took part in a Euro-American reinvention of the Buddha as a modern empiricist philosopher and argued that the Buddha’s teachings were based on science, rather than supernatural claims, and that Buddhism opposed rituals, ceremonies, idolatry, and belief in miracles. This was not a Buddhism based on Olcott’s encounters with Buddhist tradition as people actually lived it in the world, but only the “true Buddhism” that he found in the Buddha’s original message. Olcott’s “true Buddhism” was necessarily contrasted with what he saw as the superstitions and corruptions of uneducated, uncivilized Buddhist masses. In other words, Olcott converted to Buddhism and then claimed to understand the Buddha better than every other Buddhist on the planet.

Sound familiar? We do, unfortunately, see this same idea played out in convert Buddhist communities and literature all the time. We assume that we can separate the “real Buddhism” from its various Asian “cultural containers,” like we’re not coming at it with any cultural baggage of our own. Or as Knight handily summarizes the problem:

When people assume that “religion” and “culture” exist as two separate categories, culture is then seen as an obstacle to knowing religion. In this view, what born-and-raised members of a religious tradition possess cannot be the religion in its pure, text-based essence, but only a mixture of that essence with local customs and innovated traditions. The convert (especially the white convert, who claims universality, supreme objectivity, and isolation from history, unlike the black convert, whose conversion is read as a response to history), imagined as coming from a place outside culture, becomes privileged as the owner of truth and authenticity. People forget that these white guys aren’t simply extracting “true” meaning from the text, but bringing their own cultural baggage and injecting it into the words.

If you couldn’t tell, Knight is known in Islamic circles as being a bit of a provocateur…

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