Crossing Materialism and Religion: An Interview on Marxism and Spirituality with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Abstract

This conversation with the fourteenth Dalai Lama—the spiritual-political inspiration of the displaced Tibetan community—revolves around questions of why a practitioner of the Buddha Dharma would like to call himself Marxist, and also his views on the violence of both Marxist praxis and religion. The Dalai Lama splits Marxism into, on the one hand, violent paranoid statecraft, and, on the other, the moral principle of equal distribution. He aligns with the latter. He also displaces other-worldly religion to this-worldly moksha; he calls it spirituality. The conversation brings to dialogue the possible political consequences of a this-worldly spirituality and the possible spiritual consequences of a reflexive Marxism keenly attuned to experiences of human suffering.

Key Words:

• Buddhism
• Marxism
• Religion
• Spirituality
• Violence

Acknowledgments

The editors of this special issue of Rethinking Marxism would like to thank Dr. Dibyesh Anand, for assistance in setting up the interview with the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Mr. Tenzin Taklha, Secretary, Office of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, for help in conducting the interview and for constant editorial support with respect to the transcript of the interview. The editors would also like to thank Karuna Chandrasekhar for help in transcription.

Notes

1 McLeod Ganj is a suburb of Dharamsala in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, India. It is known as “Little Lhasa” or “Dhasa” (a short form of Dharamshala used mainly by Tibetans) because of its large population of Tibetans. In March 1959, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, fled to India. The Indian government offered him refuge in Dharamshala, where he set up the Tibetan Government in Exile in 1960, while McLeod Ganj became his official residence and also home to several Buddhist monasteries and thousands of Tibetan refugees. See https://www.mcleodganj.com/about for details.

2 Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering.

3 It is this craving that leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there: that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.

4 It is the remainder-less fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.

5 The Eightfold Path: that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

6 Kedarnath Pandey, who later changed his name to Rahul Sankrityayan—after Gautam Buddha's son, Rahul, and Sankrityayan, meaning “assimilator”—did perfect justice in giving himself this new name, for he went on to become a renowned Buddhist scholar. Sankrityayan is called the “Father of Hindi Travelogue” because he played a pivotal role in giving travelogue a “literary form.” Even though he had a limited formal education, Sankrityayan wrote around 150 books on sociology, history, philosophy, Buddhism, science, drama, folklore, politics, Tibetology, lexicography, biography, autobiography, essays, and pamphlets in as many as five languages: Hindi, Sanskrit, Bhojpuri, Pali, and Tibetan. In 1937–8 and in 1947–8 he was appointed professor of Indology at the University of Leningrad. Sankrityayan was also an Indian nationalist, having been arrested and jailed for three years for anti-British writings and speeches. He was both a polymath and a polyglot. Read more at http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes/rahul-sankrityayan.html.

7 Nāgārjuna (ca. A.D. 150–250) is the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha himself. His philosophy of the “middle way” (madhyamaka), based around the central notion of “emptiness” (śūnyatā), influenced the Indian philosophical debate for a thousand years after his death; with the spread of Buddhism to Tibet, China, Japan, and other Asian countries, the writings of Nāgārjuna became an indispensable point of reference for their own philosophical inquiries. A specific reading of Nāgārjuna's thought, called Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka, became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nagarjuna for a detailed exposition.

8 Śāntideva (literally “god of peace”) was an eighth-century (ca. A.D. 685–763) Indian Buddhist monk and scholar at Nalanda and is among the most renowned and esteemed figures in the entire history of Mahayana Buddhism. He was an adherent of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nāgārjuna. Śāntideva is the author of the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra (glossed as “A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life” or “Entering the Path of Enlightenment”) and the Śikṣāsamuccaya. The Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is the primary source of most of the Tibetan Buddhist literature on the cultivation of altruism and the Spirit of Awakening. The term Mahāyāna, literally “Great Vehicle,” came to mean the idea of attempting to become a bodhisattva (and eventually a buddha) oneself rather than merely following the teachings set out by Siddhārtha Gautama (considered the original Buddha). An introduction to and commentary on the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra by the fourteenth Dalai Lama, called A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night, was printed in 1994 (Shambhala). A commentary on the “Patience” chapter was provided by the Dalai Lama in Healing Anger (Snow Lion, 1997), and his commentaries on the “Wisdom” chapter can be found in Practicing Wisdom (2004, Wisdom Publications). See http://www.iep.utm.edu/santideva and http://shantidevameditation.org/shantideva-story for details.

9 It was a moment of table turning; and “table turning” or “turning the table” is Marx's (2016, 39) metaphor (in Capital, vol. 1: “In the expression of value there is a complete turn of the tables”). Conventional standards of interviewing suggest that one person (the interviewer) asks/poses questions and the other person (the interviewee) answers/responds to the questions. What happens when the interviewee begins to ask questions? What happens when the other poses questions—questions that have not been already anticipated/assimilated by the self? Why would the other ask questions? When the other knows? When the other already knows that I come from and represent the journal Rethinking Marxism? Why would the other ask, “Are you a Marxist?” What is the other hinting at? Is the question, “Are you still a Marxist”—the stress on the still, with the exclamation mark: still!—“still a Marxist, after all that you have heard and seen about our suffering?” Was there a secret ethical charge in the question? I was somewhat paralyzed by the question, paralyzed as I was already by the experience of visiting the Tibet museum in McLeod Ganj, a visit that preceded the question, the shame the visit generated: What have we done? What have we, as Marxists, done in Tibet? How could we have perpetuated such brutality? A certain numbness comes to haunt one as one makes one's way through the Tibet museum. And here was the living embodiment of the brutalized; here was the brutalized asking me, “Are you a Marxist? Are you still a Marxist,” after all that you have heard and seen? Can you be one?

For a moment, I found it difficult to say with consummate ease and pride, “Yes, I am one.” I felt for a moment I would be failing the brutalized, I would be failing history and the history of brutality, if I uttered, without a pause, without a moment's reflection, without doubt, and with too much confidence, “Yes, I am a Marxist.” Faced with the history and experience of violence, face-to-face with the brutalized, I couldn’t say with confidence, “Yes, I am.” I could only manage, “Not in the old way.” It was like saying, “Yes, I am. I am still. But not in the old way”—the “ways” that have brutalized you. It was as if to reassure the brutalized: I have heard you. I feel for you. I am not like them. “We”—the Rethinking Marxism collective—are not like them. We are in search of a different Marxism. Of Marxism with a difference.