When White People Quote the Buddha...

(a draft)

Some people seem to have a “white-washed” image of the Buddha, Gandhi and MLK. According to them, these leaders of great movements in history were never angry, never impatient and never called their opponents names. The Buddha in particular has become the patron saint of the socio-politically constipated. To them, all he talked about was taking your time, meditating and not upsetting anyone or anything around us. Really?

Prince Gautama was born a Hindu and rebelled against the rule of the Brahmin priests. The priests in his time stifled reform and made themselves the middle men between God and human beings. They were very similar to how the Pope and the Catholic priests acted at the time of Martin Luther. Sanskrit was the Latin of the Hindu priests and Pali was the Buddha’s German/Italian. There were even Hindu indulgences and relics. Part of the process of Gautama becoming the Buddha (the enlightened one) was to reject his parents’ religion (Hinduism) and start his own movement. We do not have actual quotes of the Buddha calling the priests names but the Jatakas (Buddhist parables) are full of (often not complimentary) references to Brahmins.

There was tremendous urgency about the Buddha’s teachings. He advocated social service and justice and not just meditating under a tree as some of our white Buddhist friends have us believe. His disciples traveled great distances to spread his message of egalitarianism. From its birthplace in India/Nepal, Buddhism spread to the far corners of Asia in relatively short time partly because of its appeal to the common man and woman (yes, there were many female Buddhist monks even, called bhikkhuni). Many Brahmin priests of that time probably would have called the Buddha a socialist (if they knew the word, that is) and a troublemaker.

In the case of Gandhi and Dr. King, it’s important to remember they repeatedly broke unjust laws, courted arrest and spent significant time in jail. Gandhi refused to refer to non-violence as passive resistance because there was nothing passive about it. Several things Gandhi said about Europeans and their tactics were blunt and what we today would characterize as "in your face" (see a collection of Gandhi's less quoted writings here).

Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (in his appropriately titled book Why We Can’t Wait) is very critical of the “white moderate.” Here's an excerpt:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

(When you have 20-30 minutes, please read the entire letter - included here).

My point is this: nothing significant ever got accomplished on this earth without friction. Telling agents of change to slow down and wait for a “more convenient season” is “paternalistic” and “frustrating” (to paraphrase Dr. King). Especially coming from straight white males, who are the beneficieries of multiple forms of privilege, these psuedo-Buddhist messages seem self-complacent at best and self-serving at its worst. Please do not try to remake leaders of color into your image. We need a sense of urgency to surmount the problems our people face. We surely do not need our leaders misrepresented and appropriated, especially if it results in slowing our progress.

This transformation of some of our leaders (of color) into anemic, non-threatening figures may be psychologically comforting to liberal Whites who would want to deny conservative White theories that all people of color are dangerous. This transformation may also be subconsciously christologic: every great leader behaves like Jesus did or like we think Jesus did since Jesus was also a revolutionary in his own right.

(Dec, 2009)