Hmm...The Dalai Lama Doesn't Seem To Be A Very Good Buddhist

Um, let's just say this is interesting:

Usually what we hear from the Dalai Lama is an insistant yet soothing voice for compassion and peace.

So Tsering Namgyal, a journalist based in Minneapolis, was jolted by the Dalai Lama's talk to 150 Chinese students this month at the University of Minnesota. Writing at Religion Dispatches, he says:

Midway through the conversation, His Holiness, much to their surprise, told them "as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I consider myself a Marxist ... But not a Leninist," he clarified....

Marx was not against religion or religious philosophy per se but against religious institutions that were allied, during Marx's time, with the European ruling class.

Wow. This is spectacularly wrong, and I can hardly see how this could be a matter of opinion. (This is true looking at it from either the philosophical or historical point of view.) Marx was very clearly against religion per se. You see, Marx was a materialist. He denied the very possibility of real spiritual existence. The only meaning which can exist for a Marxist is a meaning based upon the relationship of thing to thing, e.g. workers to the means of production, the individual to the superstructure of the state, the worker alienated from the product of his labor, etc.

How can such a materialism be squared with the basic tenets of Buddhism? Well, it cannot, not without making Buddhism a dead thing.

Which would be fine by the Chinese....