Tibet’s cause was done no favors this week by one of its Hollywood supporters, glamor icon Sharon Stone, who did a Glenn Hoddle by suggesting the Sichuan earthquake was the down to bad karma, a kind of cosmic payback for China’s treatment of Tibet.
The deep unpleasantness and anti-popular attitudes of airhead Western Buddhists and many Tibet supporters go right back to the founder of Buddhism, Sakyamuni himself. Sakyamuni was rich, heir to a kingdom; he sought and obtained the patronage of the rich, and his renunciation of wealth and royal status was always and at any time reversible.
His concept of “suffering”, one of the cornerstones of Buddhist thought, is that of a man who has everything, but still feels there is something lacking in his life. Rather like Hollywood’s ignorati devotees of the Dalai Lama.
Unlike Sakyamuni, Jesus of Nazareth was a carpenter, whose basic instinct was to sympathise with working people and the poor. Blessed are the poor, he said (although his epigones later bowdlerized his words) for they will inherit the earth. It is more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
For the Christians (the early Christians at least) the rich will be punished in Christ’s Kingdom - or will simply not be present - while the last (the poor) will be first. For Buddhists, the poor are already being punished and, by corollary, the rich rewarded, on the basis of their good works or mis-deeds in previous incarnations; it is a fundamental difference between the faiths.
All of which should go some way towards explaining the insufferable smugness of Sakyanmuni’s followers. Of course I exlude from this the millions of simple devotees of the Boddhisattva Guanyin. Also the tens or hundreds of thousands of Tibetan monks who, like all monks in history, take orders out of poverty and remain ignorant of everything but the formulae of their monastic routine.
