Encouraging Buddhist communities to resist the new presidential administration, San Francisco Zen Center priest Jiryu Rutschman-Byler argues that the idea of “apolitical Buddhism” is flawed from the start, based on four misconceptions.



“Buddhism is apolitical! Buddhism needs to stay apolitical!”

I’ve been hearing this a lot lately. It’s a tempting idea, and there are some good intentions behind it.

But it’s not true, and it’s not helpful. And it’s certainly not timely.

First off, to say that Buddhism should be apolitical is just to say “I prefer not to use the lens of politics to look at how Buddhism functions in the world.” It doesn’t change the fact that Buddhism has people in it, doing things and affecting each other. Wherever Buddhism goes, it has a culture, and a flavor, and a social impact. And that’s true of any human project. Believing something is “apolitical” is like believing that “secularity” or “science” aren’t belief systems. Secularity is just another belief system, and “apolitical” is just another politics. Like it or not, where there are people, there are politics.

My friends who advocate for apolitical Buddhism ask with such sincerity: “Why do you have to take sides? That just alienates people! Why not just love and accept everyone equally?

Specifically here and now, in the U.S.A. two weeks from the inauguration of Donald Trump, the politics of being “apolitical” are very clear. Expressing the value of the “apolitical” amounts to an active politics of complacency and complicity. Who does being “apolitical” benefit? A friend recently shared Desmond Tutu’s words:

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

SIGN UP FOR LION’S ROAR NEWSLETTERS Get even more Buddhist wisdom delivered straight to your inbox! Sign up for Lion’s Roar free email newsletters. Leave this field empty if you're human:

My friends who advocate for apolitical Buddhism ask with such sincerity: “Why do you have to take sides? That just alienates people! Why not just love and accept everyone equally?

Squeak, squeak, squeak goes the mouse. Snap, snap, snap go its tiny bones.

So far I’ve come across four versions of “Buddhism is apolitical,” and I’d suggest that they are all based on misunderstandings.

1. The Teaching of Emptiness is Apolitical

At the core of Buddhism (Mahayana at least) is the teaching of Emptiness. It’s taught in different ways, but it amounts to the appreciation that no idea, no thought, no view has any contact at all with reality. Even the idea “reality.” Even the most basic views like “there is” or “there is not.” None of these concepts come anywhere close to capturing the truth of existence.

It’s easy to see how one could gather from this teaching that Buddhism is apolitical. If Buddhism says that even the almost inconceivably subtle thought “there is a world” completely misses the point, how much more so some almost inconceivably complex and judgmental thought like “Russian intervention in the U.S. election system is unacceptable and we need a president who won’t be manipulated by Putin!”

Naturally, all politics is just more false thinking and views, and as Buddhists we need to let it all go. Better to have no view at all.

But as our aforementioned mouse might want to point out, there are a couple of problems here.

The first is a classical problem, diagnosed in the teachings themselves. Ideas like “let it all go” or “better to have no view at all” are, at the end of the day, just another flavor of the same. “Nothing is true” is no less of an idea than “Bernie really pointed the right way forward for the country” — it’s more of the same. Sticking to the idea of emptiness — that “no view” always gets it right and “a view” always gets it wrong — isn’t just a misunderstanding, but a kind of Buddhist disease. As the ancient Chan Master Yunmen said, better to have a whole mountain of views that “things exist” than just a particle of the view that “things don’t exist.”

That it’s better to make the mistake “things exist” than to make the mistake “things don’t exist” gets us to the second problem with the idea that emptiness implies apolitics.

Buddhism has two sides. We could call these Ultimate and Relative, or Wisdom and Compassion, or Emptiness and Precepts. Alongside the relentless going-beyond that is the emptiness teaching, there is always in authentic Buddhism the appreciation of the conventional world, the everyday world that we experience as people and objects and places. This everyday deluded world is of no less value than this “true” world. (In fact, it’s of exactly equal value, because it’s exactly the same world.) And even though at the end of the day there’s no question that the whole show is delusion, our responsibility as Buddhists is to live harmoniously in that delusion. The bodhisattva path is to observe ethical precepts and to manifest compassion in this empty world.

When someone is attacking our friends, or our relations, or our earth, or ourselves, we must tell them to stop. Even if that means we have to let go of our ideas about “emptiness” and descend into the mud of “politics.”

Emptiness is only one wing. Without this other wing — Compassion or Precepts — the bird doesn’t just fail to fly, it dies a writhing death on the ground. With both wings it takes flight, like in the old Jataka tale, carrying water in its beak to put out a forest fire.

So when someone is attacking our friends, or our relations, or our earth, or ourselves, we must tell them to stop. Even if that means we have to let go of our ideas about “emptiness” and descend into the mud of “politics.”

2. Buddhist Institutions Taking a Political Position Will Alienate People

The premise of Mahayana, or “Universal Vehicle” Buddhism is that all beings are included; none are left out.

Part of the problem of having a view is that it often leads to us excluding those with other views. (This is part of why Buddhists are told not to have them, as just discussed.) When Buddhist institutions or temples or centers express some political stance, all of the people who see the world otherwise are marginalized or outright excluded from the transformational and salvific practices of the dharma. Were a Buddhist center to assert, for example, “We stand opposed to and ready to resist Trump’s racist and ecocidal vision,” the people who support Trump would feel unwelcome and thereby lose their access to the dharma. Moreover, the center itself would suffer, as it would come to lack intellectual or political diversity and breed an insular and self-congratulatory culture.

(A subcategory of this position is, “It’s okay to take a stand on issues, but you can’t mention politicians.” In this view, the difference between saying “We are for bridges, not walls” and saying “Unlike Trump, we are for bridges, not walls” is the difference between excluding people and not.)

This rationale for why Buddhism should be apolitical is insidious, especially here and now, because it’s based on a lovely (and dharmically sound) idea of “including all,” but totally misses our political and social reality.

The political and social reality is that Donald Trump has targeted all kinds of people — immigrants and refugees, Muslims, women, LGBTQ folks, etc. — and he has fed and fanned and delighted in a White Nationalist core base. The apolitical folks want the stated attitude of our temples and congregations to be “Here, we don’t do politics – just sitting and study and chanting.”

Do I really need to explain how this is a problem? How this nice-seeming “non-position” actually is a position, one that alienates the hell out of a whole ton of people? (If you need a pointer, think back to the mouse: “Oh, we don’t mind here if you’re an elephant or a mouse! We don’t get into that stuff.”)

To put it in Zen terms, you can’t get out of the koan. (And you shouldn’t try to! You have to stay right in the middle of the problem, right where it hurts and consumes you and is totally impossible. That’s the only way forward.) The ancients say, “Thirty blows either way,” and, “Speech and silence both equally fail.” You aren’t off the hook by just holding your tongue.

3. Buddhists Are Traditionally Apolitical

The idea here is that Buddhists always have avoided politics — until just now when American Lefty Buddhists have come to destroy the Dharma!

This is a fantasy, one that especially afflicts us modern Western Buddhists with such little lived experience of Buddhism as a political and historical force. The actual history of Buddhism in Asia is precisely a history of Buddhist interaction with politics and power. (This goes all the way back — who would call the Buddha’s rejection of the caste system “apolitical”?) There wouldn’t be a Buddhism today without its deliberate political engagement everywhere it has been.

My guess is that our assumption of Buddhism as an apolitical tradition is based on a naïve reading of parts of the early monastic code that warn against affiliation with political parties or factions. By naïve I mean taking the texts as descriptive of actual monastic life rather than as prescriptive of an ideal monastic life — they said not to, so they must not have!

Whatever those early scriptures said, it should be pretty clear that admonitions to pre-modern Indian subjects about relating to their rulers does not need be the last word for us on how to skillfully engage with a modern participatory democracy.

Whatever those early scriptures said, whatever word they used for “politics” and whatever they meant by that (and not to mention whether any of that is relevant to modern and mostly-householding Buddhists), it should be pretty clear that admonitions to pre-modern Indian subjects about relating to their rulers does not need be the last word for us on how to skillfully engage with a modern participatory democracy.

4. Church and State Are Separate in the U.S. — So Buddhist Institutions Can’t be Political

This version of the idea is nobly and sincerely held, and I hate to be too hard on it, but it’s just impossible to square with our actual political system. Have you noticed how much the Christian Right has accomplished in the last few decades?! Evangelical churches can get George W. elected, and somehow squeeze their God-loving noses tight enough even to elect the — how to put this… “not-entirely-pious?” — Donald Trump, but Buddhists centers can’t even say they disagree with him?

This legal objection to politicized Buddhism isn’t totally unfounded – there are indeed limitations on what a religious nonprofit can say or do before it loses its IRS tax-exempt status, and there are semantic and financial landmines that institutional administrators should probably be aware of. But the idea that Buddhists centers should self-censor in anticipation of legal consequences that the Christian Right, or even the Quakers, have scarcely suffered, is hard to swallow. We could work hard to become the most pro-actively legally compliant religion of them all, and who would notice or care?

So What Is Buddhist Politics?

If Buddhism is not apolitical, what politics does it have? Would I say there is a right Buddhist politics?

Yes.

I’d say it’s the politics of Bodhisattva Precepts — especially in their active, positive aspect: We vow “to support life,” not just “not to kill”; “to speak the truth,” not just “not to lie”; etc. It’s the politics of interdependence — which means no scapegoating immigrants, no dehumanizing refugees, no big beautiful walls around my country, my race, or myself. It’s the politics of nourishing the planet that nourishes us, not seeing it as God’s gift for humans to extract from. And so on. That’s how I see it, at least.

But what is Buddhist politics, really? The peace-making activism of Thich Nhat Hanh? The wholehearted imperialism of early twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism? Militant Burmese Buddhist nationalism?

What do you say? What will your center, your temple say?

Buddhism is not apolitical. With love in your heart, alienating no one, act now. Act clearly. Look, someone’s alienated. Speak! Speak again! Stand up for something. Follow the precepts and insist on them. Honor interdependence, and insist on it. Stand up for the vulnerable. Stand up for yourself. Make no mistake, though you can’t get it right. Vow to resist Trump, and to resist without hate.

A snarkier version of this article first appeared on the blog No Zen in the West.