anarchism and buddhism

it's funny because i have read a Koan a while back in which a Chan teacher slapped an emperor in the face because the emperor though he had a superior status than the teacher. the emperor realized that just because he was in a higher social status did not make him any better than other people. in fact, it was a hindrance which made him worse than others because it strengthened his ego.

Chan buddhism is deeply rooted in Taoism, and Taoism is what originally attracted me to buddhism. so im wondering if anyone here is interested in buddhism or taoism. i'd be glad to talk about this, it would be very interesting.

I have the Tao Te Ching, and i like it a lot. In fact, fairly often it's considered to be the first anarchist writings. Very insightful piece of literature. Though I'm not religious, i'm an absurdist.

lol, the tao te ching. thats what introduced me to anarchism and eastern thought.
taoism is more libertarian than anarchist though when you think about it. there would be a leader, but he would no control society, he would just defend certain rights of the people.

god0fmusic wrote:

taoism is more libertarian than anarchist though when you think about it. there would be a leader, but he would no control society, he would just defend certain rights of the people.

Well then i wouldn't call him a leader, just some Robocop-like entity. And how would he defend rights with no control? He must control something if he is to defend rights (weapons, soldiers, law).

More importantly, why couldn't the people do this for themselves? If they're armed, i think they'd have a rather easy time thwarting any authoritarian advances on their liberty. Besides, even when you see the very few instances of crime popping up in old communal villages, it's handled by the people involved. Until the birth of the State, people were quite capable of handling all of their own problems. It's only since then that people have been overcome with ineptitude. When the people had their initiative taken away, they learned to cope differently, since all the issues within their society were then controlled by a select few, a complete stratification of their once peaceful, equal, and usually prosperous society. It's obvious to see what the consequence of this new structure of society would be for people. They're personality, spirit, work ethic, everything would have changed with such an enormous reversal of roles.

Once we bring ourselves back to what was very natural for us, that being grassroots democracy, cooperation, peace, we'll re-learn how to operate our society, including how to deal with the rare occasion of crime (that is, an act of coercive authority). So i see no need for any leaders (in fact you could argue that the beginning of "leaders" was the beginning of significant crime, as we see with the birth of capitalism; a new "civilized" society that brought with it enormous social excess, unbelievable violence and pathetic disorder).

violence and ignorance is not the only way to rule. reason is another way to rule, and i think that a leader or an elite (or a group of awakened people, like some anarchists) needs to use reason to awaken people so they can rule themselves.

this is something which i think is closely related to taoism.

god0fmusic wrote:

violence and ignorance is not the only way to rule. reason is another way to rule, and i think that a leader or an elite (or a group of awakened people, like some anarchists) needs to use reason to awaken people so they can rule themselves.

As an anarchist, it should hit you pretty hard how much this resembles leninism and other forms of vanguardism, like capitalism and fascism. All of them say the same things, but none of them can accomplish a rule by reason. The line between rhetoric and reality should be quite bold to us.