The main problem with so-called “Engaged Buddhism” is that this “engagement” has always amounted to an uncritical (and invariably superficial) adoption of bits and pieces of western leftist ideology, which are then dressed  up with pseudo-dharmic phraseology.

The result is twofold: (1) a dharmicized politics that claims to be non-political, and, worse (much worse), (2) a politicized dharma that claims to speak for all right-thinking Buddhists.

The resulting moral absolutism leads to (indeed, demands) attacks on all Buddhists who fail to live up to a set of newly minted political litmus tests.

And now in the wake of the October 7 pogrom in Israel, we have the spectacle of a smal number of outspoken Buddhists who uncritically repeat the most extreme antisemitic rhetoric of Israel-hatred, while demanding that all Buddhists must join them in their denunciations of the new great enemy of the Dharma, the new Mara incarnate: Zionism.

Happy Shining Antisemites