Buddha and Marx
Yuvraj Saharan| 03 January, 2016 The Statesman
A few days ago I read BR Ambedkar’s essay, ‘Buddha or Karl Marx. Ambedkar writes that the basic tenets of Marxism involve violence, as the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be established without. The second objection was on the duration of dictatorship. He writes that it is unclear even amongst Marxists how long shall the dictatorship last. Later in his life Ambedkar advocated the path of Buddha to bring about transformation in society. He writes that most Marxists may have a natural aversion to anything closely resembling religion, but it is important to keep one’s prejudices aside (for a while) and critically examine the social tenets of Buddha’s teachings. Buddhist social tenets are not meant to create a utopian socialism but are directed towards increasing happiness and welfare of citizens.
Buddha and Marx are two personalities with a time interval of more than two thousand years. Both in their own ways, wanted to bring about change in society. One had a firm faith in non-violence; the other could not foresee the path to future without violence. Joseph Conrad in the Heart of Darkness writes that man lives like he dreams, he dreams alone and hence lives alone. I wonder to what degree this precondition of human living goes into Buddha and Marx’s ways of understanding the world. Buddha said that suffering is a part of existence; whether that suffering is individual or social is not fully clear. Does the social suffering comprise the sum-total of individual sufferings or is it something extraneous to the sum-total of individuals and therefore more, perhaps different? Buddha said every man suffers; there is no escape from suffering. On inquiry by one of his disciples on what is suffering, Buddha replied suffering encompasses all the disappointments, confusion, anxieties that afflict a human being.
In comparison Marx divides the world into two classes, one is the ruler and therefore must exploit to maintain its hegemony, the other ruled and thus by its nature subservient and exploited. Marx has not written much on the individual. Individuality, according to Marx, is shaped and made up by historical forces beyond an individual’s comprehension and therefore unseen and absent. And thus Marx writes, that on founding of Communism exploitation would cease, ushering in some form of unexploitative society. Marx was writing in mid-nineteenth century, living in exile, in London, using the resources available at what is now called the British Museum library.
Buddha lived four hundred years before the beginning of the Common Era. Living at that time he was disenchanted by distortion of thought and spread of ritualistic practices. A time that is so distant that it seems unimaginable to comprehend its social conditions and ordinary men and women. Buddha codified his thoughts into an eight-fold path. He did not write a book as detailed as Das Kapital, based on analysis of social and economic conditions and the two classes, indeed the idea that has come to be called Marxism. There is a sharp difference between Marxian and Marxist. Marxian can be called an analytic concept that uses Marx’s writings, whereas Marxist refers to an adherent of a political ideology. Thus one can be a Marxian and simultaneously not necessarily be a Marxist.
Buddha’s concept of impermanence is enlightening. Buddha said, all that we have in the world is marked by change and therefore impermanent. Human nature seeks a certainty amidst that change, but these attempts are futile and permanency elusive. Acceptance of the natural order brings about a conscious transformation in our minds and thereby we begin to understand ourselves and others. According to Buddha, seeking permanence in human life is not accepting life. Buddha’s impermanence does not mean an unsteady mind; steadiness of mind is a pre-requisite to understand the suffering that afflicts life. Many even in the time of Buddha were confounded by his idea of impermanence. After a little thinking it can be realized that impermanence of natural phenomena and paraphernalia associated with conventional life is not a vision of negation but of knowledge and understanding. Marx described all tools of living as intrinsically exploitative as their foundation was built on unfair economic relations.
To mark a distinction between Buddha and Marx’s thoughts; Buddha’s thoughts eventually formed a religion and Marx’s an ideology. Religion is not only concerned with explaining the world but also with personal conduct. Ideology is seeing the way the world functions and in defining its parts. Ideology is not concerned with birth and death as religions are. Although Buddha was different, he did not seek an irrational explanation to understand the world. Buddha has been called the greatest spiritual teacher of India. His ideas were not limited to the realm of spirit and had and perhaps still have social and material consequences. Marx was a scholar and a revolutionary. Some argue that Marx ignored human nature and the role natural resources play in creating and sustaining relations. His ideas eventually penetrated the psyche of many culminating in twentieth century revolutions. During Marx’s lifetime a commune was founded in Paris but did not last long and crumbled as soon as it had begun. Buddha stresses the importance of understanding, empathy and decency in our conduct, Marx warns us on the fractures that are inevitable in a market economy and its consequences on the general population.
Marx’s theory of alienation describes the way in which a man becomes alienated from the society he functions in. In the capitalist mode of production, alienation refers to workers becoming alienated from the output and losing control over their product and life. This eventually produces a sense of estrangement from the self and is not limited to the individual but spreads across social classes. Umberto Eco in his essay on literature writes that most writings can be classified as either autobiographical or autocritical. Marx’s writings were not always literary, as they intended to reflect his revolutionary fervour, but when he wrote without he exemplified being autocritical. Self was not left alone but was constantly under different forms of criticism, at times social, political, economic or psychological.
Text has a special significance in Marx’s writings. He wrote not with the aim of adding onto the world of literary output, which in itself is a worthy desire and a legitimate aim, but to create conditions for revolution. Buddha was much closer to poetic sensibility. He wanted to understand human passions, and poetry is often described as an essay to congeal human passions. Buddha didn’t leave any texts behind but left an unfathomable insight into the human mind. His insights were so complete that they almost touched physical reality. Buddha’s poetic way of seeing the world led him to discover human passions, their origin and end. Besides the immediate and direct, do Buddha and Marx have anything to say to thinking and inquisitive minds? Marx depicts the world and ways it can be made; Buddha tells us to understand the causes of our disenchantment.