Buddhism is politically quietist traditionally, but Abrahamic religions are politically activist, so Western reception of Buddhism requires transforming it into “engaged” Buddhism. It’s hard for someone raised in the West to look at Nazis and just shrug and say that they can only kill the body but not the soul, but that is more or less what Buddhists before 1800 would say.
I am not a scholar but what little I know of East Asian history strongly suggests otherwise, particularly in Japan, where even today one of the biggest and most active political parties (Komeito) is just the political wing of a Buddhist sect (Soka Gakkai.) Any religion which is adopted by the elite class becomes politically active. Buddhism is no different that Christianity, Judaism or Islam in this regard.
Komeito is post-war, so doesn’t constitute a counter-example.
Buddhists pretty much had the opinion that a king who supports the sangha is a dharma king, whatever other sins he’s committing. The important thing is that the king pays the monastery for his legitimation. Beyond that, they’re not greedy. The king is probably going to hell for 10 million years for all the mayhem he’s causing. No need to be rude about it.
Are you aware that a sect of Theravada Buddhism has been perpetuating genocide against the Rohingya population of Myanmar for almost 5 years now?
How about the dozens of self-immolations performed by Tibetan Buddhists to protest China's annexation of their homeland?
Honestly, it's hard not to think of Buddhism as a religion which is traditionally politically activist. Wasn't Siddhartha himself a wealthy prince who only left his life of comfort and privilege after being shocked by the injustice and pain that he saw when he stepped out of his ivory tower?
The parent comment just the typical western romanticisation of eastern religion. Why are our religions so bad and corrupted, while those mystical buddhists are so pure and enlightened?... It’s just nonsense really.
Who says quietism is good? Or romantic? It seems to me that the Romantic vision is of an exotic kingdom where the state and religion are a utopian whole.
Look, you can be against Orientalism without pushing nonsense like all religions just being the same under the skin. Religions are really different from each other, because they do different things in their societies. Some things are the same in all or most societies because we are all humans, but there’s also a lot of cross society diversity and you can talk about those differences by making sweeping generalizations. Yes, generalizations are simplifications and can be done poorly, but if you try to do without them, you just have to give up on understanding anything at all about humans.
I’m not saying simplifications aren’t valid. I’m saying this simplification is simply wrong.
Theologically Buddhism is not a quietist religion. Buddhism has both communal and vocal worship rituals (mantra chanting). It has some quietist rituals, like meditation. But you can’t just pick one aspect of a religion and say it describes the whole thing. Otherwise a contemplating monk would make Christianity quietist too.
In terms of social issues it’s certainly not quietist either. Some Buddhists will argue that Buddhism is apolitical, and others will argue the opposite. I’ve heard Christian priests take either side of that issue too.
Then when you put theology aside, it’s not quietist in practice either. Any place that you have a large population of Buddhists, you’re going to have Buddhist political activism (which is more to do with them just being people, rather than specifically Buddhists).
The simplification only makes sense when viewed from the misinformed, romanticized perspective.
Okay, I sort of suspected the problem is that I didn't define "quietist" before, but I didn’t have a real keyboard at the time.
Chanting mantras (???) is not an example of being "non-quietist." Political quietism is the belief that the material world is basically screwed and there's no use in bashing your head in trying to fix it. It means advocating total disengaging from government—including not bothering to advocate for less activist government. That politics will not alleivate our true causes of suffering is a trivial corollary to the First Noble Truth in Buddhism. There are occasional strains of Christian quietism but overall, Abrahamic faiths don't believe you should just sit around while the world is burning. They think you should try to fix government.
Judaism begins as an explicitly political project. There are kings who are "wicked" or not based on whether they oppress the people and worship "foreign" gods. The project of the prophets is to reform these kings. The Jews are sent into Babylonian exile. This isn't taken as a sign that land doesn't matter, you can be Jewish anywhere, what's really important is spiritual worship, or whatever else. No, this is taken as a sign that God is punishing the Jews, so they need to be on their best behavior to get their land back! All of the religions that derive from Judaism take from it the goal that the state works to protect the poor, do justice, and promote true religion.
Okay, Christianity comes along as a reformation/expansion of Judaism. It has some quietistic elements ("render unto Caesar" is quietistic) and emerging under persecution leads to a little bit of fatalism about reforming the state, but post-Constantine, the project is mostly about creating some sort of symbiosis between the popes and the emperors. There are two spheres of influence (secular and religious), but even within the secular sphere, there is an explicit goal of perfecting the state. Even with the Protestant Reformation, while there are some quietistic strains like the Quakers and the literal Quietists, you still end up with things like Calvin running Geneva and the Westphalian settlement still assumes that each territory will have an explicit religious affiliation.
So then there’s Islam. Islam I know the least about, but obviously jihad is a central concern of Islam, and there’s an explicit goal of creating a politicial sphere in which God’s justice reigns. Islam is an explicit continuation of the Jewish/Christian project with the goal of creating a universal kingdom of divinely inspired governance. There are some Suffis and others who think the real jihad is the spiritual jihad, but physical jihad is also a pretty big theme in the history of Islam.
In the Enlightenment, humanistic atheism emerges as another sucessor to the Abrahamic tradition. It drops the supernatural elements and the belief in God, but it absolutely doubles down on political perfectionism. There are a lot of conflicting schools of thought on how to arrange the state to achieve maximum liberty, equality, and fraternity, but everyone is on board with that being the goal. There are essentially no big movements that say “politics is dirty and never helps; your best bet is to just reform youself.” Even movements that seem like they might want to say that, like Ayn Rand-ism, end up swerving at the last second and saying “government sucks and never helps… and therefore we need to put all of effort into creating a political movement to stymie the spread of government and create libertopia.”
Nietzsche’s Geneology of Morality is pretty fanciful as history, but as a metaphor for what happened that made the West different from prior and other cultures, it’s not that crazy. At some point, the Abrahamic cultures decided that we can and should do something to keep the Nobles from trampling over everybody else. This is an important historical change in how we see the world.
Pre-Western Buddhism was just not like this. The political goal of Buddhism is to get tax money for the sangha. That’s it. There’s nothing about trying to reform the state, to get the kings to be less vicious, to get the kings to live by the laws of dharma. It’s just not there. You see political agitation and interventions by monastaries all the time, but the interventions always amount to “give us tax money, so we can afford to do our Buddhism stuff on our own!” They never make demands about reforming government qua government until after Western contact. (NB Islam is absolutely a part of the West, and any schema that doesn’t put it in the West is garbage.) Even Ashoka, who kinda felt bad about all his conquering, didn't actually stop doing violence after converting to Buddhism. He just started sponsoring a bunch of monasteries and councils and whatnot. And this was not considered a sign he was a "fake" Buddhist. It was just assumed that being king is bad for your karma because inevitably you get sucked into doing a ton of violence. The king's best bet is to give enough money to monks to balance all this bad karma out.
If you look around today, you can find various ethnic groups using “Buddhism” as the name of their cause, but look closely at what’s going on with them. Even after Western contact, the goal is still not “let’s get rid of the Burmese generals because they’re oppressing the poor”. It’s “let’s get rid of the Karen because they’re not like us.” It’s just a classic case of seeing religion and ethnicity as two names for the same thing, and then trying to stamp out other ethnic groups. This sucks, but it doesn’t bear on the historical nature of Buddhism or whether Buddhism typically is more quietistic than Abrahamic religions. It just means that genocide is a common impulse in the modern world, and when it arises, it often latches onto "religion" as the name for the group it's trying to eliminate.
