Communism and Buddhism
Buddhism has been said to be compatible with communism given that both can be interpreted as atheistic and arguably share some similarities regarding their views of the world of nature and the relationship between matter and mind. Regardless, Buddhists have still been persecuted in communist states, notably China, Mongolia and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Many supporters of the Viet Cong were Buddhists, strongly believing in the unification of Vietnam, with many opposing South Vietnam due to former president Ngo Dinh Diem's persecution of Buddhism during the early 1960s.
The current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, speaks positively of Marxism, despite the heavy persecution of the Tibetan people by the Chinese communists.
Read more about this topic: Marxism And Religion
Famous quotes containing the words communism and, communism and/or buddhism:
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)
“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)