If vajrayana is real and the dalai lamai is a manifestation of avalokistesvara, why didn't he stop the chinese from invading?
Fuck why didn't any of them use their supposed siddhis? milarepa before he even became a buddhist was supposedly able to call down avalanches and rockslides, and could supposedly phase through physical material and do other crazy shit after he became a buddhist.

there are a lot of supposed incarnations of various buddhas and bodhisattvas from tibet, a lot of supposed rebirths of various masters capable of doing wild things with their siddhis, yet none of them did anything. they just instantly fled, or got rounded up and put in a camp, like Garchen Rinpoche.

Mao Zedong was possessed by the greater Spirit. He chased the demons out of China.

>>40730419 (OP)
uh well maybe Varjayana isn't real after all
/x/isters they got us again

The wicked so often turn to psychism... "spiritual people" are such easy prey for Satanists.

>>40730419 (OP)
Dalai Lama was too busy raping young boys

>>40730419 (OP)
There is no way to tell a chinese person apart from a tibet person. They were meant to be part of the same nation.

>UGH I JUST CANT DO COLLECTIVE LABOUR I JUST CANT OH NOOOO DON'T MAKE ME GO WORK ON A FARM AND READ MARXIST THEORY AAAACK

hahaha

བོད་གུང་ཁྲན་ཏང

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth
Michael Parenti
Berkeley, California

Throughout the ages there has prevailed a distressing symbiosis between religion and violence. The histories of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam are heavily laced with internecine vendettas, inquisitions, and wars. Again and again, religionists have claimed a divine mandate to terrorize and massacre heretics, infidels, and other sinners.

Some people have argued that Buddhism is different, that it stands in marked contrast to the chronic violence of other religions. But a glance at history reveals that Buddhist organizations throughout the centuries have not been free of the violent pursuits so characteristic of other religious groups. In the 20th century alone, from Thailand to Burma to Korea to Japan, Buddhists have clashed with each other and with non-Buddhists. In Sri Lanka, huge battles in the name of Buddhism are part of Sinhalese history.

Just a few years ago in South Korea, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order—reputedly devoted to a meditative search for spiritual enlightenment—fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its additional millions of dollars in property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various duties. The brawls left dozens of monks injured, some seriously.

>>40730666
But many present-day Buddhists in the United States would argue that none of this applies to the Dalai Lama and the Tibet he presided over before the Chinese crackdown in 1959. The Dalai Lama’s Tibet, they believe, was a spiritually oriented kingdom, free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, pointless pursuits, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, and a slew of travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La and the Dalai Lama as a wise saint, “the greatest living human,” as actor Richard Gere gushed.

The Dalai Lama himself lent support to this idealized image of Tibet with statements such as: “Tibetan civilization has a long and rich history. Thepervasive influence of Buddhism and the rigors of life amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.” In fact, Tibet’s history reads a little differently. In the 13th century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet. Here is a historical irony: the first Dalai Lama was installed by a Chinese army.

>>40730682
meds or kys.

choose wisely.

>>40730682
To elevate his authority beyond worldly challenge, the first Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, writing erotic poetry, and acting in other ways that might seem unfitting for an incarnate deity. For this he was “disappeared” by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized status as gods, five Dalai Lamas were murdered by their enlightened nonviolent Buddhist courtiers.

Shangri-La (for Lords and Lamas)

Religions have had a close relationship not only to violence but to economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into religious or secular manorial estates worked by serfs. Even a writer like Pradyumna Karan, sympathetic to the old order, admits that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches … In addition, individual monks and lamas were able to accumulate great wealth through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries went to the higher-ranking lamas, many of them scions of aristocratic families, while most of the lower clergy were as poor as the peasant class from which they sprang. This class-determined economic inequality within the Tibetan clergy closely parallels that of the Christian clergy in medieval Europe.

>>40730699
Along with the upper clergy, secular leaders did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. He also was a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some of its Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order and catch runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they became bonded for life. Tashi-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common practice for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated childhood rape not long after he was taken into the monastery at age nine. The monastic estates also conscripted peasant children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

>>40730716
In Old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. A small minority were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery.

In 1953, the greater part of the rural population—some 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000—were serfs. Tied to the land, they were allotted only a small parcel to grow their own food. Serfs and other peasants generally went without schooling or medical care. They spent most of their time laboring for the monasteries and individual high-ranking lamas, or for a secular aristocracy that numbered not more than 200 wealthy families. In effect, they were owned by their masters who told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. A serf might easily be separated from his family should the owner send him to work in a distant location. Serfs could be sold by their masters, or subjected to torture and death.

A Tibetan lord would often take his pick of females in the serf population, if we are to believe one 22-year-old woman, herself a runaway serf: “All pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished.” They “were just slaves without rights.” Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture and forcibly bring back those who tried to flee. A 24-year-old runaway serf, interviewed by Anna Louise Strong, welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” During his time as a serf he claims he was not much different from a draft animal, subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold, unable to read or write, and knowing nothing at all.

>>40730725
In addition to being under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land—or the monastery’s land—without pay, the serfs were obliged to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. It was an efficient system of economic exploitation that guaranteed to the country’s religious and secular elites a permanent and secure labor force to cultivate their land holdings without burdening them either with any direct day-to-day responsibility for the serf’s subsistence and without the need to compete for labor in a market
context.

The common people labored under the twin burdens of the corvée (forced unpaid labor on behalf of the lord) and onerous tithes. They were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child, and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a new tree in their yard, for keeping domestic or barnyard animals, for owning a flower pot, or putting a bell on an animal. There were taxes for religious festivals, for singing, dancing, drumming, and bell ringing. People were taxed for being sent to prison and upon being released. Even beggars were taxed. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20–50% interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being placed into slavery for as long as the monastery demanded, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

>>40730725
In addition to being under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land—or the monastery’s land—without pay, the serfs were obliged to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. It was an efficient system of economic exploitation that guaranteed to the country’s religious and secular elites a permanent and secure labor force to cultivate their land holdings without burdening them either with any direct day-to-day responsibility for the serf’s subsistence and without the need to compete for labor in a market context.

The common people labored under the twin burdens of the corvée (forced unpaid labor on behalf of the lord) and onerous tithes. They were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child, and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a new tree in their yard, for keeping domestic or barnyard animals, for owning a flower pot, or putting a bell on an animal. There were taxes for religious festivals, for singing, dancing, drumming, and bell ringing. People were taxed for being sent to prison and upon being released. Even beggars were taxed. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20–50% interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being placed into slavery for as long as the monastery demanded, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their foolish and wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as an atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve upon being reborn. The rich and powerful of course treated their good fortune as a reward for—and tangible evidence of—virtue in past and present lives.

>>40730776
Torture and Mutilation in Shangri-La

In the Dalai Lama’s Tibet, torture and mutilation—including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation of arms and legs—were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, runaway serfs, and other “criminals.” Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”

Some Western visitors to Old Tibet remarked on the number of amputees to be seen. Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. Some monasteries had their own private prisons, reports Anna Louise Strong. In 1959, she visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, and breaking off hands. For gouging out eyes, there was a special stone cap with two holes in it that was pressed down over the head so that the eyes bulged out through the holes and could be more readily torn out. There were instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling.

>>40730666
>those trips
>that namefagging
>citing a communist fifth column's shock compilation
Yup, it's Mara time.

>>40730785
Theocratic despotism had been the rule for generations. An English visitor to Tibet in 1895, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the Tibetan people were under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people.

In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression” and “a barrier to all human improvement.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W. F. T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests … exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft the world has ever seen.” Tibetan rulers, like those of Europe during the Middle Ages, “forged innumerable weapons of servitude, invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people.

In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them, nor do laymen take part in or even attend the monastery services. The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.”

>>40730419 (OP)
>why didn't he stop the chinese from invading?
Because of radar technology.
No warlord could invade Tibet before, the monks used telepathy in order to convince these warlords to leave them alone.
Radio and eventually the radar negated it.
We also had hearths made of radium in the 19th century, and no one got cancer. Tampering with the radio waves did much harm do old magick.

>>40730506
>everybody is Epstein because... it just is, okay?
Nice try, /pol/
I support trannies.

The Communists Overthrow Feudalism

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese in Tibet after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They built the only hospitals that exist in the country, and established secular education, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. They constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa. They also put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment.

The Chinese also expropriated the landed estates and reorganized the peasants into hundreds of communes. Heinrich Harrer wrote a bestseller about his experiences in Tibet that was made into a popular Hollywood movie. (It was later revealed that Harrer had been a sergeant in Hitler’s SS.) He proudly reports that the Tibetans who resisted the Chinese and “who gallantly defended their independence … were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city before the tourists arrived.” They also had to live in a camp originally reserved for beggars and vagrants.

By 1961, hundreds of thousands of acres formerly owned by the lords and lamas had been distributed to tenant farmers and landless peasants. In pastoral areas, herds that were once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which led to an increase in agrarian production.

>>40732121
Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But people were no longer compelled to pay tributes or make gifts to the monasteries and lords. The many monks who had been conscripted into the religious orders as children were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends, and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals.

Elites, Émigrés, and CIA Money

For the Tibetan upper-class lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they wouldhave to work for a living. Those feudal elites who remained in Tibet and decided to cooperate with the new regime faced difficult adjustments.

The émigréso plight received fulsome play in the West and substantial support from US agencies dedicated to making the world safe for economic inequality. Throughout the 1960s the Tibetan exile community secretly pocketed $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual share was $186,000, making him a paid agent of the CIA. Indian intelligence also financed him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked with the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.

>>40732121
Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But people were no longer compelled to pay tributes or make gifts to the monasteries and lords. The many monks who had been conscripted into the religious orders as children were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends, and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals.

Elites, Émigrés, and CIA Money

For the Tibetan upper-class lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they wouldhave to work for a living. Those feudal elites who remained in Tibet and decided to cooperate with the new regime faced difficult adjustments.

The émigrés' plight received fulsome play in the West and substantial support from US agencies dedicated to making the world safe for economic inequality. Throughout the 1960s the Tibetan exile community secretly pocketed $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual share was $186,000, making him a paid agent of the CIA. Indian intelligence also financed him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked with the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.

>>40732121
Many peasants remained as religious as ever, giving alms to the clergy. But people were no longer compelled to pay tributes or make gifts to the monasteries and lords. The many monks who had been conscripted into the religious orders as children were now free to renounce the monastic life, and thousands did, especially the younger ones. The remaining clergy lived on modest government stipends, and extra income earned by officiating at prayer services, weddings, and funerals.

Elites, Émigrés, and CIA Money

For the Tibetan upper-class lamas and lords, the Communist intervention was a calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Those feudal elites who remained in Tibet and decided to cooperate with the new regime faced difficult adjustments.

The émigrés' plight received fulsome play in the West and substantial support from US agencies dedicated to making the world safe for economic inequality. Throughout the 1960s the Tibetan exile community secretly pocketed $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual share was $186,000, making him a paid agent of the CIA. Indian intelligence also financed him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked with the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.

>>40732238
you're an annoying spammer

>>40732337
factual information is not spam, so your comment is erroneous

anyway, why are you upset that the slaves were freed?

>>40732479
I like neither Vajrayana nor feudal Tibet, but shitting up a potentially-interesting thread with a Parenti essay that could have just as easily been summed up in a paragraph is annoying. Also, you're a safe-edgy tripfag that worships Mao, an impotent failure whose life's work was undone almost immediately by Deng. How does it feel, knowing that China is a capitalist state, indistinguishable in economics from the KMT they fought so bitterly, that has reduced Mao to a mere figurehead?

>>40730553
There is no way to tell a German person from a French person. They were meant to be part of the same nation.

>>40732650
I like China, thanks to Deng Xiaoping it's the most successful fascist experiment. I wish they'd actually care about animal rights, though.

>>40730419 (OP)
Remember when the dali llama sucked on the boy’s tongue

>>40732650
actually Mao worships me, you have it completely backwards

so what's your problem, anyway, why did those facts annoy you so greatly

>BECAUSE I HATE PROGRESS AND YOU REMIND ME OF PROGRESS

lmao

how does it feel knowing that reactionary "spirituality" is just a coping mechanism for delusional fascists? it must suck to learn that Divinity is fundamentally not on your side

slavery is evil, which means... you're not good. and so you lose.

Why hasn't this spamming faggot been ip banned yet? This nigger retard spreads out what should be one post across five or six, and he does it on multiple boards.

>>40732785
Germany and France are very distinct energetically. Whereas Tibet is just the spiritual part of China.

>>40730433
we've reached peak schizophrenia

is Dzogchen advanced vajrayana? or rebranded Bon? Supposedly Dzogchen is the fastest track to nirvana BUT even the Ngondro is like X3 times harder\longer

>>40732121
>they did abolish slavery and the serfdom system of unpaid labor
lol

He's a western puppet who tried sucking a child's tongue on camera

>>40730419 (OP)
Apparently the magic of Karl Marx was stronger

>>40730419 (OP)
If there’s any single thing that makes me doubt the claims of Tibetan magic, it’s this. If the stories were true they should have had no problem taking on the Chinese. Even a moderately powerful mage would have been able to scare them off!

>>40735799
Based. Puritan matronly moralisers btfo

>LUCIFER tripfag banned
I've prayed for days like this

>>40731372
Iblove how elite pedophilia is just Epstein now, as if there aren't a number of cases demonstrating its reality.

>>40730419 (OP)
Because they're all corrupted political tools managing a business. Besides, siddhis aren't "superpowers you unlock" like in a tv show. When a siddhi first shows up it's very ambiguous and hard to grasp and use, it usually manifests as minor psychic experiences outside the control of the practitioner. It takes work to actually grasp the siddhi and make it usable, it takes even more work to actually refine control over siddhis while not focusing on them. So i assure you these tools don't have any siddhis they can freely use, much less to any extent where they'd be able to "stop a war" kek.

>>40732811
I completely understand why a fascist (and I don't mean this as any sort of pejorative) would like post-Deng China, it's a relatively homogenous state that synthesizes the interests of the nation into a highly successful form of corporatism. From that lens, it's the greatest fascist state in history. I was simply pointing out to that spammer that Mao was a failure and all his "anti-revisionist" experiments were immediately undone as soon as he became an invalid. That's the weird thing about all these Maoists and Hoxhaists, they can never explain how an entire "superior" mode of production can be immediately dissolved by a single change of leadership (whether it be Khrushchev or Deng). It makes no sense within the Marxist understanding of political economy (which ironically makes a lot of sense, Marxism as a whole is incoherent and a pseudo-religious worship of Enlightenment ideals, so incoherencies are to be expected).

But regardless, to keep the thread on-topic, as >>40736112 said, this historical fact makes the grandiose claims of Tibetan Buddhism doubtful. Why would they not use these supposed powers when their entire society was about to be destroyed by atheist communists? There'd be a stronger claim for Theravada expressing some level of power, given how majority-Theravadin nations were actually able to eventually repel colonialism and, in most cases, keep Buddhism as their state religion (with Thailand avoiding colonialism altogether).

>stole my shitpost from /omg/
I still stand by it though.
Also someone said the OP is a maoist, but the content of the OP is mine, and I'm definitely not, but I thought it was funny regardless.

>>40736112
The tales of people like Virupa, Nagarjuna, Marpa and Milarepa, Guru Rinpoche/Padmasambhava, Tsongkhapa all make it clear anyone that is at or near Buddhahood is extremely powerful, magically. They usually don't manifest this power in any material way, but they do use it.
They can transport people to other dimensions and Buddha lands, they can fly, they can summon enormous divine nagas, they control the weather, they can call down avalanches or mudslides at a moments notice, etc.

Yet the only people that actually did anything were small contingents of random under trained soldiers that got massacred, while the monks fled on horses that were reserved specifically for them, and were fed most of the rations that were kept for the road, while the attendants/serfs with them starved to death, literally, in many cases while walking.

>>40736805
>There'd be a stronger claim for Theravada expressing some level of power, given how majority-Theravadin nations were actually able to eventually repel colonialism and, in most cases, keep Buddhism as their state religion (with Thailand avoiding colonialism altogether).

I agree with this. An enormous amount of grandiose claims are still made to this day about their spiritual abilities, but absolutely nothing to back it up. Its all just for show to keep people attending temples and donating money. Thanks to various Tantras, even monks that hold the Vinaya in Tibetan traditions are allowed to handle/keep money. Thats literally all you need to know to understand how fucked up this stuff is.

Plus, SE Asian countries where Theravada is still heavily practiced repelled colonial/imperialist interests over and over again throughout history with often minimal resources.2xty

>>40737423
>Plus, SE Asian countries where Theravada is still heavily practiced repelled colonial/imperialist interests over and over again throughout history with often minimal resources.
I'd also like to add that, unlike some of the majority-Mahayana countries that also repelled colonialism, Theravadin countries were far better at preserving their religiosity. Theravada Buddhism is still the state religion of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and the governments of Thailand and Laos give special support and protection to Buddhists and their practices (this is especially remarkable in the case of Laos, a nominally Marxist-Leninist state). The difference between these countries and countries like Vietnam and South Korea is stark. I don't usually take historical success as an automatic sign that a religion is true (I'm not even a Buddhist), but if any branch of Buddhism has demonstrated an extraordinary display of temporal power, it's Theravada. Their pro-independence monks, who usually never claimed any powers on par with those claimed by their Tibetan counterparts, pulled off far greater feats.

>>40737423
>>40737929
And it turns into Theravada online shilling.

>>40737988
I'm >>40737423

I'm not actually shilling for Theravada at all, its all bullshit because Buddhism in general is bullshit. But Theravada is the only tradition which has actually seemingly pulled off some serious shit, even if its not directly related to spiritual powers.

>>40738049
Military feats and Theravada have nothing to do with each other.

>>40738060
SE Asian countries militaries have historically paled in comparison to the colonial powers they've gone up against, and so resistance has also come from the people that help prop up monastic communities.

But, you know what Theravadin monks didn't do? They didn't flee, hoard their peoples food, and let them die on the road.

>>40738103
I get it, you're a Thanissaro drone.

>>40738141
Does Thanissaro think all Buddhists are retards?
If so, sure

>>40738141
>Anyone who positively compares one sect of a religion to another belongs to that sect
I also think Vishishtadvaita Vedanta makes relatively more sense than Advaita Vedanta, that doesn't make a me a Hindu either

really makes u think..

>>40730419 (OP)
Because they're just roleplayers is the answer.