It happened again. Someone, clearly serious about making a purchase, is about to finalize when the fact of my disability comes up (I’m in a wheelchair). And then they bolt.
As a maker of goods sold on the Internet, that I am disabled is not immediately obvious. That the goods I make and sell are prayer beads makes the religious identity of the bolters, the ones who can’t bear to have their beads contaminated by disability cooties, completely obvious.
They’re Buddhists. All of them.
The title of this post is somewhat unfair. I chose it, frankly, to grab the readers attention, and not because I think all, or even most, Buddhists suck. I’m pretty sure not all Buddhists are scared of crip cooties. Probably most of them aren’t. But this concession is purely theoretical, because every Buddhist who has learned I am disabled has bolted, and no one from any other religion has done so.
Are you, the reader, shocked by this? I’m not. Buddhists have a karma problem.
As I’ve mentioned before, karma, stated as “what you do has consequences for yourself”, is difficult to argue with. It’s essentially a spiritual restatement of cause and effect.
The problem comes when people mix up their precedents and anticedents. The above statement inverted, “what you experience is the consequences of what you have done”, does not mean the same thing. Inverted karma is anything but inarguable. Accepting the “truth” of this inverted karma means necessarily the rejection of the concept of justice.
Many Buddhists go a step further. They believe in karma cooties — that it is possible to somehow transfer karma from one person to another, or from a person to an object. Hence, my beads have crip cooties. Upon learning this, one should bolt. Or so they think.
I have seen karma cooties, as an idea, taught by Tibetan Buddhists. I don’t think it is a universally accepted Tibetan doctrine, though it may be. I’ve also seen it adopted widely by Buddhists not of the Tibetan lineage, as well as, of course, by the whole of the name-it/claim-it “The Secret” nonsense so loved by many New Agers. It spreads easily because it validates any bigotry already extant in its adopters. It lets organic food munching, Democratic-voting, ex-hippie middle class liberals explain to themselves that it isn’t that they hate those people. Heavens, no! They’re not bigots. They’re just feel that it is necessary for any particular instance of those people to work out his or her own negative karma, without any interference from those whose better karma comes from, among other things, ancestral genocide and bloody contemporary imperialism.
I refuse to believe that Buddhists, in general, operate this way. I refuse to believe it because, regardless of professed belief, almost every human is in possession of a still small voice within, that lets them know what is right and wrong.
But that’s all it is: a belief. I’ve never actually seen any Buddhist observe, and then repudiate , their own inclination toward bigotry. I don’t actually know that Buddhists have examined, and rejected, inverted karma and the notion of karma cooties. When I dealt with Buddhists in person on a near-daily basis, I was able-bodied (and young and pale skinned) and this issue never arose. I have no relevant body of evidence to examine as a disabled person except the sampling of Incredible Disappearing Buddhists I’ve seen as a prayer bead maker. If I am compelled to base my belief on my factual knowledge alone, I am forced to conclude that Buddhists are assholes. Still, cherished beliefs, on both sides of the basic human decency divide, die hard. I’ll stick to my conviction that an entire world religion can’t have all gone off the moral deep end unless the evidence in favor of what I disbelieve becomes too overwhelming to ignore.
And this brings me to a related topic, one that I had been playing with in my head, trying to find the proper words for, when yet another Disappearing Buddhist came and went. As is happening too often these days, someone in dire financial straits posted to a board I frequent. She was in despair, and questioned everything she once believed. After a series of not always on-cue, but sympathetic, responses, a believer in inverted karma piped up. Predictably, the inverted karma true believer dumped all over this poor woman.
The inverted karma devotee felt good afterward. Or if not good, at least superior. Anybody else with an intact conscience who witnessed the incident felt some indescribable combination of rage, compassion, and nausea.
And since I still can’t find words for the incident, I’ll leave it just as it is right now.
I’ve been on what appears to be an anti-religion run for a few posts. I’m nowhere near as anti-religion as the last few posts might suggest. I’ll have to post what I like about existing religion soon, to put things into better perspective. Yes, I even like Buddhism, a lot, though not several of its problems.
