(Tamil) meaning ‘red’ or ‘reddening’ – and Chakrin ('wheel
turner') being a term synonymous with 'revolutionary'. The
paradox is one of Buddhism itself raising the Red Banner
of a Hindu god – Rudra – as that god empowered to turn
the wheel of spiritual-political revolution for a coming age.
However this ‘red revolution’ or ‘inner revolution’ as
Robert Thurman (America’s chief advocate of Tibetan
Buddhism) conceives it, turns out to present only an
amalgam of the weakest and least ‘red-blooded’ of liberal
policies as its political platform for universal liberation or
Moksha – policies totally empty of any Marxist
understanding of capitalist economics, and sanctified and
supplemented instead merely by the traditional Buddhist
principle of “emptiness of self” and the advocacy of a new
Tibetan-style monasticism.
In the first of three appendices, I cite from the
Trimundis’ critique of the idealised ‘spiritual’ image of
social life in pre-Communist Tibet – an image still fostered
throughout Europe and the West. In the second appendix I
cite from Justin Whitaker’s summary of the views of
Marxist psychologist Slavoj Zizek on Western Buddhism.
In the final appendix I cite a brief account of my own of
the Virashaiva sect of Southern India, showing it to be an
early example of a social-spiritual liberationary movement
based on a tantric stream of heterodox 'Counter-Hinduism'
long present within 'Hinduism' itself.