revolutionary. Yet this interpretation ignores the simple
root association of the names Rudra and Shiva (from Tamil
Civa) with ruddiness, redness or reddening. The Rudra
Chakrin is, quite literally the ‘red’ or ‘reddening’ religious
‘wheel turner’ or revolutionary. Symbolically, it is a curious
yet significant paradox that the culmination of the Buddhist
Tantras should raise ‘The Red Banner of Rudra’ in its
search to unite ‘Marxism and Moksha’.
Yet any ‘red’ agenda of Buddhism in the Marxist or
left-wing sense is totally belied by the spiritual politics of
the Dalai Lama’s chief American advocate, Robert
Thurman. For in his audaciously red-covered book entitled
‘Inner Revolution’, he reveals a total lack of any Marxist
understanding of the nature and innate contradictions of
capitalist economics. The book ends up presenting a
‘Political Platform Based on [Buddhist] Enlightenment
Principles’ which reveals his true political colours, boiling
down as it does to a selection of the most yellow-bellied
and tepid of ‘liberal’ policies of the sort which merely
tamper at the edges of capitalist injustice (for example a
‘revolutionary’ proposal for graduated income tax, reduced
military expenditure and the abolition of the death penalty).
His political ideals and idealism do indeed centre on the
idea of ‘Moksha’ as individual liberation. Yet this is watered
down to a repetition of weak and outworn liberal mantras
concerning the rights and freedoms of individuals – rights
and freedoms of the sort long entrenched in the U.S.