Uchiyama Gudō: Buddhist Anarchist Martyr

Uchiyama Gudō (内山愚童) was born May 17, 1874, in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. He came from a family of rural woodworkers, and learned to carve Buddha statues from his father at an early age. When he was sixteen, his father died, which lead Gudō to renounce worldly life and join the Soto Zen sect, ordaining as […]

An Anarchist History of Buddhism: 400 BCE-1800 CE

I dislike the liturgical lists of revolutionary heroes, martyrs, writers, etc. which we rely on to define ideologies and history. But I can’t deny it isn’t useful for legitimating arguments and telling interesting stories. Buddhists who were also anarchists, anarchists who were Buddhists; People inspired by both Buddhism and anarchism but self-identified as one, both, […]

Axioms

Graham Priest and the “0th Noble Truth” I recently listened to a podcast interview with philosophy professor at CUNY Graham Priest in which he discusses Buddhist ethics and Anarchism. He raised some interesting points which I think are relevant for this project, so I thought I would post my notes here: Priest supposes the classic […]

On Selves and Masters

“Taken as a whole, man is nothing but a resultant, always changeable, of all his diverse faculties, of all his autonomous tendencies, of brain cells and nerve centers. All are related so closely to one another that they each react on all the others, but they lead their own life without being subordinated to a […]

The Transmission of Freedom

In the Zen school, there is a concept called “face-to-face transmission of dharma”. It is the principal means by which a teacher passes on knowledge, tradition and lineage and confirms a student’s theoretical and direct (non-conceptual) understanding of the Buddhist teachings as passed down through the Zen schools. The story goes that this practice goes […]

Buddhist Anarchists for Myanmar

To ensure that victory is achieved and peace is lasting, revolutionaries, especially those who are Buddhists, should consider these ideas. Myanmar, also known as Burma: It is one of the world’s most devout Buddhist nations as well as one of the world’s most violent, home to the longest ongoing civil war in modern history. It […]

Anarchist Communist Revolution by Uchiyama Gudō

From Fabio Rambelli’s Zen Anarchism: The Egalitarian Dharma of Uchiyama Gudō: “Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei (Nyūgoku kinen) (“Anarchist Communist Revolution: In Commemoration of Imprisonment), Gudō’s first extensive work, was written after the Red flag incident (Akahata jiken) of June 1908, in which anarchist activists took to the street in Tokyo, waving banners advocating “Anarchy” (museifu), “Anarchist […]

Bhante Sujato: Why I am an Anarchist

Working Definitions

Anarchist and buddhist thought are both much too broad to simply slap them together and expect a coherent ideology or practice to emerge. I’m going to attempt a working definition of specifically which anarchisms and which buddhisms I’m using to get a clearer idea of what the resulting buddhist anarchism might look like. For myself, […]

Hakugen Ichikawa (市川白弦) and Buddhist Anarchist Communism

Made a (potentially) big discovery for english language buddhist anarchists! So far it’s been dreadfully difficult to find scholarship on any people who developed a coherent buddhist anarchist philosophy. Uchiyama Gudo or Gary Snyder are typically the go-to people associated with the idea, but neither did much political theorizing. Snyder wrote his short essay in […]