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Ideal and Love
Today, I would like to introduce the concept of the machine as a dangerous political-religious apparatus, capable of crushing the wholehearted aspirations of patriotic youth.
- The Chinese Revolution of 1911 marked the transition from the feudal Qing dynasty to the Republic, with Puyi abdicating and Sun Yat-sen becoming the first president before yielding to Chiang Kai-shek.
- The two parties—the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party—first allied and then struggled for power, leading to internal purges in which hundreds of thousands of patriotic youths lost their lives.
- Vietnamese youth before 1945 joined both the Vietnamese Kuomintang and the Vietnamese Communist Party, swept into the international machinery directed by Moscow, and then experienced mutual purges—exemplified in the novel “The Thanh Thuy River” (by Nhat Linh), where three travelers received orders to eliminate each other on their journey home.
From the political machine to the religious machine, Vietnamese Buddhism was also not spared from oppression and elimination:
- Venerable Thich Mat The—the author of “A Brief History of Vietnamese Buddhism”—was surrounded and starved until he had to emigrate; many young devotees were not allowed to be ordained during the time of division.
- Elder Thieu Chuu—the chief editor of the Sino-Vietnamese Dictionary, who cared for seventy orphans at Quan Su Pagoda—was forced to commit suicide, showing how the machinery of authority viewed religion as “opium.”
The key lesson: love and idealism are only genuine when inseparable from the lives of our compatriots. The spirit of non-attachment to views—as taught in the Diamond Sutra and the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings—is the path for the Dharma not to become a fanatic machine, helping us transcend all isms and dogmas.
