The dark side of Buddhism.
Over the weekend I watched the film Blindsight, which is a documentary about a group of blind Tibetan children who take on the challenge of climbing one of Tibet’s mountains. The children are all members of a school for the blind ran by a blind woman from Germany. They are in dire need of such charity because in Tibet, being blind is a horrible stigma. Buddhist doctrine teaches that such physical afflictions and handicaps are forms of punishment for a wicked past life. Therefore, the blind people of Tibet are social outcasts.
It was actually quite surprising to see the level of cruelty directed towards these children. At one point, two blind children accidentally bump into an old woman in the street, who responds “Look out, morons. You deserve to eat your father’s corpse!”
Saddest of all, some of the children themselves speculate about what they did to deserve their blindness. “It’s because of my bad deeds in a previous life that I’m blind in this one,” says one child. “It’s what’s written in my karma. … But I doubt if I killed anybody, because killing a person is heinous, and so I wouldn’t have been born human.”
We don’t often hear as much from atheists about Hinduism and Buddhism, and there are arguments to be made that of the major religions, these are the least harmful. But it is also well known that we in the West receive a very sanitized, very pre-packaged version of “Eastern spirituality,” and it is good to keep in mind that even in Buddhism, the religious tendency to impart shame and exclusion on innocent people is present.