BuddhaGang History
The BuddhaGang path includes both listening and roaring
Silence,
when it is silence born of complicity,
is Mara’s tongue.
And speech,
when it is speech that cuts through delusion,
is the lion’s roar.
We listen — because listening is the first generosity.
We roar — because beings are being crushed,
and the propaganda machine keeps working overtime
to redefine cruelty as necessity and compassion as weakness,
to present racism as realism and try to undermine the reality of interbeing,
to stoke fear, greed, and hate; then present it as patriotism.
History is also this present moment
In the 1930s, some of the most dangerous ideas dressed themselves up in heritage, in myth, in blood-and-soil. It was white supremacy with runes, genocide justified by fake scholarship and power-drunk delusion.
And yes, its consequences are still moving now — in echoes and systems and silence and slogans. That karma still unfolds because beings are still conditioned by those same wrong views.
Look and see!
And many still refuse to look.
Because it’s painful.
Because seeing it evokes a feeling that calls for change.
Because it is not comfortable to know what sucks.
But the Buddha didn’t praise this kind of comfort.
He praised awakening.
And awakening includes understanding the history behind all manifestations appearing as this present moment.
We pay attention not just to our own little personal bubble
but to newspaper headlines,
to Aligator Auschwitz,
to the reports of good friends near and far,
to every word uttered by those who do and do not wield archonic power.
Bodhisattva work is dharma-delight
We’re not “the other side.”
The Bodhisattva path is not about opposing people—
but it does stand firmly against what harms them: the three poisons.
We’re the Bodhisattva side.
Not a side against others,
but a vow-driven response to suffering that doesn’t treat all beings the same—
because love uses diverse skillful means.
Good and bad
It praises what is good.
It clarifies what is harmful, and why.
All for the sake of beings—
even those lost in delusion.
We don’t deny their humanity.
We name their karma.
We don’t do eel-wriggling.
We get close enough to touch the wound—
to know it,
and speak clearly about its true nature.
An eel-wriggler won’t call good good, or bad bad.
They squirm around truth,
refusing to make clear statements—
afraid to offend, afraid to commit.
But the Buddha named this habit.
He called it out directly.
And he did make definitive statements—again and again.
Eel-wrigglers won’t name bad karma,
whether it’s inside themselves or in the world.
And in some new age spaces, this habit gets praised—
wrapped up as humility or nonduality.
But that doesn’t make it Buddhist.
And it doesn’t make it helpful.
Serve love
A bodhisattva is one who loves when love is dangerous—
who listens even when it hurts,
and who acts when action means leaving comfort—
whether online or in the flesh—
especially when those comfort zones praise spiritual bypassing
as if it were Buddhism.
Engaged Buddhism and Thich Nhat Hanh
And yes —
Thich Nhat Hanh taught,
“Don’t consume toxins.”
But the thing is:
ignorance is the deadliest toxin of all.
He didn’t mean that you should never watch the news.
Delusion floats through airwaves,
printed pages,
courtrooms,
campaign slogans,
and a Bodhisattva can smell it.
Study
So we study this historian’s work on ancient Germany, knowing he is not without bad habit energies— but there is clarity in what he reveals.
We use what he preserved to recognize patterns.
We remember so that we don’t repeat.
We investigate so that we can intervene.
So now we study —
not to hate,
but to see.
Not to despair,
but to vow.
Not to bury the past,
but to liberate the present.
Now we draw out what this old book reveals about ancient Germany—
but we won’t adopt the author’s bias,
and we won’t leave his racism unchallenged.
Walking through an old book about ‘Germans”
This text gives us something important:
a window into how 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers—especially in England and the U.S.—
laid the groundwork for the fascist race myths of the 1930s and ’40s.
And those myths didn’t die.
They’ve carried forward into the present.
That matters!
This writer is working from a toxic stew: British colonialism, Anglo chauvinism, and American eugenics — all simmering in the pot of romantic nationalism and half-digested Darwinism. And from that stew, he tells us a story about “the Germanic type.” But it’s fantasy based on older fearful and greedy fantasies — built partly on misread Roman sources like Tacitus, partly on Grimm’s philological research, and partly on his own racialized projections about size, strength, and spiritual destiny.
He begins by acknowledging that the “German” of Tacitus’ time was probably a nomad with emerging agricultural practice. But then he reveals his agenda—elevating the “German” as a noble, warlike, male, and dominant being, whose instincts were too elevated for the dirty work of farming, which he delegated to “slaves, captives, and women, the old and the infirm.” That’s the voice of patriarchy and caste talking. And it sets the tone.
“He was a warrior: his nomadic traditions and his agricultural instincts found no expression in his own acts…”
Even as the writer tries to sound neutral, he describes the Germanic ancestor as a naturally superior fighter who simply doesn’t stoop to labor. That’s the aristocrat’s fantasy — already echoing the warrior caste’s delusions in prehistoric Indo-European myth.
Then he turns to boundaries.
“The main boundary of a land… was generally a forest… or a moor, or a stretch of swamp.”
And in this we find something useful! There was deep sacred meaning in the Germanic understanding of boundary. This is worth remembering.
Mark and March — both words for border — carry both legal and mythic weight. These liminal zones were protected by divine wrath, enforced by ritual, and remembered by lore. The ancients carved signs into trees. They laid eggs and dropped hammers. The line between land and land was sacred.
The writer goes further and tells us:
“The gods themselves were thought to have laid out the boundaries of land and land.”
And this fits. All over the Indo-European world, we see boundary stones, sacred hills, and gods of borders—just as we see Yama in Vedic lore, or Hermes in Greek, protecting the edges of realms and regulating transitions between life and death.
But the problem is that the writer uses this spiritual insight to justify a nationalist and even racial worldview. He says the “desire to have and hold a settled territory is Germanic instinct, is original, and needed no importing.”
That’s bad logic. That’s nationalism talking. And it leans directly into the mythic errors that fed that flare-up of fascism. Hitler’s claims about “blood and soil” are just a louder echo of what this author is whispering here: that the Germanic type is rooted in land, and that others — Jews, Roma, Slavs, whoever — are rootless and therefore dangerous. It’s poison.
Even worse, he implies that the harshness of German boundaries shaped racial traits — he praises the “purity” of this “race,” claiming the people were “huge of stature,” unlike “puny or undersized children” who were “thrust aside…into the byways of household and menial labor.” That’s straight-up eugenics. He’s telling us that weaker children were discarded to ensure a strong race. That’s horrifying.
But look deeper, and we see something true despite his racism. His sources—especially Grimm and some old folk traditions — point to deep reverence for place, border, tree, and mythic continuity. He tells us that:
“Perforated stones… served as sign of the boundary.”
“The Scandinavian Thor had to do with boundaries.”
“The border-line was marked by a place of worship and sacrifice.”
That tells us: these were sacred zones. Rituals of justice, duels (holmgang), weddings, burials, and even curses were often conducted at the border. In fact, the ghost stories and superstitions—like Strande’s wife freezing to death after moving a boundary stone—aren’t just random peasant folklore. They reflect the Indo-European conviction that crossing or violating sacred space invites cosmic punishment.
This worldview saw the land and its divisions as part of the cosmic order. Just as Rta (cosmic truth) in Vedic thought orders heaven, earth, and society, so too the Germanic ordnung (order) was spiritual, not just geographic.
But all this got warped — badly — when writers like this one projected their own modern race obsessions into ancient lore. He takes sacred traditions and boundary rituals and uses them to give foundation to the wrong view of racial superiority.
In contrast, Buddhist teaching on interbeing reveals that all these identities are composite, conditioned, and co-arising. Each “race” is made of notself elements. There is no German race without all the other “not German” peoples that came together under this particular umbrella of wrong view and wrong speech. There is no eternal “German race,” no fixed blood destiny. What we inherit is complex—genetics, yes, but also trauma, language, habit, land memory, and karmic pattern.
Even the word “German” was a Roman invention—an imperial label for many distinct and diverse peoples. It’s like how many white Americans today say “Native American religion,” as if the Diné, Lakota, and Salish all shared the same spiritual expression. But they didn’t. They each cultivated rich, distinct forms of collective spirituality—what we might call religion, in the deepest sense: the way a community binds itself together across time and space. This flattening of difference is a habit of empire. It hides diversity behind a single name.
So we don’t throw away the lore. We reclaim it.
We say:
• Yes, there is sacred meaning in the land.
• Yes, the old border-stones and tree carvings were real.
• Yes, the duels, the rites, the river crossings—they carried spiritual force.
But we don’t build race myths out of them.
And we don’t believe the fantasy that strong children belong in battle and weak ones should be thrown away. Every being matters. Every lineage carries pain. And the karmic result of these delusions—the Aryan race myths and Nazi genocides—proves how dangerous a little sacred truth becomes when twisted by hatred and delusion.
That’s why we study the sources.
That’s why we tell these stories again—with love, with critique, and with eyes open.
It’s all real enough to matter.
And none of it stands alone.
A Mind-Made, Strong but Stupid and War-Hungry People
“The German of Tacitus was a nomad with the beginnings of agriculture, but also with a passion for warfare that threw all his other tendencies into the shade.”
He sets up a hierarchy: agriculture and family are secondary to violence and conquest. But then he reveals the gender and class assumptions:
“His nomadic traditions and his agricultural instincts found no expression in his own acts, but were left to slaves, captives, and women, the old and the infirm.”
This matters. The projection of the “real man” as a warrior disdaining the work of care, cultivation, and connection is central to fascist thinking later. It shows up in how Nazis styled themselves, how modern patriarchy still operates. These are not neutral lines—they tell us what values the writer thinks are high and low. Farming is for slaves and women, war is for men. False hierarchy.
Then he describes the Mark, the Germanic concept of borderland:
“The main boundary of a land, called the ‘Mark’ in German, and in English ‘March,’ mostly neutral and uninhabited, was generally a forest… the word meant both boundary and woods.”
These “Marks” were sacred spaces, mythically charged. He notes:
“Later, but still in primitive times, rude marks, often of a sacred character, were cut into a tree.”
We hear in this echoes of sacred space as we know from global traditions: the Bodhi tree, the Yggdrasil, the tree where boundary and world meet. The problem comes when these sacred acts are chained to land ownership, punishment, and race myths.
He continues:
“Perforated stones… held sacred, served as sign of the boundary; and so did the huge mound which marked a grave.”
This is big. It shows that these early Germans tied their sacred to the soil—very literally. It is a worldview that sees land, death, and sacred boundary all entwined.
It gets darker. He brings up Anglo-Saxon metod—a word meaning “measurer,” and here taken to mean god. He says:
“We find everywhere bold, irregular lines of rock, or huge, isolated stones, standing in some connection with the devil,—behind whom, remarks Grimm, there lurks an ancient god.”
In this view, what Christians later labeled “devil” was once an older god—pagan, pre-Christian, unassimilated. The author, without irony, sees these stones as haunted by ancient, possibly malevolent power.
He names Thor:
“The Scandinavian Thor had to do with boundaries.”
This line is potent. The storm god not only rules thunder and war but land demarcation and law. It’s a reminder that gods of power are often gods of law and limits too.
Then he explains that crimes were punished on the border, a liminal place:
“It is quite evident why a criminal should be punished ‘on the border.’”
And in a particularly grim Anglo-Saxon case:
“This saint and martyr is led ‘to the borders of the land, to that place where the stern ones determined in their hatred to behead her.’”
So again, sacred space, sacred crime, sacred punishment—all linked to the idea of land as identity and the border as mythic edge.
He then links marriage and betrothal to borders, and concludes:
“It was custom for a prince to receive his bride on the frontier of the realm.”
What this shows is that in the mythic psyche of these early Germanic systems, the border is more than a political thing—it’s a place of encounter, transition, danger, and law. That part isn’t wrong. But it’s turned toward nationalist exclusion, not compassion or reverence.
The message is soaked in fear. The author writes:
“Nothing, however, testifies so clearly to the anxiety with which the German regarded the preservation of boundaries…”
Then comes the horror story:
“Strande’s wife had helped her husband move a boundary-stone; and now she is dead and haunts the place each night, and is heard crying pitifully to her husband—his punishment may be even worse—‘O Strande, I’m freezing!’”
This ghost story is used to show how deeply boundary violation was feared and mythologized. Moving a rock becomes a crime against the land and the dead.
He adds:
“Custom demanded a formal inspection of bounds and borders… we hear of villagers whipping their children at the border of the hamlet in order that this important boundary may be indelibly impressed upon the memory of future townsmen.”
This is not neutral folklore. This is indoctrination into spatial fear, sacred violence, and the inheritance of land-based identity. It links to fascism’s obsession with soil and blood (Blut und Boden). And it stands in complete contrast to the Buddhist teaching that all dharmas are dependently originated—not inherently fixed, owned, or separate.
And the racial myth begins to show itself more fully.
“About his bigness but one tale is told… all agree that he was huge of stature.”
He builds an image of the Germanic body as tall, strong, pure, repeating stories of “seven foot tall skeletons” and “blue eyes flashing.”
“The race seems to have been pure, so that these bodily traits were shared by all its members…”
This is where he swerves deep into racial pseudoscience. He says:
“The giant was no lolling, good-natured fellow; his huge frame was easily shaken by passion…”
And then this:
“Hehn is inclined to think that this ferocity is inherent in the glance of all nomads…”
He’s now attributing psychological traits—ferocity—to blood and birth, drawing a line from the way a person looks or “glances” to their moral character.
That is wrong view. That is how racism thinks.
He then retells the grim tale of Svanhild—daughter of Gudrun and Sigurd—who is condemned to be trampled by horses for dishonor. And adds:
“But when she looked up at them, the horses durst not tread upon her…”
Implying she had a magical, supernatural power in her gaze. It is a twisted valorization of Aryan female pride, mixing misogyny with mythic force.
He closes with:
“It was easy for this fearful glance to attract a superstitious terror, and pass into the domain of spells and enchantments.”
So he paints the image of these ancient Germans as tall, strong, wild-eyed, myth-haunted, border-obsessed people bound to the land through fear, death, and honor.
Comments
This is the ground from which Nazi myth-making grew. And even when this author doesn’t say it directly, he is laying the groundwork for the romanticization of race, border, violence, and nation.
But as we say:
There is no “Germanic race.”
No “Aryan soul.”
No fixed boundaries between peoples.
The Buddha said:
“All things are without self. They arise in dependence upon causes and conditions.”
Race is not an essence. It is a karma thing. It is a delusion, a construct, and a weapon when wielded without understanding.
The genetic view of “blood” was wrong. The American eugenicists passed that poison to the Nazis. But the early signs were there in this kind of literature. Romantic longing for imagined ancestors, racial purity as strength, fear of mixture, idolizing the violent male—all of it was already active.
We’re not telling these stories to justify any of it.
We’re telling them so that we can be precise about what went wrong.
And then:
We can go another way.