As a muslim-buddhist, I must confess I'm a little tired of the rhetoric of oppression that's so commonplace in the buddhist community. Many prominent lamas often advise their students that others cannot make you suffer, that you must forgive your oppressors, that you shouldn't blame others for your problems. While I don't necessarily disagree, I think there is a story on the side of the oppressed, and also the oppressed who are fighting back, which is not being told.
I don't like how the emphasis tends to imply inaction in the face of adversity, and seems to subtly imply that we should always blame the victim for their own oppression, and never encourage or help them to fight back. On top of that, there's the added indignity of saying that it's the oppressor's good karma that allows them to be so negative. The indication seems to be that the universe rewards bad behavior and punishes good behavior.
Additionally, the oppressed is in a double-bind: if you do something bad, it's your fault and you get bad karma. If your oppressors do something bad, it's your fault, and you get bad karma. If you do something bad, it's your bad karma, if something bad happens to you it's karma for you to do bad things (because abuse is cyclical). According to this world-view, everything is always bad and it's your fault. I'm surprised more Buddhists don't commit suicide!
The biggest problem with this point of view is that it eternally binds people to suffering, with no hope for salvation. This directly contradicts the buddhist dharma which states that Nirvana is true, attainable peace. It also leads to an isolationist worldview that separates buddhists from those who could benefit from buddhism among the poor and dispossessed. In other words, it enables middle-, upper-middle, and upper-class Buddhists to say to the dispossessed, "I've got mine, screw you." And quite often, this is exactly what they say.
The Dalai Lama himself says that we Buddhists could learn a lesson from Christians in the area of charity. But the root of the problem is karma: the en-vogue definition of karma is one that Christians don't share, and is specifically refuted in many ways in the Bible, which is why they do more charity. What I would like to see more of is an emphasis on the correct way of viewing karma and its relationship to the external world, which is explained in H.H. The Dalai Lama's The Four Noble Truths, published in 1997 by Thorsons. In this book, karma is confined solely to mental activity by a moral agent which leads to emotional experience by the same moral agent. And the external world, by contrast, should not be viewed as "karma," but rather as the sport of Buddhas, which is an idea from a different scripture. Karma means that if you lash out in anger, you will be unhappy. Not, as in all the Internet memes, that something similar happens to someone who does something. Karma, in other words, is pretty much a mental phenomenon, and the physical aspects of it, though not entirely wrong, are vastly overplayed by the Buddhist community at large.
It's really sad that buddhists leave this sort of critical view to outsiders, and don't adopt it for themselves. Perhaps they view their constituency as primarily focused on internal mental development rather than external works of charity. Frankly, though, I see it as a problem which encourages a large and growing section of middle-class Americans and Westerners to view adversity and problems, where real people, perhaps even themselves, suffer, and do nothing. I guess as a muslim / Tibetan buddhist I'm not really an outsider, but I'm also not ordained as a teacher formally in any sect of buddhism. No buddhists have shared my point of view on karma, even though two specific emanations of Tara have come to me and told me flat-out, "I don't believe in karma." One of these women squashed a bug for emphasis, and that bug is now probably in a pure land. I think there is an important lesson in that for both Buddhists and New-Agers. The lesson is that our ideas about karma are totally wrong, and they hurt real people. And the karma for spreading these ideas is that we will end up feeling hurt and oppressed.
