Dalai Lama (14th) — "Sometimes I think I am a Communist."
Sometimes I think I am a Communist.
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More from Dalai Lama (14th)
"Sometimes I think I am a little bit lazy."
"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."
"My father was a farmer, my mother was a farmer. My family was very poor."
"I am a Marxist monk."
"When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways — either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The speaker is saying that when he reflects on economic fairness and concern for the poor, he finds himself aligned with certain communist ideals — specifically the redistribution of wealth and prioritizing the welfare of working people over profit. He is not endorsing political communism or its atheism, but acknowledging that its core economic concern for the disadvantaged resonates with his own values around human equality and compassion.
Relevance to Dalai Lama (14th)
Tenzin Gyatso has explicitly called himself 'half-Buddhist, half-Marxist,' drawing a sharp line between Marxist economic justice and communist political repression. Having been exiled from Tibet in 1959 by the Chinese Communist Party — a regime that destroyed monasteries and imprisoned monks — his sympathy with Marxist economics despite living under its cruelest application reveals the depth of his commitment to separating ideology from compassion. Buddhist principles demand concern for suffering regardless of its political framing.
The era
The Dalai Lama has made this remark repeatedly since the 1990s through the 2010s, a period of staggering global wealth concentration following the Cold War's end. As unregulated capitalism produced billionaires alongside mass poverty, and the 2008 financial crisis exposed systemic inequality, his statement landed as a deliberate provocation — challenging Western audiences who saw capitalism and spiritual values as natural allies while communism and spirituality were opposites.
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