Post #170: The Buddhist Stripes of America

20 Jan. 2025

     The Marvelization of American politics is complete, the alleged superheroes have been lined up in full force, and overcompensation owns the field: let the Great Games of braggadocio and incessant flag-waving begin, and good luck to us all!

     For anyone not ecstatic at the prospect, let me offer the possibility of treating the next four years as an equanimity exercise. It is what it is, like it or not; let’s see where it takes us. And while we are at it, a note on the American flag that may come as a surprise: believe it or not, the stripes really do have a Buddhist connection, no joke! So when you see the endless waving, leave the histrionics to others, left or right, and be reminded to keep your calm and maintain your practice.

     Buddhist stripes on the American flag? What the heck: you can’t be serious! But I am, quite. Let me start from the end: have you ever seen the Malaysian flag and asked yourself why it should bear such a striking resemblance to the American (excepting the important differences in the blue box, of course, technically called the canton). Does it have something to do with the great historical precedent for independence from Britain, you may wonder, or with the Malaysians wishing to appear modern on the U.S. model in 1950, when the design was first adopted? Or did the stripes happen to be convenient for representing the member states of the Malaysian federation, just as they were two and a half centuries ago for the dissident North American colonials?

     All these factors are at play, no doubt, but there is a more intriguing historical reason. The Americans, it turns out, did not just design their flag from scratch, they took it, very nearly unchanged, from the ensign that the (British) East India Company had been trading under in South East Asia since 1600! At first it was a Cross of St. George in the canton, the flag of England, but by the period in question it was what we know as the Union Jack—and this the colonialists adopted with only very minor changes as their Grand Union Flag in 1775, well aware that the design was already in use elsewhere (as Ben Franklin made quite explicit in a letter to George Washington).

     Things get even more interesting when you scratch the surface of the stripes  themselves: for then you discover that the East India Company too did not draw them from thin air, but rather in its turn took them from the flags of the Srivajaya and Majapahit Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms that had controlled much of today’s Malaysia and Indonesia from the 7th until the early 16th century. In the Srivajayan banners, the red stripes had been arranged around the sun (a little like the Japanese rising sun flag), but in that of the successor Majapahit kingdom, they looked exactly as they later appeared on the ensigns of the East India Company and still do on the flag of the United States.

     In other words, although neither the officers of the colonial trading company nor the dissident Americans had any intention of paying homage to the Buddha with the flags they adopted, in effect they conserved an ancient Hindu-Buddhist tradition! The two can be named together in one breath like this because the lines tend to blur in the region: the many finds of Buddha statues and stupas demonstrate the Buddhist presence as robustly as anyone could ask, but as one can still witness in today’s Thailand, Buddhist and Hindu shrines, and even animistic elements of local folk religion—the worship of tree spirits, for example—flow together quite seamlessly.

     There you are: Buddhist stripes on the American flag! The world is full of surprises. So enjoy seeing the flags fly on Inauguration Day and be happy, whether you love The Donald or loathe him. Say what he may, and posture all he wants, he doesn’t own the colors, or the world…