@Diest TKO,
Your confusion is not for me to cure--however, i will respond to your post.
I am not defining feudalism in any other way than the way the word is intended to be used. And that is to mean that the people of Tibet, before the Chinese invasion, owned nothing, and had the use of the land only so long as they worked the land for the benefit of the monasteries, which owned everything, including the people. Certainly, i consider the notion that one has access to land for the purpose of eking out a subsistence living (if they were lucky and very, very hard working) to be inferior to a system in which people own the land they work, and have the full use of the production of that land. This has nothing to do with "western values," although, ironically, the Chinese so often play the PC card by claiming that they don't have to give people the human rights about the lack of which western nations complain because those are western values, and not Chinese values. Of course, historically that's bullshit, but that's neither here nor there in a discussion of feudalism in Tibet.
The term feudalism was often applied to China in the Spring and Autumn periods more than 2000 years ago, but that was somewhat inaccurate because there was no hierarchy, just independent rulers who might or might not have submitted on any one of a number of hegemons. The term was also applied to Japan in the period of the Ashikaga shogunate, but is was just as false as the application in China because the Daimyo were independent rulers who only paid lip service to the authority of the Ashikaga Shogun to the extent that they could or could not defy him in arms.
Strictly speaking, feudalism only ever really existed in Europe, but the term feudalism can reasonably be applied to any situation in which the population of the agricultural sector do not own their land and only have the use of it to the extent that they provide a portion of their harvest to their overlords. This is why it is not entirely inaccurate to apply the term to pre-imperial China and pre-Tokugawa Japan. In the case of Tibet, there was no formalized system as there was in Europe a thousand years ago, when peasants provided labor in lieu of taxes, or payments in lieu of labor, and had the absolute use of a portion of the manor's lands, if not the actual ownership of the land. In Tibet, the agricultural peasant had the use of the land only so long as they provided a fixed proportion of their harvest to the monatery which owned the land, and had no rights to the production of any of the land except to the extent that the monastery annually renewed the agreement. To that extent, the system was feudal.
I don't know what the hell you think you mean by "a minimalistic lifestyle," but the peasants of Tibet prior to 1950 had no lifestyle at all, and no choice about how they would live their lives. It was work on the monastery's land, on the monastery's terms, or starve. I rather supsect, though, that when it comes to eating, people rarely, voluntarily adopt a "minimalistic lifestyle," unless they are already the overfed children of western civilization. It seems to me that you are assuming western values here.
My "outrage," as you term it, is with Buddhist who take a holier-than-thou stance toward other organized religions, as though they were somehow free of the superstition and hypocrisy of other religious confessions. They are not. Note that i not only used the example of the condition of the people of Tibet, but also the murderous violence between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, as well as referring to the Sohei, the warrior monks of Japan in the Sengoku period which attened the collapse of the Ashikaga shogunate. My experience of Buddhists in the west is that they are hypocrites in these respects.
