This paper focuses on the political meaning of structuralism from the point of the view of the unusual link between Marxism and Buddhism established by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the final pages of Sad Tropics. Marxism appears here as a Western attempt to start a process of social transformation that is traditionally embedded in the core of Eastern cultures. Comparing these different worlds allows Lévi-Strauss to identify an internal yet unrecognized differentiation of Western culture, and provides a remarkable example of how the structural method applies to deep cultural analysis.