The publication of Buddhist Warfare, a book I co-edited with Mark Juergensmeyer, is a bittersweet experience as it marks the culmination of a journey that began with an exploration of the peaceful aspects of Buddhism only to end up chronicling portions of its dark side. This journey, which consumed much of the last six years of my life, began in 2003 when my wife and I spent a little over a year in Thailand. It was then that I began to research Buddhist social activism which was going to be the topic of my dissertation.
Rather than look to archives, I decided to speak with Buddhist monks and nuns on the ground. I interviewed monks protecting the forests from big business and villagers from dangerous pesticides; I met and began to chronicle the activities of the first fully ordained Thai Buddhist nun, Dhammananda Bhikkuni; and I met with Thai Buddhist monastic intellectuals.
Military Monks
Then in January 2004, violent attacks broke out in the southern provinces of Thailand, some of which were directed at Buddhist monks. These attacks and the numerous ones to follow shocked the country. But, since contemporary issues and my research interests seemed to be converging, I thought: what better way to study Buddhist activism than to observe Buddhist monks engaged in peacemaking?
Unfortunately, I found very little of this.
During my visits between 2006 and 2008, southern Thai monks shared the challenges of living in their fear-infested communities. All but a few concentrated on survival; peacemaking was the last thing on their minds.
The constant fear and violence took a toll on them. Monks talked about the guns they had bought and now kept at their bedsides. Others spoke heatedly about the violent militant attacks on Buddhist civilians and monasteries. Although the cause of the violence is multilayered—owing much to corruption, drug trade, and corporatization—many monks also felt Islam was to blame. In their minds, the conflict was anchored to the larger discussion of religious violence: Muslims against Buddhists.
One day after teaching an English class for Buddhist novices at a monastery a young monk came over and pulled back the folds of his robe to reveal a Smith & Wesson. I later learned that he was a military monk—one of many covert, fully ordained soldiers placed in monasteries throughout Thailand. To these monks, peacemaking requires militancy.
Since my initial realization in 2004, I began to look critically at my earlier perspective on Buddhism—one that shielded an extensive and historical dimension to Buddhist traditions: violence. Armed Buddhist monks in Thailand are not an exception to the rule; they are contemporary examples of a long historical precedence. For centuries monks have been at the helm, or armed in the ranks, of wars. How could this be the case? But more importantly, why did I (and many others) hold the belief that Buddhism=Peace (and that other religions, such as Islam, are more prone to violence)?
Buddhist Propaganda
It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as mystical.
Yet these mystical depictions did not remove the two-dimensional nature of Western understanding. And while it contributed to the history of Buddhism, this presentation of an otherworldly Buddhism ultimately robbed Buddhists of their humanity.
Thupten Tsering, the co-director of “Windhorse,” encapsulates the effects of two-dimensional portrayal in a 1999 interview with the New York Times. “They see Tibetans as cute, sweet, warmhearted. I tell people, when you cut me, I bleed just like you.”
In an effort to combat this view and to humanize Buddhists, then, Mark Juergensmeyer and I put together a collection of critical essays that illustrate the violent history of Buddhism across Mongolia, Tibet, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India.
Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence.
Although the book only arrived at bookstores last month, it apparently touched some nerves in the academic community before its release. Some have objected to the cover [image right], which they feel is not an appropriate subject for Buddhism. Ironically, that is the very reason this collection of essays is so important: to address the apparent and widespread inability to acknowledge the violent side to religious traditions. It is this inability that robs its adherents of their humanity.
In a way, I wish I could return to that dream of Buddhist traditions as a purely peaceful, benevolent religion that lacks mortal failures and shortcomings. But I cannot. It is, ultimately, a selfish dream and it hurts other people in the process.
Buddhist Warfare certainly contributes to the broader discussion of religious violence, but on a more intimate and local level, I hope this collection will effect some significant change in the way Buddhism is perceived in the United States. Only time will tell.
It is interesting that you could only find toy guns to photo monks with.
It's wonderful to see my own stereotypes dissolving after a good splash of facts and reason.
Thanks also for the pun on the best Band Name Evar: Drunks With Guns.
I am quite new to Religious Dispatches, regularly visiting the site & reading articles for the past several months (and just recently creating an account for comments, etc.).
One of the things that strikes me repeatedly is the great challenge that certain "dispatches" face in attempting to encapsulate complex ideas and/or book length subjects in a necessarily abbreviated form; some are successful, some less so, and I fear Mr. Jerryson's article falls into this latter category.
I would argue (for starters) that it is a gross mischaracterization to label as "propaganda" the efforts of Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese Buddhists to explicate the subtleties -and a radically different ontology- of Buddhist spirituality, especially to an audience well marinated in the philosophical and religious traditions of "the West." Pretty clearly, properly delineating the whole Buddhist paradigm is an uphill climb without introducing acts of violence perpetrated by its adherents. Doing so however is not tantamount to propagandizing, nor robbing Buddhists of their human natures.
Is it really necessary or a good idea to stir in the Crusades or the Inquisition when relating the basic tenants of Christianity or conveying a nominal grasp of the soteriological nature of the crucifixion? Does omitting those episodes for that purpose amount to propagandizing? Does it characterize Christians as incapable of violence?
It is indeed a mistake to ignore violent acts by Buddhists; I don't believe any Buddhist would deny them in any case. Furthermore, any self-respecting Buddhist will tell you emphatically (and this certainly includes the likes of Suzuki, Trungpa, Thich Nhat Hahn, and HH the Dalai Lama, et. al.), that Buddhists are people too -they screw up, they fail, lie, cheat, steal, even kill- just like everybody else!
If one's project is educating a whole culture -and that culture casts a sidelong glance, regarding as "primitive" an incredibly rich and often sophisticated tradition- then setting aside for the moment the acts of violence its adherents have engaged in neither dehumanizes its practitioners nor amounts to propaganda.
That said, I think it is indeed very refreshing in a sense, and a very needed thing to have a compilation of the willing participation in the kinds of political and/or religious conflicts (violent and otherwise) by those who claim Buddhism as their religion. Examples of violent Buddhists simply do not leap to mind as readily as the very long catalogue of Christian vs Christian, Christian vs Jew, Christian vs Muslim, etc., so familiar to us in Western culture.
I do, however, have problems with an argument that posits that Buddhist clergy & laity have willingly ignored the fallibility of their community, depicting either the tradition itself as transcendent or disconnected, or its adherents as somehow untouched by the foibles with which we all struggle.
Geschickt, welcome to Religion Dispatches. We can always use a new perspective because we are dealing with the biggest religion problems of the day. Perhaps you have some ideas that might help. Put away your Buddhist problems for now, and look at things from the point of view of the problems in Christendom.
At the moment, Christianity is splitting along a fault line of basic belief, and this might turn out to be major on the Richter scale. The basic split is over the nature of the name of Jesus Christ. Most Christians have long held the belief that if you profess the name of Jesus, you will be saved, and if not, you will go to hell. Now some Christians like our president feel there might be multiple paths to salvation. This alternative concept is a major threat to conservative Christianity, and this is important because we are the superpower.
We spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, we have the biggest stockpile of WMD's, and we have a virtual monopoly on 21st century weapons design and we are using it to develop new things like laser weapons in space, a truck based ray gun that makes a crowd think they are burning up (we currently have it set on stun mode), and of course now our drone airforce that grows in size and sophistication by a factor of about 100 every decade. Depending on who is our president at the moment, we are not afraid of using this power for the good of our rich, and the only way the rich have been able to get power recently is to pander to the conservative Christian base, the ones that have absoloute faith that their belief in the name of Jesus will get them raptured when the big war is about to start, and they pray for that to be soon. Our two party system stops most other voices from being heard, so the Christian split is kind of a crapshoot. We certainly don't have the answers. Perhaps the other religions of the world might have some suggestions that could help us.
Thank you Mr. Reed, I appreciate the welcome!
I couldn't agree more regarding the binary trend in, at least American, mainstream Christianity (adding that I believe it's traceable back to the origins). In the weltanschauung of the Left Behind, rapture ready sects, the concept of peace (indeed, the very definition), has been turned on it's head - it has become a dirty word, short-hand code for at best merely liberal, at worst truly evil endeavors that can only and ever fail. Fortunately, such belief is in the minority in Christendom; unfortunately, it is a powerful and very vocal minority, especially here in the US.
Religious pluralism is typically marginalized in the context of such sectarian strife, still I've always felt other religions can be invaluable in suggesting new ways to approach a given "problem" in one's own system, at individual and institutional levels.
You often hear a line of argument that mainstream Islam is too tolerant of the radical strains that engage in terrorism in its name. I wonder where the threshold is within Christianity for tolerating a faction that can't be bothered about common-sense environmental conservation, ignores a crisis of moral relativism, and for whom peace is a wholly unworthy human pursuit...?
I think that minority is influencing many of the others. We put Bush in power, most Americans are not sure about evolution, they are skeptical of environmental issues and distrust the science, and Americans are surprisingly supportive of torture. We are also accepting of the Left Behind series of novels and movies and the children's version of that series. We seem to be in a downward spiral where fiscal conservative interests and social conservative interests are combined and are bringing out the worst in each other. I think most religion are primarily composed of followers, so I wonder if the problem is really the party of the rich that our religion is currently allied with rather than the religion itself? If this is the case, what does the future hold as the globalists expand their empire? If they gain control in a Buddhist country, will they be able to use the Buddhist population to their advantage the way they have the Christian poplulation in this country?
You argue, "Is it really necessary or a good idea to stir in the Crusades or the Inquisition when relating the basic tenants of Christianity or conveying a nominal grasp of the soteriological nature of the crucifixion? Does omitting those episodes for that purpose amount to propagandizing? Does it characterize Christians as incapable of violence?"
I rather think it is necessary to stir in those historical expressions of traditions, since soteriologies too take shape in the world, and respond to it. Jerryson's book, which I have not read, sounds like an important contribution to exactly this. To insist on purified and universalized ideologies as normative is blind to historical realities.
MK, I completely agree that negative actions taken by individuals and/or groups in a given religious tradition, which contradict the basic tenets of that system, should never be whitewashed or artificially purified.
I simply disagree with and Jerryson's (and presumably Jurgensmeyer's) assertion that doing so has been a purposeful agenda by the major Buddhist figures who have been explicating Buddhism for the West for the past fifty-odd years.
Now, leaving it out of church history is one thing(!), but as part of evangelizing/proselytizing, the Inquisition is quite tangential when trying to impart the core tenets of the faith; I think that's plain enough.
You sure misunderstood what I was trying to say. Rather, religions do not exist as pure systems. They exist on the ground. Philosophy and theology have historical consequences. Any intro to religions class ...
I agree with geschickt that "propagana" is lacking as the sole explanation of why Buddhism is understood as non-violent in our culture. There is also the teachings of the tradition itself (ahimsa, metta, etc.), which undeniably advocates non-violence, and the historical record, which is not without blemish but nevertheless seems to compare favorably against at least the Abrahamic traditions. Consider the first major Buddhist king, Ashoka, against the first major Christian one, Constantine. The difference is significant. I don't want to claim Buddhist superiority on this basis, I just want to temper Jerryson's article a little. Nevertheless, I appreciate your work and look forward to reading the book. I think it is very important for Buddhists to understand these examples of violence so that we can better return to the truly non-violent teachings of the Tathagata. May all beings benefit.
you mustn't condemn someone for "perpetrating violence" if it's an act of self defense. Self defense extents to one's community as well.
Have you ever run for your life from a mob? Feared at any moment strangers breaking into your house and killing your family? You'd buy a gun too Michael Jerryson.
First, I want to thank Stereo Lotus for the thoughtful comments, and express my regret at not sounding a more similar tone; I seem to have come off a bit harsher than I intended(!)
Second, I'm troubled by the images of the young monastics with toy guns in that they hype more than accurately reflect the thrust of Buddhist Warfare. In fact, the title itself is similarly hyperbolic in suggesting actual Buddhist counterparts to the bona fide armies in the Abrahamic traditions (e.g., Crusaders, Ottoman expansion, etc.). Boys like to play with guns, and young monastics are no different, though doubtless their elders forbid it (which of course increases the attraction!).
I can't help but feel that images of grown men, monastics with real guns, such as those described in the article in Thailand and elsewhere, would help bolster the arguments set out in the article and book. I assume the book has them -why not show them here? Because a boy in monks robes with a gun (real or not) is simply more shocking...
Living in a monastery, an ashram, a cave is a very privileged, simplified and safe endeavor. There, one can work on dealing with a very limited set of difficulties and aspire towards a particular set of ideals. It is a very artificial experience.
Going out into the ordinary world, or being dragged out into the street, and there being confronted with a much more chaotic set of challenges is a shocking experience. There have been many, many examples of serene beings who have "fallen" in various ways due to such shocks to their systems, which may have been lulled into a false sense of simplicity, wholeness, centeredness, balance - a shattering of an illusion of understanding life and being able to deal with it.
By my observation and in my experience, it is ultimately much better to tread a spiritual path that not only allows for but actually encourages and facilitates the full integration of the transcendent and the emergent. The insight, knowledge, and understanding that can be gained through various methods of seeking Higher Guidance, plus the wisdom gained by applying this to practical situations in this worldly life, brings about a true realization. It also enables one to live life much more fully and completely - to become the person that one was really intended to be.
While taking up a gun might seem the only reasonable option for someone who has lived in relative seclusion and who has then been suddenly thrust into a threatening situation, one with more developed skills of integrating the spiritual with the mundane might be better able to see that other options are often available.
Buddhism says the three basic "no-no" deeds are (1) lying, (2)taking what is not given to you and (3) taking of life. If you must take life because, say, you're a police officer and kill someone in the line of duty, Buddhism requires you to pray for your victim so that s/he gets a "better incarnation" next time around.
Buddhism comes in different flavours. In Thailand, every male is expected to spend 15 or 30 days as a monk once in his life. Obviously, this is not going to be a game-changer that overhauls a juvenile delinquent into a saint.
In Tibet, there are four schools of Buddhism. The largest is the Gelug, which trains the dalai and panchen lamas. They are warrior monks by tradition (as are the kungfu monks of Shaolin). Those were the monks the Chinese fired at some 50 years ago for the simple reason that the monks had opened fire first. That's not how the Dalai tells it, but ask monks from the Kagyu, Sakya and Nigma schools.
The writer seems to have forgotten the Samurai tradition, which borrowed heavily from Zen Buddhism.
Myanmar is another example, where there appears to be a "disconnect" in the reasoning of some people in the West who have attempted to justify or just ignore behavior that is contrary to the Buddha-dharma, beginning with members of the Sangha who took hostages and set cars on fire in Pakokku township [1], an overt act of retaliatory aggression which occured prior to the Burmese crackdown, clearly meant as intimidation and unbecoming of the spirit of the Buddhist tradition, then the more recent reports that some members of the Sangha have taken to stockpiling firearms for their next encounter with military junta in the aftermath [2].
Of course, such behavior doesn't occur in a vacuum, but most notable in all of this is the attempt to compare such aggressive behavior to an incident mentioned in the Parinibbana Sutta of the Digha Nikaya, where the Buddha is said to have stood in the middle of a river to stop two warring kingdoms who were about to fight over the supply of water.
I don't remember the Parinibbana Sutta mentioning any aggressive behavior by the Buddha, nor was it a protest or demonstration, but intervention in and of itself alone. When members of the laity don't know the difference between a peaceful demonstration and aggressive behavior it is sad enough, but when this appears within the Sangha it becomes even a greater tragedy.
[1] Monks Take Officials Hostage for hours
http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=51,4818,0,0,1,0
[2] Monks with guns? Burma's younger activists get bolder
http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=82,7147,0,0,1,0
I was very interested in this article when I saw the title; but rather disappointed with what followed for it was curiously lacking in actual content...
Ever since I attended the first Buddhism in America conference (held in Boston in 1997) and a well-known American adherent of one of the Buddhist traditions ruefully acknowledged the fact of Buddhist violence and even Buddhist Wars in direct contradiction to ordinary Buddhist propaganda, I've been waiting for a serious, honest treatment of this issue.
And yet, this article illustrates it's premise with stories of Buddhist monks acting in self defense... Nothing is said about Buddhists as violent aggressors or as imperialistic ideologues, when examples of both exist, in history and current events.
Perhaps I'll have to read the book: Looking at the table of contents, I expect that the book may prove better than the article. It is rather short, under 300 pages...
The Dalai Lama teaches according to the Tibetan Buddhist community he leads. If that community does not sanction armed conflict, then he is in fact being forthright about his religion's position on peace and violence. This article appeals to the fact that there actually have been a significant number of violent Buddhists, but the article does not discuss what, if any, influence those violent Buddhists have had on the larger Buddhist community. Does Buddhism have a "just war" doctrine, as Christianity does? Did major Buddhist figures and communities sanction the violence these authors chronicle?
Michael Jerryson gives some examples and details in a response on Killing the Buddha.
"I think all the points raised in this thread are important ones and unfortunately I do not think I have space to cover them adequately in a response, but I will try.
The true motivations for violence are myriad, and I think it important to remember the different motivations that underlie much of these wars (economics, natural resources, etc.).
No global organized religion has doctrine that openly calls for violence. In fact, almost every religion has interdictions to the contrary (and we should scrutinize the need for this). But this aspect is what I call “idealized” religion. It is the religion that we aspire to practice. When I was teaching monks in Thailand, they asked me about people in the United States.
“Ajaan, they don’t lie, or steal, right?” The question was prompted by their study of the Ten Commandments. Certainly Christians, Jews, Muslims aspire to these rules, but there are very different ways that they are practiced– what I called “lived religion.” Paul Hill, a Presbyterian minister in Florida, had very different views of murder when it came to abortion clinics.
But as for Buddhists, there are all types of examples to draw from: You have monks taking up arms and marching in the Russo-Japanese War, or earlier messianic battles in China when they thought killing people would bring them closer to enlightenment (a Ten Stage Process). Buddhists have fought against non-Buddhists, or other Buddhists. Japanese Buddhists fought to cleanse the impure Buddhist lands in China and Korea. Thai and Burmese fought for centuries against each other, each claiming religious authority as Cakravartins. This is what the book covers.
The recent bloody violence in Sri Lanka and Thailand are but examples of this. Yes, Sri Lanka’s violence has traditionally recognized political and cultural components to it, but the Janata Vimukti Peramuna had very clear religious motivations voiced during their assassinations and calls to exterminate the LTTE.
Shaku Soen and D.T. Suzuki, along with Paul Carus, were instrumental in bringing Japanese Zen to this country. There is a long history of this, covered quite well by Verhoeven in “Americanizing the Buddha.” And lets not forget that Suzuki and his teacher Soen were at the vanguard of Japanese militarism during the Russo-Japanese and second World Wars. In Suzuki’s own words, Buddhism must protect the nation.
Walpola Rahula did the same for Sri Lankan Buddhism in the United States, and he had similar concepts of religiously justified violence in Sri Lanka.
In the end, what I find odd is how we try to displace a very long and lengthy history as anecdotal or enigmatic examples of people gone awry, instead of seeing the nature of religious violence present in Buddhist traditions (as well as others)."
Wow. Thanks for this. I've been looking into the dark side of buddhism myself here. I think this is deserving of a post on it's own, will link back.
Jerryson is way off.
The problem is that Jerryson managed to build up an erroneous version of Buddhism in his own mind. This is not the fault of Walpola Rahula, or D.T. Suzuki, or the Dalai Lama (or anyone else, obviously, other than Jerryson himself).
Anyone who makes a serious study of what has been said and written by the three great Buddhist teachers named by Jerryson will find that they have not engaged in deceitful "propaganda", but rather they have honestly attempted to reconcile the aspiration to non-violence with the challenges posed by, for example, living in the same world as terrorists.
Over 12 years ago, Matthew Kosuta produced a detailed study of "The Military in the Pali Canon" (which is nowhere mentioned, even in a footnote, in Jerryson's book). In the conclusion of that study Kosuta states that based on the Pali Canon (as close as we can get to the "original" teachings of the historical Buddha) Buddhist teachings have always recognized "that, in a mundane perspective, the military is ever present, of high prestige, and even necessary in some circumstances for the protection of Buddhism."
Kosuta's study is freely available online.
Jerryson's article is reasonably accurate, but he comes across as someone who just learned there is no Santa Claus and now is on a crusade to spread the truth about Christmas.
Someone going to Thailand to study Buddhist monks ought to have been reasonably acquainted with the Vinaya-pitaka, the Buddha's rules for the monastic orders, which permit monks to defend themselves and others, even with deadly force. And the tradition of warrior monks was not exactly a secret either, as any devotee of kung fu movies can attest.
Tecumsah, I hear ya.
I had a similar thought, have you never heard of a shaolin monk, never watched a kung-fu movie.
Buddhists like Daoists, believe in the natural cycles of life, recognise the good, the bad, and the ugly as natural.
Animals (and plants for that matter) fight for their survival everyday, and we are an animal after all.
It's a misconception that violence is not a natural act. Its oppression and malice, that is damaging to the soul.
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