When I say “Buddhist violence,” you say you “oxymoron.”
Buddhism is a quintessentially peaceful and nonviolent faith. But for the past couple of years, reports of Buddhist violence aimed at eliminating local Muslim populations have come out of Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Despite the celestial peace child image of Buddhists, most people understand that lay practitioners are, at the end of the day, human, and may drift from the teachings of the faith into violence and hatred.
Problem is, that’s not what’s going on in Southeast Asia. What’s truly disturbing to many is that groups like the 969 Movement in Myanmar and Bodu Bala Sena in Sri Lanka aren’t just composed of Buddhists, but are led by monks as Buddhist groups, purportedly operating on Buddhist beliefs and under Buddhist doctrine, to promote violence and aggression. Yet while this explicitly Buddhist violence feels incongruent with the faith, there’s actually a long, but often forgotten historical tradition and strong theological basis for violence in (and in the name of) Buddhism.
Although TIME magazine’s coverage of the Southeast Asian surge in Buddhist violence has snapped attention towards the issue, the coverage has colored the history of much of recent history. A Buddhist monk led a major assassination plot, known as the League of Blood Incident in 1932 Japan. In the 1970s Laotian and Thai Buddhists took up arms against communists, declaring that it was not karmically wrong to do so. From 1983 to 2009, Buddhist monks sanctioned aggression against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan Civil War. Since 1992, one of the major militias fighting the Myanmar government, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, has been led or under the influence of a monk named U Thuzana. In 1995, the Japanese cultic terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo justified their release of Sarin gas on the Japanese subway system by claiming that they were liberating less enlightened beings in accordance with tantric Buddhist teachings. And as recently as 2004 and 2008, respectively, Thai monasteries became militant bases in the conflict between local Muslims and Buddhists and Chinese officials claimed to have found weapons caches in Tibetan temples.
And that’s just the last century. Entire books have been written on the history and theology of Buddhist violence. Many violent Buddhist leaders or sects have drawn upon variations of the Mahaparinirvana and Upayakaushalya Sutras, the Kalachakra Tantra and other Buddhist writings in a wide and ever-evolving non-static canon to justify their actions. These scriptures explicitly enjoin believers, under certain conditions, to kill or maim in defense of the Buddhist faith, to spread Buddhist beliefs and values, or to prevent the death of others. Most troublingly for the casual observer, one of the fundamental stories of the past lives of the Buddha tells of a time when he was a ship’s captain who learned of a passenger’s intent to kill 500 people on the boat. The Buddha resolved to kill the killer, and considered it not a sin, but an act of compassion with (depending on interpretations) little to no negative karmic repercussions, as he’d the man from accumulating bad karma and saved everyone else as well.
These beliefs were at play in the foundation of the wushu martial arts, the granddaddy of karate, kung fu, and tarkwondo, amongst the Shaolin Buddhist monks of China as far back as 1,500 years ago; contrary to some stories, their martial arts weren’t entirely defensive as they sent a cadre of monks to help the Chinese Tang dynasty conquer and establish a peaceful realm for Buddhism to thrive and prosper. They also factor into the Tibetan legend of the 841 assassination of King Langdarma, a supporter of the pre-Buddhist Bon religion who dismantled Tibetan state support for monasteries; the Buddhist monk and former warrior Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje determined that he could save both the king and the faith, and thus commit an act of karmic good, by assassinating the king and escaping to resume his monastic practice.
Even modern proponents of the happy, peaceful vision of Buddhism, like the 14th Dalai Lama, admit that their nonviolent ideals exist in a violent world, and allow some leeway. The Dalai Lama, whose predecessor actually tried to develop and modernize a centralized Tibetan army, notoriously endorsed the killing of Osama bin Laden and in 2009 described how physical violence could be construed as nonviolence if done with compassion in mind.
Other modern monks differ with the Dalai Lama, the violent Buddhist groups, and the veracity, validity, or relevance of certain ancient scriptures. But no matter how much they protest, the scriptures leave room for Buddhist violence as a holy justification. Texts are tools for Buddhists as for every other faith. And as long as the world is violent and full of hate, there’ll always be room for some war and pain in the seemingly peaceful Buddhist faith as well.
