Buddhism as a Challenge to Peace?

Part I

Often associated with peace and non-violence, Buddhism has a thing or two to say about peace.

One time the Buddha was asked about the human predicament: “By what fetters, sir, are beings bound… whereby, although they wish to live without hate, harming, hostility or enmity, and in peace, yet they live in hate, harming one another, hostile and malign?”

The Buddha’s short answer was “[I]t is the bonds of jealousy and avarice…” (DN 21.2.1). It is obvious that, for the Buddha, peace must come first from within.

So when asked to come up with my own definition of peace during the first day of class, my best shot at a Buddhist definition of peace was “the cessation of strife and violence against oneself and other.”

This should sound familiar to any Buddhists, since nirvana – the highest Buddhist value – is also defined by the Buddha as the cessation of dukkha (suffering, dissatisfaction). In fact, nirvana is also called “the peaceful state” (santaṃ padaṃ). All ideas, theories, intentions, conducts, practices, goals, etc. must be measured by how conducive they are to nirvana.

Both peace and nirvana also are similar in the way that they are considered almost unobtainable goals. However, it can be argued that both should be considered rather as processes.

To some, a Buddhist definition of peace as “internal” may smack of solipsism. It seems to confirm Max Weber’s view that "Buddhism had no tie with any social movement, nor did it run in parallel with such and it has established no social and political goal." Therefore, he labelled Buddhism as “other-worldly religion” having little to do with the social and political world. (Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, 1958)

But let us consider A. J. Muste’s famous quote: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” Where does such peaceful way come from? It is hard to argue with the first aphorism in the Dhammapada that “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” (Max Müller, The Dhammapada, 1881). The fifth aphorism addresses the question of peace even more specifically: “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an eternal rule.” (Müller, 1881).

Weber apparently made a mistake by equating internal peace with inaction. This would have been true if Buddhism operated on Cartesian mind-body dualism. But that’s not the case. Mental actions are but one of three type of actions. While mental actions may be important in the sense that they precede verbal and physical actions, these last two are key to social interactions.

In Good, Evil and Beyond, the venerable PA Payutto cites three mental attributes – taṇhā (craving for personal gain), māna (pride, desire to dominate), and diṭṭhi (clinging to views) – which “can be seen even more clearly on the social scale than on the individual level.” (A comparison with the security dilemma and realist view of peace will be interesting here.)

In the final analysis, even structural and cultural violence which contribute to direct violence are nothing but accretions over time of social interactions laced by such internal attributes of the human mind. However, what can be constructed by human interactions can also be de-structed by human interactions. Therein lies a message of hope.

Embodying Buddhist principles, “engaged Buddhists” like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama have been vocally and physically active in opposing injustice around the world in non-violent ways to undo the social and cultural violence.

Such approach to peace is clearly not limited to Buddhists, as non-violent movement have sprung up around the world after Gandhi clearly showed that it is possible to confront – even defeat – oppression and direct violence with non-violent resistance.

While Brahmanistic rites celebrated the supreme rule of the universal monarch or ‘cakkavatti’ – he who sets rolling the wheel– the Buddha declared every member of society a wheel-turner. In Vāseṭṭha sutta he said, “Action makes the world go round. Action turns generations of men. Beings are held together by action, Like the chariot wheel by the linchpin.”

When the Buddha “set in motion the wheel of dharma (uprightness)” with his first sermon, he gave a new meaning to ancient India’s wheel symbolism, which previously referred not to just any wheel but that of the war chariot – the equivalent of modern day tanks. This superiority of right over might was later adopted by India’s first emperor Asoka, and the wheel of dharma still appears on India’s national flag until today.

Part II

The recent communal conflicts in Myanmar between the majority Buddhists and minority Muslims must have shattered whatever remained of the idea of Buddhism as a religion of peace and non-violence.

Although my previous reflection papers demonstrated Buddhism’s canonical support for peace, such principles may not be adhered to in reality by present day “Buddhists” with their particular brands of Buddhisms.

That’s why before the recent violence in Myanmar we had a bloody war waged by predominantly Buddhist Sri Lanka against Tamil minorities for a quarter of a century. My country, Thailand, has also become enmeshed in an undeclared war against Muslim minorities since 2004.

Here I would like to touch on seven strands in Buddhism which combined to warp the religion of compassion and wisdom into a violence-mongering blind faith. Although the main focus is Thailand, these points are to a large extent applicable to Myanmar and Sri Lanka as well.

1) Monopoly of Truth

Most religion claims to teach the supreme truth. But Buddhist teachings, in particular, center itself on the four “Noble Truths” as the way to realize ultimate liberation.

These Noble Truths – held to be universally true for all beings – are the fact of the unsatisfactoriness of existence (dukkha), the cause of such unsatisfactoriness (samudaya), the cessation of unsatisfactoriness (nirodha) and the way to such cessation (marga).

Buddhist hagiography portrayed the Buddha as the discoverer of this universal truth who saw things as the way they really are and taught it to the benefits of humanity. For that reason, Buddhists believe that theirs is the one true religion.

2) Grand narrative of Buddhism’s decline

Related to 1), this supreme truth discovered by the Buddha is said by Buddhist tradition to have been discovered by a countless number of previous Buddhas and then again lost to later generations until being rediscovered by another Buddha after indeterminable period of time.

Therefore, it logically follows that the teachings (dhamma) of each Buddha have an “expiration period.” Later literature puts the “expiry date” for this present Buddha’s religion at 500 years, which was later revised to 5000 years.

According to this tradition, the time when the Buddha was alive was the golden period, and his passing away marked the beginning of a long decline which would ultimately leads to the disappearance of the religion altogether. Despite Buddhism’s rejection of a “Creator God”, this tradition is in keeping of the pan-Indian belief in cyclical universe divided into ages, starting with “creation” followed by decay and ultimate “destruction”.

This “grand narrative of decay” led generations of Buddhists to make heroic attempts to spread and sustain their religions by building a vast number of temples, organizing the “council” to ensure accurate records of the Buddhist Canon considered to be the words of the Buddha himself, and supporting the sangha or the monastic system tasked with transmitting the Buddha’s teachings.

These efforts sometimes result in impressive results – for example, the world’s “largest books” in Bagan in the form of thousands of ornate marble slabs inscribed with pages from the whole Buddhist Canon– and other times in a rather comico-paranoid ones such as a nuclear bunker in a Thai temple built to safeguard printed version of the Canon.

Needless to say that this grand narrative of Buddhism’s disappearance is in need of de-construction as much as its opposite – the Eurocentric “grand narrative of progress”.

3) Manichean Buddhism

In Buddhist legends there is a being called māra -- a personification of death (maraṇa) – portrayed as the “ruler” of all beings who tried to persuade the Buddha from discovering and teaching the supreme truth to mankind. Therefore, from the earliest time, there is a trend to see the world as a field where Manichean battle between good and evil plays out, whose result will determine the fate of the religion.

Buddhists therefore tend to see these “evil forces” everywhere and put all efforts into countering them in order to ensure the longevity of the religion. Contemporary Buddhist societies tend to apply the term māra to individuals or groups thought to be against social order, norms and morality.

However, such Manichean view – possibly a Persian influence – actually contradicts the spirit of the Buddha’s teachings in which all human beings are imbued with the same qualities such as egoistic delusion (moha), greed/lust (lobha) and hate/aversion (dosa) and must individually work towards their elimination within themselves. The real battle in Buddhism, therefore, is within each individual. The Buddha emphasizes the positive values which each individuals should inculcate in themselves and project towards others. Chief among these is the Brahmavihāra – loving kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), empathetic joy (muditā) and equal-mindedness (upekkha)

4) Just war

Related to 3), Manichean Buddhism leads to the notion of just war against any individual or group thought as māra.

In Hinduism’s seminal text the Bhagavad Gītā, verses such as “Holding pleasure and pain alike, gain and loss, victory and defeat, then gird thyself for battle; thus thou shalt not get evil,” would be interpreted by most modern Hindu thinkers as addressing a spiritual battle inside oneself. However, fundamentalists see them literally as validation for actual wars, considering it righteous to kill in the name of dharma – much like Arjuna, who was advised by Krishna to follow his warrior duty by going to war with his own cousins.

Interestingly, this idea of duty to kill has been adopted by some Buddhists. For example, in 2010 many Thais were calling for the government to crack down on the tens of thousands of “red-shirt” protesters who were camping for weeks in the heart of Bangkok. To justify the foreseeable bloodshed against these māra, one violence-monger published a Gītā-alluding poem dedicated to the then prime minister entitled, “Go to war, Abhisit!”

As already elaborated in my reflection paper #2, the Buddha thoroughly rejected this kind of thinking in Aṅgulimāla sutta. If modern-day Buddhists understand the message therein, at least there would be “negative peace” in society.

5) The karmic “theory of everything”

Lacking knowledge of competing karma theories in the Buddha’s time, many Buddhists fail to grasp how the Buddha revolutionized the concept of karma, turning it from an all-oppressive cosmic force to an agency to command one’s own life and make spiritual progress in this life. Oblivious to the Buddha’s emphasis on the here and now, they regress to the pre-Buddhist belief that everything in life is determined by the past. This kind of karmic navel-gazing allows all of today’s predicaments to be conveniently blamed on deeds committed in previous lives. Therefore, instead of making efforts to improve one’s conditions according to the Buddha’s forward-looking doctrine, they are preoccupied with staring retrospectively into the karmic crystal and conducting charlatan rituals to “untangle karma”.

Karmic determinism has done great damage not only to individual efforts but also to society as a whole, when karma is used to rationalize inequality and justify prejudices. According to this view, the disabled, the poor and women are said to deserve their present woes because they made too little merit or, worse, committed sins in their past lives. this list of second-class humans has in modern times extended to include homosexuals, transgenders, people with HIV, sex workers, victims of crimes, the frail and even tsunami victims

In this wrong-headed belief in karma, everything happens for a karmic reason, and all victims deserve their violations. It can be used to justify everything without explaining anything. This paves way for all kind of structural and direct violence in society.

In a society reveling in karmic fatalism and cosmic retribution, rigid norm and communal sanctions are enforced to preserve the social – and cosmic – order. It is thought righteous to maintain prejudice and discrimination against marginalized minorities, while empowering measures provided for them are seen as undue approval and encouragement for those with allegedly undeserving moral characters.

Taken by believers into their own hands and institutionalized by society, karmic determinism, in effect, is turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, much of the ordeal suffered by the vulnerable is ensured by structural violence in the forms of public censure and social sanctions.

According to Buddhism, however, differences among people should be a cause for kindness and compassion. In fact, in the Vāstṭha Sutta the Buddha was the first religious teacher to proclaim the commonality of all humankind in an age when caste, sexism and racism prevailed.

Therefore, the Buddha’s karma theory should be used to improve societies for the benefit of all – not for blaming the victims. To use a science metaphor, the Buddha was not only the Newton who transformed the understanding of karmic gravity, but also the Wright brothers who led the way in navigating and even defying it. If adopted by modern-day Buddhists, it would ensure “positive peace” in society.

6) The primacy of intention

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Eichmann showed no remorse or guilt because he was just "did his duty...; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law." (p. 135).

In “Decoding Two Miracles of the Buddha” published in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, I wrote about similar phenomenon in Asia where Nuon Chea, Khmer Rouge’s “Brother Number 2”, convinced his subordinates of their innocence after their reign of terror had caused millions of deaths.

This is how he put it: “You did not have any intention; therefore you did not commit any sin.” According to this, no wrongs have been committed if one merely follows orders without “taking it personally”.

Similarly, Zen Buddhism underpinned Japan’s Code of Bushidō – “the way of the warrior” – and instilled samurais with bravery in the face of death, as well as the determination to carry out their bloody tasks.

Brian Victoria, author of Zen at War, summarized: “There is a Zen belief that you can transcend good and evil. And once you’ve done this, you act in a spontaneous and intuitive manner. Once you believe that discriminating thought is no longer important – in fact, that not only is it not important, but that it has to be discarded – then all ethical concerns disappear.”

Starting even before World War II, Japanese religious leaders cited Buddhism to support the country’s militaristic expansion. Soyen Shaku, teacher of D.T. Suzuki, defended the Russo-Japanese war by calling it a just war against evils that “must be unflinchingly prosecuted”. But nothing can be further removed from the Buddha’s teachings than war and violence.

Most Buddhists are familiar with the Angulimāla Sutta in which the Buddha used a “miracle” to convert the eponymous brigand who tried to kill him. Although this famous story is widely considered as the best demonstration of the compassionate Buddha’s redemptive power and the universal human potential for spiritual progress, I constructed a new line of evidence to show that there’s another important message which can be recovered from the sutra.

Based on the works of two prominent Buddhist scholars, it could be deduced that Angulimāla went on a murderous spree as a service to the god Śiva, with a belief that such selfless devotion freed him of any culpability and would lead to spiritual liberation from suffering and rebirth. More specifically, no “karma (action)” is incurred if one does not attach oneself to the action itself or its result.

This particular belief echoes Hinduism’s seminal text, the Bhagavadgītā, which was the advice given by the demi-god Krishna to the warrior Arjuna to follow his duty by going to war with his own cousins. A passage reads, “Holding pleasure and pain alike, gain and loss, victory and defeat, then gird thyself for battle; thus thou shalt not get evil.” In other words, not committing oneself to an act is as good as not committing it.

In this light, Nuon Chea’s belief is clearly a modern variant of Angulimāla’s devolitonalism. The difference is Nuon Chea and his lieutenants were not worshipping Śiva but practicing the faith of radical totalitarianism.

Although the Angulimāla Sutta obviously censures violence, it is more importantly a rebuttal of moral suspension, of which murder is but one possible manifestation.

J. Robert Oppenheimer is believed to have read verses from the Bhagavadgītā to calm his mind and justify his central role in building the world’s first nuclear bombs. After the first explosion, he quoted the Bhagavadgītā, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” His case is an example of how one man’s moral suspension can affect the lives and deaths of millions, even though he was “just doing his job”.

Buddhism, on the other hand, would allow no such moral vacuum, emphasizing mindfulness over actions at all time. For the Buddha, we can never detach ourselves from or deny responsibility for our karma (action) because we are the sum of all volitions reflected in them. Committing acts in the name of a god, belief, ideology, cause, regime or institution doesn’t lessen our moral responsibility.

Even more chillingly, it is moral suspension on a grand scale that allows great atrocities like the Holocaust and genocides to happen. Films like "The Reader" powerfully portrays the guilt and anguish of post-war Germans who, in their own ways, became accomplices to the Holocaust by "just doing their jobs" or turning a blind eye. Angulimāla Sutta, in its broad sense, speaks not only to aggressors, their supporters and accessories, but also to those who keep silent, allowing violence to happen.

In this 21st century, there are more and more "religions" to die for. They tell us it is righteous to safeguard certain values “by any means” - violently if unavoidable. But no matter how noble a cause is - national unity, the monarchy, freedom, democracy, peace, the environment, justice, equality or human rights - it is our moral responsibility to be vigilant and stop ourselves from directly or indirectly doing violence to other human beings. Neither can we keep silent when violence happens, especially when it's committed in our name as a movement, society or country.

I would, therefore, argue that peace must come from each individual’s moral responsibility and mindfulness of the consequences of our action (or inaction) towards themselves and others. I also argue that people like Eichmann, Oppenheimer and Nuon Chea also pursued internal peace, albeit through shortcuts like “duty”, “order” or the “law”.

But, as I hope to have shown, when we try to separate peace inside from peace outside through such shortcuts spurred by our individual “greed for peace” – while turning a blind eye to direct, structural or cultural violence – we can very well end up in committing grave violence towards others.

7) Buddhist nationalism

Buddhist societies faced a great challenge from expanding colonialism since the 18th century. This resulted in the forming of nation-state to resist and/or fight against Western colonialists. Similar to what Ben Anderson wrote in Imagined Community, Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka have found the use of Buddhism as a tool in reorganizing their societies, despite the substantial percentage of non-Buddhist populations in each country.

These “nation-builders” ignored the varieties of Buddhist traditions that existed and constructed a standard official version of history intimately tied up with the upholding of the “religion” – read Buddhism – by the ruling class.

For example, while Thailand’s King Rama V initiated the process of political and administrative centralization, his ordained brother (from a different mother) became the Supreme Patriarch and standardized education system for monks to be dispatched across the kingdom as missionaries to teach the official version of Buddhism. In this newly construct Buddhist nationalism, Buddhism was placed in alliance with “nation” and “monarchy” representing the three colors on Thailand’s national flag.

But Dr. Charles Keyes, professor emeritus of anthropology and international studies at the University of Washington, pointed out, “Even in the ‘successful’ cases where nationalism is based on a dominant religion, minorities who follow other religions tend to be relegated to second-class citizenship, sometimes with disastrous consequences. This was especially true for Hindu and Christian Tamils in Sri Lanka and has proven to be true for Muslim minorities in Thailand and Myanmar.”

This construction of Buddhist nationalism is ironic considering that the nature of the self has been thoroughly deconstructed by the Buddha more than two thousand years ago in his elaboration on Dependent Origination (paticcasamuppāda).

Conclusion

These seven strands of Buddhism(s) make for explosive recipe. Where Buddhism is quasi-national religion, religious minorities are seen as an anomaly or worse a threat to Buddhism and national purity. They are scapegoated in times of economic hardship or political turmoil.

Buddhist fundamentalists call for a war against them to “safeguard the religion.” This is often tied up with accounts of history which portray non-Buddhists as invaders and destructors of Buddhism, particularly ancient Sinhalese account of Tamil invading kings and the account of the “wiping out” of Buddhism in India’s Muslim rulers in medieval period.

As Pruitt Dean put it, “Collective traumas, if they are left untreated, have a long shelf life and are often transmitted to following generations. According to Volcan (2001), an untreated wound of this kind becomes a ‘chosen trauma,’ which is a ‘shared mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered at the hand of an enemy’… Chosen traumas are core components of people’s group identity. They are deposited deep into the collective memory bank of a group’s grievances and periodically withdrawn to justify aggression against the adversary. Chosen traumas can keep hostility alive across many generations to come.”

Such a self-inflicting narrative needs to be constructed. With Dependent Origination, the Buddha has provided a tool to understand and remedy ignorance and egoistic delusion. It can also be put to use to understand and deconstruct nationalistic delusion.