[Buddha-l] Re: Buddhist pacifism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 16:32 -0400, curt wrote:

> Looking at what Buddhists actually do is more important than is ever
> acknowledged by the people who insist that "Buddhism is inherently
> pacifist".

Looking at what any group of people actually does is the worst place to
look for what they ought to do. If one looked. for example, at what
Americans do, one would have to conclude that the Constitution requires
invading foreign countries for no defensible reason, detaining suspected
enemies of the government indefinitely without trial, and passing laws
that place no obstacles at all in the way of major corporations while
making it almost impossible for the poor to make a legal living.

>  But the "Buddhism is inherently pacifist" argument largely 
> consists of quotations intended to convince to us that Buddhists were 
> always supposed to "believe" that all violence is wrong (and please pay 
> no attention to all those piles of dead bodies over there.)

You misconstrue the argument made for pacifism. This argument is rather
simple and has nothing at all to do with belief. It has everything to do
with practice based on the observation that harming others causes
dukkha. And since the objective of Buddhist practice is to avoid dukkha,
harming others is inconsistent with positively effective Buddhist
practice. That is not a creed. It is a sample of applying elementary
logic.

> That argument, by the way, has the, hopefully unintended, side-effect of 
> promoting a view of Buddhists as the most hypocritical people in the 
> history of hypocrisy.

Not really. It simply makes it obvious that Buddhists have not been much
better than anyone else at following the practices recommended for
them. 

> Even more embarrassingly, it puts its proponents in the position of
> being the ones who are going to explain what Buddhism is really
> supposed to be - to people who have been practicing it for 2500 years.

Not at all. Rather, it puts people who understand the practice and
follow it in the position of offering help to those who have failed to
understand the practice and to follow it.

> You don't need a Buddhist to tell you what you will find when you
> already know exactly what you are looking for.

Quite true. If one does not look for a non-violent way of being in the
world, one will never find it. Buddhists have no monopoly on that
insight, nor have they claimed to have one. 

-- 
Richard Hayes