[Buddha-l] Subject: the poignancy of Donald Lopez

[Richard Hayes]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 8:51 AM, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> 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."

I'm glad you mentioned Kosuta's M.A. thesis, on which I happen to have been one of the examiners when he defended it. It's an interesting thesis and well worth reading. Kosuta was interested in the topic because he himself comes form a military family and had a career in the military before returning to school. His first impression on encountering Buddhism was that Buddhism is entirely anti-military, because there are so many references to anti-war passages in the secondary literature. As Kosuta became more familiar with the Pali literature (which he studied with his mentor, Mathieu Boisvert at Université du Québec à Montréal), he was struck by how frequently military imagery is used in a positive way. Good monks are compared to brave soldiers, war elephants, skilled archers and so on. None of this is terribly surprising, he notes, considering that Gotama was of the warrior varna, and given that there are numerous passages claiming that warriors are superior to and more worthy of respect than intellectuals (or, to put it otherwise, that khattiyas are more worthy of respect than brahmins). It's not as though Buddhism had been hijacked by warriors; rather, it was martial from the very beginning.

After writing his MA thesis, Matthew Kosuta spent a year as an exchange student at a Buddhist university in Yangon, Myanmar (formerly known as Rangoon, Burma). He went to the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University in Yangon. I kept in touch with him before and after his time there. It intrigued him no end that the military government in Myanmar closed every university in the country except a couple of Buddhist universities. He was also interested in the tight and cosy relationship between the bhikkhusangha and the generals. He became increasingly convinced that the monks were not simply being prudent and pretending to agree with the military, but that there was a fundamental approval of the military dictatorship among the senior monks. The monks and generals seemed to agree that lay people are unruly savages who require top-down control, and that foreigners are all potentially dangerous influences whose contact with Burmese people must be kept to a bare minimum. 

As his year in Myanmar went on, Kosuta found himself becoming increasingly annoyed by several aspects of his situation as a foreign student in a Buddhist missionary university in Myanmar. Every single e-mail that every student wrote had to be routed through censors, with the result that it could take an e-mail as long as four months to reach its destination. Not only e-mails but posted letters, both inbound and outbound, were read and censored by university officials (who, of course, were all monks). What eventually got to him most was that the one and only pedagogical methodology at the Buddhist missionary university was memorization and recitation of Pali texts. There was no discussion, no interpretation more recent than Buddhaghosa's (which was also memorized), no historical contextualization, no writing of essays, no encouragement to put the meaning of a text into one's own words. There seemed to be no apparent understanding that Buddhist missionaries might not be very effective if the only thing they could do was recite the Pali canon to their potential converts. Although Matthew himself had been a career military person before becoming a student, and therefore had a certain amount of respect for authority and discipline, he was not at all charmed by the authoritarianism of the Buddhism he encountered under a military junta.

As an anti-authoritarian pacifist, my own disenchantment with traditional Buddhism was kicked into high gear when I read Michel Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_ (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison) in 1988. While Foucault was talking about the influence of Christian monasticism on both the European military and the penitentiary system in post-Enlightenment Europe, I was struck by how almost every observation he made about Christian monastic authoritarianism could be applied to the culture of the Buddhist community I then belonged to, and to others I had had a chance to observe at close range. Buddhism in America was, with a few happy exceptions, authoritarian to the core. And, insofar as authoritarianism is essentially a form of violence, I could only conclude that Buddhist institutions, as I had experienced them, were essentially violent to the core.

I did not believe then, and still do not believe, that Buddhism must be authoritarian and violent. The teachings (military metaphors in the Pali canon notwithstanding) are not violent. Quite the opposite. (Or perhaps I should just say that the Buddhist teachings I have chosen to inspire me are not violent. If there are violent teachings, I simply them.) Give anything to human beings, however, and they can quickly turn it into something violent and ugly. That, in a nutshell, is the story of world religions.

-- 
Richard Hayes