[Buddha-l] Religious violence, Buddhist violence

[Dan Lusthaus]

Curt,

I might agree with you up to a point. Christianity and Islam are unique not 
only in the degree of complicity they have had with violence and war, but in 
the essentializing sacrilization of violence. Buddhism, the other great 
world missionary tradition, doesn't hold a candle to either of them -- even 
factoring in the revelations mentioned in my last post.

We know we have a special case with Islam, not in the hoary past but at this 
very moment, when Yale University Press publishes a book on the Mohammed 
Cartoon controversy and, over the objection of its author, excludes any 
pictures of the actual cartoons (although they are all available online), 
for fear that literally heads will roll. And not just from a couple of nut 
job fanatics. The large, angry mobs that gathered throughout the Muslim 
world, tearing down embassies, etc., was still vivid in the press's mind.

Christians have started to exercise some restraint during the course of the 
20th c (not much before that), and so have installed a kind of mass amnesia 
and denial of their past, but it's there for anyone with eyes, memory and 
the ability to read. With the decline in Western power, the violence option 
gets more remote and interreligious "dialogue" has largely replaced 
missionaries stirring up the natives under the protection of the Imperial 
militaries. Islam is more optimistic about its rise in the future, and so 
violence is embraced. That equation -- a sense of dominance and the 
propensity to justify violence -- needs to be studied, esp. in the context 
of religion.

But to acknowledge that Christianity and Islam are special cases, and 
clearly the worst offenders, doesn't let Buddhists, etc. off the hook 
completely. The notion that pagans are spared -- that only monotheists are 
violent -- is belied by E. Asian history, which has been as bloody and 
ruthless as anywhere on the planet -- only perpetrated by different motives 
and rationalizations. The Greeks loved war, courage, violence, conquest, 
rape, plunder, and songs from the id. Sparta. The greatness of Athens was 
measured in the ancient world  by its military successes as much as by its 
intellectual foment (remember what they did to that gadfly Socrates).

Islam and Christianity also have a "peace" rhetorical counter-current, which 
historically always tended to be a tentative minority, and frequently 
persecuted, moreso in Islam than Christianity. But it is admirable that such 
countercurrents exist at all, and they should be encouraged (without 
adopting the false view that they represent "real" Islam" or "real" 
Christianity; that view only belongs to those minorities and their 
cheerleaders, not history).

Japan might be unique in Buddhist history in terms of the extent to which it 
institutionalized its violence and formed its own military (making Faure's 
claim all the more bizarre). It is fair to say that the "peace" component in 
Buddhism has always been more mainstream, not a minor countercurrent. That 
difference from Chr. and Isl. is more than significant. It is monumental. It 
may be a fair generalization, however, to note that once Buddhists 
institutionalize a mutually approving relationship to the State, or, as in 
the case of Tibet, etc., become the State, Buddhist militancy, violence 
(both approval and meting out) is not only tolerated but also 
institutionalized. That deserves to be carefully studied, not hidden away in 
the closet. Violence does become sacred, sadly, even in Buddhism.

Dan