[Buddha-l] Dharmapala

[Dan Lusthaus]

Barnaby,

> The (silly?) point I was making is that if you look at scriptures you can get one picture, but if you look at what real people actually do you get another. 

Only if you are selective as to which scriptures you are reading. Stephen Jenkins' "Making Merit through Warfare and Torture According to the _Ārya-Bodhisattva-gocara-upāyaviṣaya-vikurvaṇa-nirdeśa Sūtra_" is the first essay after the translation of the Demieville piece.

This sūtra, also called Ārya-Satyakaparivarta, has been translated and studied in a dissertation by Lozang Jamspal, and Michael Zimmerman has researched it as well:

Lozang Jamspal, _The Range of the Bodhisattva: A Study of an Early Mahāyānasūtra, "Āryasatyakaparivarta," Discourse of Truth Teller_, PhD Diss, Columbia U, 1991.

Michael Zimmerman, "A Mahāyānist Criticism of _Arthaśāstra_, the Chapter on Royal Ethics in the _Bodhisattva-gocaropāya-viṣaya-vikurvaṇa-nirdeśa sūtra," Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University for the Academic Year 1999 (2000).

There are two Chinese translations as well as a Tibetan translation: Tsong-kha-pa cited it often with exhortations to study it. Nagarjuna and Santideva, among many others, cite it.

The end of the first paragraph of Jenkins' essay puts the reader on notice of what to expect:

"The exploration of its intertextual details opens up an ever-wider view of the sort of Buddhism strongly at odds with the pacifist stereotypes. Here, an armed bodyguard accompanies the Buddha and threatens to destroy those who offend him. Torture can be an expression of compassion. Capital punishment may be encouraged. Body armor and a side arm are amng the most important metaphors and symbols of the power of compassion. Celestial bodhisattvas, divinized embodiments of the power of enlightened compassion, support campaigns of conquest to spread the influence of Buddhism, and kings vested with the dharma commit mass murder against Jains and Hindus." (p. 59)

As you continue to read other essays in the book, this sutra and its cousins keep reappearing, showing that their provenance and influence are not Jenkins' hype, but these served as normative ideas in much of the Mahayana Buddhist world for almost two millennia (the chapters on the Fifth Dalai Lama and on the Mongols especially bear this out, where this sutra's rhetoric is loudly echoing).

So, to make a small point: There is some important Buddhist literature, influential to Buddhists and Buddhism on the ground for a long time, that is only now starting to receive commensurate attention. Heap scorn on me for mentioning it; boycott the Jerryson and Juergensmeyer book; but the scholarship is mounting, so this material will be increasingly hard to ignore or dismiss with facile alibis. There are numerous important aspects that the book never deals with, such as the important role of "protecting the state" that was rhetorically, ritually, and with practical results on the line, promoted and used by Buddhist missionaries to win approval of the rulers in countries like Korea and Japan. Buddhism, nationalism, militarism, mercantilism, slavery, indentured workers, etc. -- bedmates, not opponents.

Is that the best Buddhism can do? Might some of the current ideas about what Buddhism could ideally be offer a more attractive Buddhism? Is that modern idea feasible? Is it important to recognize that that is a modern construction based on a selective view of Buddhist thought and history? Those are the questions.

Dan

Whether a Buddhism that