Scholars may debate the interpretation of the official Buddhist doctrinal stance on violence, but history confirms a widespread propensity among states to adopt Buddhisms as the official religion and for Buddhisms to provide the rationalization for the state’s sanctioned use of violence. State applications of Buddhisms were so pervasive in ancient India that they became an assumed practice. One of the leading scholars of early Buddhisms, Balkrishna Gokhale, has argued that early Buddhist thinkers always took for granted the power of the state, and that this “organization of force or violence” was “largely restricted to the king.”26 The implicit Buddhist understanding of state and violence is such that, as it says in the Vinaya, “those who administer torture and maiming are called kings.”27 Uma Chakravarti argues that Buddhist ideas on power are invariably expressed through the medium of the king. Buddhists, she writes, “do not seem to envisage a political and social system without the institution of kingship.”28 Numerous Buddhist canonical texts stress the intrinsic relationship between Buddhism and the state. One of these is “The Lion’s Roar on the Turning of the Wheel” (Pli: Cakkavatti-shanda sutta) in the largest collection of discourses, the Dgha Nikya. In discourse, the Buddha explains to his retinue of monks the importance of a just rule. He tells the story of a monarch named Dalhanemi, who is unable to preserve order in his realm because he fails to correctly administer the dhamma in his state policies—in this particular instance, by not giving property to the needy. Thus, one incorrect policy by the king catalyzes a concatenation of events that result in depravity and disorder.29
The inability to conceive of a state without Buddhism alludes to a kind of religious nationalism. Religious nationalism thus becomes a way of conceptualizing the state and its society as necessarily Buddhist. This concept was actualized in such Buddhist societies as sixteenth-century Tibet. After examining the relationship between the Fifth Dalai Lama and Gushri Khan, the Mongol ruler, Derek Maher in this volume offers a cogent example of how the interests of the state and of religion coalesce. Buddhist nationalism becomes a way of thinking and a rationale for justifying warfare, either to defend the nation or to extend the power of the nation. The phenomenon of soldier-Zen and the just-war ideology in support of the Japanese in World War II is addressed in Victoria’s chapter. Another chapter in this volume, Xue Yu’s “Buddhist Monks in China during the Korean War (1951–1953),” provides a more recent example of Buddhist nationalism. He reveals Chinese Buddhist justifications for engaging in the Korean War. In Paul Demiéville’s chapter, we find reoccurring Buddhist justifications for warfare in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese societies.
The final chapters herein relate Buddhist warfare to other aspects of violence. Michael Jerryson’s chapter notes that violence is often associated with the role of a Buddhist monk as a political symbol in Buddhist countries. He theorizes that one catalyst for Buddhist violence might be an attack upon a Buddhist monk, which would then lead to violent acts of retaliation. Jerryson’s observations are based on the Buddhist-Muslim conflict in Thailand, but the pattern may hold true throughout Buddhist societies. In “Afterthoughts,” Bernard Faure urges us to look beyond the popular associations of violence with war and to consider more nuanced aspects of violence. This intellectual nudge puts into context the self-immolation of Vietnamese monks during the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Spivakian category of epistemic violence, and even Buddhist perspectives on anorexia and bulimia. Hence, this volume on Buddhist warfare in such countries as Tibet, India, China, Mongolia, and Sri Lanka counters the pervasive illusion that Buddhism is a pacifistic religion and raises the issue of the relationship of violence to spirituality in Buddhisms. Hopefully, in a wider sense, this volume will help to bring Buddhist examples to the discourse about sacred violence in general. The problematic idea of religious war is an intellectual challenge not only for historical reflection, but also for understanding the social tensions of the contemporary age.
I
Buddhism and War
Paul Demiéville Translated by Michelle Kendall
General Renondeau’s superb text on Japan’s warrior-monks (shei) precedes this. In it, the thrice-endowed expert of Japanology, Buddhism, and military history presents a few observations and musings that go further than usual; these I would now like to summarize.1 Is Buddhism’s militarization just a phenomenon found in Japan, or do we see other examples in the general history of Buddhism? How is this explained, how was it explained, this departure from a doctrine whose main cardinal precept is to refrain absolutely from killing any living being? What might the social, economic, and political motives of this phenomenon have been? What logic do the guilty parties use to ideologically justify their deviation from the prescribed doctrine? Such are the questions I am given the opportunity to consider, thanks to Renondeau, in this Chinese-style postscript.
When the Hieizan monks took up arms to go off to war their faces were veiled. Their heads were wrapped in a cloth that left only their eyes uncovered. It can surely be said that they were in bad faith, and for good reason. Murder, harming living creatures, as is said in Sanskrit (prntipta), the act of killing (cha-cheng) or cutting short life (touan cheng-ming) as the Chinese say, are all in fact the subject of the first of the five precepts (pañca-la), which every practitioner in the Buddhist community must observe, laypersons as well as monks. Within this not inherently Buddhist pentalogy,2 the precept of not-killing comes before stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and the taking of intoxicants, all of which war also exploits, in addition to murder. Yet, there is nothing more worthy than not-killing. The canonical tradition is unanimous on this: “Murder is the most serious of all sins.”3 It is also ranked number one in the ten major sins that we call “negative paths of karma” (akuala-karmapatha) and which are forbidden to the clerics, beginners, catechumen, monks, and nuns. No other precept is followed so strictly by all Buddhists, even now. Not-killing is a characteristic so anchored in Buddhism that it is practically considered a custom.4
It has its distinctive quality. My reverend friend Bhikkhu Walpola Rahula has often told me that, until her death, his mother (a simple peasant from Ceylon) had never killed a living creature, not even an insect. In the Vinaya, the set of rules regulating the monastic community, the killing of any being (animal or plant) is considered a sin requiring purification. Hence, the clergy were required to take precautions such as using filters, abstaining from nightly walks or walks soon after rainfall, etc., as a measure to protect the lives of even the tiniest sentient beings. For monks and nuns, killing a human being is one of the four transgressions that are grounds for excommunication and definitive expulsion from the monastic community (prjika). On the canonical list of transgressions that qualify for excommunication, murder is ranked third, after sexual misconduct and stealing, but before lying. Yet, the Chinese interpreters of the Great Vehicle insist that this classification must be rectified and that murder must be placed first.5
Buddhist pedagogy was observed when it came to the sin of killing. This sin is defined as more than the act of killing itself, it includes simply provoking or even approving of a murder committed by someone else, or likewise contributing in any way to one. Hence, it follows that with war, responsibility is collective in nature:
When soldiers join together toward the same goal, they are all equally as guilty as the one who does the actual killing. In fact … communally they egg each other on, if not with words, then in the mere fact that they are all there together to kill. … Even [if ] it is out of duty that they have joined the army, they are guilty, except if they have made this pledge: I will not kill a living being, even to save my own life.6
On this point, the Buddhist logicians concur with every antimilitarist logician, from Mö-tseu to Tchouang-tseu, from Pascal to La Bruyère:7 “If a man steals a buckle, he’s put to death; yet if a man steals a principality, he becomes a prince”8; or like the French proverb states, “If a man steals money, he’s condemned. If he steals a nation, he’s crowned.”
T
hey go even further, and not without pushing the logic of their own dogma to its near limits, it seems: better to die than to kill, they teach; better to observe the taboo on someone else’s life than to preserve one’s own life.9 With this, we are touching on one of the fundamental paradoxes in Buddhist doctrine (the other one concerning us is the antinomy of karma and the negation of all personality, nairtmya), paradoxes stemming no doubt from the conflict between the Buddhist reformation’s innovations and old, immemorial principles that were anchored in the collective unconscious.10 The Buddhist axiom is that everything is suffering, but that there is a way to end this suffering: this path leads to nirvana, which principally consists in the end of rebirth. The condemnation of life is evident, and naïve logic would favor these eleventh-century Chinese sectarians who massacred their contemporaries while declaring that, since life is suffering, killing one’s neighbor is doing him a favor.11 This is a simple-minded heresy for there is karma which cannot be extinguished by death.12 The most misleading of all temptations therefore would be using suicide as an option. Dually noted in various texts of the Vinaya is the condemnation of suicide as preceding that of murder or which serves as the preliminary opportunity for it.13 Certainly suicide is not as serious as murder:14 it is only a wrong action (duskta) or a serious misdeed (sthltyaya) and is not, like murder, cause for excommunication (prjika) or for purification (pyantika).15 The common monk is no less formally counseled against suicide, for it prevents him from continuing the cultivation of pure conduct (brahmacary), in other words good karma (kuala-karman), and therefore from his salvation.16 Certainly, we notice on many occasions in Buddhist texts where suicides have not been condemned;17 but it usually concerns the saints of the Lesser Vehicle who were ready for nirvana and, “having done what there was to do” (kta-ktya), no longer have to accumulate redemptive karma. Or it concerns the bodhisattva[s] sacrificing their lives for the good of others. As La Vallée Poussin notes, the example of a saint like Vakkali—who attains nirvana while slicing his own throat (with the Buddha’s approval)—is completely different from the example of the average suicide victim who covets non-existence, and for whom suicide is an act of passion and not the result of a supreme peace of mind.18 Vakkali was “beyond reproach, without remorse”; he was ready for deliverance (vimukti); Vakkali was mature.19 As for the Great Vehicle, we read in the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom attributed to Ngrjuna that suicide is not a sin of killing, because it does not destroy the life of another.20 Further, is not the other’s life more precious than my own life? Certainly, according to the Great Vehicle, whose moral is essentially altruistic. So why do the Lesser Vehicle texts like those referenced earlier, teach that in war it is better to let oneself be killed than to kill? Admittedly, Buddhist altruism is not an innovation of the Great Vehicle; it only develops it.
The saint of the Great Vehicle, the bodhisattva, must “contribute to the life of everything that exists.”21 But, what is this thing called “me”? What is the “me” of another living being? Why compassion, why altruism, why would I sacrifice myself out of respect for another living being if it does not exist in itself, if it is only an aggregate of continually changing aggregates, as Buddhism asserts? “Why combat suffering if the suffering being does not exist?”22 And as for killing, what is it really, since the aggregates (skandha) are short-lived (kaika)?23 “The destruction of things is spontaneous,” states a well-known treatise from the Lesser Vehicle. “[T]hings perish on their own, because it is in their nature to perish. As they perish with no help from the other, they perish in being born; perishing in birth, they are short-lived.”24 What then is the role of the murderer? We are told that he puts an end to the vital breath (pra) by inhibiting it to continue to recur. What is more, he annihilates the very organ that houses the life force (jvitendriya), by obstructing the birth of a new “moment.” However, if there is no person, no entity endowed with breath (prin) who is killed: what dies, as what lives, [is] simply a material body complete with sense organs.25 Therefore, killing is allowed to be defined as “cutting short the series, of a predetermined duration, of a sentient being.”26 Mahyna doctors do not hesitate to jump to the conclusion:
[S]ince the living being [sattva] does not exist, neither does the sin of murder. And since the sin of murder does not exist, there is no longer any reason to forbid it. … In killing then, given that the five aggregates are characteristically empty, similar to the visions of dreams or reflections in a mirror, one commits no wrongdoing.27
Not surprisingly with such definitions, the Buddhism of the Great Vehicle was able to engender a reasoning which the clergy only had to draw upon to justify its warrior aberrations. The Lesser Vehicle, which tends to condemn life, remains firm in its interdiction of killing; the Great Vehicle lauds life, and it is the Great Vehicle that will in the end find excuses for murder, and will even glorify it.
We will discuss these ideas in even more detail than the Buddhists from the Far East have done, though they have had numerous opportunities to bring them to the fore. Among the treatises on discipline in which the Great Vehicle devises to thwart the Vinaya of the Lesser Vehicle, none has had more success, in China, as well as in Japan, and in neighboring countries, than the work entitled the Brahma Net stra (Brahmajla stra). This was purportedly translated from the Sanskrit at the beginning of the fifth century, but its authenticity is, to say the least, dubious. For instance, we have found no evidence of it outside China. Nevertheless, this text strongly insists upon the responsibility that befalls the children of the Buddha; in other words, the follower who has taken his bodhisattva vows in line with the Great Vehicle is to take no part whatsoever in war. It forbids them to possess arms, to “stockpile” any object destined for the killing of other living beings, such as knives, sticks, bows or arrows, spears, axes, fishing nets, or hunting lassos.28 When armies come into contact with one another, they are to refrain from getting involved with each other, from going back and forth between camps, and especially from participating in any armed combat against the state, all while following their missions.29 They will not attend battles wishing ill on the other.30 They will not kill. They will not make the other kill. They will not attain the means for killing. They will refrain from praising killing and from approving of it when they find themselves witnessing it. They will abstain from being accomplices of murder through the use of black magic, etc.31 For all intents and purposes, their mind must always be filled with charitable and submissive thoughts, thoughts of the other’s salvation; for them, killing will lead to their excommunication (prjika).32
This was a long insistence on warlike temptations that most assuredly were assailing the Buddhists at the time this text was written, a time in China’s history when peasant uprisings were rife with Buddhist inspiration.33 Perhaps in other parts of its vast and expanding domain Buddhism contributed to softening, if not eliminating war. I recollect having read that a king from Indianized Indochina had the tips of soldiers’ arrows rounded. Even in India, I don’t believe Buddhist monks ever took up arms; they left that to the yogin and sannysin ascetic orders which were still overrunning the countryside in the eighteenth century and which the British administration had to suppress.34 The emperor Aoka seems to have been converted to Buddhism through his experience of the horrors of war:
Eight years after his coronation, the King Piyadasi, the Beloved-of-the-Gods, conquered Kalinga. One hundred thousand people were deported; one hundred thousand were killed; this number many times over perished. Then, once Kalinga was taken, his fervent supporters were for the Beloved-of-the-Gods the enforcement of the Law, the love of the Law, the teaching of the Law. Regret took hold of the Beloved-of-the-Gods after he conquered Kalinga. Seeing that conquering an independent country is murder, it means death or captivity for its people.35
Also, Buddhist nonviolence (avihis) most certainly contributed to the weakening of the lamaist, Tibetan, and Mongol military. As early as the eighth century a Turkish khan was advised to be wary of Buddhism (
and of Taoism), for it was said that these doctrines “make one good and weak, and are usually against using war or forceful conflict as an option.”36 Likewise, in the thirteenth century, Khubilai [Qubilai] had to use Buddhism to politically neutralize Tibet.37
Yet we do not see Buddhism making the people it came in contact with (be it in China, nor Japan, or even in countries of Chinese development) more pacifistic. In these countries, it was contending with “closed-minded,” well-established nations, built mostly on Confucianism. Here, the relationship between church and state was posing problems the likes of which history has scarcely seen except in Europe.38
So many different solutions! It is significant that in the history of China the question of Buddhist monks serving in the military was never discussed in ideological terms, only in economical ones. Buddhist clergy maintained a privileged status with regard to the state that exempted them from paying taxes and exempted them from any state-required civic duty, such as military service.39 In exchange for these privileges, the state expected religious benefits for its welfare, the welfare of the dynasty, and all its citizens. Rites were performed against natural calamities, such as droughts, as well as against human calamities, such as war or enemies. Subsequently, most notably in Tantric liturgy, we see Buddhist rituals used toward military ends continuously throughout the Far East. For this, they used such apocryphal manuscripts as the well-known text from the Perfection of Wisdom, the Diamond stra.40 As the first Christian rulers in Europe relied on Christianity to win wars, so it was with the barbarians in northern China, and later in Japan: one of the principal reasons for adopting Buddhism was the hope of gaining some military advantages.41
Buddhist Warfare Page 3