The battleground is uncertain. It is uncertain whether you will die today or tomorrow. Bombs and mortars fall everywhere. Friends die. Then your heart gets upset. That is why we always need to keep our hearts healthy. It is times like that that you need the help of a monk. Not every monk can accomplish that in a sermon.40
Chakkrawarthi explained that a beautiful sermon or well-told story can help to keep the hearts of soldiers healthy. Another officer referred to the sermons of monks as “medicine for the heart”:
The monks preach in order to calm [the soldiers’] hearts. They fix their hearts by saying things like “You all are doing a good job.” There is a saying that if you break your arm there is medicine, but if you break your heart there is no medicine. So the monks preach in such a way as to calm people’s hearts so that they don’t break.41
These officers testify to the potential transformative healing capacity of a skillfully delivered sermon and a well-told story.
What are the benefits of taking a calm heart into battle? First, soldiers explained that a calm heart is the only real protection that a soldier can receive from religion. Second, monks explain that a calm heart can reduce the negative karma that soldiers create on the battlefield. Finally, not only does a calm heart intrinsically produce less negative karma than an upset one, but soldiers who go to battle with a calm heart will be less likely to engage in activities that produce negative karma.
Many soldiers reported to me that a calm heart is the only sure way of being protected on the battlefield. “A protective medallion cannot stop a bullet,” claimed one officer at Pangoa camp. “The only way to get any kind of protection on the battlefield is to have a calm heart.”42 The soldier was not implying that a tranquil heart can magically protect one from enemy artillery, but it allows one to act with equanimity and without obstructive negative emotions.
It should be remembered here that hita as an equivalent to cetan does not refer to one’s emotional state alone; hita is also intimately connected with the creation of karma. Soldiers and monks both explained that actions performed with a calm hita do not result in negative karma. As such, shaping the hita of soldiers does not just protect soldiers through the evocation of a meritorious state of mind; shaping the hita of soldiers also shapes their intentions, thus reducing the negative karma created when they fire their weapons.
Ven. Assaji, an official advisor to the Sri Lankan army’s Buddhist association, explained the importance of a composed heart in soldiers: “A soldier’s mind must be calm because he has a sharp weapon in his hand. A person with a sharp weapon in his hand must work with wisdom. They have to work with intelligence and efficiency. A soldier must be wise and have a calm heart.”43 Assaji’s comments have a dual meaning: not only can a soldier easily harm the enemy, he can also harm himself and those around him. In order to keep himself and his regiment safe, the soldier must have the presence of mind to use his weapon effectively.
Monks hope that their sermons will also limit negative behavior in very concrete terms. Ven. Ratanavasa stressed the potential danger of a soldier with an upset heart:
Normally when people are fighting with weapons in an extraordinary mental state, they need to have mercy and compassion. … If not, they may go out and use their strength for wrong things. … A soldier can be very skilled at theft. As for murder, a soldier can do that too. That is why he needs to have love, compassion, and mercy to direct his mind towards good things.44
Given the dangers of a battlefield, it is very easy for a soldier to fall into negative behavior. Ratanavasa explained that a soldier on the battlefield is often “consumed with hatred for the enemy, thinking, ‘Where are they coming from, who shall I kill, who shall I shoot, who is coming forward?’”
As the Buddha points out in the Yodhjvasutta, if a soldier dies seized by anger in the midst of battle, he will be reborn in a hell realm. While it is impossible to control completely the contents of a soldier’s heart, many preachers stress that they do their best to shape soldiers in other directions. Ven. Dhammalankra explained his role in reducing unnecessary violence on the battlefield:
They could go to war and kill innocent Tamil people. We don’t want this at all. On the battlefield there is a war between two groups and people from both sides die. However, we can’t condone the killing of innocent Tamils, Muslims, or Sinhala. We tell them to never do such things. We tell them not to harm a single animal whether it is a goat or a cow. There is no need to harm animals like that. They are innocent animals.45
By preaching in this way, Dhammalankra seeks to reduce collateral damage. Soldiers who go to war with calm minds, Dhammalankra explained, are less likely to harm innocent civilians or animals.
When I asked Vimaladhajja, whose sermons contained the most martial themes of any of the monks with whom I spoke, if he saw anything wrong with his sermons to soldiers, he exclaimed:
My gods! If we go to the battlefield and recite protective verses, tell them stories of the kings, and preach some sermons about the Buddha, the morale of the boys will increase, won’t it? Won’t such things increase their spiritual comfort [adyatmika suvaya]? It is not an offense or a disgrace for a monk to go to the battlefield. It gives comfort to the boys. Our boys are happy when they hear that our monks are going to the battlefield. How great would it be to turn a battleground into a place of worship? [He was making a play on the Sinhalese words yuda bma and puda bma, “battleground” and “place of worship.”]46
While Vimaladhajja’s statements may be troubling to scholars of Buddhism, it should be noted that he never justified nor authorized the war. On the contrary, Vimaladhajja’s goal is transformation. By preaching to soldiers and shaping their hearts, he seeks to increase their morale and spiritual comfort. By transforming the hearts of soldiers, he seeks to protect them and limit the violence in which they engage on the battlefield. Through the transformation of individuals, Vimaladhajja hopes to ultimately transform the world itself, making yuda bma into puda bma.
Conclusion
At the end of nandavasa’s sermon, the gathered soldiers begin distributing orange fruit drink to the civilians in the audience. This ceremony, like the six that had preceded it every night of that week, had been commissioned by the army to correspond with a large-scale military operation that was about to begin in the north of the island. The commander of every army base in the country had been ordered to commission sermons during the week leading up to the operation. This entire ceremony had been sponsored by the army in an attempt to bless its soldiers, protect them, and grant them success in battle.
When a monk preaches before a group of soldiers, he walks a fine line between serving the needs of the soldiers as individuals suffering in sasra and serving the Sri Lankan government, which needs soldiers willing to fight and die for its cause. On the one hand, a preacher does not want to encourage soldiers to kill; on the other hand, he does not want soldiers to have any doubts that might put them into danger. At the same time, these monks hope that the soldiers to whom they preach will go into battle with selfless intentions. Rather than fighting for money or out of personal hatred, the monks urge the soldiers to adopt selfless intentions, such as the intention to protect the innocent and defenseless. Whether or not each individual monk believes that it is, in fact, possible to kill without akusala, or unwholesome, intention, when they preach, they attempt to instill this intention in the hearts of the soldiers, thus granting them the protection of a calm mind and discouraging theft and unnecessary killing on the battlefield.
In this chapter, I have suggested an alternative approach to Buddhist warfare. Scholarship on the topic of Buddhist warfare has focused primarily on Buddhist justification of war, but there are many other questions that must be asked about Buddhists participating in war or in any type of state-sanctioned violence. Rather than asking how Buddhists can justify war, I have asked, how does an individual Buddhist understand his actions on the battlefield and the consequences of those actions? How do monks balance their desire to assist the youn
g men who go off to war with Buddhist teachings on the negative consequences of killing? How do Buddhists understand death on the battlefield, and how do they remember the dead? By investigating the questions asked by Buddhist soldiers and the responses given by the monks ministering to them, we can get beyond perceived conflicts between Buddhism and war and begin to understand the complicated world of Buddhists engaged in war.
8
Militarizing Buddhism: Violence in Southern Thailand
Michael Jerryson
In a school within a Thai Buddhist monastery in southern Thailand, a monk in saffron robes sat beside me in a corner of the room; twenty feet away from us, another monk gave a Pli lesson to seven novices.1 We spoke in hushed voices; our bodies were relaxed, our countenances devoid of emotion. Our conversation was different from most conversations between a layperson and a monk. I was there to learn more about the issue of military monks. I asked him: “Why did you decide to become a soldier?”
He explained that this decision was quite typical for a twenty-one-year-old Thai man. We talked about the training exercises he went through, the places he stayed, and then I paused. Clearing my throat, I turned to him and asked: “When you became a military monk, did you have to train more?”
“No,” he replied. “I finished training when I was twenty-two. Then I ordained as a monk. For this position, we have to start as a noncommissioned corporal and work our way up from there.”2 Our conversation continued, but I could not stop thinking about how publicly, yet covertly, we were discussing the militarization of monks inside this Pli classroom. With this conversation, I realized that a new space for violence had emerged in the Thai sangha.
In this region, once an Islamic kingdom, the predominant local identity is Malay Muslim. Conflicts emerged throughout the twentieth century revolving around the ethnoreligious clashes between the Malay Muslims and the Thai Buddhist state. Since January 2004, Thailand’s three southernmost provinces—Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat—have been under martial law due to numerous bombings, murders, and arson attacks by unidentified groups. In this most recent surge of violence in southern Thailand, Buddhist monks have been targets and victims of the violence. In the most dangerous districts of southern Thailand, abbots own and sometimes use firearms. These abbots claim that they never plan to use firearms to hurt people; rather, they fire their guns to scare off potential attackers. However, according to Thai Buddhist ecclesiastical codes, the use of firearms by an ordained monk is a misdemeanor. In this respect, by even handling a weapon, one would be performing a military action. A military monk, however, is quite different from a gun-wielding abbot. The role of the abbots remains strictly religious. Military monks, however, maintain both monastic and state values and responsibilities, though this dual political identity is forbidden according to monastic guidelines. Drawing upon my fieldwork during frequent trips to southern Thailand between July 2004 and November 2008, this chapter focuses on the state’s militarization of Buddhist roles and the militarization of Buddhist spaces.
Brief Background
The issue of militarization is absent from most introductory books on “Buddhisms” in the United States.3 The perception, by inference, is that militarization is in direct contrast to Buddhist principles. This perception is well merited, since militarization is grounded in violence and suffering (Pli: dukkha) and reflects a seemingly counterintuitive approach to one of the core tenets of Buddhisms, namely, to overcome suffering. The root word “military” can refer to the positions of uniformed personnel in the armed forces, or to the Weberian category of the state, wherein organized violence is accepted as a legitimate means of realizing social objectives. Following the Weberian view, military organizations, such as the army, are structures for the coordination of activities meant to ensure victory on the battlefield.4 For the purposes of this chapter, “militarization” will refer to the process that invests social, economic, and political responsibilities in military institutions and values.5 As such, the Thai state’s militarization of Thai Buddhism refers to the process by which the state invests military responsibilities in the Thai Buddhist sangha.
Although Buddhist studies has paid little attention to the relationship between Buddhisms and militarization, the military has been involved with Buddhist affairs throughout the history of Buddhisms.6 Although written over fifty years ago, Paul Demiéville’s seminal work “Le bouddhisme et la guerre” has not until now been incorporated into U.S. Buddhist studies; its first English translation is provided in this volume. Even more surprising is that Demiéville’s article did not spark broader conversations about the nature of Buddhist traditions in relation to militarization. The one exception to this trend is the isolated, albeit voluminous, discussions on Buddhist militarism in Sri Lanka.
States throughout South and Southeast Asia have long enjoyed a healthy relationship with Buddhist monasticism. This extended tradition led scholars such as anthropologist Stanley Tambiah to argue that Buddhisms were centered not merely on enlightenment, but also on kingship and the polity.7 The role of the early Indian Buddhist Mauryan emperor Aoka was an actualization of the religion’s political design, not an aberration or evolution of the religion. The design and infrastructure of Buddhist principles and rules were, and continue to be, amenable to militarization.8
However, over time as the structure of polities changed, so did state applications of Buddhisms. One important and significant change occurred in Thailand in the early 1900s. At the same time that nation-states were developing in western Eurasia (otherwise referred to in its continental sense, Europe), a new form of religiopolitical Buddhism was surfacing in Siam: State Buddhism.9 Historian Kamala Tiyavanich applies the term “State Buddhism” to refer to acts of Siamese nation building under King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910).10 These acts created and perpetuated a new form of Buddhism, one specifically designed to centralize and unify Siam. While further accentuating the Siamese nation-state’s application and integration of Buddhist nationalism, King Chulalongkorn’s son King Vajiravudh (r. 1910–1925) also instituted his personal politics. Influenced partly by his education at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurt, and in Christ Church at Oxford, King Vajiravudh publicly identified three ideological canons (lak thai) of Siam: nation (cht), religion (ssan), and monarchy (phramahkasat), which bear a striking similarity to England’s “God, King, and Country.” In a speech to the Wild Tigers Corps, his nationalist party, on May 26, 1911, Vajiravudh first referred to these three ideological canons.11 In the same speech, Vajiravudh used “religion” as a synonym for Thai Buddhism.12
Siam, through bureaucratic reforms, continued to sustain systemic ideological interconnections between the state and Siamese Buddhism.13 In each instance, the state was an active force in both shaping and utilizing the power of the Thai sangha. Peter Jackson, after examining the role of Thai Buddhism in Bangkok, declared that, throughout the twentieth century, using Thai Buddhism to legitimize a bureaucracy was virtually endemic with Thai administrations:
[E]ach new political regime in the past century has attempted to restructure the organization of the order of Buddhist monks in its political image in order to maintain a legitimatory [sic] parallelism between the symbolic religious domain and the secular power structure.14
According to Jackson, twentieth-century Thai political regimes continued to garner symbolic capital from state Buddhism to further buttress their own capital and ensure legitimacy.
This closely intertwined relationship between the Thai state and the Thai Buddhist sangha continues in the twenty-first century; it is particularly visible in the three southernmost provinces, where the state has situated its forces within local Buddhist monasteries. This military presence within the monasteries symbolizes the collapse of any distinction between Thai Buddhism and the state. This intimate relationship is in stark contrast to the distinctive Malay Muslim culture and religion in the area, which is relatively dislocated from the national government and politics. It has also contributed to violenc
e in the area and the targeting of Buddhist monks. Simultaneously with the collapse of any visible distinction between Thai Buddhism and the Thai state has come the advent of the military monk (thahnphra).
Military Monks
Military monks are fully ordained monks who simultaneously serve as armed soldiers, marines, or navy or air force personnel. This amalgam of Thai Buddhism and the military reflects the inherent violence. For many, the idea of a militarized monk conflicts sharply with a monk’s most fundamental duties. A Buddhist monk’s purpose is to avoid life’s vulgarities, to aspire toward enlightenment. A soldier’s life is virtually the opposite; that job requires confrontation with life’s worst vulgarities.
In addition to these ideological complications, there is also an ecclesiastical interdiction that prohibits soldiers from becoming monks. However, as anthropologist Hayashi Yukio explains in his study of the Thai-Lao of northeastern Thailand, a people’s religious practice is rooted in experience. Buddhism “does not consist merely of cultivated knowledge sealed in texts, or of its interpretation. Rather it consists of practices that live in the ‘here and now.’”15 While the Buddhist textual tradition clearly disallows the existence of a military monk, lived Buddhist traditions demonstrate a different attitude. Throughout the development of Buddhisms in such countries as China, Korea, and Japan, we find traditions that do not follow the idealized notions of Buddhisms. Similar to Thai Buddhists, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhist monasticisms also have had military monks.
The Thai Theravda Buddhist tradition is unique among these monasticisms in allowing men to temporarily join the sangha. It is common for Thai Buddhist men to ordain as monks for a short time at least once in their lives. Other Theravda, Mahyna, and Vajrayna traditions treat ordination as a permanent life decision. Anthropologist Charles Keyes notes that Thai men gain considerable esteem by their temporary ordinations, which generally occur during Buddhist Lent (Thai: khaophans). By entering the Thai sangha, all men, regardless of class, have access to education and a means of increasing their social status.16 Moreover, in addition to these social benefits, it is also popularly believed that, by becoming a monk, a son grants his mother merit to enter heaven.
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