Buddhist Warfare Read online

  Buddhist Warfare

  Buddhist Warfare

  Edited by

  MICHAEL JERRYSON AND

  MARK JUERGENSMEYER

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buddhist warfare/Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer (editors).

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-19-539483-2 ISBN 978-0-19-539484-9 (pbk.)

  1. War–Religious aspects–Buddhism.

  2. Violence–Religious aspects–Buddhism.

  I. Jerryson, Michael K. II. Juergensmeyer, Mark.

  BQ4570.W3B83 2009

  294.3'37273–dc22 2009012194

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  Acknowledgments

  Without the permission and assistance of many people, this book could have never come together. We would like to express our gratitude to the Instituts d’Extrême-Orient du Collège de France for granting us permission to translate and include Paul Demiéville’s article in this volume. We would also like to thank the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies for its permission to include Michael Jerryson’s article. Brenda Turnnidge was kind enough to share her photograph of a Burmese novice monk overlooking the Irrawaddy River (cover picture), which was taken in August 1988. Throughout its various drafts, we were fortunate to have the assistance of Rhella Kessler and Fawn Jerryson, who have helped to bring cohesion and coherence to the diverse chapters. We would also be remiss if we did not thank Oxford University Press’s anonymous reviewers, whose extremely insightful and generous suggestions molded the book in its final stages.

  Finally, a word about the role played by each of the co-editors of this book. Michael Jerryson organized the original panel at the American Academy of Religion that produced the first draft of many of these essays, communicated with the authors, and wrote the introductory chapter. Mark Juergensmeyer was the commentator on the original panel and provided insight about the comparative study of religion and violence, which was useful for the introduction and for the project as a whole; he also helped to edit the introduction and to shepherd the manuscript through the publication process.

  Contents

  Contributors

  Introduction

  Michael Jerryson

  1. Buddhism and War

  Paul Demiéville

  2. Making Merit through Warfare According to the rya-Bodhisattva-gocara-upyaviaya-vikurvaa-nirdea stra

  Stephen Jenkins

  3. Sacralized Warfare: The Fifth Dalai Lama and the Discourse of Religious Violence

  Derek F. Maher

  4. Legalized Violence: Punitive Measures of Buddhist Khans in Mongolia

  Vesna A. Wallace

  5. A Buddhological Critique of “Soldier-Zen” in Wartime Japan

  Brian Daizen Victoria

  6. Buddhists in China during the Korean War (1951–1953)

  Xue Yu

  7. Onward Buddhist Soldiers: Preaching to the Sri Lankan Army

  Daniel W. Kent

  8. Militarizing Buddhism: Violence in Southern Thailand

  Michael Jerryson

  Afterthoughts

  Bernard Faure

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  Index

  Contributors

  Paul Demiéville (1894–1979) is considered one of the eminent architects of the Franco-Belgian school of Buddhology that drew upon Sanskrit texts and their corresponding commentaries in Mandarin and Tibetan. He was appointed as Chair of Chinese Language and Literature at the College de France in 1946, where he supervised the development of important Buddhist Studies scholars such as Wapola Rahula and Bernard Faure. He co-edited the T’oung Pao until 1976 and published numerous books in French, among them Anthologie de la Poésie Chinoise Classique (1962), the French translation of the Dunhuang manuscripts (1971) and Choix d’études Bouddhiques, 1929–1970 (1973).

  Bernard Faure is the Kao Professor of Japanese Religion at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. (Doctorat d’Etat) from Paris University in 1984. His work has focused on topics such as the construction of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the Buddhist cult of relics, iconography, and sexuality and gender. His current research deals with the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism and its relationships with medieval Japanese religion. He has published a number of books in French and English. His most recent English publications include The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality; The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender; and Double Exposure. He is presently working on a book on Japanese gods and demons.

  Stephen Jenkins was trained at Harvard University and is currently the chair of Religious Studies at Humboldt State University. His doctoral work and publications focus on problems in the interpretation of compassion in the Indian Buddhist literature.

  Michael Jerryson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Eckerd College. His publications have surveyed religious traditions from across Asia, including Singapore and, most recently, Thailand. One of his more recent publications, Mongolian Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of the Sangha, explores the development of Mongolia’s state religion until its demise in the twentieth century under the Soviet Union.

  Mark Juergensmeyer is a professor of sociology and global studies and the director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of twenty books on global religion and politics, including Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State and Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

  Michelle Kendall is the translator of The Cradle of Humanity and The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge by Georges Bataille and Sade and Lautreamont by Maurice Blanchot. Currently, she is pursuing her doctorate in French literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  Daniel W. Kent received his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia with a dissertation entitled “Shelter for You, Nirvana for Our Sons: Buddhist Belief and Practice in the Sri Lankan Army,” which was based on extensive ethnographic research on two different military bases in Sri Lanka. Kent is currently revising his dissertation for publication, beginning work on a new project on Buddhist-Muslim tensions in contemporary Sri Lanka, and teaching courses on Theravda Buddhism at the University of Virginia and at Mary Baldwin College.

  Derek F. Maher received his Ph.D. in history of religions and Tibetan studies from the University of
Virginia. He now teaches at East Carolina University, where he is the co-director of the Religious Studies Program. He writes about religious biographical writings, the intersection of religion and politics, and religious history. His most recent publications are an annotated translation of Tsepn Shakabpa’s One Hundred Thousand Moons: An Advanced Political History of Tibet and a co-edited volume with Calvin Mercer, Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension.

  Brian Daizen Victoria is a native of Omaha, Nebraska, and a 1961 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. He holds an M.A. in Buddhist studies from the Soto Zen sect–affiliated Komazawa University in Tokyo and a Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University. In addition to his most recent book, Zen War Stories, Victoria’s major writings include Zen at War and an autobiographical work in Japanese entitled Gaijin de ari, Zen bozu de ari (As a Foreigner, as a Zen Priest). Currently, he is a professor of Japanese studies at Antioch University and the director of the Antioch Education Abroad Buddhist Studies in Japan Program.

  Vesna A. Wallace is the holder of the Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. She has published several books and a series of articles on Indian esoteric Buddhism and on different aspects of Mongolian Buddhism.

  Xue Yu has undertaken Buddhist studies for more than twenty-five years. He has studied Mahyna Buddhism, Theravda Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, and Chinese Buddhism in China, Sri Lanka, Japan, and the United States. Having received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2003, he began research on Buddhism and modern society, particularly humanistic Buddhism. Xue Yu is now an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and also serves as the director for the Study of Humanistic Buddhism jointly sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Foguan Shan. His recent book Buddhism, War, and Nationalism investigates the activities of Chinese monks and nuns against Japanese aggressions during the Republic era (1912–1949).

  Buddhist Warfare

  Introduction

  Michael Jerryson

  It is a well-known fact that the first of all the commandments of the Buddhist creed is “Thou shalt not kill” [but] Chinese books contain various passages relating to Buddhist monks who freely indulged in carnage and butchery and took an active part in military expeditions of every description, thus leaving no room for doubt that warfare was an integrate part of their religious profession for centuries.

  —J. J. M. de Groot, 1891

  Violence is found in all religious traditions, and Buddhism is no exception. This may surprise those who think of Buddhism as a religion based solely on peace. Indeed, one of the principal reasons for producing this book was to address such a misconception. Within the various Buddhist traditions (which Trevor Ling describes as “Buddhisms”), there is a long history of violence.1 Since the inception of Buddhist traditions 2,500 years ago, there have been numerous individual and structural cases of prolonged Buddhist violence. This book explores instances in which Buddhist ideas and religious leaders have been related to structural violence in one of its most destructive and public form: warfare. The motivations for this volume are many, but chief among them is the goal of disrupting the social imaginary that holds Buddhist traditions to be exclusively pacifistic and exotic. Most religious traditions, whether Judaic, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, or Hindu, is quintessentially social in nature; and because religious traditions are social, they suffer from the negative elements inherent in the human condition. The chapters in this volume investigate this dark underbelly of Buddhisms, with particular attention to the monastic interplay with warfare.

  This investigation is conducted by means of both textual and ethnographic approaches. The first of these chapters is Paul Demiéville’s article “Buddhism and War,” which was initially published in French in 1957 as a postscript to G. Renondeau’s “The History of the Warrior Monks of Japan.” Demiéville surveys East Asia’s history of soldier-monks and the Buddhist principles applied in times of war. As a Buddhist studies scholar, Demiéville’s training was similar to the training of the other contributors to this volume who were educated in and/or teach religious studies. The second chapter is by Stephen Jenkins, who bases his analysis on South Asian texts; Jenkins’s focus is more on Buddhist philosophical stances toward violence. The subsequent five chapters rely on textual analyses, refer to specific regional and historical events, and thematically follow in chronological order. Derek Maher reviews the development of just-war ideology during the Tibetan-Mongol war in 1642. Vesna Wallace examines the historical development of corporal punishment in theocratic Mongolia from the early sixteenth century to the late twentieth century. Brian Victoria offers a critique of Japan’s wartime soldier-Zen during the first half of the twentieth century. The role of Buddhist monks during the Korean War of the 1950s is related by Xue Yu. Then, two chapters use ethnography to examine contemporary conflict zones in South and Southeast Asia. Daniel Kent investigates the Buddhist sermons given to Sri Lankan soldiers between 2004 and 2006. Michael Jerryson traces the Thai state’s militarization of Thai Buddhism in an area under martial law between 2004 and 2008. The concluding chapter is by Bernard Faure, who reviews the arguments in this volume and then paves the way for larger subsequent discussions on the topic of Buddhisms and violence.

  While most of the contributors locate violence within Buddhist traditions, Brian Victoria’s chapter disavows a relationship between Buddhisms and violence. For Victoria, Buddhists who perform acts of violence are not acting as Buddhists; Buddhisms, in this scenario, remain unsoiled by the trappings of human frailty. Victoria’s stance is shared by other Buddhologists and Buddhist studies scholars, many of whom (like Brian Victoria) are current or former monks. An example of this comes from the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and religious studies scholar Mahinda Deegalle, who raises a similar argument in his article “Is Violence Justified in Theravada Buddhism?” Deegalle confronts a difficult passage in the Mahvasa, one in which a Buddhist monk consoles the Sinhalese king Duttagamani (Pli: Duagma, Sinhala: Duugämuu) for killing “evil unbelievers”; the monk explains that the acts carry no more weight than killing animals. Deegalle argues that this passage is not a Buddhist justification for violence—rather, that it is heretical to the teachings of the Buddha.2

  Indeed, there are scholars of other religious traditions that take a similar position when facing violent acts in the name of their religion. In other religious traditions, some adherents have also been adamant that violence has no legitimate place in their faiths. Christian pacificists have often argued that the injunction of Jesus to “turn the other cheek” rather than to fight is a mandate for absolute nonviolence. In the Hindu tradition, Mohandas Gandhi thought that Hindu scriptures gave no room for religiously sanctioned violence, even going so far as to reinterpret the traditional battle scenes in the Mahbhrata and Rmyaa epics as allegories for the struggle between truth and falsehood.

  Can people, as Buddhists, commit acts of violence? It is ultimately up to the reader to decide which of these perspectives to adopt. Beyond these differing perspectives on authenticity lie two questions that demand attention: (1) how can Buddhist scripture be interpreted for warfare? and (2) how is it interpreted for warfare?

  Before exploring the relationship between Buddhisms and warfare, it is critical to define these two terms. For the purposes of this volume, “Buddhisms” is a web of interconnected cultural entities predicated on the teachings of the Buddha, whether he is conceived as historical and/or cosmological. This definition is deliberately broad in order to encompass the fluid and polythetic characteristics found in self-ascribed Buddhist traditions, specific beliefs, texts, and leaders related to Buddhist organizations. There is an enormous diversity in Buddhist principles and followers, which raises the question of whether we should use value-laden terms that are all-encompassing, such as “Buddhism.” This is similar to the concern that religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith poses in regard to Judais
ms. Smith calls on scholars to dismantle old theological and imperialistic impulses toward totalization and integration, explaining that the “labor at achieving the goal of a polythetic classification of Judaisms, rather than a monothetic definition of early Judaism, is but a preliminary step toward this end.”3 It is this totalizing impulse found in the term Buddhism that demands change, if not critical reflection.4

  Although virtually every Buddhist tradition holds the Four Noble Truths (Pli: cattri ariyasaccni)5 as its core principles, there is no unifying canonical scripture that interprets and explains them in detail.6 One can easily find variegated descriptions of the Noble Truths when comparing the Sinhalese, Thai, Burmese, Sanskrit, Pli, and Khmer canonical scriptures (and there are geographical variations within each linguistic category). In addition, each Buddhist tradition contains unique practices and doctrines (which constitute the very nature of a tradition): for example, Mongolian Buddhists circumambulate cairns made of rock and wood; Thai Buddhists believe that people have two different spirits, the winyan and kwan;7 and monks from the Jogye school initiate their followers to Korean Buddhism by placing five incense sticks on the initiate’s arm. Although each tradition contains unique practices and beliefs, Buddhists associate these variegated beliefs and practices with the teachings of the Buddha.

  Warfare is another term that encompasses a plethora of actions and meanings. For the purposes of this volume, warfare refers to the processes and activities affiliated with war, and specifically for the purpose of defeating an enemy or gaining property. Wars are not simply physical conflicts in our cosmos, they can manifest in the spiritual dimension as well.8 One example of this dual nature of warfare is found in Vesna Wallace’s chapter “Legalized Violence: Punitive Measures of Buddhist Khans in Mongolia.” Mongolian khans subjugated shamans and believers in different schools in their attempts to convert the populace. When Wallace examines Buddhist state-sanctioned violence, she finds that it is motivated by both physical wants (i.e., the confiscation of property) and the spiritual desire to create a religiously and politically harmonious nation. Indeed, throughout this volume, nationalism is found embedded within different forms of warfare. Nationalism is also a contested term. For the purposes of this book, we will use Mark Juergensmeyer’s definition of nationalism, by which he means “not only the xenophobic extremes of patriotism but also the more subdued expressions of identity based on shared assumptions regarding why a community constitutes a nation and why the state that rules it is legitimate.”9