Buddhism and Violence PDF
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LIRI Seminar Proceedings Series Edited by Lumbini International Research Institute Volume 2 Buddhism and Violence Edited by Michael Zimmermann with the assistance of Chiew Hui Ho and Philip Pierce Lumbini 2006 LUMBINI INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE Lumbini International Research Institute P.O. Box 39 Bhairahawa, Dist. Rupandehi NEPAL e-mail: [email protected] © Lumbini International Research Institute Cover: Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace, from the Illustrated Scrolls of the Events of the Heiji Era (Heiji monogatari emaki) (detail) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Fenollosa-Weld Collection Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, microfilm, scanner or any other means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. ISBN 99946-933-1-X First published 2006 Printed in Nepal Contents Introduction The Path of the Bodhisattva and the Creation of Oppressive Cultures Francis Brassard Views on Suicide in Buddhism: Some Remarks Martin Delhey Evil Monks with Good Intentions? Remarks on Buddhist Monastic Violence and its Doctrinal Background Christoph Kleine Between the Profane and the Sacred? On the Context of the Rite of “Liberation” (sgrol ba) Carmen Meinert Compassionate Killing or Conflict Resolution? The Murder of King Langdarma according to Tibetan Buddhist Sources Jens Schlieter D. T. Suzuki and Japanese Militarism: Supporter or Opponent? Brian Victoria Buddhism and the Killing of Animals in Premodem Japan Klaus Vollmer Only a Fool Becomes a King: Buddhist Stances on Punishment Michael Zimmermann Contributors ' Index Introduction This volume is the outgrowth of a panel on Buddhism and violence at the XHIth Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, held in Bangkok, December 2002. There is as yet no definitive work on the general topic of Buddhism and violence.1 There are, however, a growing number of studies of specific cases of violence in Buddhism, drawn from particular periods and places. 2 It is hoped that the contributions to this volume, largely following the textual approaches that have dominated Buddhist studies since its origins, will be supplemented by research based on other methodologies and materials to provide rich resources for more comprehensive, multi-layered approaches to the relationship between Buddhism and violence. The content of this volume reflects only indirectly the panel from which it grew. Not all of the panelists present in Bangkok were in a position to submit their paper. Some of the articles retain traces of their oral presentation; others have been completely rewritten. Carmen Meinert and Martin Delhey, though originally part of the panel, were unable to attend and submitted their work at a l.ater date. Brian Victoria, who in Bangkok read a paper on “Zen As a Religion of Death in Japanese Militarism，，，shifted the focus of his article here to D. T. Suzuki. The piece by Jens Schlieter, not originally a panelist in 1 A pioneering piece on Buddhism and violence is Paul Demi6ville，s “Le bouddhisme et la guerre: post-scriptum a YHistoire des moines-guerriers du Japon de G. Renondeau，，，Melanges publies par VInstitut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises 1 (1957): 347-85。Lambert Schmithausen elaborated on Demieville^ excellent work and suggested four main categories into which legitimized Buddhist warfare would fit; see his t4Buddhismus und Glaubenskriege，，，in Glaubenskriege in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart: Referate, gehalten aufdem Symposium der Joachim-Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Hamburg, am 28. und 29. Oktober 1994, ed. Peter Herrmann (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996)，63-92. 2 For a recently published volume with a variety of papers dealing exclusively with the topic of Buddhism and violence see Karenina Kollmar-Paulenz and Inken Prohl, eds.，Zeitschrift fur Religionswissenschaft (Buddhismus und Gewalt) 11-2 (2003). Bangkok, was included because of its excellent fit with the other case studies presented here and, in particular, the further light it sheds on the murder of the Tibetan king Langdarma dealt with by Carmen Meinert. One of the aims of this volume is to provide material, based on critical, unbiased research, illustrating the fact that, at particular moments in their history and in certain aspects of their doctrines, the traditions of Buddhism, like other religious traditions, have actively or passively promoted—and may continue to promote—violent modes of behavior or structural violence. The more comprehensive and systematic inquiry hoped for above can only proceed once this fact is fully acknowledged and has challenged the dominant and obstinate perception of Buddhism as a religion that in its conception and history is categorically divorced from violence. Only then will we begin to see the specific character of the relation of the Buddhist traditions to forms of violence, and only then will we be in a position to draw more general conclusions on the shape this relation took over the centuries. This will be a task for the future. The articles in this volume cover an extremely broad spectrum of the Buddhist world in terms of regions and periods. They deal with aspects of violence starting in India before the Common Era and ranging to the support of Japanese militarism by Buddhist leaders and scholars far into the twentieth century. Three contributions focus primarily on India. Francis Brassard writes about the complex relations of ideas originating in the spiritual and religious realm of Buddhism to ideas found in popular lay culture. He differentiates four categories of ideas, based on their transferability between the religious and lay spheres. His main thesis is that “good” religious ideas will not easily translate into lay culture as long as there exist no dominant cultural models of behavior with which these ideas could accord. Without such models, Brassard argues, any well-intended idea can simply be instrumentalized as part of a socially oppressive system of rules。As the title of his paper suggests, he associates certain elements exposed in Mahayana writings on the path of the bodhisattva with the danger of leading in this unintended direction. In his article on suicide, Martin Delhey provides an in-depth analysis of relevant textual sources in the Buddhist traditions. Starting from ancient India with focus on the literature of the canons of the schools of the Sravakayana, post-canonical developments，narratives, and Mahayana Buddhism, his research leads him to medieval China and to the self immolations by fire in Vietnam in the 1960s. Displaying a subtle approach aware of the complexities of his material, he offers a profoundly new evaluation of the treatment of suicide in Buddhist literature. Against what seems to be the common scholarly view, Delhey argues that Buddhist thinkers treated suicide as something distinctly different from killing other sentient beings and that, in contrast to Western notions of human life as sacred，life does not have such a basic value in Buddhism. His comprehensive bibliography mentions the most relevant publications on this topic. The last paper dealing with Buddhism in India is my own. Based on sources from the Pali tradition, narrative literature and the Mahayana, I try to throw light on the different ways Buddhist thinkers have dealt with the tension personified in the punishing Buddhist king: on the one hand it is his primary obligation to chastise evildoers，on the other the precept of non-violence applies also to him. Whereas the early Buddhist ideal of the wheel-turning monarch, thanks to the high standards of morality in the emperor5s realm, is not challenged by the need to punish violently, one strand of Mahayana sources argues that a compassionate attitude while punishing exempts the king from any negative karmic after-effects. Compassion, as the key element of the Mahayana ethical code, assumes a role serving the legitimization of violence. At the same time these texts propose a penal system which values the idea of rehabilitation. Two articles centering on the murder of King Langdarma (gLang Dar ma), the last emperor of the early Tibetan dynasty, lead the reader from India to Tibet. The notorious scarcity of reliable information on personalities and events in ancient India is here counterbalanced by the works of some Tibetan historiographers, which allow us to deal with the murder of Langdarma as a meaningful event in the history of Tibet. Carmen Meinert discusses the historiographic descriptions of the killing of this ninth-century king in the light of the Tantric rite of “liberation through killing。” Her main focus is the question of how a profane act of killing can, by means of a religious framing, be understood as a sacred act. The act has to transcend the profane setting and, as a transformatory ritual, restructure the world according to Tantric principles. In the second part of her work she analyzes an important Tibetan manuscript from Dunhuang, which deals with the rite of liberation, an integral part of Tantric practice at that time. In her translation of the middle part of the ritual described in the manuscript, she finds evidence that it is indeed the experience of transformation from a profane to a sacred reality that is procured there. Jens Schlieter approaches the same event from a different perspective and inquires about the function it assumed in the historiographic literature of Tibet. With very few indications that the killing was understood as a rite of liberation in the earliest available sources, Schlieter argues that the event attained a mythical dimension only later and served as a justification for tyrannicide under very particular circumstances—in other words, that it became a model for political conflict resolution with a wholesome spiritual outcome on both sides. He is careful to point out that the Indo-Tibetan traditions of Buddhism know several threads of “liberation killing” and analyzes how these different threads are woven into the later descriptions of the event. The last three contributions deal with Japan. Christoph Kleine focuses on monastic violence and comes to the conclusion that monks resorting to violent means was a common feature in medieval Japan since the tenth century. His presentation of historical evidence for his thesis is undergirded by a fivefold systematization of occasions when so-called soldier-monks were employed. Illustrating what Brassard, on a more theoretical level, meant by the instrumentalization of religious ideas, Kleine connects these de facto eruptions of monastic violence with doctrinal developments and the underlying ethical antinomianism of certain Mahayana scriptures. His analysis leads him back to Indian sources and can serve as a starting point for further explorations of the theoretical foundations of Buddhist justifications of violence. Klaus Vollmer，s contribution deals with prohibitions against killing animals in premodern Japan. He first investigates such prohibitions in the framework of political symbolism, as an expression of the benevolence of the ruler and a means of restoring order in his realm. The naive assumption that such prohibitions against killing animals would be the natural imprint of Buddhist ethics on the political establishment is further eroded by Vollmer’s case studies of how the Buddhist clergy, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, incorporated indigenous religious beliefs and practices into their own. Justifications of killing animals for sacrifices and consumption are formulated in Buddhist vocabulary and based on arguments by now well known to the reader, such as killing out of compassion or as a means for the slaughtered animal to attain awakening. With Brian Victoria’s article on D. T. Suzuki we finally enter the twentieth century. A well-nuanced and balanced treatment of one of the most influential Buddhist leaders of the last century, Victoria’s contribution will certainly provoke much discussion among those scholars and followers of Zen who identify D. T. Suzuki primarily as a spiritual teacher. Victoria’s summarizing portrayal of Suzuki as an ideological collaborator of Japanese militarism, “closet socialist，，and self-deceived moral coward is based on close readings of his correspondence and other materials unavailable in Western translations. Suzuki5s inspiration from the socialist movement is，for the first time,. given broad attention. In the present context of Buddhism and violence， the study of Suzuki fulfills an important function by impressively illustrating the complex issues at work when the -ism of Buddhism takes on the personal coloration of an individual life story, historical circumstances, immediate challenges, and intellectual interpretations. It also demonstrates how thin the line between spiritual edification and moral failure can be. 氺 氺 氺 I am indebted to a number of persons and institutions without whose generous support this volume would not have come into existence。First and foremost, I would like to thank Chiew Hui Ho and Philip Pierce for the time and painstaking care they have dedicated to editing and revising the manuscripts. Further, my thanks to Chiew Hui Ho for
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