THE STONE

Why Are We Surprised When

Buddhists Are Violent?
By Dan Arnold and Alicia Turner

March 5, 2018

Most adherents of the world’s religions claim that their traditions place a premium on virtues like love, compassion and
forgiveness, and that the state toward which they aim is one of universal peace. History has shown us, however, that
religious traditions are human affairs, and that no matter how noble they may be in their aspirations, they display a full
range of both human virtues and human failings.

While few sophisticated observers are shocked, then, by the occurrence of religious violence, there is one notable
exception in this regard; there remains a persistent and widespread belief that Buddhist societies really are peaceful and
harmonious. This presumption is evident in the reactions of astonishment many people have to events like those taking
place in Myanmar. How, many wonder, could a Buddhist society — especially Buddhist monks! — have anything to do
with something so monstrously violent as the ethnic cleansing now being perpetrated on Myanmar’s long-beleaguered
Rohingya minority? Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be compassionate and pacifist?

While history suggests it is naïve to be surprised that Buddhists are as capable of inhuman cruelty as anyone else, such
astonishment is nevertheless widespread — a fact that partly reflects the distinctive history of modern Buddhism. By
“modern Buddhism,” we mean not simply Buddhism as it happens to exist in the contemporary world but rather the
distinctive new form of Buddhism that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this period, Buddhist religious leaders,
often living under colonial rule in the historically Buddhist countries of Asia, together with Western enthusiasts who
eagerly sought their teachings, collectively produced a newly ecumenical form of Buddhism — one that often indifferently
drew from the various Buddhist traditions of countries like China, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Japan and Thailand.

This modern form of Buddhism is distinguished by a novel emphasis on meditation and by a corresponding disregard for
rituals, relics, rebirth and all the other peculiarly “religious” dimensions of history’s many Buddhist traditions. The
widespread embrace of modern Buddhism is reflected in familiar statements insisting that Buddhism is not a religion at
all but rather (take your pick) a “way of life,” a “philosophy” or (reflecting recent enthusiasm for all things cognitive-
scientific) a “mind science.”

Buddhism, in such a view, is not exemplified by practices like Japanese funerary rites, Thai amulet-worship or Tibetan
oracular rituals but by the blandly nonreligious mindfulness meditation now becoming more ubiquitous even than yoga.
To the extent that such deracinated expressions of Buddhist ideas are accepted as defining what Buddhism is, it can
indeed be surprising to learn that the world’s Buddhists have, both in past and present, engaged in violence and
destruction.

There is, however, no shortage of historical examples of violence in Buddhist societies. Sri Lanka’s long and tragic civil
war (1983-2009), for example, involved a great deal of specifically Buddhist nationalism on the part of a Sinhalese
majority resentful of the presence of Tamil Hindus in what the former took to be the last bastion of true Buddhism (the
“island of dharma”). Political violence in modern Thailand, too, has often been inflected by Buddhist involvement, and
there is a growing body of scholarly literature on the martial complicity of Buddhist institutions in World War II-era
Japanese nationalism. Even the history of the Dalai Lama’s own sect of Tibetan Buddhism includes events like the razing
of rival monasteries, and recent decades have seen a controversy centering on a wrathful protector deity believed by
some of the Dalai Lama’s fellow religionists to heap destruction on the false teachers of rival sects.

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These and other such examples have, to be sure, often involved eloquent Buddhist critics of violence — but the fact
remains that the histories of Buddhist societies are as checkered as most human history.
It is important to emphasize that the current violence against the Rohingya is not a straightforwardly “religious” matter.
Myanmar’s long history of exclusion and violence toward the Rohingya has typically been framed by the question of who
counts as a legitimate ethnic minority and who is instead to be judged a foreigner (and thus an illegal migrant). It is also
significant that the contemporary nation-state of Myanmar represents the blending of the former military dictatorship
and the democratically elected National League of Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi; in this hybrid form of
government, the mechanisms and influence of civil society and public opinion are relatively new.

Nevertheless, the violence against the Rohingya is certainly related to increasingly popular campaigns in recent years to
revive Myanmar’s Buddhist tradition (understood by some to be the marker of “real” Burmese identity) and to protect it
particularly against the threat that Islam is thought to represent. Popular campaigns to this effect involve the politics of
monastic hierarchies, revivalist education campaigns, the advancement of laws for the “protection of race and religion”
and attempts to influence the 2015 elections. While the movement is diverse, there is little doubt that it is shaped by (and
that it further fuels) a strong anti-Muslim discourse.

This anti-Muslim discourse is, to be sure, exacerbated by all manner of sociopolitical considerations (in Myanmar as
elsewhere there is widespread uncertainty at a time of rapid economic, social and political change), and these and other
factors are used by a wide range of political actors to gain advantage in the new hybrid democracy. One notion central to
this discourse, though, is the idea that Buddhism is under threat in the contemporary world — an idea that appears not
only in Myanmar’s history but also in the Buddhist texts, written in the Indic language of Pali, that are taken as canonical
in Myanmar. Indeed, many Buddhist traditions preserve narratives (undergirded by the cardinal doctrine of
impermanence) to the effect that the Buddha’s teachings are always in decline.

Efforts to revive and preserve Buddhism against this supposed decline have driven many developments in Burmese
Buddhism for at least two centuries. One such movement was the Buddhist leader Ledi Sayadaw’s colonial-era program
of teaching insight meditation to Buddhist laypeople, who had not traditionally engaged in the meditative and other
practices typical only of monastics. This lay meditation movement was later promoted as a practice available to an
international audience — a development that is part of the history of contemporary Western fascination with
mindfulness.

What is especially interesting is that Buddhist proponents of anti-Muslim discourse often assert that Myanmar is under
threat from Muslims precisely because Buddhism is, they say, a uniquely peaceful and tolerant religion. In arguing that
Rohingya are illegal immigrants who promote an exclusivist and proselytizing religion that is bent on geographical and
cultural conquest through conversion and marriage, some Buddhist leaders in Myanmar thus exploit the very same
presumption of uniform tolerance and peacefulness that makes many Westerners uniquely surprised by Buddhist
violence.

There are, in fact, important historical reasons that the idea of distinctively Buddhist tolerance figures both in nationalist
disparagement of Myanmar’s Rohingya and in widespread Western astonishment at the idea of Buddhists engaging in it.
Both phenomena have something to do with Myanmar’s experience under British colonial rule, during which religion
came to be an important and operative aspect of Burmese identity.

In this regard, it is not self-evident that being “Buddhist” or “Muslim” should be taken as the most salient facts about
people who are many other things (Burmese, shopkeepers, farmers, students) besides. Nevertheless, religious identity
under British rule came to be overwhelmingly significant — significant enough that it can now be mobilized to turn large
numbers of Buddhists against the Muslim neighbors with whom they have lived peacefully for generations.

The British colonial state required, for instance, that every person have a single religious identity for the purposes of
personal law and administration. Such policies reflected the extent to which colonial administrators typically interpreted
all of the various cultural interactions in colonial Burma through the lens of “world religions.” According to this way of
seeing things, relatively distinct and static religious traditions were defined in opposition to one another, with each one
thought to infuse its communities of believers with distinctive characteristics. One of the characteristics ascribed to
“Buddhists,” according to this rubric, was that they are generally tolerant and pacifist. The idea of Myanmar’s Buddhists
as distinctively tolerant, then, became a key mechanism for dividing Burmese Buddhists from the Indian Hindus and
Muslims living alongside them.

Colonial discourse that praised Burmese Buddhists for their tolerance functioned in part to condemn the “superstitious”
and “backward” practices of caste Hindus and Muslims in colonial Myanmar. This discourse was picked up by Burmese
nationalists and is now invoked, tragically, to justify violence toward Rohingya Muslims.
There is a philosophically problematic presupposition that also figures in widespread surprise at the very idea of violence
perpetrated by Buddhists — that there is a straightforward relationship between the beliefs people hold and the likelihood
that they will behave in corresponding ways.

Even if we suppose that most Buddhists, or members of any other religious group, really do hold beliefs that are pacifist
and tolerant, we have no reason to expect that they will really be pacifist and tolerant. As Immanuel Kant well
understood, we are not transparent to ourselves and can never exhaustively know why we do what we do. We can never
be certain whether or to what extent we have acted for the reasons we think we did (whether because, for example, “it
was the right thing to do”), or whether we are under the sway of psychological, neurophysiological or socioeconomic
causes that are altogether opaque to us.

That doesn’t mean that we should (or can) jettison all reference to our stated beliefs, reasons, rationality; indeed, Kant
also cogently argued that despite the efforts of all manner of determinists, we cannot coherently explain these away (for
any attempt to explain away our rationality would itself represent a use of that faculty). But it does mean that we cannot
infer from, say, a society’s widely held belief in toleration and peace that the actions of people in that society will be
strictly guided by those beliefs.

We should thus be wary of any narrative on which historical events are straightforwardly explained by the fact that the
people in any society hold whatever religious beliefs they do. It just doesn’t follow from the fact that someone is
admirable — or for that matter, that she is vile — that it is because of her beliefs that she is so. Given this, we should
expect that even in societies where virtuous beliefs are widely held, we will find pretty much the same range of human
failings evident throughout history. Buddhist societies are no different in this respect than others.

Many of history’s great Buddhist philosophers would themselves acknowledge as much. Buddhist thinkers have typically
emphasized that there is a profound difference between merely assenting to a belief (for example, that all sentient beings
deserve compassion) and actually living in ways informed by that belief. To be really changed by a belief regarding one’s
relationship to all other beings, one must cultivate that belief — one must come to experience it as vividly real — through
the disciplined practices of the Buddhist path.

The reason this is necessary, Buddhist philosophers recognized, is that all of us — even those who are Buddhists — are
deeply habituated to self-centered ways of being. Indeed, if that weren’t the case, there would be no need for Buddhist
practice; it is just because people everywhere (even in Tibet, Myanmar and Japan) are generally self-centered that it
takes so much work — innumerable lifetimes of it, according to many Buddhists — to overcome the habituated
dispositions that typically run riot over our stated beliefs.

The basic Buddhist analysis of the human predicament makes sense, as well, of the irony of colonialist conceptions of
Buddhism and of the misguidedness of colonial attempts to exploit religious identities. According to a Buddhist analysis,
we go through life thinking we’re advancing our own interests, while actually producing ever more suffering because we
misunderstand ourselves.

Similarly, as the case of Myanmar shows, the colonial origins of the modern secular state have, in some ways, insidiously
fostered the hardening of religious identities. To that extent, the violence perpetrated by Buddhists in Myanmar,
astonishing though it might seem to us, may not be so far from the origins of our own ways of perceiving the world. It is
clear that this violence is driven by Burmese participation in (and interpretation of) global contemporary discourses that
also shape societies in Europe and North America, where the vilification of Islam and of immigrants has (not
coincidentally) also been widespread.

Indeed, our own perception of Buddhism as peaceful and tolerant may itself contribute to a global discourse that has,
among other things, represented Muslims as less than full citizens — indeed, less than fully human — in Myanmar as in
many other places.

Dan Arnold is an associate professor of philosophy of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the author of “Brains, Buddhas, and Believing.” Alicia
Turner is an associate professor of humanities and religious studies at York University and is at work on a book about religion in colonial Burma. This essay was
commissioned by the University of Chicagoʼs Stevanovich Institute.

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter
Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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