There were new waves of violence in northwestern Burma this weekend. Mobs identified as "Buddhist" burned dozens of homes and shops, most belonging to Muslims. And this brings us back to the relationship between Buddhism, or religion generally, and violence.
Around the Web I run into many variations on this statement -- People who call themselves Buddhist are violent; therefore, they are violent because they are Buddhists. Or, they are violent because Buddhism is a religion of violence. You may think this is absurd (I hope you do, anyway), but seriously, many of the comments I read boil down to that.
Last year at Wildmind, Bodhipaksa wrote,
"... in what way does it make sense to criticize Buddhism itself because of the behavior of people who call themselves Buddhists? ... The Buddha was completely uncompromising on the question of violence. When people are violent they're not following the Buddha's teachings."
Reading Bodhipaksa, and also Alan Peto's more recent comments, I sense that people are projecting an intrinsic "self" onto the violent individuals identified as Buddhist, and this self is a monochromatic thing colored only by the quality "Buddhist." But real people are more complicated than that. Most of us drag around a suitcase full of identities, and we change from one to another many times throughout the day.
For example, sometimes your identity may be "employee." Or "husband." Or "Canadian." Or "conservative." Or "woman." Or "hockey fan." It depends on context. None of us are intrinsically anything; we take our identity from our role, or from our relationship to other people.
I remember a sociology professor who challenged us students to explain who we were without referring to any kind of relationship. None of us could do it.
One of our identities may be a religious one -- Buddhist or Christian or Jewish -- but that doesn't necessarily mean our declared religious tradition is our primary guide. In countries dominated by one religious tradition for a long time, people often self-identify with that tradition even if they aren't especially religious. You may know people who self-identify as "Christian" even if they haven't been to church in a decade and can't remember which gospel comes after Matthew.
In countries like Sri Lanka or Burma, in which Buddhism has been the majority religion going back centuries, Buddhism has gotten mixed into national, cultural, and ethnic identities. Further, "Buddhist" appears to be a default identity for any Burmese who is not specifically something else.
From here, it's impossible to know how "Buddhist" those "Buddhist mobs" actually are. I get a sense that Burmese are "defending" Buddhism in a spirit of tribal loyalty. And there's a lot of plain ol' bigotry mixed into that. As we've seen, even ordained monastics can manifest bigotry. Wrapping oneself in an orange robe doesn't erase a lifetime of cultural conditioning.
So, yes, people who self-identify as Buddhists do sometimes commit acts of violence. And because our ability to rationalize is as boundless as our delusions, sometimes people use Buddhism in creative ways to justify the violence. But there's a big difference between "using" and "following."
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