Mark Juergensmeyer, Professor of Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
: Exactly. And you can say 'oh, well, Buddhism is pacifist and holds those values, regardless of where it exists in whatever culture'. That's in part true of the Mahanyana tradition of Buddhism, which in China and Japan and Korea, is one strand of religiosity where there are forms of state religion - emperor worship for example, Confucianism for example - that support the civic virtues and the offices of the state, and in a sense liberate Buddhism from having to take on that moral responsibility.
But this is not the case in the Therevada Buddhist societies, like Sri Lanka or Burma or Thailand, where Buddhism is the sole resource for justifying the morality of statecraft, and there Buddhism is very closely related to state power and the support of the military. There are young men who have become monks, and then have become soldiers, and then go back and forth between those two forms of monastic disciplinary organisations. And it's in those traditions that you have forms of Buddhist warfare. The great Mahavamsa, the Chronicles of Sri Lanka, are all about war between Buddhist kings and Tamil-Hindu kings.
And so all of the traditions of warfare, of violence, that one finds in any other religious tradition are also found in Buddhism - when Buddhism is the dominant social religion undergirding the moral responsibilities of the state.
I talked with Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka who were supporting revolutionary attacks on the Sri Lankan government. These were some of the most authoritative of the Buddhist monks in the sanghas in Kandy, in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, who they themselves had not picked up a sword and fought - although it was a Buddhist monk who had actually assassinated a Prime Minister in Sri Lanka - but they understood and supported those who did. And I said 'How? How can you possibly justify such a thing?' And they looked at me sternly and they said 'Well, we believe in karma, and we believe that those who advocate violence [and by this they were meaning the political leaders that they were opposed to in Sri Lanka] get what they deserve, and it may happen sooner rather than later. And to help the law of karma do its work is not necessarily a bad thing. In this situation where these people have so much bad karma because of the bad things that we're doing, we're actually doing them a favour by releasing them from this life, and thereby allowing them to gain a better karmic control of their existence.'
