Theravada Buddhism, State and Violence

Here under  a link to my DEA thesis, in French, on "Theravada Buddhism, violence and the state" (Le bouddhisme theravada, la violence et l'état, 2007) :

http://www.memoireonline.com/09/08/1514/m_le-bouddhisme-theravada-la-violence-et-l-etat.html

and a "résumé"of it,  in English, that was published as an article  in the review Hieron (Copyrights : Hieron, Comenius University, Bratislava, 2012) under the title

Theravada Buddhism, State and Violence: Scriptures, Principles and Realities

This article is a summary of a dissertation on Theravada Buddhism and violence¹ presented by Jacques Huynen in June 2007, for the postgraduate DEA Diploma of Advanced Studies² in History of Religions at the University of Liège, Belgium.

In that dissertation Jacques Huynen attempts to identify and explain the features of religion connoted violence, endemic to this day in countries where Theravada Buddhism prevails. To that effect he explores the textual basis of the Theravada doctrine regarding violence and contrasts it with realities on the terrain to find that fusion of religious, ethnic and/or national identities might represent there a key variable among possible explanation factors for the persistence of that type of conflict in the Theravada world while it has almost completely disappeared from countries where Mahayana prevailed³.

Introduction

Abstention from anger and violence is the most basic tenet of Buddhist ethics. But while Walpola Rahula’s contention that not a single drop of blood has been spilled for the propagation of Buddhism⁴ can be admitted inasmuch as it never caused massive violence such as the Crusades or Jihad, most recognize now that violence is absent neither from Buddhist societies, nor from the relations between Buddhist countries and even between Buddhist institutions: monks’ sanghas and nikâyas.

Being familiar with Theravada countries where I frequently travel, my interest in the specific features of violence in these countries was triggered by the reading of Buddhism and Violence, edited by Michael Zimmerman (Lumbini International Research Institute, Lumbini, 2006), which covers both Theravada and Mahayana. Intrigued by the fact that the phenomenon of violence in which religious factors play a role has almost completely disappeared from the Mahayana since the end of the Middle Age (14^th CE), and completely since the end of the Vietnam War⁵, I set out to investigate and extricate some of the reasons why until present, religion connoted violence has remained a sad characteristic of Theravada countries and societies. Putting aside the international conflicts between them as states, still recently Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, all went through bouts of internecine violence, either motivated by, or in which religion enters as a variable. The independence of Sri Lanka in 1948 was soon followed by social conflicts and a war, civil and military, between the mostly Buddhists Sinhalese and Christian or Hindu Tamils, that is still going on. In Myanmar, hostility between the Burmese Buddhist majority and religious or ethnic minorities remains chronic. And in the deep South of Thailand the unresolved irredentism of three Muslim provinces, almost forgotten after two decades of that country’s fast development, has resurfaced over the last decade and is making headlines again.

While in East-Asia countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan have as nations and states, been at war with some of their neighbors, religion was conspicuously absent from these international conflict motives, which were essentially political, territorial or economical. Besides, these countries’ economical development continues unabated, leaving on their Southwestern flank a Theravada world stranded in the throes of underdevelopment, poverty, civil war, coups d’état, a situation that evokes the troublesome Balkans lagging behind its more developed and stable European neighboring states.

My dissertation consists of two main parts (not counting the Introduction and Conclusion):

1. Les Textes, dedicated to the doctrinal stand of Pâli literature with regard to violence, incidentally compared with that of Mahayana literature. In that section I translated into French passages from four suttas (Aggañña, Cakkavatti and Mahâparinibbâna and Adhammika), three Jâtakas (Sumangala, Bikkhâparampara and Mûgapakkha) and from the extra-canonical Mahâvamsa, dealing with the State, violence and punishment.
2. La Réalité in which, drawing from more recent historical and sociological secondary sources, in English and French, as well as a long familiarity with Buddhist milieus in that part of the world, I compare the doctrinal stand of the Canon regarding violence with reality both past and present on the ground, in and between countries where Theravada Buddhism has been the dominant religious tradition for various lengths of time, more than 2000 years in Sri Lanka, barely one thousand in Indochina.

This Summary will follow the same pattern. I will in the first part deal with the textual Pâli tradition relevant to our subject, delineating the ideological matrix that Collins has coined the Pâli imaginaire⁶ and in the second part try to track the ideology’s various avatars through the history of the Theravada world.

I. The textual tradition

The basic political philosophy and mythology of Theravada Buddhism is contained in three suttas, of which I translated long passages: the Aggañña Sutta which puts a description of the genesis of the state and monarchy in the Buddha’s mouth, the Mahâparinibbâna, which many think shows the Buddha’s preference for a republican system, and the Cakkavatti Sutta, where we find the picture of the ideal cakkavatti or Universal Monarch.

I will hereafter summarize the content of these three texts.

The Aggañña Sutta

Consistently with Buddhist psychological and ethical views, crime and violence stem out of envy, rooted in desire or craving. At the beginning says this sutta, human beings were asexual and almost purely «mind made, feeding on joy, self-luminous, floating in ether, dwelling in glory»:

mayam hi pubbe manomayā ahumha pīti­-bhakkā sayam­-pabhā antalikkha­-carā subhaṭṭhāyino (DN III, 27.18 /PTS iii 92)

It is craving for a special food, which suddenly appeared on the surface of the primeval waters that precipitated the whole subsequent unhappy evolution, giving birth in sequence to differences in physical appearance, to craving for sex, then – in order to conceal sexual shame – to craving for private property of land and the ensuing endemic conflicts. It is in order to put an end to these that the idea arose in humans to choose among themselves the most handsome and charismatic man as a leader, to entrust him with keeping order, admonishing, judging and punishing, and repay him with a share of rice, the first taxes :

[Y]an’ nūna mayam ekam sattam sammaneyyāma. So no sammā khīyitabbam khīyeyya, sammā garahitabbam garaheyya, sammā-pabbājetabbam pabbājeyya. Mayam pan’assa sālīnam bhāgam anupadassāmāti (DN 27.20/PTS iii 94)

which I translate : «What about electing one [human] being who when it is right to denounce, would denounce, when it is right to scold, would scold, and when it is right to banish, would banish ? And we would let him have a share of [our] rice»

The Mahâparinibbâna

At the beginning of this most famous sutta, we find a passage⁷ in which many scholars have seen the advocacy of a republican or democratic system of government.

The issue of violence is not explicitly addressed in it but it shares with the Aggañña a rather democratic bent, and states that governance should be based on consensus. It also contrasts sharply with that of the following Cakkavatti Sutta where monarchy is clearly hereditary and the ideal king’s features, despite his stated duty to consult experts before taking decisions, is rather that of an enlightened despot.

The Cakkavattî Sutta

This Sutta⁸ states that the power of the cakkavatti must be deserved, that it can be inherited but not automatically, that it results from a sort of Heaven’s mandate of which the icon, appearing in the sky at every beginning of a new reign, is the cakkaratana, which I translate «jewel shaped as a helm». Some of the characteristics of the cakkavatti’s power is that it is based on the dhamma⁹ [dhammena : through the «rule of law» ] and is spread through persuasion without resorting to violence (asatthena). It is precisely the failure of the eighth successor to Dalhanemi, the archetypal cakkavatti, to consult with his council of experts, and the mistakes he commits thereafter, that keeps the cakkaratana from appearing in the sky, obliges the king to resort to violence in order to maintain public order and precipitates a cycle of decadence, several thousands of years long, leading to a state of violent anarchy reaching down to the intermediate «sword-time period», lasting one week, during which humans will consider each other as mere beasts and preys. The survivors, understanding the cause of their sorry state, will then gradually adopt rules leading back to healthier public behavior and initiating an upwards trend culminating with the appearance of a new ideal cakkavatti, Samkha, soon followed by Metteyya, the Buddha to come, here mentioned for the first time in the Pâli literature¹⁰.

If one of the main lessons of this sutta may be summarized as being that crime may not be rewarded but that punishment must be proportionate to its severity, and that violent punishment is counterproductive, the textual tradition, so far, seems to confirm the commonly accepted image of Buddhism as promoting a most pacifist political philosophy. Let us turn now to the Jâtakas.

The Jâtakas

Although numerous violent episodes occur in these tales of the Buddha’s former births, the three jâtakas I selected will not contradict the overall picture left by the three foregoing suttas. One of them, the Mûgapakkha Jâtaka (Ja, 538, 15–25) even seems to push non-violent ethics a bit further, to the fringe of an utopia where no salvation is possible but in a society where everyone is a monk, non-violent by definition.

Let us start with the Sumangala (Ja 420, 3:441-2), which teaches that a king should not make a decision or pronounce a judgment when angry — quite reasonable even for non-Buddhists. A bit more utopian is the Bhikkhâparampara Jâtaka (Ja 496,13) which shows that in a kingdom ruled by a dhammarâja (king following the dhamma) courts of justice become empty and redundant. An other text, the Adhammika Sutta¹¹, although not a jâtaka, follows the same utopian inspiration since it predicts that the respect or non-respect of the Law or Dhamma by rulers impacts on Nature itself, climatic phenomena and the course of stars and planets. Finally, the Mûgapakkha Jâtaka tells us the story of Prince Temiya who was reborn in a royal family where he himself had already been king in a former life. The baby, after having seen his father cruelly punishing four thieves, remembered that his former experience as a king had caused him to spend eighty thousand years in the Ussada purgatory. The overall message is that the status of king — that can always lead its incumbent to having to exert violence — is incompatible with hope for salvation. Very frightened by the prospect of having to go back to the Ussada purgatory if he were to be king again, after growing up, he escapes to the wilderness and becomes a hermit. The king finds his whereabouts and impressed by his son’s superior intelligence, converts to the Dhamma with all his family, becomes a hermit himself, and opens the borders of his kingdom to all the neighboring kings. All become hermits. Peace and harmony settle in before spreading around the world.

With the Mûgapakkha we reach the utopian acme of what Collins calls the Pâli imaginaire. For Collins (p. 565) «The universal Buddhist Dhamma has either to inscribe violence into oneself (no easy task, given the basic postulates of its soteriology) or to push it outside, and in so doing risk pushing itself out of any sphere of relevance to productive and reproductive communities.»

What happened between the canonical texts we just read — probably composed before the first century CE and put to writing in Sri Lanka around the beginning of the common era — and another, non-canonical text, that dates? much later (fifth century CE), the Mahâvamsa or Ceylon’s Great Chronicle, in which murdering heretics is not only condoned but, in certain circumstances, recommended?

Most probably, after being for about a thousand years, from Asoka (3^rd century BCE) to Harsa (7^th century CE)¹² at different times and in different parts of India the dominant, or one of the most important religions, starting with the Hindu Renaissance of the 5^th century CE, pressure began to be felt on Ceylonese Theravada from both Tamil Shivaist revivalism in South India and a Mahayana offensive. As Collins (ibidem) puts it, «The pre-modern pâli imaginaire was an elite ideology», and that of a protected elite indeed, which suddenly had to confront challenges it was not used to.

The Mahâvamsa

While in Mahâyana literature two canonical texts, the Mahâparinirvâna Sutra and the Tibetan Kala Cakra allow and even advise violence against the icchantikas or enemies of the Dharma¹³, in the Theravada canonical literature violence remains absolutely forbidden. It is not before the 5^th century CE that a non-canonical Chronicle, the Mahâvamsa¹⁴, retrospectively absolves king Dutthagamini (2^nd century BCE) having massacred thousands in order to repel an invasion of Tamil heretics.

In the book XXV^th of the Mahâvamsa, we read that after the battle, King Dutthagamani, resting in a splendid environment, is supposed to celebrate his victory over the Tamil King, but crushed by a feeling of guilt for having killed so many human beings, he feels no joy at the thought of his achievement. Eight arhats, or completely enlightened monks fly through the air and land on his terrace to comfort him. Dutthagamani tells the arhats of his worries. The arhats reply that he should not feel guilt, for he killed only «one man and a half», one who was a Buddhist monk, and one who was a Buddhist layman having taken the five minimum vows. The remaining, as heretics or non-Buddhists, were mere animals. Furthermore, as he fought to defend the Dhamma and the monks’ Sangha, when he dies he will go to the Tusita heaven and remain there in the company of Metteyya, the Buddha to come.

In book XXXVII (26–31) relating to a much later event, probably occurring a short time before the Chronicle itself was put to writing, it is the murder of two Mahayana followers that is excused.

II. Reality

Historical outline of Theravada

India

Theravada, as a school distinct from the other 18 most ancient Hinayana schools, originated in India at the 3^rd Council of Pataliputra (Patna), under Asoka, in the 3^rd century BCE. It benefited from Asoka’s patronage and spread widely over all the parts of India controlled by the Mauryas and beyond, but nowhere was it ever the only «official religion». By the 7^th century CE, it had almost disappeared from the subcontinent, yielding ground to the Hindu Renaissance initiated with the Guptas, to the progress of Mahâyana Buddhism, and soon of Islam, except for a few pockets in Kalinga, Orissa and, most notably, Ceylon.

Ceylon

When Asoka’s son Mahinda reached Ceylon, the island was probably less densely colonized by Aryans than Northern India and therefore brahmanisation and caste structure must have been shallower there. Consequently it may have been easier for Buddhism to impregnate a society that was still predominantly tribal and animistic. The Aryan nobility tracing back to Vijaya may have found Buddhism more efficient than Brahmanism for social integration. In any case, the concept of state in Ceylon must have been from the outset, or very early on, that of a Buddhist state which did not have to seriously compromise with or accommodate to the brahmanical state model.

Theravada became, and still is, the majority religion in Ceylon, that of the Sinhalese. The first war between a Sinhala kingdom and Northern Tamils who had kept their identity and language is the one, involving Dutthagamani that we just mentioned in the above section. It is presented as a reaction not to migration but to an invasion since the city of Anurâdhapura had been taken. About seven centuries later (5^th century CE), following the progress of a brand of Shivaism hostile to Buddhism in South India, a first definition of a Sinhalese identity, based on religion, comes to head in the Mahâvamsa. Thence, that identity newly defined in opposition to Tamil unbelievers, will keep consolidating at the same time as Theravada slowly yields grounds on the continent. In the 12^th century CE, in answer to the occupation of the island by the Chola South-Indian dynasty, a reconquista war is led by the hero of the Polonaruwa period, Parakramabâhu. The following centuries, until the arrival of the Portuguese, will see repeated incursions of Tamil and Kalinga princes with their «gangs» (Tambiah, op.cit., 1992, p. 140) which will precipitate the fall of the Polonaruwa kingdom in the Center of the island. The desertion and drying up of that area still divides the island between a Southern Sinhalese domain and a Northeastern Tamil majority region. The Sinhalese/Tamils antagonism still can be seen in the middle of the 19^th CE when the elite of Kandy, the last independent Sinhalese kingdom, calls the British to the rescue in order to get them rid of the Nayakkar, a Tamil dynasty suspected to be Buddhist only in name.

Meanwhile, starting from around the 8^th century CE, Theravada had bounced back from some of its residual pockets and niches in Eastern India to take root in Indochina. By the 11^th century, its followers there were ready to turn to Ceylon, the only country of the Indian world where Theravada had remained dominant, for religious inspiration (texts, monks and relics) as well as for trade, and occasionally, war.

Indochina

Indians contributed to the emergence of the first Indochinese States as early as the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries CE, but, strangely enough, on the Easternmost shore of the peninsula, on the China Sea: Champâ, in present days South Vietnam, and Funan, the forerunner of Cambodia. Meanwhile, the hinterland and most of the Indochinese subcontinent was to remain for several more centuries a wild area occupied by scarce animistic forest tribes, a bit like what Ceylon must have looked like when the first Aryans reached it, soon followed by the first Buddhist missionaries. It is there that Theravada was, starting from the 5^th –7^th centuries CE, to successfully take root and impress its model of the state in an rather virgin area with as a result some sort of confusion between national and religious identity that cannot be observed in the Mahayana countries, Tibet excepted.

I did not go in my dissertation over the details of Mahayana’s history. But most will admit that it is a deeply sinicized Mahayana that spread to other parts of Eastern Asia, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, after having accommodated to pre-existing Chinese religions, the social system and political philosophy, where Buddhism holds towards society and the state a position very different from that it held in Indian types of polities, and never, in Tibet excepted, an undisputed or monopolistic one.

*

In the areas where Theravada eventually prevailed, just as belonging to the Christian faith did not prevent European nations from waging war against one another, allegiance to the same school of Buddhism did not keep Theravada countries from conflicting relationships.

The first unifier of Burma, Anuruddha (Anawrahta/Anôratha :1044–1077) had his capital and base in Northern Burma near Pagan where a decadent tantric Mahayana had spread from neighboring Bengal. Finding the Mon Theravada of the central and southern regions more to his taste, he requested texts and relics from King Manuha of Thaton, equally Burmese, in Lower Burma. Manuha refused, giving so a pretext to Anuruddha for invading his kingdom, unify Burma and import Theravada from Thaton to Pagan¹⁵.

Anuruddha also established the first official contacts between a Theravada Indochinese country and Ceylon, inaugurating a pattern of exchanges between Ceylon and Indochina which, after a brief trade war between two of their successors, the Sinhalese Parâkramabâhu (1153-1186) and the Burmese Alaungsithu, continued almost uninterrupted despite incidents often related to relics, the possession of which was an important symbol of power and protection from above.

Anuruddha had initiated, in the relationships between Theravada countries a pattern that we could call the Anuruddha syndrom, that is the competition between Theravada countries for the possession of the Faith symbols, as well as for the purity, not so much of the orthodoxy, but of the orthopraxis, or observance, of their respective monastic lineages or nikâyas, which provided them with rights to the leadership of the Theravada world. That competition took at times a violent turn, reminiscent of the contest between Christian monarchs — the Very Christian King of France, the Very Catholic King of Spain, The Holy Romano-Germanic Emperor, the British King, Defender of the Faith — as to who was « more Catholic than the Pope ».

In those interactions, although supply and demand regularly came from both sides, Ceylon always enjoyed a special prestige as the oldest Theravada country where the Canon had been conserved and put to writing around the turn of the CE. In comparison Burma, coming into existence as a distinct entity from the 10^th century CE, Thailand from the 13^th century CE, and Laos even later, were much younger nations.

From the 11^th century CE, the Mons and Pyus having been reduced, the history of the peninsula is that of the Burmese and Thais repelling the Khmers to the South-East (which was achieved in the 13^th century CE) and converting them to Theravada (which had begun even earlier, under Jayavarman VII himself) before coming themselves into conflicts that are not quite over yet. From the 13^th century on to the 19^th century CE, the history of the peninsula is that of the difficult relationship between Burma and Siam.

As we said, some of these wars had religious motives or pretexts (Hazra, op.cit,1981, p. 164–165). One of the first attempts to invade Ayutthaya by the Burmese in the 16^th century CE aimed at capturing white elephants, distinctive emblems of a dhammarâja or Buddhist sovereign (Hazra, op. cit., p. 120 and 165). After Ayutthaya was finally taken, the Sâsanavamsa tells us that Anekasetibhinda (Bayin Naung) sent the Thera Saddhammacakkasâmi and prince Anuruddha to Siam in order to «purify the religion there» (Hazra, op.cit., 1981, p. 138–139).

Between Laos and Thailand the tension and recurrent conflicts partly pertain to the fact that Thais and? Laotians are ethnically and linguistically related, whence the permanent temptation for Thailand to attract or maintain her small cousin in her orbit. In 1777 Vientiane is taken by Phaya Tak, who had restored Siamese independence after a Burmese incursion. In Vientiane he took the Phra Keo, a precious emerald statue of the Buddha, and brought it over to Bangkok where it can still be worshiped at the Wat Phra Keo. In 1828 the Siamese invaded Laos again, destroyed Vientiane, deported part of its population to the Thai North-East (Issan), and occupied Champassak. On the eve of the French colonization, the North and East being occupied by Vietnam, there was of Laos only the Luang Prabang principality left¹⁶.

Monks in politics : Monk-kings and King-monks

In Indochina, kings frequently became monks and vice versa¹⁷. In Burma, King Dhammaceti (15^th century CE) was a monk in Ava (North) before becoming king of Pegu by marrying the daughter of Queen Shin Sawbu whom he had helped flee Ava where she had been married to the local king against her will (Hazra, 1981, p. 108, in note).

Thibaw, the last king of Burma (Trevor Ling, Idem, p. 68), who after having been a monk, massacred his rivals to become king before being finally forced by the British to abdicate in 1885. The way he had gotten the throne did not prevent Burmese nationalists, and amongst them many Buddhists, to consider him to be a martyr.

In Thailand, Mahâsami, grand son of Pha Müöng, who had helped Râma K’amhèng to establish the Sukhodaya kingdom, left the royal cloak for the robes of a forest monk, living on roots and fruit « as a Sinhalese monk » (Hazra, Idem, p. 151 and G. Coedès, op. cit., pp. 398–399). Lü T'ai, son of King Lö T'ai of Sukhodaya became a monk in 1361 after losing his kingdom to the first king of Ayutthaya, Râmâdhipati¹⁸. The phenomenon became specially remarkable in the XVIII ^th century(?). After the taking of Ayutthaya by the Burmese, local centers of power emerged here and there in the country. In Sawangbury, North of the central plain near Sukhodaya, a Buddhist monk called Ruan took control and appointed some of his colleagues as generals and officers. He also considered it to be within the scope of his competence to monitor the Sangha’s training, both moral and physical. Around 1777, as he started to manifest symptoms of eccentricity, his general Phraya Chakri took over and in 1782 moved the capital to Bangkok where he founded the present Chakri dynasty (Trevor Ling, Idem, p. 51). Two of the Chakri kings, Mongkut et Chulalongkorn, were monks before accessing the throne, and several princes ended up as Thailand Supreme Patriarchs of the Sangha..

In Burma King Alaungpaya, founder of the Konbaung dynasty identified himself as a Cakkavatti and Metteyya combined, before besieging Ayutthaya (Collins, p. 398) in order to reform the faith there. The Siamese wittily replied that if he really was Metteyya he should be standing in the Tusita Heaven rather than before the walls of Ayutthaya.

The 20^th century

A striking paradox of the politico-religious scene in the Theravada world is that in Sri Lanka and Myanmar the Sangha shows a pro-Marxist bent to the point of seeing in the Buddha a forerunner of the socialist ideology and/or the welfare state, while in Thailand anti-Marxism is prevalent among monks. In Laos, the inclusion of the country in the Vietnamese zone of influence did not leave monks the choice to take a stand, and in Cambodia monks were among the first victims of the Khmères rouges.

The Thai Sangha’s anti-communism has at times been virulent. In 1976 Kittivuddho¹⁹ a far right monk²⁰, declared that killing communists did not entail bad karma for it was an ideology that was aimed at, and not people. Taking perhaps his inspiration from the non-canonical Sinhalese Mahâvamsa, he added that « these enemies of the nation and religion were anyway not really people but wild beasts». The former Junta Chief, Thanom Kittikachorn, had been obliged in 1973 to flee to Singapore where he was accepted as a novice and received the lower ordination. After it was announced in 1976 that he wanted to come back to Thailand to receive the higher ordination (upasampada) at Wat Bovornives in Bangkok, street troubles started. The general came back anyway which triggered more troubles. Hundreds died and a new coup restored the army to power with a program inspired partly by Kittivuddho’s Party, the Nawaphon, even if no member of that Party got a seat in the new junta for, as Charles Keyes (op.cit, p. 160) remarks, it seems that militant Buddhism makes the Thais, even the most nationalist, feel uneasy.

In Sri Lanka the Sangha followed two opposite directions, one we could call conservative, the second socialist or leftist and nationalist. The colonial era (1505–1948) had been here longer than in any other Theravada country. That may explain the strength and periodic reaffirming of the nationalist themes.

In 1948, Sinhalese Buddhists were still the majority (70–80 %) but felt threatened in their social status. Their economical basis still was, as before the colonial period, land property, large, middle and small, while administration, politics, schools and university were controlled by Christians, Sinhalese or Tamil, and by a fraction of the westernized English-speaking Christian-Buddhist elite. Liberal professions were the monopole of Tamil high castes, and Muslims (7%) controlled large sectors of the international trade sector. In addition the Sinhala language was challenged by the increasing use of English. The majority developed a «minority complex»²¹ that can be compared to that of the Indonesian and Malay bhumiputras, although in the case of the Sinhalese, it would be more exact to speak of buddhaputras²².

Even before independence, Dhammapala, the fervent anagarika who had led a Buddhist revival that was later coined « protestant Buddhism», may have contributed to the hostility of the new Sinhalese bourgeoisie towards their Muslim competitors, which resulted in the 1915 riots. Following these, he wrote to the State Secretary for colonies a letter in which we can read:

The Muhammadans, an alien people who in the early part of the nineteenth century were common traders, by Shylockian methods became prosperous like the Jews. The Sinhalese, sons of the soil, whose ancestors for 2358 years had shed rivers of blood to keep the country from alien invaders,...today...are in the eyes of the British only vagabonds... The alien South Indian Muhammadan comes to Ceylan, sees the neglected, illiterate villagers, without any experience in trade, without any knowledge of any kind of technical industry, and isolated from the whole of Asia on account of his language, religion and race, and the result is that the Muhammadan thrives and the sons of the soil go to the wall.²³

After independence, it did not bother parties centering on Buddhist «communalist » themes to ally with new Marxist parties explicitly legitimizing violence against the «class enemies»²⁴. The contradiction is difficult to avoid even if one reckons with the fact that those alliances were often supported by the Amarapura et Ramañña nikayas which recruit mostly in the middle and lower castes. The Siam Nikaya, accepting only high cast goyigama (land owners) in their fold, as well as the Catholic Church, equally well endowed in real estate, generally supported the right of center business friendly UNP, also more tolerant with regard to ethnic, religious and linguistic differences.

In 1959, following a series of violent incidents with Tamils where monks or «fake monks» played a role often as inciters more than perpetrators²⁵ S.W.R.D Bandaranaïke, leader of the MEP (Mahajana Eksath Peramuna: People's United Front) a leftist coalition including the Marxist party VLSSP, the Basha Peramuna (Language Front) and diverse leftist independents as well as Bandaranaïke’s own party the SLFP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party), was killed for not having followed up with his electoral promises²⁶. The perpetrator was a monk mandated by a «politician-monk», Buddharakkhita, whose Eksath Bhikkhu Peramuna (United Monks Front) had greatly contributed to the MEP’s victory in 1956.

In the seventies and eighties, young monks’ activism was reactivated, feeding on themes such as: opposition to any negotiation with the Tamil federalists and the terrorist organization LTTE, to any autonomy for the Tamil majority Northern and Eastern provinces, to the presence of the Indian Army there – called to rescue in 1987 – to spreading consumerism and to a free exchange zone promoted by the UNP. On these themes it is with the JVP—whose program was egalitarian, populist, nationalist, and Buddhist—that as soon as 1971²⁷ militant monks confronted not so much the Tamil minority than the government (Tambiah, 1992, p. 95 and sq). That solidarity has been explained by the common rural background of the JVP adherents and the young monks of the Amarapura and Ramañña nikayas.

After a parenthesis of about ten years, at the beginning of the 21^st century, and the end of Chandrika Kumaratunga’s reign, monks took to politics again with clearly nationalist slogans. Judging Chandrika Kumaratunga too soft with the LTTE and the Norwegian negotiators, they founded a new party, the JHU (Jathika Hela Urumaya) defending Sri Lanka’s national and religious heritage. In addition to their opposing granting any autonomy to the Northern and Eastern provinces, they added two themes that stress their rightist character. First, they want to promote a law forbidding unethical conversions, generally from Buddhism to Christianity, arguing that those conversions are purchased⁠. Secondly, they oppose the funds from international donors after the December 2004 tsunami being handed over directly to Tamil victims through the LTTE.

Mahinda Rajapakse, also a candidate of the C. Kumaratunga’s SLFP, won the 2005 presidential elections after promising the JHU to take a firmer stand towards the LTTE. The two parties signed an agreement rejecting federalism as a basis of a peace agreement with the LTTE, the terms of the 2002 cease-fire agreement as well as the government/LTTE joint management of the tsunami funds (World Socialist Website, September 21, 2005, signed Wije Dias).

Consequently, it is with the backing of a political party managed by monks that the offensive against the LTTE strongholds in the East and North have resumed. Presently the Sri Lankan Government has retaken control of the East and exerts heavy pressure on the North. Although the LTTE has been listed as a terrorist organization by most western countries, indiscriminate bombing of civilians inhabited areas by the Sri Lankan Army, lack of long term political foresight for the period following a possible victory, and in general neglecting diplomacy for an exclusively military strategy are among the reproaches currently addressed to the Sri Lankan Government.

About Burma Tambiah (1992, p. 100) wrote:

The participation of monks in rebellion and millennial movements in precolonial times against the British raj, and subsequently in post-independence times, is not new. Burma has perhaps the most impressive evidence of this. Examples are the Saya San rebellion in the 1930s and the most recent uprisings in 1988 (continuing to this day) by the students and young monks of Rangoon and Mandalay against an oppressive military regime.

Regarding minorities, in Burma, it is mainly the presence of an important and prosperous Muslim minority that provoked troubles even before the end of the colonial era. In 1938, Muslims were accused by «political monks» of «stealing» Burmese women. On the 26^th of July of that year, a meeting was organized at the Shwe Dagon pagoda; it was followed by a demonstration which headed to the Indian (Muslim) neighborhood where it turned into riots targeting Muslims. For a few days the Rangoon area was prey to anti-Muslim and anti-Indian hysteria. It took a while before order was restored ²⁸.

In spite of his declared intention, in 1950, to make Buddhism Burma’s constitutional religion (Trevor Ling, 1979, p. 129) U Nu refused in 1954 to exclude the teaching of Islam and Christianity from State subsidized schools. That refusal triggered a nation-wide upsurge and it is on the asking of Muslim leaders, fearing a repeat of the 1938 riots and pogroms, that he yielded to the fundamentalist monks´ demands. Still he made Buddhism the State religion in 1961. The erratic and indecisive course of his policies, as well as his clumsy management of ethnic minorities’ rebellions, mainly Karens and Shans, led to general Ne Win’s Buddho-Marxist coup in 1962.

Nowadays, under a military dictatorship (from 1989 on) which no longer refers to Marxism nor to Buddhism, certain monastic groups continue to worry about Muslims’ demographic progress and hypergamous strategy. I have observed for myself in Rangoon the tension between Muslims and monks in 1998. A Western monk belonging to a Burmese lineage²⁹ told me that confrontations between monks and Muslim groups still had occurred over the last five years, that is since 2002.

But it is the troubles in the three southernmost Muslim provinces of Thailand³⁰ that since 1990 are making headlines again. Following an increase of terrorist attacks in the South in 2004 the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, considering them as mere criminal phenomena declared an emergency in 2005. The suppression, as brutal as inefficient, only served to kindle the fire. It is said that the worsening of the situation there is the main reason why King Bhumipol of Thailand accepted the September 2006 the coup led by General Sonthi Boonyaratkalin, a Muslim, with a program of granting Muslims in the South the right to apply the Sharia law among themselves regarding personal matters (marriage and inheritance). New terror attacks resulted in some 2 100 casualties and in March 2007 when I was wrapping up my dissertation, violence was continuing unabated. In reaction to these events proposals have been re-iterated to make Buddhism the official religion of Thailand³¹. But the general public as well as the Sangha, at least in Bangkok and the North, seem to remain remarkably calm with regard to the problem in the South.

Death penalty in Theravada countries

Most of them, most of the time, presently commute death penalty to life sentence but in case of a severe crisis, as under Shinawatra in Thailand for drug related crimes, it happens that the sentence is executed. Among them, Cambodia is the only country where the death penalty has been abolished, in 1993, but extra-judicial execution is frequent.

Conclusion

Why, among countries where Buddhism spread, do Theravada countries, despite the most pacifist doctrine of the Pâli Canon, remain more prone to religious and ethnic violence than their Mahayana counterparts?

I already suggested elements of explanation. Let me try now to wrap them up. The Pâli imaginaire was molded in the Indian environment, climatic and cultural, where holy men, religious mendicants, monks, were respected and protected by the state³². It spread first to areas still mostly without any state tradition, and similar to India with regard to climate. It could so impose the Buddhist concept of the state, as defined in the Pâli suttas, jâtakas and Mahâvamsa, as on a tabula rasa. To put it in another way, in Theravada countries Buddhism created the state. This contributed to the fusion in these countries of national, state and religious identities whereas in most Mahayana countries, Buddhism had to accommodate and yield to pre-existing formalized religious and socio-political concepts and the monkhood did not enjoy such an almost constitutionally privileged status as it did in Theravada polities.

According to the Pâli tradition, protection of the Sangha is constitutive of the cakkavatti’s and/or Buddhist state mission. But in the present Theravada world, only in Thailand does the state still fully play that role. In Sri Lanka, the respective status of state and Sangha has been debated and criticized for a long time, especially among urban educated «protestant Buddhists». But since the outset of colonization, even after independence, the state in Ceylon does not play anymore its traditional protective/disciplinarian role with regard to the very independent nikayas making up the Sangha. After independence the Sri Lankan state apparatus, not longer wholly Buddhist as it included well organized Christians, Hindus and Muslims, was not able or ready to play that role, abandoning the Sangha to its internecine disagreements and inability to reach a minimal consensus even regarding the definition of their common interests. In Myanmar the bond was broken in 1989 with the arrival to power of General Than Shwe. As for Laos and Cambodia one can surmise that the Sangha there, if protected, is also muzzled and mainly used as a prop by the communist establishment.

Can the Theravada Sangha institution and establishment survive in a political environment where the traditional bond between Sangha and state is relaxed or nonexistent? Are the Sangha’s confrontational attitudes observed in Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar answers to challenges that are experienced as threats to their status, more exclusively privileged and monopolistic than that of monks in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam? These are the questions that I propose to the reader as a conclusion, with a corollary and prospective question: can Theravada Sanghas adapt to the challenges of this increasingly global world, as the Northwestern Indian, Central Asian and Chinese Sanghas did to new conditions two thousand years ago³³, while keeping a literal reading of the Pâli Vinaya (monastic code of conduct) regarding, for instance, the interdiction for monks to deal in any way with agriculture because it would imply getting involved in killing insects and other small organisms?

Thailand in that respect may have shown the way. Under the enlightened leadership of the Chakri monarchs, the Sangha here strove to become more socially active (schools, universities, hospitals, counseling even in agricultural productivity improvement strategies) renewing in that way the bond not only between Sangha and state but also, and perhaps more importantly, with civil society³⁴.

1Bouddhisme theravada et violence

2DEA : Diplôme d’Études Approfondies.

3Readers who want the complete dissertation can obtain it, with the original Pâli scriptures or only their French translations, by sending an e-mail to jhuynen@gmail.com

4L’enseignement du Bouddha, 1978, p. 22.

5The conflict between China, large sections of the Tibetan people and the Government of the Dalai Lama is more cultural, linguistic and political than religious in nature.

6Collins Stevens, Nirvâna and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of Pali Imaginaire,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

7Mahâparinibbâna Sutta (DN, II, 16 et sq); we use here the VRI edition (134–136) = Ed. PTS ii, 72.

8DN.III.58-77

9Defined as «no killing, no taking what is not given, no lying, no taking intoxicants, no abusing sensual pleasure, no overeating which roughly matches the pañca sîla or five interdictions to be respected not only by monks but also by lay followers of the Buddha, while the specific dhamma (duty) of the cakkavatti can be summarized as «promoting the dhamma, protecting monks and brahmins, ordinary people, poor and rich, as well as animals. Cf. PTS 61 (5).

10S. Collins, op.cit., p. 335.

11Anguttara Nikâya. PTS : II, 74–76.

12See chapter IV of A. Smith, The Oxford History of India, Oxford University Press, 2006 : 22^nd reprint of the 1958 Indian edition (first published 1919).

13See Schmithausen Lambert, “Aspects of the Buddhist Attitude towards War” in Violence, Non-Violence and the Rationalization of Violence in South Asian Cultural History. Ed. Jan E.M.Houben and Karel R.Van Kooij, Leiden, Brill, 1999.

14Some pro-war milieus in Sri Lanka presently advocate its inclusion in the Canon.

15Hazra Kanai Lal, History of Theravâda Buddhism in South-East Asia, with special reference to India and Ceylon, Munishiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 1981, pp.79–85.

16 Xavier Roze, Géopolitique de l’Indochine, Paris, Economica, 2000, p. 2 and map p. 107.

17Trevor Oswald Ling, Buddhism, imperialism and war: Burma and Thailand in modern history, London; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979, p. 51.

18G.Coedès, op. cit, pp. 398–402.

19Communists had just taken power in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Cf. Charles Keyes « Political Crisis and Militant Buddhism » in B.L.Smith, Religion and Legitimation of Power, p.150 et sq.

20There also was a leftist monks faction, the Yuvan Song.

21S.J.Tambiah, op.cit., 1992, p. 33

22Cf. Sarath Amunugama. «Buddhaputra and Bhumiputra ? Dilemmas of Modern Sinhala Buddhist Monks in Relation to Ethnic and Political Conflict» in Religion, 21 (1991): 115-39.

23Ananda Guruge, ed. Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays, and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala. Colombo: Government Press, 1965, p. 540, quoted by S.J.Tambiah, 1992, p. 8.

24See, Donald Eugène Smith, Ed., South Asian Politics and Religion, Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 484, and all chapters dedicated to Sri Lanka which provide a very thorough account of the ground in which posterior events — the beginnings of Tamil terror attacks, the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983 and the recent 2006 rekindling of war — are rooted.

25Tambiah, 1992, pp. 49–57.

26Nationalizing of private schools, mostly Christian.

27It is said that weapons were found in certain monasteries , cf. Tambiah, 1992, p. 96.

28Trevor Ling, 1979, p. 88.

29Following his request, I prefer not to mention his name.

30 Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and, marginally, the province of Songkhla.

31So far the only clause along those lines in the Constitution is that the king must be a Buddhist.

32When Buddhism came to areas where the respect and protection of mendicant monks by society and state could not be taken for granted, monks had to adapt, become land owners and even marry, as in Tibet.

33See Jean Naudou, Les bouddhistes kashmîriens au moyen-âge, Paris, PUF, 1968; Jacques Gernet, Les aspects économiques du bouddhisme dans la société chinoise du V e au X e siècle, Saïgon, EFEO, 1956 ; Gregory Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters, Hawaii University Press, 2004.

34According to Tambiah S.J.( World conqueror and world renouncer : a study of Buddhism and polity in Thailand against a historical background, Cambridge [Engl.]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976) between 30 and 50% of the Thai administration, academia, army and police are composed of former monks or have been trained in monasteries .