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
violence
presented by Jacques Huynen in June 2007, for the postgraduate
DEA Diploma of Advanced Studies
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 prevailed.
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 Buddhism
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 (14th
CE), and completely since the end of the Vietnam War,
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):
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.
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 imaginaire
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 passage
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 Sutta
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 dhamma
[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 literature.
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 Sutta,
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 (3rd century BCE) to Harsa (7th
century CE)
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 5th 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 Dharma,
in the Theravada canonical literature violence remains absolutely
forbidden. It is not before the 5th century CE that a
non-canonical Chronicle, the Mahâvamsa,
retrospectively absolves king Dutthagamini (2nd century
BCE) having massacred thousands in order to repel an invasion of
Tamil heretics.
In the book XXVth 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 3rd Council of Pataliputra (Patna), under
Asoka, in the 3rd 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 7th 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 (5th 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 12th
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 19th 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 8th
century CE, Theravada had bounced back from some of its residual
pockets and niches in Eastern India to take root in Indochina. By the
11th 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 2nd and 3rd
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 5th –7th
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 Pagan.
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 10th
century CE, Thailand from the 13th century CE, and Laos
even later, were much younger nations.
From the 11th 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 13th 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 13th century on to the 19th
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 16th
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 left.
Monks
in politics : Monk-kings and King-monks
In Indochina, kings frequently became monks and vice
versa.
In Burma, King Dhammaceti (15th 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, Râmâdhipati.
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
20th
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 Kittivuddho
a far right monk,
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»
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 buddhaputras.
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.
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».
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 perpetrators
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 promises.
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 1971
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 21st 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 26th 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 .
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 lineage
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 Thailand
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 Thailand.
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
state.
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 ago,
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 society.
