Reddit reviews Buddhist Warfare

Although it doesn't fit the popular image of Buddhism, there's a book about buddhist warfare. Religion has always been as a reason to attack other groups that doesn't share the same religion.

There's the book Buddhist Warfare that goes into this in detail, see also: Buddhist Fury: Religion and Violence in Southern Thailand. Most are familiar with the Samurai tradition and there's Zen at War.

The Dalai Lama, in a previous incarnation, was a real apologist for military conquest. I'd love to goad his current incarnation by bringing up what he said a few hundred years ago on the topic.

...and Jesus was apparently a rather peaceful fellow too, but that didn't stop such horrors as the Crusades.

There is a difference between the origins of a religion and its continuing expression and practice. No religion is free of it. I don't think the attempt to sanitize the image of religion by appeal to its progenitors is at all useful. What is under discussion is religion as practiced, not as imagined.

Found this book - looks like it might be worth a read.

> Buddhism is the exception

You really think so? You might want to read this fine work of scholarship. Buddhism has just as much of a history of ideological involvement in warfare as any of the other major religions. But I suspect you'll just answer with No True Scotsman talk.

> But Buddha is not even a God

You're right, the Mahayana canon says that the Buddha is higher than the gods.

There is a great book about this very topic called "Buddhist Warfare". I highly recommend reading it. There is a story in there about two Tibetan groups who hated each other so much that one built their monastery higher up a mountain from the other so they could roll boulders down on the other group.

As another commenter has pointed out, the situation in Myanmar is a great example of violence in the name of Buddhism. The teachings of the Buddha are that we are all products of prior causes and conditions. As Thich Nhat Hanh once pointed out, "if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, there is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate."

Overall, the core values of Buddhism do not condone violence (one of the five precepts is not to kill/cause to be killed - thus, valuing all life as sacred). Not condoning violence does not mean not having compassion for those who perpetrate it, though. Remember, even Angulimala became an arahant.

For further reading, there's "BUddhist Warfare" and "Zen at War", one discusses the long history of BUddhism, while the latter focuses on Japanese Zen.

https://www.amazon.com/Buddhist-Warfare-Michael-Jerryson/dp/0195394844/ref=pd_sim_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=M7295Z1SV0KBKF1YX16Z

https://www.amazon.com/Zen-War-Brian-Daizen-Victoria/dp/0742539261/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504935818&sr=8-1&keywords=buddhism+at+war

I have no objections to your clarifications about karma and determinism.

I didn't read the book, just read the description of it on Amazon which said:

>Buddhist Warfare demonstrates that the discourse on religion and violence, usually applied to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, can no longer exclude Buddhist traditions. The book examines Buddhist military action in Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, and shows that even the most unlikely and allegedly pacifist religious traditions are susceptible to the violent tendencies of man. http://www.amazon.com/Buddhist-Warfare-Michael-Jerryson/dp/0195394844(italics mine)

The italicized part seemed to placing the onus on Buddhism itself rather than a clear corruption of the teachings. I would re-write it to say: "shows that even the most unlikely and clearly pacifist religious teachings are susceptible to the violent tendencies of man." But I didn't read the book, so I'll take your word that it is a fair treatment of the subject.

>That doesn't mean monks, novices, nuns, or lay Buddhists have never killed others in the name of religion or religious indignation.

I'm not sure where you said this, but I have a small point to make about it. I would say this actually provides another clear distinction between Buddhism and other religions. If a monk or nun killed, for any reason, it would only be once, because the instant they do it they are disrobed for life. Even if they tell someone else to kill and the killing occurs, they are no longer a monk or nun. Most other religions don't have such clear consequences with regard to violence.

I do think there are reasonable arguments one can make that support Buddhism's peaceful reputation. First, statistically, do self-identified Buddhists, per capita, throughout history, engage in warfare less often than Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever? I don't know the answer, but it's certainly possible. How reliable are arguments like this? How do you separate other cultural factors and influences from the equation? People will be arguing over comparisons like this forever.

Second, and more importantly, is Buddhist doctrine peaceful, or more peaceful? Since in the Buddha's recorded teachings in the Pali Canon, there is not one instance of the Buddha justifying intentional killing under any circumstances, you could say it is much more clearly peaceful than the scriptures of other religions which have many unambiguous passages about God telling one tribe to kill others, and all sorts of ambiguous passages that can be easily interpreted to justify killing. Fortunately the Buddha was supremely careful in his speech.

>Where do you have in mind? Except kind of for Tibet, I can't really think of any places where that's true.

Buddhist Warfare by Michael Jerryson is a good book on the subject. In Sri Lanka there are Muslim terrorists whom target Buddhists or Buddhist temples. The situation is similar in southern Thailand. Buddhist women who live in majority Muslim villages are frequently raped.

Cont'd

Now moving forward, the crusades will not take place. Certainly not as they did in OTL. Remember, the rationale behind the Crusades was that good Christian pilgrims were blocked from Jerusalem because of the Muslim conquests. This falls flat because even if the Arabs conquer Jerusalem, it wouldn't be much of a holy site. Even under the possibilities (however remote) that Jesus and Muhammed are both considered bodhisattvas or high lamas and both had their meditative experiences in Jerusalem, the High Priest in Rome wouldn't have a theological basis to call for an invasion of the Levant. Holy warring simply doesn't exist in Buddhism.

But don't be discouraged! Historians now tend to agree that the crusades were wars over economic control of the western terminus of the Silk Road (Constantinople and the Levant, specifically) than wars of religion. There won't be any grand Vatican councils to declare war against the infidel, but gradually we'll begin to see wars from the merchant republics of Italy and the Empires and Kingdoms of Europe over control of this delicate region. The result will eventually be a region divided by history and a patchwork of Buddhist states. My guess is that it will be just as contentious as our world's Middle East with conflict driven more by race and ethnicity than religion (since the vast majority will be Buddhist).

That said, eventually the New World transmission will take place Buddhist conquistadors will scour the Americas from Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego. It's way too removed from our POD to be able to determine exactly how the New World would be divided or how bloody the conquest would be. Personally, I'd like to think that Buddhist missionaries would seek to civilize the indigenous tribes before the conquistadors sweep in with swords and the excuses of, "We're not monks." This, after all, tends to be the pattern of Buddhist transmission: the kingdoms and tribes that survived slaughter tended to adopt Buddhism from the missionaries and then when the conquerors came, the newly Buddhist kings would throw up their hands and say, "Would you kill fellow sangha members?"

So say the Aztecs and Inca still exist by the time the Buddhists show up, I'd like to imagine that missionaries - Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana - would approach the natives and try to convert them. After all the Tibetans practiced human sacrifice before the second transmission of Buddhism. Maybe Buddhist Cortez will approach Mexico and find out that he can't slaughter willy nilly without incurring the wrath of High Lamas and teachers. Unfortunately, disease doesn't know religion and plagues will still wipe out huge swaths of the Native American tribes.

Buddhist monasteries (and I'd like to think this is a result of their decentralized nature) have supported learning especially in proto-sciences so I'd also like to imagine that missionaries would traverse the Americas seeking to stem the tide of smallpox and typhoid. In this world, perhaps the slaughter and plague would both be decreased by at least a quarter, maybe as much as half.

Where it would get really interesting would be if/when Buddhist Europeans would finally cross the Pacific and meet China and India. The cultural shock would be reduced quite a bit if ships sailed into Hangzhou with an altar room dedicated to the Buddha. Or if the ship's chaplain was able to discuss the Dhammapada with the Son of Heaven's court priests.

The timeline here gets absurdly fuzzy by the Alternate Colombian Exchange. After all, the butterfly effect demands that different dynasties will rise and fall in China, perhaps even the Mongols may be spurred on by a full European conquest, distorting these not-crusades and perhaps giving alt-China time to catch up and explore the New World well before the Europeans. So we're reaching really dark territory but here's my assessment: Roman Europe converting to Buddhism presents a (very) strong probability that Scandinavia and Arabia will also convert to Buddhism (albeit their own flavor). With Arabia being converted to Buddhism, even if they destroy Persia and pour into India as the Arabs did IOTL, then they won't destroy the Buddhist temples and monasteries of North India. This means that Buddhism will remain a major religion of India and possibly (though not certainly) not spread to Tibet. Tibet - somewhat ironically - may convert to Chinese Ch'an Buddhism and not Indian Vajrayana Buddhism as it did IOTL. So with Buddhists spreading from Ireland to Japan, it will no doubt be THE largest and most influential religion in the world regardless of who gets to the New World first, European or Chinese (or Indian?).

I'm not stupid enough to believe that a Buddhist world is a pacifist one. But I'd like to imagine it would be at least somewhat less violent as holy warring is not typically a facet of Buddhist warfare (though textual justification after the fact certainly is). That said, things are somewhat easier when you can travel from Rome to Nanjing and always be among fellow worshippers. If you're more interested in a timeline like this, check out "Buddhist Warfare." You can compare Christian and Muslim warfare with Buddhist ones. No one declared a holy war for Bodh Gaya or Oddiyana even though both were taken over by the Muslims, though the Christians certainly did for Jerusalem. Buddhist history hasn't always been peaceful, but it is nice when a cardinal declaration of your religion is not to harm others.

http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/Buddhism/Oxford%20University%20Press%20Buddhist%20Warfare%20%282010%29.pdf <== pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Buddhist-Warfare-Michael-Jerryson/dp/0195394844 <== amazon book

>I get that the story paints that picture, but the moral of the story is not very Buddhist to me.

What these and a great many other sources such as this illustrate is that Buddhism isn't necessarily pacifist by nature. Throughout its history it has had its own very Buddhist ways of coming to grips with violence. If the story doesn't sound very Buddhist, then perhaps the problem isn't with the story but with your ideas about what Buddhism "is" or rather what you believe Buddhism "should be."