The dark side of…Buddhism?
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- January
- 12
Buddhists are always peace-loving, serene and detached, right?
It’s a pretty simplistic formula, but an image that many non-Buddhists probably share.
So I was struck by a short essay I read on ReligionDispatches.org by religion scholar Michael Jerryson, who has co-edited a new book about another side of Buddhism.
It’s called Buddhism Warfare.
Heh?
Jerryson writes:
*****
It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as mystical.
Yet these mystical depictions did not remove the two-dimensional nature of Western understanding. And while it contributed to the history of Buddhism, this presentation of an otherworldly Buddhism ultimately robbed Buddhists of their humanity.
*****
Jerryson is a prof at Eckerd College on Florida’s Gulf Coast. He’s edited the book with Mark Juergensmeyer, director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an expert on religion-fueled violence.
Their book consists of critical essays that “illustrate the violent history of Buddhism across Mongolia, Tibet, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India.”
Jerryson writes that some have already raised concerns about the book.
But he’s undaunted: “In a way, I wish I could return to that dream of Buddhist traditions as a purely peaceful, benevolent religion that lacks mortal failures and shortcomings. But I cannot. It is, ultimately, a selfish dream and it hurts other people in the process.”
The headline over his essay: “Monks With Guns.”
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:23 am by Gary Stern.
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Category: "Buddhism Warefare", Buddhist violence, Mark Juergensmeyer, Michael Jerryson, ReligionDispatches.org
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The world of religion, we don't have to tell you, is vast. The purpose of this blog is for Stern to note, flag and comment on some of the more interesting religious developments on the scene – weighty and quirky, somber and laughable, far away and just down the road. He won't interpret Scripture, take sides in conflicts or judge anyone. But he will take advantage of the journalist's license to observe.
Most learned people are chagrined by the fact that the two religions which speak most of love have been in the most wars.
That is, Christianity and Buddhism.
In Japan, there were many sects of Buddhism which fought (literally) to the death.
Buddhism was the supply to Japanaese bushido (according to Nitobe) with the friendliness with death which is so germaine to the samurai.
Furthermore, it wasn’t the atheistic Nobunaga, or the agnostic Hediyoshi that persecuted the Catholic Church the most, but the Buddhist Tokugawa Shogunate.
Just some examples :)
If Buddhists are aggressive then they have been completely unsuccesful, since in all countries where they have come into conflict they have lost to Islam http://seanrobsville.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-buddhists-and-pagans-need-to-know.html
Charlie U:
Buddhism talk about love?
Peace, yes, and detached compassion; but not love.
I wonder if this exposure of the violent side of Buddhism applies to all of its various Schools? Enlightening, nonetheless.
Yes and the Christian and Jews were so peaceful and love. the crusades? the inquisition? The zealots/zions ?