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IN DEFENSE OF DHARMA This is the first book to examine war and violence in Sri Lanka from the perspective of cross-cultural studies on just-war tradition and theory. In a study that is textual, historical, and anthropological, it is argued that the ongoing Sinhala–Tamil conflict is often justified by resorting to religious stories that allow for war when Buddhism is in peril. Since Buddhism is often commonly assumed to be a religion that never allows for war, this book – by suggesting otherwise – brings Buddhism into the ethical dialogue on religion and war. Without a realistic consideration of just-war thinking in contemporary Sri Lanka, it will remain impossible to understand the existing power of religion that can create both peace and war. Tessa J. Bartholomeusz was Professor of Religion at The Florida State University, Tallahassee. She was the author of Women Under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka (1994) and co-editor of Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka (1998). Her work concentrated on gender, religious identity, and, most recently, on Buddhism in the USA. General Editors Charles S. Prebish and Damien Keown The RoutledgeCurzon Critical Studies in Buddhism series is a comprehensive study of the Buddhist tradition. The series explores this complex and extensive tradition from a variety of perspectives, using a range of different methodologies. The series is diverse in its focus, including historical studies, textual translations and commentaries, sociological investigations, bibliographic studies, and considerations of religious practice as expressions of Buddhism’s integral religiosity. It also presents material on modern intellectual historical studies, including the role of Buddhist thought and scholarship in a contemporary, critical context and in the light of current social issues. The series is expansive and imaginative in scope, spanning more than two and a half millennia of Buddhist history. It is receptive to all research works that inform and advance our knowledge and understanding of the Buddhist tradition. THE REFLEXIVE NATURE OF AWARENESS Paul Williams BUDDHISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS Edited by Damien Keown, Charles Prebish, and Wayne Husted ALTRUISM AND REALITY Paul Williams WOMEN IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE BUDDHA Kathryn R. Blackstone THE RESONANCE OF EMPTINESS Gay Watson IMAGING WISDOM Jacob N. Kinnard AMERICAN BUDDHISM Edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher Queen PAIN AND ITS ENDING Carol S. Anderson THE SOUND OF LIBERATING TRUTH Edited by Sallie B. King and Paul O. Ingram BUDDHIST THEOLOGY Edited by Roger R. Jackson and John J. Makransky EMPTINESS APPRAISED David F. Burton THE GLORIOUS DEEDS OF PU¤RNA Joel Tatelman CONTEMPORARY BUDDHIST ETHICS Edited by Damien Keown INNOVATIVE BUDDHIST WOMEN Edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo TEACHING BUDDHISM IN THE WEST Edited by V. S. Hori, R. P. Hayes, and J. M. Shields EMPTY VISION David L. McMahan SELF, REALITY AND REASON IN TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Thupten Jinpa RELIGIOUS MOTIVATION AND THE ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM Torkel Brekke IN DEFENSE OF DHARMA Tessa J. Bartholomeusz IN DEFENSE OF DHARMA Just-war ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka Tessa J. Bartholomeusz First published 2002 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2002 Tessa J. Bartholomeusz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-99480-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-7007-1681-5 (hbk) ISBN 0-7007-1682-3 (pbk) FOR JEFF CONTENTS Foreword xi Editors’ preface xvii Preface xix 1 Narrative, ethics, and war 1 2 Just-war thinking in texts and contexts 32 3 Dharma yuddhaya and dharma warriors in Sri Lanka 68 4 Buddhism, pacifism, war, and ethical orientations 101 5 Sri Lankan Buddhism and just-war thinking revisited 136 Notes 168 Selected bibliography 195 Primary sources 201 Index 202 ix FOREWORD Tessa Jane Bartholomeusz was born on 13 August 1958 in the seaport town of Trincomalee. Her father, a Dutch Burgher officer in the Sri Lankan Army, was an alumnus of Royal College and a graduate, one of Sri Lanka’s first, of Sandhurst; her mother, an Englishwoman, had trained at the Royal Academy of Music. It was not long after her birth that Tessa’s family recognized the degree to which the political and social perturbations of the time threatened to blight their prospects. Emigration to the USA supervened, followed by hard-earned, that is to say thoroughly merited, prosperity. These are details of Tessa’s life that possess more than merely personal interest, because the cosmopolitanism of her heritage and the circumstances of her immigration became profound influences on her intellectual and scholarly development, as readers of her work will quickly recognize. Hence, then, the centrality to her research of issues such as the relationship between religion and ethnicity, the complexities and complications attending (or dogging) the constructions, academic and vulgar alike, of the West and the East, and – and this especially – marginalization, whatever its situation and whatever its derivation, be it a function of race, religion, or gender. Though she began her university career as the holder of a scholarship in drama, Tessa was soon attracted to the comparative study of religion, in which occupation her attentions were quickly concentrated on the religions of South Asia. She took an Honors Degree in Religion at the University of Florida; an MA in Religion from the Florida State University followed, after which she studied Buddhism and Hinduism at the University of Virginia, where in 1991 she received her PhD in the History of Religions with a dissertation on Buddhist lay nuns in Sri Lanka. Students of South Asia must go there, of course, and so Tessa’s education included stints at Varanasi Hindu University (where she studied Sinhala) and at the University of Peradeniya. She also studied Sinhala at Cornell University. Tessa taught Hindi in the Department of Oriental Languages at the University of Virginia and religious studies at Indiana University in Indianapolis. In 1993 she joined the Faculty of Religion at the Florida State University, where, at the time of her death, she was Professor of Religion. She was a brilliant teacher: her classes were always filled, and her success was appreciated by her colleagues, as her multiple teaching awards – she received a University Teaching Award, The Superior Liberal Studies xi FOREWORD Honors Teaching Award, and a University Teaching Incentive Program Award – attest. It was not simply her charm or her style that attracted undergraduates in abundance (though more than a few undergraduate women, from various disciplines, looked to Tessa as a role model, a position in which she was not entirely comfortable): it was her passion for her scholarship, her ideas, and her determination to convince her classes how very much the ways in which we think about religion or gender or violence matter to the lives of everyone, even comfortable, cosseted middle-class Americans. Tessa’s first book, Women Under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka, appeared in the series Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions in 1994. Her interest in the dasa sil mata, what she described as a “lay nun,” went back to 1983, when, during a visit to Sri Lanka, one of her relations offered to introduce her to a Buddhist nun, an offer she met with skepticism. (“I had been taught that there were no nuns in Theravadin Buddhist countries,” as she would put it when recollecting the event.) The woman she met, Sister Sudharma, a seventy-year-old “mother of the ten precepts,” fascinated her: here was a figure whose very existence instantiated the adaptability, the vivacity, of Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka (as well as the importance of studying religion “on the ground” and not exclusively in a library or classroom), and who embodied the complications of gender, of femininity, in South Asian society in general and more specifically in Sri Lankan Buddhism. Thereafter she could not stop reading about female renunciation in South Asia, not that there was so much to read about the topic in those days, and in any event most of it was more concerned with “influences” than with the lived realities of the thousands of individuals who constituted the “phenomenon” of female renunciation. Hence the impetus for the research that resulted in Women Under the Bo Tree, a comprehensive account of the history of the re-emergence of female renunciation in the nineteenth century, of Buddhist ideas about gender that shaped the tradition of female renunciation, of the multiple and diverse voices of past and present-day nuns, their supporters and their critics – all of which shed considerable light on the position of women in contemporary Sri Lankan society and all of which was formulated in a style accessible to students of gender and religion who are not South Asian specialists. Women Under the Bo Tree had been preceded by specialist articles that adumbrated her treatment of the topic, the most frequently cited of which remains “The female mendicant in Buddhist Sri Lanka” (in J.

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