Buddhism and Violence Edited by Michael Zimmermann with the assistance of Chiew Hui Ho and Philip Pierce Lumbini 2006 LUMBINI INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE Lumbini International Research Institute P.O. Box 39 Bhairahawa, Dist. Rupandehi NEPAL e-mail: [email protected] © Lumbini International Research Institute All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, microfilm, scanner or any other means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. ISBN 99946-933-1-X First published 2006 Printed in Nepal Contents Introduction 5 The Path of the Bodhisattva 11 and the Creation of Oppressive Cultures Francis Brassard Views on Suicide in Buddhism: 25 Some Remarks Martin Delhey Evil Monks with Good Intentions? 65 Remarks on Buddhist Monastic Violence and its Doctrinal Background Christoph Kleine Between the Profane and the Sacred? 99 On the Context of the Rite of “Liberation” (sgrol ba) Carmen Meinert Compassionate Killing or Conflict Resolution? 131 The Murder of King Langdarma according to Tibetan Buddhist Sources Jens Schlieter D. T. Suzuki and Japanese Militarism: 159 Supporter or Opponent? Brian Victoria Buddhism and the Killing of Animals 195 in Premodern Japan Klaus Vollmer Only a Fool Becomes a King: 213 Buddhist Stances on Punishment Michael Zimmermann Contributors 243 Index 245 Introduction This volume is the outgrowth of a panel on Buddhism and violence at the XIIIth Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, held in Bangkok, December 2002. There is as yet no definitive work on the general topic of Buddhism and violence.1 There are, however, a growing number of studies of specific cases of violence in Buddhism, drawn from particular periods and places. 2 It is hoped that the contributions to this volume, largely following the textual approaches that have dominated Buddhist studies since its origins, will be supplemented by research based on other methodologies and materials to provide rich resources for more comprehensive, multi-layered approaches to the relationship between Buddhism and violence. The content of this volume reflects only indirectly the panel from which it grew. Not all of the panelists present in Bangkok were in a position to submit their paper. Some of the articles retain traces of their oral presentation; others have been completely rewritten. Carmen Meinert and Martin Delhey, though originally part of the panel, were unable to attend and submitted their work at a later date. Brian Victoria, who in Bangkok read a paper on “Zen As a Religion of Death in Japanese Militarism,” shifted the focus of his article here to D. T. Suzuki. The piece by Jens Schlieter, not originally a panelist in 1 A pioneering piece on Buddhism and violence is Paul Demiéville’s “Le bouddhisme et la guerre: post-scriptum à l'Histoire des moines-guerriers du Japon de G. Renondeau,” Mélanges publiés par l’Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises 1 (1957): 347–85. Lambert Schmithausen elaborated on Demiéville’s excellent work and suggested four main categories into which legitimized Buddhist warfare would fit; see his “Buddhismus und Glaubenskriege,” in Glaubenskriege in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart: Referate, gehalten auf dem Symposium der Joachim-Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Hamburg, am 28. und 29. Oktober 1994, ed. Peter Herrmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 63–92. 2 For a recently published volume with a variety of papers dealing exclusively with the topic of Buddhism and violence see Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Inken Prohl, eds., Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft (Buddhismus und Gewalt) 11-2 (2003). Michael Zimmermann Bangkok, was included because of its excellent fit with the other case studies presented here and, in particular, the further light it sheds on the murder of the Tibetan king Langdarma dealt with by Carmen Meinert. One of the aims of this volume is to provide material, based on critical, unbiased research, illustrating the fact that, at particular moments in their history and in certain aspects of their doctrines, the traditions of Buddhism, like other religious traditions, have actively or passively promoted—and may continue to promote—violent modes of behavior or structural violence. The more comprehensive and systematic inquiry hoped for above can only proceed once this fact is fully acknowledged and has challenged the dominant and obstinate perception of Buddhism as a religion that in its conception and history is categorically divorced from violence. Only then will we begin to see the specific character of the relation of the Buddhist traditions to forms of violence, and only then will we be in a position to draw more general conclusions on the shape this relation took over the centuries. This will be a task for the future. The articles in this volume cover an extremely broad spectrum of the Buddhist world in terms of regions and periods. They deal with aspects of violence starting in India before the Common Era and ranging to the support of Japanese militarism by Buddhist leaders and scholars far into the twentieth century. Three contributions focus primarily on India. Francis Brassard writes about the complex relations of ideas originating in the spiritual and religious realm of Buddhism to ideas found in popular lay culture. He differentiates four categories of ideas, based on their transferability between the religious and lay spheres. His main thesis is that “good” religious ideas will not easily translate into lay culture as long as there exist no dominant cultural models of behavior with which these ideas could accord. Without such models, Brassard argues, any well-intended idea can simply be instrumentalized as part of a socially oppressive system of rules. As the title of his paper suggests, he associates certain elements exposed in Mahāyāna writings on the path of the bodhisattva with the danger of leading in this unintended direction. In his article on suicide, Martin Delhey provides an in-depth analysis 6 Introduction of relevant textual sources in the Buddhist traditions. Starting from ancient India with focus on the literature of the canons of the schools of the Śrāvakayāna, post-canonical developments, narratives, and Mahāyāna Buddhism, his research leads him to medieval China and to the self- immolations by fire in Vietnam in the 1960s. Displaying a subtle approach aware of the complexities of his material, he offers a profoundly new evaluation of the treatment of suicide in Buddhist literature. Against what seems to be the common scholarly view, Delhey argues that Buddhist thinkers treated suicide as something distinctly different from killing other sentient beings and that, in contrast to Western notions of human life as sacred, life does not have such a basic value in Buddhism. His comprehensive bibliography mentions the most relevant publications on this topic. The last paper dealing with Buddhism in India is my own. Based on sources from the Pāli tradition, narrative literature and the Mahāyāna, I try to throw light on the different ways Buddhist thinkers have dealt with the tension personified in the punishing Buddhist king: on the one hand it is his primary obligation to chastise evildoers, on the other the precept of non-violence applies also to him. Whereas the early Buddhist ideal of the wheel-turning monarch, thanks to the high standards of morality in the emperor’s realm, is not challenged by the need to punish violently, one strand of Mahāyāna sources argues that a compassionate attitude while punishing exempts the king from any negative karmic after-effects. Compassion, as the key element of the Mahāyāna ethical code, assumes a role serving the legitimization of violence. At the same time these texts propose a penal system which values the idea of rehabilitation. Two articles centering on the murder of King Langdarma (gLang Dar ma), the last emperor of the early Tibetan dynasty, lead the reader from India to Tibet. The notorious scarcity of reliable information on personalities and events in ancient India is here counterbalanced by the works of some Tibetan historiographers, which allow us to deal with the murder of Langdarma as a meaningful event in the history of Tibet. Carmen Meinert discusses the historiographic descriptions of the killing of this ninth-century king in the light of the Tantric rite of “liberation through killing.” Her main focus is the question of how a profane act of 7 Michael Zimmermann killing can, by means of a religious framing, be understood as a sacred act. The act has to transcend the profane setting and, as a transformatory ritual, restructure the world according to Tantric principles. In the second part of her work she analyzes an important Tibetan manuscript from Dunhuang, which deals with the rite of liberation, an integral part of Tantric practice at that time. In her translation of the middle part of the ritual described in the manuscript, she finds evidence that it is indeed the experience of transformation from a profane to a sacred reality that is procured there. Jens Schlieter approaches the same event from a different perspective and inquires about the function it assumed in the historiographic literature of Tibet. With very few indications that the killing was understood as a rite of liberation in the earliest available sources, Schlieter argues that the event attained a mythical dimension only later and served as a justification for tyrannicide under very particular circumstances—in other words, that it became a model for political conflict resolution with a wholesome spiritual outcome on both sides. He is careful to point out that the Indo-Tibetan traditions of Buddhism know several threads of “liberation killing” and analyzes how these different threads are woven into the later descriptions of the event. The last three contributions deal with Japan.