Fernando Kaskais posted: " During a clash between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities in Sittwe, Myanmar, 10 June 2012. Photo by Reuters staff The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists? Mar" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
Most Buddhists recognise that the injunction not to kill, the first of the religion's five precepts, is central to the ethos of the different Buddhist traditions. In the past decade, however, a surprising amount of popular and scholarly discussion on the subject of killing and Buddhism – from Slavoj Žižek's commentaries, to Michael Jerryson's essay 'Monks with Guns' in Aeon – has stressed how violent Buddhists themselves have historically proven to be.
Being what they are, some human beings will choose to kill, for better and for worse reasons. And many of them might happen to have been raised in one of the various Buddhist traditions, from South and Southeast Asia, to North, Central and East Asia, and, increasingly since the 1970s, in many Western countries as well. Unsurprisingly, then, there are numerous cases of cultural Buddhists killing for the usual reasons. Animals, especially in the high Tibetan plateau, as elsewhere, have been a staple source of sustenance. Sometimes, defensive wars have been engaged to save a city or state from foreign incursion. Buddhist women have chosen to abort unwanted foetuses. There is also textual record, stretching back to the early Buddhist period, of suicide being condoned in rare cases where its agent possesses remarkable properties of wisdom, is incurably ill, and is, in early Buddhist terms, an arhat (an 'awakened one'). These cases of suicide, but notably not others, were exonerated from moral blame by no less an authority than the Buddha himself.
However, in large part, killing is antithetical to the basic tenets of Buddhism. Along with exhortations to nonviolence and compassion, the early Buddhist monastic case law (vinaya) presents the most overt claims for the punishment of lethal acts, its severity seeming to indicate a scale of more or less bad acts, at least for monastic agents. But these do not explain their wrongness per se. There are other intriguing but disparate statements about killing through the first millennium of the written record, with subsequent comment deriving largely from this earlier textual stratum.
In the Indian Mahāyāna, and culminating in Tibetan and Chinese Mahāyāna traditions, the ethic of the bodhisattva – something like a saint or an aspiring one, with superlative properties of wisdom as well as compassion – even commends lethal acts when they are informed by these unusual capacities. These include compassionate or so-called 'auspicious' homicide, as well as religious and altruistic suicide, the latter particularly evident historically in Chinese Buddhism but also more recently in Vietnamese and Tibetan Buddhist cases too, in which lethal acts directed purely towards oneself are intended to inspire others, somewhat paradoxically, to a moral appreciation of the inherent value of altruistic self-sacrifice. Hence, we are increasingly familiar with examples of Buddhists in Tibet self-immolating for the cause, ultimately, of the amelioration and extirpation of all sentient suffering. I'm not sure what Žižek might say about that, but surprisingly he's not mentioned it yet.
The would-be Buddhist 'ethics of killing' thus developed in a piecemeal fashion, the various traditions emphasising different kinds of agents committing various kinds of acts, because these practices reflected the cultural norms specific to a range of Buddhist communities. The Buddha himself in his sermons (suttas) tended to comment only generally on lethal practices, and so questions around permissible killing in some cases may have been left largely to the cultural norms and mores of those Buddhist cultures that, over the centuries, engaged them.
In one sense, this is inevitable. But to suggest that these practices are endorsed by Buddhists, rather than sometimes tolerated by them, is misleading. The exceptions prove the rule, and many Buddhists don't think certain lethal practices and the assumptions behind them are compatible with Buddhism – just as many Theravāda practitioners reject the lethal bodhisattva ethics of the Mahāyāna (though this hasn't stopped at least one Theravāda monk, in Sri Lanka, from self-immolating for a cause). When in 2011 the 14th Dalai Lama appeared to exonerate the intentional killing of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US state agents, this added potent fuel to the discussion, culminating most provocatively with a Time magazine cover two years later devoted to the oxymoronic 'face of Buddhist terror'. The subject of what appeared to be an inherently Buddhist relation with lethal violence – of 'Buddhist terror' as opposed to violence espoused by some self-identifying Buddhists – had by this time really hit the world stage...
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