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| Sunday, 09 April 2006 |
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Point of view:
Hate speech kills by Forrest Church Venerable Ellawala Medhananda, a famous Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, doesn't mince words. Speaking to Reuters in February, he declared: "If Prabhakaran is dead, Sri Lanka is a better place. He is the stumbling block to the peace process. We should take his influence out of society." Medhananda, the leader of a nationalist Buddhist political party, was calling for the assassination of Velupillai Prabhakaran, a chief architect of the religious and ethnic conflict that has killed more than 60,000 people in Sri Lanka. Depending on one's views, Prabhakaran is either a Hindu terrorist who threatens Sri Lanka's democracy or a freedom fighter struggling to achieve justice for his oppressed Tamil minority. With Muslim killings over cartoons and Buddhist calls for the murder of opponents, this seems like an excellent time to reflect on the rhetoric swirling around violence and religion in the modern world. Buddhism, after all, is widely considered a "religion of peace" by people in the United States, and this perception is especially strong among religious liberals. In the 19th century, Unitarians were instrumental in bringing knowledge of Buddhism to the West, and much of their interest stemmed from perceptions that Buddhism offered a rational, peaceful, pragmatic approach to religion-in contrast, they thought, to much of Christianity. Even opponents of Buddhism expressed admiration for the character of the Buddha, whose commitment to moral principles and personal integrity impressed Unitarians, Protestants, and Roman Catholics alike. Later, attitudes such as these were important in bringing many Euro- and African Americans into the Buddhist fold during the tumultuous latter-part of the 20th century. And in part because it was people who sympathized with Buddhism's reputation for rationality and peacefulness who tended to become Buddhists, Buddhism in America often operates as a form of liberal religion. To offer an anecdotal example, Buddhism was given such favourable coverage during my years in the Sunday School at the Universalist Church of West Hartford, Connecticut, that I recall thinking as a young boy, "If I ever have to choose another religion when I grow up, it will be Buddhism." Being Unitarian Universalist, of course, I didn't end up having to choose: I've been a Buddhist for a decade now without abandoning my UU commitments, and they find a happy marriage in my editorship of the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Buddhist Fellowship. Although Buddhism's history is less checkered than that of Christianity or Islam, there are plenty of dirty little secrets that Westerners rarely learn about. Buddhist monks, for example, have marched with armies in nearly every Buddhist country. In some times and places, the monks were the armies: They clashed with rival sects, supported certain political figures, or enforced fealty on the part of serfs. Buddhism was used to justify Japan's imperialism before and during World War II, with Buddhist monks praying for the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. One legend claims that in a previous lifetime the Buddha preemptively killed a man to prevent him from murdering 500 others. The slippery slope that this logic sets up is one that more than a few Buddhists have slid down to achieve their own ends. So is Buddhism a "religion of nonviolence" or a "religion of war"? What about Islam: Is it, as President George W. Bush has asserted, a "religion of peace"? Or is it a "religion of violence," as televangelist Pat Robertson and many others declared in the wake of September 11? And what about Christianity, for that matter, which provides us with a Jesus who blesses the peacemakers and a Jesus who comes with a sword-both of whom have had their fair share of devotees? |
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