Some Buddhists complicit in genocide?

Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show, jimmydore.com) with Max Blumenthal (thegrayzone.com)

US propaganda supports war, weapons, killing? The Left has lost its sense to CIA psy-ops on Ukraine

Immediate ceasefire? - Eventual, when they die.

There are various ways to kill. The obvious one. You know, kill. And other not so obvious ones -- attitudes, approving words, supportive actions that encourage, applaud, aid, and abet the karmic crime.

What is our individual intention when we say we "support Israel" or that our government "better support Israel"? Do many mean "support expelling and/or exterminating Palestinians"? That's what's happening. Is that what we support?

The Buddha, who so often talked about karma that they called him a Karmavadin or "Teacher of the Efficacy of Deeds," which was not well understood and not very much talked about in his day, made very clear that killing or causing to kill was one of the very worst things one could do. (Most people seem to think elite Brahmin temple-priests were going around revealing Vedic secrets, like an understanding of karma, to anyone who would listen. In fact, they thought their Sanskrit texts were handed down from the heavens and from Brahma, or "El Supremo," mainly to benefit them, not the contemptible lower castes).

The Buddha gave and explained the five factors (see below) that constitute "killing." If we do, indeed, all know what "killing" is, wouldn't we already know what those elements are? He would just be preaching to the choir. "Yeah, yeah, we get it, killing bad. Caveman God say so, too." When we cheer on killing, support it, applaud, approve, cry out "sadhu, sadhu, sadhu," or "Hooray for our side; death to the other side," we are partaking in that unskillful and heavy karma of killing.

Intentional deeds (karmas) in fact are so sensitive that a Buddhist monastic vows never to break four rules aiming to prevent four particularly heavy deeds: killing, stealing, engaging in sex, and lying about spiritual attainments. To break any of these even once is called a "defeat offense" (parajika), immediately and irrevocably casting oneself out of the Monastic Community (the Sangha of monks and nuns).

We mention this monastic fact because what we do not know can still very much hurt us. One way a Buddhist monastic might "kill" is that if one were to recommend someone get an abortion (or commit suicide or kill someone else), and that person subsequently were to do it, the defeat offense has been accomplished. All the factors are there even though they may not seem to be. Wow. Let's think about it.

We as Americans (many females, many liberals, many radical feminists, many secularists) don't really consider abortion "killing," so we rationalize doing it ourselves or put others at ease by redefining a fetus as a "clump of cells," not a "living being," just so much detritus to expel from MY womb. "My body, my rules!" Would that all were as we wish it to be. Would that only what we believed counted. There's objective reality, too.

• You know how when you run someone over, that isn't killing unless you see them? Otherwise, they're just fine. They walk away, right? Only "intentional" killing leads to killing, right? Wrong, of course. Unintentional killing leads to death, too. We have to be careful, watchful, mindful of the road, alert, and vigilant while driving. It's an inherently dangerous act. Seeing them and killing them is called murder in the eyes of the law. A court, a judge, a jury might let one off the hook for simply killing, which is much less likely to happen when murdering. The law has many gradients, and karma has more. We are not concerned here with what the world will think or with what a judge, a court of public opinion, a prosecutor, or a jury will decide. That's trivial by comparison. We're concerned with objective reality, which exists even though it does seem to be interdependent on unobjective things like perception, thoughts, and so on. The example that might establish this is, Would it be unskillful karma for a driver to run people over without the intention of killing them? Yes, of course. If a man didn't put on his glasses and drove into a bunch of people who died as a result, but he did it because he didn't see the people in front of him, on account of not having his glasses on, is that killing? It may not be murder, but it sure is killing. The law might say "negligent homicide," "gross vehicular manslaughter" based on reckless behavior with a big punishment. But what's the karma? That's tougher for us to say. It is not at all tougher for karma to know, as if the Playing Out of Karma (the Results of Our Deeds) were the Jewish-Christian concept of God, who "works in mysterious ways." Karma is not a mystery to karma, which doesn't count because karma is not a being or a counsel of being. Sorry, Dave, no Karma Police, which is nevertheless a useful animistic way of envisioning it sometimes, so long as we do not confuse useful heuristic device for actual reality. 

All that may be as it is, but if the Buddha were correct, it would be killing, and it would suggest that life begins at conception, with the magical union of the female's contribution, the male's contribution, and the presence of the gandhabba or "being to be born."

If a "bad" man is given the death penalty and we push for it, applaud it, approve of it (even silently), celebrate it, encourage it, or extol it, we become complicit in that killing. (The good news is that approving and extolling skillful deeds is wholesome karma even though we are not ourselves doing the act we are applauding and approving of (even silently). Karma is strange to us and always paying attention.

The Buddha could see karma and the playing out of karmic results better than anyone; yet, he recognized that even he could not say with certainty how the result would exactly go. How it would generally go, he could do very well. How it was likely to go, he could do very well. How it was sure to go, sometimes he could see so long as nothing unexpected and unlikely got in the way. He could not reduce to probability to a certainty because so much of karma is based on freewill and the interaction of actions, with the results of past actions popping up at unlikely times sometimes.

For example, say you're a parent and you see a kid eating bugs picked from the yard. You run over and nearly choke it out of her throat in a loving, motherly way. Do you "know" if that bug was going to sicken or kill her? No, you don't know that, but what you do know is that if she falls into the habit, eventually, sooner than later, it's going to hurt her, maybe even kill her. Who knows what bugs can get into a yard? The Buddha knew like that.

Different beings doing the same thing will meet the results of that same deed, that same intentional action, differently. He made known what generally happens, what could happen, and what has happened to others who did that act. But the variability of beings leads to the variability of results. Not everyone who lives by the sword will die by the sword, but eventually. We can no longer understand this in Christianity because the patriarchs of the church (corporate body officers) have changed, amended, retranslated, altered, forged, "fixed," ignored scholarship, picked and chose, and so on. When there were countless rebirths rather than one life and one death and one eternal result, things were much closer to reality than the current version of Christianity. (See the records of devout Christian and New Age mystic Edgar Cayce).

How much the worse when many people, many innocents -- even many "guilties" -- are the victims of a state sponsored, state executed death? Karma is a very strange thing. It seems to know all and see all because it is looking from our point of view, what we call ourselves, and also the other person's or persons' point of view, and what might even be called a bigger "objective" point of view.

Nothing is done that karma does not know it. This isn't mysterious because what is laying down the karma (cetana) and reading it later to produce the resultants (vipaka) and fruits (phala) are right in the same place: the mind/heart (countless cittas and javanas, explained in extraordinary detail in the Abhidhamma). Support humans (Jews, Vietnamese, Palestinians, Arabs); oppose militarism.

We cannot think of a single instance where killing (as technically defined) is positive or acceptable. It may seem acceptable to us, okay with us, as we perform all sorts of philosophical sophistry, worm wriggling (or much more often have it performed for us by skilled military propagandists and college grads trained by the Pentagon, Shin Bet, Mossad, CIA, NSA, NSC, and PR firms), but what we mean is that the result, the fruit (phala), of that deed will be unwelcome, unwanted, and unpleasant. So someone can rightly say, "That person's gone, and that's good," meaning we like it. But, strangely, that person being gone is not due to the karmic-results (vipaka and phala)

The karmic-results have not yet appeared, but when they do, one will see how bad they were. (It is very likely one will not understand why the thing is happening to us; we often have no idea, which can make the Universe seem awful unfair. We were told in a previous life, and in a subsequent life we forgot and did it, and in a future life the results came to fruition -- what sounds fair about that?

The results of a deed may not even arrive in this or the next lifetime; they may appear almost immediately, or they may appear many lives later. The shocking thing is they are likely to appear many times.

• That's why wise sages say that giving is the way to riches. If I give, I'm going to immediately have less when I want more. But at any time in the future when I want, what will be the reason for me to get it? The Buddha oftentimes spoke of the causes and conditions of fruition being giving, having given in the past. It is good to give the good, skillful to give the skillful, wholesome to give the wholesome. Islam is beautiful in the way it encourages its adherents to be beneficent to strangers, and Christianity and Judaism are no slackers in such advice either. The Buddha, when revealing the Five Precepts to live by (not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to bear false witness or engage in verbal misconduct, which is fourfold and extends beyond lying, and not to consume intoxicants that occasion heedlessness) was not saying anything new. He said that from time immemorial we all agreed on these things. All religions seem to teach them, almost as if it's a racket or as if all religious roads really lead to the same place. That would be nice, but they do not, and sometimes religion is a racket, oftentimes nowadays. We inherited much from the Buddha without knowing it or yet recognizing him as the source of it, but he was constantly giving and bringing understanding. He went so far as to say, "If you knew what I knew about (the karma of) giving, you would not eat a single meal without first sharing it if there were someone to share it with." What did he know? He knew how fruitful giving the good is.
  

Sadly, because our culture throws around the term "karma" like it has any real idea of how complex and subtle it is, many, many people believe, for example, that if one steals money, getting money is the "result." That may be true logically, observably, or grammatically, but it is not at all true karmically. Karmically, the kamma is one thing, the vipaka and phala quite another. They should never be confused, as we doo all the time, because doing so will lead to wrong views, errors, greater delusion, and a lot of trouble in the future.

No world religion (of which there are three, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, which as universalist creeds flowed into and were adopted all over the world) wants people to do bad. It's just that what they teach is "bad" differs. Even though universally agreed upon that killing is bad, people immediately start making all kinds of excuses to rename, redeem, or restore killing to okay status. It is not. And it will come up on the doers, promoters, and supporters in time, usually when it is too late. We are reminded of the best definition of wisdom by Steven Wright talking about experience:

Wisdom is what you get just after you need it. He actually said." Plautus had the right idea: One is happy in one's wisdom who has learned at another’s expense. So don't kill. Don't cause others to kill. Don't say killing is okay in some situations like self-defense or wars of aggression. Why? You may kill and no one gives a cr*p. Society is fine with it, even calls you manly. You're a policeman, he was Black? Eh. But that is not the definition of "okay." The definition we're talking about is karmic, and the real question is, What will be the result of this?

You join the CIA, get trained, work at a cubicle from 9 to 5 most weekdays, go home to your happy family, are considered a fine and upstanding member of society, and what you're doing at work is plotting the destruction of others -- socially, financially, criminally, or literally -- all for your country and its glorious stated ideals, all because you were "just following orders," a Little Eichman, What did you really think was going to come of it karmically?

Oh, didn't believe in karma or a "just God" or angels or a conscious Universe or any mystical mumbo-jumbo? Schadenfreude, pray or chant for the death of other, because you were assured that they are "bad" whereas you are "good," and it will all come to suffering, again and again, with exponential results of even one act of killing or recommending or praising killing. The Buddha couldn't convince the world to knock it off. How could we. Meditate. Question. Investigate. The Buddha taught a path to enlightenment, and freedom from all suffering, attainable in this very life. - Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

On the prospect of Buddhist complicity in genocide

Brian Daizen Victoria, BuddhistDoor.net, Dec. 30, 2024; edited with commentary by Wisdom Quarterly

"All tremble at punishment; all fear death. Likening oneself to others, neither slay nor cause others to slay."

(Dhammapada 129)

Hi, I'm Banias. I'm being exterminated in Gaza

To suggest that Buddhism, or some Buddhists, are complicit in Israel's genocide would seem preposterous and would call into question the sanity of the person making such a claim.

Yet, while I leave the question of my sanity for readers to decide, I assert that there are those who identify as Buddhists and who are now complicit in genocide. How could this be?

Let me begin by putting this assertion into context. The context I refer to is the emergence of Buddhist chaplains in the U.S. military. Although there were attempts to create a Buddhist chaplaincy in the U.S. Army as early as World War II, these attempts failed, inasmuch as they were made by Japanese American Buddhists whose Japanese ethnicity made them and their brand of religion suspect.

US War Machine sides with its proxy Israel

According to Prof. of History Greg Robinson at the University of Quebec in Montreal, then Assistant Secretary of Defense John J. McCloy feared that negative American perceptions of Buddhists would compromise the reputation of the all-Japanese American Army units formed to fight in the European theater.

So it was not until 1990 that the American military resolved to include Buddhist chaplains in its ranks. In August of that year, the Institute of Heraldry produced a rank insignia, taking the Dharma Wheel or Dharmachakra as its emblem.

The Buddhist Churches of America, affiliated with the Nishi Honganji branch of the Jodo Shin (True Pure Land) school in Japan, would be recognized as the sole organization allowed to nominate Buddhist chaplains. Lieutenant Junior Grade Jeanette Gracie Shin, an ordained priest in that school, became the first formally recognized U.S. Buddhist chaplain in 2004, serving as a U.S. Navy Chaplain stationed at Marine Base Camp Pendleton in California.

In working with service members, Shin stated that she helped them relax, meditate, and learn about the history of Buddhism.

Lt. Shin recognized there might be Buddhists who would criticize her role in the military in light of the requirements associated with Noble Eightfold Path factor "right livelihood" and keeping the first precept which is to refrain from taking life.

For this reason, in a January 2008 Dharma talk titled “Shakyamuni: The First Warrior,” Lt. Shin noted: “Siddhartha Gautama (his birth name) was born into the kshatriya varna or caste of ancient [proto-] India/Nepal. This was the caste of the warriors, the rulers and aristocrats of ancient India.... The Buddha’s enlightenment was described [metaphorically] as a ‘battle’ between himself and Mara, the embodiment of death and evil.... The ancient texts emphasize the need for determination, sacrifice, and courage for Buddhists to follow the path of Buddha-dharma, to bear up under hardships in order to achieve the highest goal a human being can attain: to conquer death, fear, ignorance, evil, and thereby attain liberation. The qualities of a good warrior are exactly the qualities needed for a serious Buddhist practitioner.” (Emphasis added).

Capt. Somya Malasri, a former Thai Theravada Buddhist monk, is a Buddhist chaplain in the U.S. Army. Like Lt. Shin, Capt. Malasri was also anxious to justify the Buddhist rationale for warfare. He wrote:

“A lot of people ask if a Buddhist can be a soldier because the first precept is no killing. The answer is yes. You can protect yourself or sacrifice yourself to do the righteous thing [and then magically it won't be killing because we give it a different name?]. You can sacrifice yourself to protect your country because if there’s no country, there’s no freedom, and you cannot practice your religion. In Buddhism, if you go to war and kill others, it’s your duty, not your intention to kill other people.

I can kill, my religious leaders to me so.

• [NOTE: It is sickening to see a Theravada Buddhist rationalize in such a manner. It is not my "intention" (cetana) to kill those other soldiers I am shooting at and bombing? It's my "duty"? Ask the military and they would say your duty as a soldier is to form the intention to kill and then kill. It would not be "killing" if there were no intention. What is the intention that results in "killing"? Five factors must be present: 1. There is a living being. 2. One perceives it is living. 2. One resolves to make that being unalive. 4. One takes action to bring this about. 4. And the being as a result is dead. Everything the soldier does in war is "wrong" and immoral, even if we tell ourselves otherwise. Let's hear it in the Buddha's own words when he was asked (SN 42.3).
• Yodhajiva the headman went to the Buddha, bowed, sat respectfully to one side, and said: "Venerable sir, I have heard that it has been passed down by the ancient teaching lineage of warriors that 'When a warrior strives and exerts himself in battle, if others strike him down and slay him while he is striving and exerting himself in battle, then with the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the company of devas slain in battle.' What does the Blessed One say about that?" "Headman, enough, set that question aside and do not ask it." But for a second and third time he asked it. "Headman, apparently I am unable to get by even when saying, 'Headman, enough, set that question aside and do not ask it.' So to answer directly, when a warrior strives and exerts himself in battle, his mind is already seized, debased, and misdirected by the thought, 'May these beings be struck down or slaughtered or destroyed or annihilated. May they cease to exist.' If others then strike him down and slay him while he is striving and exerting himself in battle, then with the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the hell called the Realm of Those Slain in Battle. But if he holds such a view as, 'When a warrior strives and exerts himself in battle, if others then strike him down and slay him while he is striving and exerting himself in battle, then with the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the company of devas slain in battle,' that is wrong view. There are two destinations for a person with wrong view, I say, either hell or rebirth as an animal." When this was said, Yodhajiva the headman sobbed then burst into tears. [The Buddha said to him:] "That is what I could not get by you when saying, 'Headman, enough, set that question aside and do not ask it.'" "Venerable sir, I am not crying because of what the Blessed One said to me, but simply because I have been deceived, cheated, and fooled for a long time by that ancient teaching lineage of warriors who say that.'

“If a person dies of your intention, and you have anger, that is wrong in Buddhism.

• [But if your intention is rooted in fear, greed, or delusion, then it's perfectly fine? Wrong action, unskillful karma, has one or more of these four roots: greed, hatred/fear (aversion), or delusion. It may have no trace of anger and still be catastrophically bad and unskillful karma.]

“When soldiers go to war, they don’t have any intention to kill [no, of course not, that just happens by luck, you know, you shoot in that direction and magically the other guys lie down and never get up again, not by any intention of yours just by the physics of bullets, right?] others and they don’t have hatred in their minds” (Emphasis added).

• [Because, as was already stated, only anger makes it killing, only anger makes it bad? The fact is most murders on the battlefield are caused by fear (a type of aversion or dosa) resulting from greed for more territory, possessions, booty, slaves, resources, and are always rooted in ignorance/wrong view that it is okay and not harmful or immoral, that one is just doing one's job, and all the propaganda we were fed to justify killing those sub-humans because, well, they not even really human and, of course, killing nonhumans isn't killing but just surviving or existing, another hideous wrong view that underlies meat eating.]

It's okay to kill, my religious leaders told me so.

While there are still only a few Buddhist chaplains in the U.S. Air Force, October 2007 saw the dedication of the Vast Refuge Dharma Hall Chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. This chapel came about as a result of a request made in 2004 by a graduate of the Academy’s first class, the Class of 1959, named Wiley Burch.

Burch, now a Buddhist priest affiliated with the Hollow Bones Rinzai Zen school, requested that a multipurpose room in the lower level of the Cadet Chapel be transformed into a Buddhist chapel.

At the Chapel’s dedication, Burch said: “I understood there was a possibility or a place for Buddhism in the military. I understand the culture very well, and I understand the diversity of it. From that place, rather than being hard and coming in against, I came in willing to accept all. That’s a Buddhist teaching, not to set yourself up against things so much as to just be, we say, like clouds and like water, just flow.... Without compassion, war is nothing but criminal activity. It is necessary sometimes to take life, but we never take it for granted.”

The Academy’s Buddhist program leader, Sarah Bender Sensei of the Springs Mountain Sangha, added: “People in the military come up — for real — against questions that most of us just consider abstractly. The questions of Buddhism are the questions of life and death. So where else would you want Buddhism than right there where those questions are most vivid?”

One American Buddhist chaplain for whom the questions of life and death were far from abstract was Lt. (now Captain) Thomas Dyer, the first Zen Buddhist chaplain in the U.S. Army. While serving with the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Lt. Dyer provided meditation instruction to soldiers stationed at Camp Taji in Iraq, a base that came under frequent attack by Iraqi opposition forces. (A video of a workshop conducted by Lt. Dyer at Camp Taji is posted on YouTube). Lt. Dyer subsequently explained the relationship of Zen to Buddhism as follows:

"Primarily Buddhism is a methodology of transforming the mind. The mind has flux in it or movement, past and future fantasy, which causes us not to interact deeply with life. So Buddhism has a methodology, a teaching and a practice of meditation to help one concentrate in the present moment to experience reality as it is.... Zen practice is to be awake in the present moment both in sitting and then walking throughout the day. So the idea is that enlightenment will come from just being purely aware of the present moment in the present moment" (YouTube).

In hindsight it can be said that Lt. Dyer’s meditation session on the battlefield marked the beginning of Buddhism’s complicity in genocide. Why? It is because, like many knowledgeable commentators, former Pentagon insider Dennis Frtiz made it clear in his recent book, Deadly Betrayal (2024), that the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq by the U.S. took place under totally false pretenses.

That is to say, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, nor did he have any connection to the terrorists who allegedly attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11 in New York City. In short, Iraq presented no threat whatsoever to the peace and security of the U.S.

Instead, Fritz revealed that the whole operation was the creation of so-called neoconservatives in Washington, DC, who responded to CIA-backed Jewish warlord and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to dispose of [murder] the leaders of Iran, Iraq, and Syria because of their opposition to the Zionist plan to rid Israel of its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants as well as enlarge the country.

So when Lt. Dyer taught soldiers prior to going into battle to be “purely aware of the present moment,” he was assisting the U.S. Army in creating a very desirable state of mind, namely, a state of mind in which soldiers were free of questions about individual moral choice or responsibility even as they unjustly killed those whom they had been scared [propagandized] into regarding as their enemy. Needless to say, Lt. Dyer said nothing about the most fundamental Buddhist precept, which is to abstain from killing.

Of course, the argument can be made that with some 5,287 Buddhists serving in the U.S. military as of June 2009, there is a clear need to address the spiritual needs of Buddhist soldiers. It can also be said that the emergence of Buddhist chaplains in an increasingly multiracial, multicultural US military was an entirely natural, even inevitable process.

Further, in light of institutional Buddhism’s millennia-long history of involvement in, if not support for, organized warfare in those Asian countries where it flourished, why should the U.S. military be any different? [The difference, of course, is that not a single person has been killed for Buddhism or to forcibly convert others to Buddhism, even if so-called Buddhists participate in war or if Japanese Shinto/Zen Buddhists are inducted and forced to participate in imperial adventures for Japan.]

Nevertheless, the question must be asked: What has been the spiritual cost to Buddhism, especially its ethical teachings, for its long and ongoing history of subservience to the state, most especially state-initiated warfare.

• [Is there any other kind? People do not organize themselves into armies then attack other countries. That is 100% the work of states and politicians, not the people. This is why it is sad to keep seeing young people fall for it and even sadder that old people tell them it's okay to do.]

What happens to the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha when the chaplains ministering to Buddhist soldiers are themselves in the military’s chain of command, wearing an officer’s uniform and receiving an officer’s salary? Are they not thereby prioritizing their nation and their national interests above the teachings of their religion?

In the case of the Buddhist military chaplaincy in the U.S., it can be argued that the price of Buddhism’s acceptance has been the same as for all other faith traditions. An August 29, 2004, Associated Press article described the role of military chaplains as follows:

“As American troops cope with life — and death — on a faraway battlefield, military chaplains cope with them, offering prayers, comfort, and spiritual advice to keep the American military machine running.... Chaplains help grease the wheels of any soldier’s troubled conscience by arguing that killing combatants is justified.” (Emphasis added).

In light of the above, it is clear that the problematic aspects of a Buddhist military chaplaincy extend far beyond the Buddhist chaplains introduced in this article. A good argument can be made that the core of the problem lies in the military chaplaincy system itself, for all military chaplains, regardless of religious tradition, are required to unconditionally support the mission of their respective country’s military: to kill, maim, or otherwise incapacitate all enemies, foreign and domestic [the domestic ones are those peaceniks and peaceful protesters a soldier gets to shoot for speaking up against the USA's wars, as happened at Kent State University in Ohio that time].

In the case of the U.S., one need only think of what would have happened to any Buddhist chaplain who dared in a Dharma talk to openly question, let alone criticize, the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Had a Buddhist chaplain questioned the grounds for the invasion, let alone its justness, how long would military authorities have allowed that chaplain to minister to the spiritual needs of soldiers before ousting her or him from military service? Needless to say, this question can, and should, be asked of military chaplains of all religions.

Further, there is no need to ask what American Buddhist chaplains could have done in the event they came to the conviction that the second U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on falsehoods (as it clearly was).

If morally challenged, they could have resigned their commissions, which is their right. However, to the best of my knowledge, none of them did. Rather, they appear to have accepted the old dictum of, “My country, right or wrong,” ignoring the commitment of their religion to truthfulness let alone non-killing and compassion.

Needless to say, the belief in “My country, right or wrong” is one expression of nationalism or, as some would say, the tribalism of the modern era.

When Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China in July 1937, Chinese Buddhists requested their Japanese counterparts to speak out against the invasion.

In response, on July 28, 1937, the pan-Buddhist Myowa-kai wrote:

“In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of ‘killing one in order that many may live,’” a reference to skillful means [a Mahayana concept that is used to rationalize nearly any wrong thing].

The Myowa-kai’s position contributed to the deaths of an estimated 20 million Chinese. On the one hand, it is true that in recent years we no longer see Buddhists in one country using their religion to support the invasion of another country. However, in predominantly Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka and Burma, we now find nationalistic Sangha leaders endorsing the use of violence in the suppression of non-Buddhist minorities in their countries.

Thus, by no means has the question of what may be termed “ethnic nationalism” disappeared as a matter of concern. This is despite the universally recognized teaching that the Buddha-dharma is concerned with relieving the suffering of all, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.

Furthermore, lurking in the background is the question many soldiers and non-soldiers alike have asked themselves in the face of war: What would the founder of my religion, Shakyamuni Buddha in this case, have done or expect me to do?

This is a particularly vexing question for Buddhists, since Shakyamuni Buddha is recorded as having personally gone to the battlefield to prevent wars on two different occasions.

In the first instance, he is said to have successfully reasoned with potential belligerents on both sides over the division of a river’s water in a time of drought, thereby preventing a war.

In the second instance, Shakyamuni Buddha repeatedly attempted to non-violently dissuade a neighboring kingdom from attacking his homeland. Ultimately, however, he realized there was nothing he could do or say to prevent the attack.

Although raised a warrior prince with numerous followers at his command, he ceased his efforts, and the result was the near total destruction of his homeland — the city-state of Kapilavastu [ancient Gandhara, modern Afghanistan, not Nepal as we are taught].

This latter episode suggests that for Shakyamuni Buddha the use of violence, even in a war to defend one’s own country, is unacceptable, which is a very high standard. More

• Brian Daizen Victoria, BuddhistDoor.net, Dec. 30, 2024; edited with commentary and explanation added Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Amber Larson, Pfc. Sandoval (eds.) Wisdom Quarterly