Abstract
Buddhism is widely seen as a peaceful faith. And yet, from Sri Lanka to Burma, religious and nationalist extremists use violence for political gain. It’s a familiar story with a long history, says
Buddhism’s contemporary reputation for non-violence rests on its enormous capacity to bring both spiritual and physical peace to the individual. But as an organised religion, it can be as prone to violent expression as any other faith. From the 5th-century warriors of the Shaolin temple to the modern-day arming of Thai monks as undercover counter-insurgents, Buddhists’ use of violence for political ends over the last 100 years alone – in China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Tibet and Vietnam – is simply under-reported.
Fundamentalists have manipulated tenets of moderation and non-violence into a contradictory and dogmatic religious identity
Buddhist anti-Muslim hostility in Burma’s Rakhine state and attacks on the Muslim Rohingya community are not new, just more evident, as long-closed regions open up to observers and satellites track the destruction of homes and houseboats. Social media shared by mainstream news does the rest. In March 2013, a ‘police video’ showed Buddhists attacking Muslims and looting their homes in Meikhtila, central Burma. More than 40 were reported killed.
The country has become a tinderbox, where the slightest of perceived offences can trigger violence. One died and nine were injured when Buddhist mobs attacked mosques and destroyed more than 70 homes in Oakkan, north of Rangoon, in late April, after a Muslim female cyclist collided with a monk.
Some anti-Muslim mobs are inspired by Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, where Therevada Buddhists are in the overwhelming majority, as they are in Burma. Halal butchers are the flashpoint, exacerbated by extremist monks, members of the Bodu Bala Sena (the Buddhist Brigade), who stage provocative rallies, call for aggressive direct action and organise boycotts of Muslim businesses.
The numbers game
These tactics are echoed in Burma’s conflict and ensuing politics, through the 969 group and its leader, the monk Ashin Wirathu, jailed in 2003 for inciting religious hatred. He was freed in 2012. The 969 group assert that the number 786 has religious significance for Asian Muslims: when added together, the numbers equal 21, which they claim signifies a Muslim plan to conquer Burma in the 21st century. The significance of the group’s name, 969, is a combination of the Buddha (represented by 9), his teachings (6) and the Sangha, or priesthood (9).
‘In both nations Theravada Buddhism is a vital political idea that has cemented the legitimacy of monarchs,’ says Sri Lankan commentator Meghal Perera. ‘Both saw a Buddhist revival as a response to colonial occupation, a revival which has allowed Buddhism to fuse with nationalism as both countries achieved their independence.’ But it didn’t end there.
Fundamentalists in Burma and Sri Lanka have manipulated tenets of moderation and non-violence into a contradictory and dogmatic religious identity and equated it with national identity, she argues. ‘A violent fanatical Buddhist organisation should be a contradiction in terms. The terrifying truth is that these groups are impervious to this irony.’
Mythologies and ethnic identity
Religious fundamentalism is said to have four qualities: a reliance on faith as a source of identity; boundaries that separate the chosen from the other; mythologised enemies; dramatic ‘escatologies’ – stories that give meaning or drive political narratives.
Sri Lanka’s political Buddhist elites rely on the mytho-history of The Mahavamsa (Great Chronicle) for their escatology. An anthology of poetry in the Buddhist canonical language of Pali, first compiled in the 5th century and updated up until the 19th, The Mahavamsa traces the history of the Buddhist kings of Sri Lanka from the coming of King Vijaya of Bengal in 543 BC to the British takeover in 1815.
This narrative has become an argument for ethno-religious supremacy, used by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority to justify their claim that Sri Lanka has been a Buddhist nation for over two millennia. But the real mythology, writes the Sri Lankan scholar KM de Silva, is rooted in the Sinhalese sense of ethnic distinctiveness, identified through religion – Theravada Buddhism – and language – Sinhala.
As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere. As has been said, rather like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and the Jews in Israel, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority in their own country, burdened with a minority’s sense of persecution.
Some of this lonely fear is shared with the Burmese Theravada Buddhist ‘story’, which better defines religion and state as distinct features of its own society. Forged during the 18th–19th century Konbaung Dynasty, this relationship allowed the monarchy to limit dissidence and disabuse the Sangha from exercising their political power. The pongyis, the monks mediating between the people and the ‘fair kings’ or Chakravartin, took responsibility for the collective good and, in return for granting legitimacy to the royal court, won the people some protection from its tyranny.
The British, the post-independence socialist government and the military junta that overthrew it paid scant respect to this religious détente. Yet the dynamic remained in place. Monks continued to play a critical role in protesting social injustice and in recent years the refusal to perform rites for military officers still stood as a potent cultural and historic challenge to the junta’s legitimacy.
In more than one standoff, the junta leadership has had to publicly beg forgiveness from the monks. ‘The ability of the monastic order to use soft diplomacy through protests, criticism and demands for apology illustrate the entrenched position of the monks in the socio-political landscape of Burmese society,’ writes Syed Mohammed Ad’ha Aljunied of Singapore’s Nanyang University.
So is the answer to the problem within the faith itself? As anti-Muslim violence spread, foreign Buddhist scholars wrote an open letter to Burma, pleading for mutual respect, harmony and tolerance. ‘Whether you are a Sayadaw [senior monk] or young monk or nun, or whether you are a lay Buddhist, please, speak out, stand up, reaffirm these Buddhist truths, and support all in Myanmar [Burma] with the compassion, dignity and respect offered by the Buddha,’ the World Buddhist Leaders wrote in late 2012.
ABOVE: Sri Lankan Muslim shopkeeper, Colombo, April 2013. In recent months, there has been an escalation in violence against Muslims in the country, with business owners coming under attack
Credit: Eranga Jayawardena/AP/PA
In Sri Lanka, appeals to these kinds of traditional values can fall on deaf ears. Sinhalase nationalist Buddhists argue ‘Sinhala-Buddhism’ is just one of many kinds of faith. To argue that Buddhist nationalists are failing ‘true’ Buddhism takes you nowhere, warns academic Kalana Senaratne. ‘While reverting to the teachings of the Buddha, it is necessary not to delude oneself into imagining that there is an absolute and pure form of Buddhism – and that once this “pure” or “correct” form of Buddhism is pointed out, everything will fall into place.’
Old rhetoric, new mediums
The monks’ inflammatory rhetoric leaves some local free expression rights defenders wondering if Burma is ‘ready’ for free speech. But technology is already circumventing the proponents of ‘responsible media’, qualified controls on the press and strict laws against ‘hate speech’. Arab and Asian Muslim social media is already awash with images, doctored or otherwise, ‘exposing’ Buddhist atrocities against Burma’s Muslims. Attacks allegedly led by Buddhist monks on the Muslim-owned Fashion Bug store chain in Sri Lanka were driven not by bloggers or mainstream media but by phone texts sent out by the Bodu Bala Sena.
The Bodu Bala Sena keeps a well-tended website and Facebook page, but Burma’s low internet penetration forces activists to find other routes. A massive effort to grow its mobile phone penetration rate from 6 to 80 per cent by 2016 is being driven by Peter Chou, the Burma-born CEO of the Indonesian smartphone giant HTC, and corporates from as far apart as Ireland and China.
Mobile internet and SMS messaging, as the Bodu Bala Sena has found, offers a faster and more censorship-resistant means of distributing hate than web cafes could ever provide. In the meantime, the 969’s ideology is shared through sermons on DVDs, anti-Muslim leaflets and the monastic schools relied on by poorer Burmese without access to state schools – a combination of content and audience targeting easily made receptive to new phone users.
If there is a short-term answer for Burma it is in the immediate repudiation of anti-Muslim violence and the pseudo-religious rhetoric that accompanies it. The apparent reluctance of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, an ethnic Burman and a Buddhist, and her interlocutor with the military junta, President Thein Sein, to categorically condemn extremists has been noted.
In Sri Lanka the argument is already lost. Its alleged war criminal double act, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his defence minister brother Gotabaya embrace the extremists. Opening the Bodhu Bala Sena’s new Leadership Academy in Galle in March, Gotabaya told the media that the clergy were engaged in a ‘nationally important task’ and should not be ‘feared or doubted by anyone’.
Those seen to be protecting groups arousing ethnic and religious hatred, politicians and public officials included, need to be held accountable and responsible for the violence that results. These are fundamental human rights, not just Buddhist values at risk. Buddhist moral relativism needs challenging in Burma if it is not to become as devalued as Sri Lankan Buddhism, mocked for allowing believers an eternity of birth and rebirth and then failing to find the will to live decently by its tenets.