Foreign Policy In Focus

Cognitive dissonance aside, Buddhists -- including monks -- take up arms against Muslims in Burma while the government stands by. 

Global Post reports on another outbreak of sectarian violence in Burma this week that left "thousands homeless and more than 50 people confirmed dead. Video footage and photos taken at the scene by the local media and wire agencies showed that three days of rioting has transformed the town of Meiktila south of Mandalay in central Myanmar into a war zone scattered with burnt houses, mosques and unrecognizable human dead bodies."

What was the immediate catalyst for the violence? Radio Free Asia:

Some believe intense business rivalry between Muslims and Buddhists in the city had contributed to the violence.

More specifically…

…a quarrel between the Muslim owner of a goldsmith shop and a Buddhist villager and his wife who had gone there to sell a gold hair pin, a police source said.

An argument broke out when the item was purportedly damaged as it was being authenticated by the goldsmith.

Tension grew as the two sides began to haggle over the price to be offered for the item and people in the shop beat the customers, causing an uproar in the bazaar, the source said.

When the villager was wounded, his sympathizers burned the goldsmith shop and ignited a mass riot, according to the source.…

"This problem erupted because business issues were mixed with religion," said Pinnyasiha, a prominent Burmese Buddhist monk popularly known as Shwe Nya Wa Sayadaw. … Adding fuel to fire was a report that a Buddhist monk had been killed by Muslims.

The emotions of Muslims in Burma are still rubbed raw over "the plight of the Rohingya Muslims, who rights groups say bore the brunt of the Rakhine violence in June and October last year which had left at least 180 dead and tens of thousands homeless."

In the aftermath of this latest incident, the government called for a state of emergency. But security forces did little or nothing to stop the attacks. The Global Post again.

… some Buddhist monks publicly called for a boycott of Muslim businesses — against which [the call, that is -- RW] the authorities took no actions at all.

Worse…

Myint Than, an eyewitness who saw the charred human bodies in the town yesterday, said that police have merely stood by while the arson attacks and the killings occurred over the past few days.

“The police said they had no order to shoot.…,” he added.

Min Ko Naing, a leader of influential 88 Generation Students Group, who visited the conflict area on Thursday, also blamed the security forces’ idleness for the deadly violence. “It is totally unacceptable that the security forces did not take any actions just because they were not ordered to.” 

Furthermore…

Some observers suspect that the former generals ruling the government and the army which remains as powerful [even though Burma is no longer officially ruled by a junta -- RW] as ever are trying to divert the public attention with sectarian violence and hatred [from] the growing public protests stemming from old grievances against the abuses by the army such as land grabs. 

In fact

Myat Ko, an official from Yangon School of Political Science, accused the high-ranking military generals of having a hand in the latest clashes. 

“We don’t have the evidence to prove it. But this is happening in our country,” he said. According to Dr.Maung Zarni, a visiting fellow at London School of Economics, the army is creating chaos which will continue to strengthen its centrality in politics.

Finally, this is fairly damning.

Writing on his Facebook page today, Zarni said, “There is a consistent and recognizable pattern of violence: the plan is hatched elsewhere. Out-of-town armed mobs are bused in to a targeted locality. All hell broke loose. The police and military stand by until the job is done. Local authorities would say they are waiting for orders from above, which never come.”

Burma -- from its president to its Nobel laureate -- has failed to address Buddhist violence in its Rakhine state against Muslim Rohingyas.

Does any religion in the world have a cleaner rep than Buddhism? With much of its efforts devoted to helping one realizing the divinity within him or her, it's disinclined to repressive morality or proselytizing. More to the point, much less violence is committed in its name than that of the other great religions. The operative word is "less."

For instance, Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka committed violence against Christians and Tamils. Even worse, during World War II, the Buddhist establishment -- even Zen -- cooperated, for the most part, with the militaristic Japanese regime. For more, read Buddhist Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2010) by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer.

Recently Burmese Buddhists -- incited by monks, no less -- have been conducting violent attacks against the Muslim Rohingyas with whom they share the Rakhine district, which borders Sri Lanka, from where the latter emigrate. Robert Fuller reports for the New York Times.

The Buddhist monastery on the edge of this seaside town is a picture of tranquillity, with novice monks in saffron robes finding shade under a towering tree and their teacher, U Nyarna, greeting a visitor in a sunlit prayer room.

But in these placid surroundings Mr. Nyarna’s message is discordant, and a far cry from the Buddhist precept of avoiding harm to living creatures. Unprompted, Mr. Nyarna launches into a rant against Muslims, calling them invaders, unwanted guests and "vipers in our laps."

"According to Buddhist teachings we should not kill," Mr. Nyarna said. "But when we feel threatened we cannot be saints."

As if, Mr. Nyarna, there isn't a world of difference between simply not being a saint and advocating ethnic cleansing. Earlier this month, at Reuters, Jason Szep and Andrew R.C. Marshall detailed some of the violence.

Tuesday [October 22] began with a massacre. … By 7 a.m. … hundreds of Rakhine arrived on boats to surround [the village of] Yin Thei, said a resident contacted by telephone. By late afternoon, the Muslim villagers were fending off waves of attacks. The resident said children, including two of his young cousins, were killed by sword-wielding Rakhines. Most houses were burned down. … A Yin Thei villager telephoned Musi Dula's neighbours and said police were shooting at them. Another farmer nervously told Reuters how he watched from afar as police opened fire from the village's western edge, also at about 5 p.m.

The official death toll is five Rakhines and 51 Muslims killed at Yin Thei, including 21 Muslim women, said a senior police officer in Naypyitaw, the new capital of Myanmar. He denied security forces opened fire or abetted the mobs. … As Yin Thei burned, the last of nearly 4,000 Rohingya Muslims were fleeing the large port town of Pauktaw, in a dramatic exodus by sea that had begun five days earlier.

Returning to the Times article, Fuller writes, "the country's leading liberal voice and defender of the downtrodden, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been circumspect in her comments about the violence." For their part, Szep and Marshall write that Suu Kyi's "studied neutrality has failed to defuse tensions and risks undermining her image as a unifying moral force. Suu Kyi, a devout Buddhist, says she refuses to take sides." [Emphasis added.]

Besides that she's a Buddhist, how does she justify her silence? Seasoned Burma watcher and activist Roland Watson speculates. In April of this year he wrote:

It is difficult to fathom her actions, but a number of explanations are possible, including: She didn't know how bad the Tatmadaw [Burma's army] was treating the ethnic groups; … she censored herself; she thinks the problems that the ethnic nationalities have are their own fault (as many Burmans [the majority ethnic group] believe) … or, she noticed that since the international community ignored the atrocities it was safe for her to do so as well. (Of note, the United States, her close advisor, for two decades only backed her and refused to acknowledge the regime's war crimes.)

During his recent visit, writes Fuller, President Obama at least made a nod to violence against the Rohingyas.

Mr. Obama spent a considerable portion of a speech at Yangon University focusing on the importance of diversity, singling out the "danger" of the Rakhine situation and telling his audience "there is no excuse for violence against innocent people."

But (Fuller again), like Suu Kyi, Burma's President Thein Sein keeps the issue at arms length.

… President Thein Sein told a visiting delegation from the United Nations in July that only Muslims who have been in the country for at least three generations would be allowed citizenship. The rest were a "threat to the peace of the nation," he said, and would be put in camps and sent abroad. The United Nations rejected the idea, saying that it was not in the business of creating refugees.

Diplomats say that Mr. Thein Sein has retreated from that position and is now talking about resettling displaced Muslim populations inside the country. He sent a letter to the United Nations just before Mr. Obama’s visit saying that once passions cooled he would "address contentious political dimensions, ranging from resettlement of displaced populations to granting of citizenship." But he offered no details or time frame.

Let's return to Mr. Nyarna, who has a talent for putting his foot in his mouth, who said

… many Muslims do not "practice human morals" and should be sent to Muslim countries to be among "their own kind."

Clearly, even some Buddhists need a refresher course in "human morals."

The "Shimano Problem" and its recent resolution make this an opportune time to briefly explore the subject of Buddhism's integration into the West. Eido Shimano Roshi had been the abbot of the New York Zen Studies Society, one of the oldest Buddhist institutions in the West, and its 1,400-acre Dai Bosatsu retreat in the Catkills until he resigned from both earlier this week. Even though he's headed the former since 1965 and is 77 years old, he isn't retiring. This comment below, posted at the Tricycle Buddhist magazine blog in reaction to the apology that accompanied his announcement, gives you an idea of what transpired.

Take it from someone who has known Eido Shimano for over thirty years, this is anything but a sincere apology. It is the same tired routine he has repeated each time he has been "caught with his robe open" for three decades.

Yes, the Achilles heel of gurus, abbots, and pastors everywhere -- sleeping with their students and/or worshippers. Before we explore its prevalence in Buddhist America, let's take a moment to celebrate "how the swans came to the lake," to borrow the title of a history of the Zen Buddhism diaspora, if you will, to the United States by Rick Fields (Shambhala, 1992).

Since Buddhism originated in India and moved east to China and then Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, it was probably as inevitable a migration across the Pacific as Homo erectus following the game out of Africa and populating Asia and Europe. Also since Eastern teachers were often stuck with students sent to them by their families, they were happy to find students in the West who, stoked in part by American traditions such as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalism, sought out the teachers on their own and were eager to initiate practice.

Of course, the extent to which Buddhism needed to be Westernized became a central issue. American Buddhist centers may appear to have integrated East and West seamlessly, but many obstacles were surmounted during their formative years. Looking back, rituals, practice, and teachings may have been the least of it. Instead, due to mixed signals between the two cultures and, however much a cliché, culture shock on the part of the Easterners, many American students wound up emotionally and spiritually wounded by Buddhist teachers -- Eastern and American. Besides, of course, the good names of the most highly regarded forms of Buddhism in America, Tibetan and Zen, were sullied.

Perhaps the most notorious perpetrator of spiritual abuses was Trungpa Rinpoche, who, while still a teenager, headed several large Tibetan monasteries until, like the Dalai Lama, he was forced out by the 1959 Chinese invasion. Once in the West, his gift for teaching facilitated the founding of what has become known as the Vajradhatu (his U.S. meditation centers), Shambhala Meditation Centers around the world, and the Naropa Institute (now University). But his hedonistic lifestyle and provocative "crazy wisdom" both mystified and alienated.

Trungpa died a grisly alcoholic's death, but his successor was arguably even more dissolute. The claim to fame of Osel Tendzin, an American from New Jersey, was not only seducing students, but becoming infected with HIV and failing to tell those with whom he engaged in sexual behavior. This scenario was paralleled by two American Zen teachers: the womanizing Richard Butler, the abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, and his successor, Reb Anderson, who gained fame by appropriating the gun from a suicide victim and later wielding it in public.

As for Shimano, his serial philandering was a source of concern for decades to long-time colleague Roshi Robert Aitken, who recently died. At the Zen Site, Vladimir K. and Stuart Lachs illuminated a series of letters from Aitken to Shimano and to others in the Zen community, including two of Japan's most venerated roshis who had been his teachers. Only much later was one of them inclined to condemn Shimano. Watch how the culture clash played out in this instance. (Emphasis added.)

Aitken excuses this lack of interest by the two Japanese Zen masters to cultural differences between America and Japan, writing "it is important to understand that mental illness and character pathology are viewed tolerantly in Japan." Aitken infers that he believes that Shimano may be suffering some form of mental illness or pathology, calling him "someone in a different dimension altogether."  Nevertheless, Shimano's Japanese teachers "felt responsible for him, and were not prepared to disgrace him by recalling him to Japan."

In a 1990 piece titled Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America that's as nuanced as you'll find on the subject, the culture clash was elucidated by Katy Butler. (If you haven't yet, read her recent powerful New York Times magazine piece that begins with her mother speaking with her about her father: "Please help me get Jeff's pacemaker turned off.") Upon arriving in the United States, Eastern teachers found a nation already predisposed to hero worship and religious hucksterism. Here Ms. Butler writes about what keeps Eastern teachers in line back home until they arrive on these shores and act like a kid in a candy store.

 "Pressure from the community is very important in controlling behavior in Tibetan communities," said Dr. Barbara Aziz, an internationally known social . . . who has spent 20 years doing fieldwork among Tibetans. . . . "In Tibetan society, they expect more of the guy they put on the pedes­tal . . . if such a scandal [as Osel Tendzin's] had happened in Tibet [he] might have been driven from the valley."

Furthermore, Aziz pointed out, Tibetans may "demonstrate all kinds of reverence to a [teacher], but they won't necessarily do what he says. I see far more discernment among my Tibetan and Nepali friends," she concluded, "than among Westerners." [Emphasis added.]

Alan Roland, a psychoanalyst and author of In Search of Self in India and Japan . . . . believes that Asian students approach the teacher-student relation­ships more subtly than Americans-who often commit rapidly and completely, or not at all. Asian students may display deference, but withhold veneration, until they have studied with a teacher for years. They seem to have a "private self" unknown to many Americans, which is capable of reserving judgement even while scrupulously following the forms. When a teacher fails, Asians may con­tinue to defer to his superior rank but silently withdraw affection and respect.

In America, it's often the reverse. Some Vajradhatu students could forgive Osel Tendzin as a human being, but could not treat him as a leader. . . . few Americans can show deference to some­one they don't venerate without feeling hypocritical. Faced with this cognitive dissonance, they either abandon deference and leave, or they deny inner feelings.

Ms. Butler then quotes the current Dalai Lama.

"I recommend never adopting the attitude toward one's Spiritual teacher of seeing his or her every action as divine or noble. . . . if one has a teacher who is not qualified, who is engaging in unsuitable or wrong behavior, then it is appropriate for the student to criticize that behavior."

Finally, a couple random observations about the issues teachers in Eastern traditions sometimes have with power and sex:

1. The sheer immaturity they're manifesting is breathtaking. Either they're resisting the transformation that long hours of meditation should be impressing on them or, in the belief that they're fully realized, or enlightened, they think that they're beyond the effects of bad karma on their future as souls.
2. It goes without saying that these problems are all but nonexistent in woman-led sanghas and zendos.

Earlier last month, in a book review at Britain's Current Intelligence titled The myth of "nonviolent Buddhism" -- demolished once again, Vladimir Tikhonov wrote that according to Mahayana Buddhism, when it comes to killing . . .

. . . it is the intention and not the act in itself that is focused upon. . . . As some of the most influential Mahāyāna sūtras . . . suggest, "killing" is simply a meaningless misconception from an "enlightened" viewpoint (since neither the killer nor the killed have any independent existence) and may be undertaken if intended to prevent a worse misfortune, and done with the best objectives in mind.

That's some world-class rationalization. Furthermore, writes Tikhonov, "the Buddhist emphasis on 'good intention' opened the door for a broad spectrum of violence legitimization, including both war and in criminal justice."

One then feels compelled to ask: If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, is the road to heaven paved with bad intentions? Consider that your koan for the day.

The subject of the review is Buddhist Warfare (Oxford University Press) edited by American academics Michael K. Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer. It follows in the tradition of Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria's 1998 book that explored how closely much of Zen Buddhism aligned itself with Japanese militarism leading up to World War II. According to Tikhonov, the new collection . . .

. . . persuasively argues that even though in theory Buddhism highlights the inescapably insalubrious [! -- RW] karmic consequences of any violence, in practice it functions pretty much like any other religion: From its inception, Buddhism was integrated into a complicated web of power relations; it always attempted to accommodate itself with the pre-existent power hierarchies while preserving a degree of internal autonomy; and it inevitably came to acknowledge, willingly or otherwise, that the powers-that-be use violence to achieve their objectives.

If that's not disillusioning enough for you, try this:

. . . the passive acknowledgement of the inexorableness of state violence further developed into active collaboration with state war-making or internal pacification -- as long as state bloodletting was seen as also serving Buddhist religious interests.

At its most extreme . . .

. . . a very similar logic was also applied to the cruelest forms of criminal justice utilized by secular rulers in Mongolian society after the conversion to Gelug-pa Buddhism in late sixteenth century. Executions by spine-breaking and slicing into pieces [as well as torture, were] justified as long as they were conducted by "Dharma-protecting" authorities with the "compassionate" intention of purifying society. Violence ended up being justified as long as it was seen as the best way of realizing rulers' good intentions in what was perceived as an inherently violent world.

"Good intentions" rears its now-ugly head again. Have you figured out the koan yet? Meanwhile, you may be surprised to learn that as Islamists take some of their cues from Muhammed leading followers into battle, the responsibility for Buddhist violence can be laid, in part, at the door of the "the historical Buddha and his disciples, since it was exactly their attitude of tacitly acknowledging state violence and accepting sponsorship from ruling-class personages directly or indirectly implicated in all sorts of violence."

Among the most pernicious effects of "early Buddhism's dichotomous view of society" is that it "gave Buddhists little reason to take risks by actively promoting antiwar views certain to alienate state rulers."

Tikhonov's powerful conclusion resounds. Much as he values Buddhist Warfare, he would still like to see . . .

. . . a broader and stronger contextualization of Buddhist violence as part and parcel of a more general tendency of practically all religions to be violent. Religions are symbolic systems that organize the universe in such a way as to make themselves central and powerful -- and closing the distance between "power" and "violence" is only a question of time, however "compassionate" the axiology of a given religion might originally have been.