The Budhha Taught Nonviolence, Not Pacifism

[AsahinaKimi]

(**Note this is not a recent posting, but I think its important)

Paul Fleischman, M.D.

Paul Fleischman is a psychiatrist and a Teacher of vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He is the author, among other workss, of Cultivating Inner Peace and Karma and Chaos.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I have found myself musing about nonviolence, its contributions, its limits, and its place in the Buddha’s teaching. I have also been surprised to hear many of my acquaintances confuse the Buddha’s teaching of nonviolence with pacifism (which I will here take to mean the objection to any kind of violence for any reason), so that, due to their confusion, they find themselves either rejecting nonviolence as hopelessly naive and inadvertently destructive, or embracing the politicized group allegiances of pacifism, which they imagine incorrectly to present what the Buddha taught.

The Buddha did not intend to form either a religious or political position, nor a philosophy of society. Historically, he lived before the era of organized, systematic theorizing about the human collective. He addressed himself as an individual to individuals. Even when he spoke to large groups, as he frequently did, he focused on individual responsibility. He understood every group - for example, the democratic states that existed in the India of his times – as resting upon the insight, conscience, and actions of each of its participants. He had no theory of, nor belief in, supervening collective structures of society or government that could amend or replace the bedrock of individual choice.

Rather than a theologian or a systems thinker, the Buddha was a liberator, a spiritually attained practitioner and teacher of the path to nibbana, freedom from hate, delusion, and fear. His goal was to help as many beings as possible live in equanimity, harmony, and loving kindness. He was against all embracing belief systems - a position that confounded many of his contemporaries, and that still puzzles people today who want to understand what “ism,” what philosophy, he propounded. Many people still yearn to find in his words some “Buddhist fundamentalism” by which they can anchor ideological convictions and security against the turmoil of life.

http://www.dharma.org/ij/archives/2002a/nonviolence.htm

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Interesting. In many ways this parallels early Quaker teachings...

While Quakers in the past 100 years or so have largely become pacifists, the first ones were not. George Fox, the founder, found troop quarters to be great recruiting fields, and he wasn't insisting on them quitting their jobs.

Nonviolence, however, was always central to Quaker life, with violence never seen as a solution. And while Quakerism was originally an attempt to return to the earliest Christian worship, there is no systematic theology.

To be a Friend, ultimately, is not to accept a theology, but to live a lifestyle.

[ZombieHorde]

2. Smells like bullshit.

"The Buddha did not intend to form either a religious or political position, nor a philosophy of society."

How does anyone know Siddhartha's intent? He did not write anything. All of Buddha's teachings are hearsay.

[AsahinaKimi]

3. He did teach.

Turing the Wheel of Dharma

Forty-nine days after Buddha attained enlightenment he was requested to teach. As a result of this request, Buddha rose from meditation and taught the first Wheel of Dharma. These teachings which include the Sutra of the Four Noble Truths and other discourses, are the principal source of the Hinayana, or Lesser Vehicle, of Buddhism. Later, Buddha taught the second and third Wheels of Dharma, which include the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras and the Sutra Discriminating the Intention respectively. These teachings are the source of the Mahayana, or Great Vehicle, of Buddhism. In the Hinayana teachings Buddha explains how to attain liberation from suffering for oneself alone, and in the Mahayana teaching he explains how to attain full enlightenment, or Buddhahood, for the sake of others. Both traditions flourished in Asia, at first in India and then gradually in other surrounding countries, including Tibet. Now they are also beginning to flourish in the West.

http://www.aboutbuddha.org/english/buddha-teachings.htm/

[ZombieHorde]

4. Different Buddhist sects have different Buddhist teachings.

Anyone who claims to know Buddha's true intentions is fooling us.

Just before Buddha died, he reportedly told his followers that thereafter the Dharma (doctrine, teaching) would be their leader. The early arhants considered Gautama's words the primary source of Dharma and Vinaya (rules of discipline and community living), and took great pains to formulate and transmit his teachings accurately. Nonetheless, no ungarnished collection of his sayings has survived. The versions of the canon (accepted scripture) preserved in Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan are sectarian variants of a corpus that grew and crystallized during three centuries of oral transmission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism

I like Buddhism, but Buddha's original teachings were never preserved enough to decipher his intentions on subtle matters, such as nonviolence versus pacifism.

[green-economy]

6. Projections on the Buddha

I'm not happy to say that this is a well written but misinformed thesis. A critical passage is:


"For the government servant who, for example, as a soldier must kill, the Buddha implicitly asks of him two questions. The first is: “Can you do this task as an upholder of safety and justice, focused on love of those you protect rather than on hate for those you must kill? If you are acting with vengeance or delight in destruction, then you are not at all a student of Dhamma. But if your hard job can be done with a base of pure mind, while you are clearly not living the life of an enlightened person, you are still able to begin walking the path towards harmony and compassion.”

Those do not sound like the words of the Buddha to me. I wish commentators on the Buddha's teachings wouldn't put words in his mouth, especially when there are vast amounts of his words you can directly quote. If he actually said such a thing or anything close to it you would not need to claim that he implied it. This is not a simple mistake; refer to Anguttara Nikaya Sutta 1.10 on the dangers of misrepresenting the Buddha.


A lucid article on the Buddha's teaching regarding violence by Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/autho...

"When a warrior strives & exerts himself in battle, his mind is already seized, debased, & misdirected by the thought: 'May these beings be struck down or slaughtered or annihilated or destroyed. May they not exist': If others then strike him down & slay him while he is thus striving & 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 this: 'When a warrior strives & exerts himself in battle, if others then strike him down & slay him while he is striving & 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 his wrong view. Now, there are two destinations for a person with wrong view, I tell you: either hell or the animal womb."

— SN 42.3

The soldier then broke down and cried — not because he felt that the Buddha's words were cruel, but because he believed their truth and was upset at his earlier teachers for having lied to him. In this case, the Buddha's reticence and tact helped to make his teaching effective. A similar set of events happened when an actor asked the Buddha if there is a special heaven reserved for actors. The Buddha's reticence and tact in informing the actor of a hell for actors who incite their audiences to greed, anger, and delusion inspired the actor to respond in the same way as the soldier.


I'll just add for folks who never knew that the Buddha spoke and taught about hell and are perhaps freaked out by that; don't live in lust of heaven, nor fear of hell. Just think, speak and do, your best and wisest. What ever will be, will be, nothing is permanent.





Below is another author "citing" the Buddha. Things like this appeal to some people; then it circulates and many people miss the true message of the Buddha:


Check Your Sources
Ajahn Punnadhammo
http://bhikkhublog.blogspot.com/2007/01/...


Check Your Sources
I've received some email asking about a passage where the Buddha apparently advocates a "Just War" doctrine. The passage in question;

The Tathagata having given his consent, Simha continued: "I am a soldier, O Blessed One, and am appointed by the king to enforce his laws and to wage his wars. Does the Tathagata who teaches kindness without end and compassion with all sufferers, permit the punishment of the criminal? and further, does the Tathagata declare that it is wrong to go to war for the protection of our homes, our wives, our children, and our property? Does the Tathagata teach the doctrine of a complete self-surrender, so that I should suffer the evil-doer to do what he pleases and yield submissively to him who threatens to take by violence what is my own? Does the Tathagata maintain that all strife, including such warfare as is waged for a righteous cause should be forbidden?"

The Buddha replied: "He who deserves punishment must be punished, and he who is worthy of favor must be favored. Yet at the same time he teaches to do no injury to any living being but to be full of love and kindness. These injunctions are not contradictory, for whosoever must be punished for the crimes which he has committed, suffers his injury not through the ill-will of the judge but on account of his evildoing. His own acts have brought upon him the injury that the executer of the law inflicts. When a magistrate punishes, let him not harbor hatred in his breast, yet a murderer, when put to death, should consider that this is the fruit of his own act. As soon as he will understand that the punishment will purify his soul, he will no longer lament his fate but rejoice at it."

The Blessed One continued: "The Tathagata teaches that all warfare in which man tries to slay his brother is lamentable, but he does not teach that those who go to war in a righteous cause after having exhausted all means to preserve the peace are blameworthy. He must be blamed who is the cause of war. The Tathagata teaches a complete surrender of self, but he does not teach a surrender of anything to those powers that are evil, be they men or gods or the elements of nature. Struggle must be, for all life is a struggle of some kind. But he that struggles should look to it lest he struggle in the interest of self against truth and righteousness.

The trouble is, the Buddha never said it. The passage is an extract from "The Gospel of the Buddha" written by Paul Carus in 1894. The "Gospel" was one of the early popularizing works which introduced Buddhist thought to the West. Like the "Light of Asia" by Edwin Arnold written around the same time, these works served a useful purpose and were many people's first encounters with Buddhism. Unfortunately, both Carus and Arnold too often let their own ideas intrude and put their own words in the Buddha's mouth.

A little Googling and I discovered that this passage from Carus is posted all over the net, usually in compilations of basic Buddhist doctrines. This is troubling for many reasons. The last thing the world needs now is a Buddhist justification for war. It also points out the scholarly sloppiness of so much material on the internet. The Carus passage is quoted here and there without indicating the source. The language is such that it would fool many into thinking it a quote from scripture.

In general I think we could learn a trick from the Christians here. Too many Buddhist books and websites quote the "Buddha" without identifying the sutta. Even if it's a genuine quote, it's frustrating if one wants to check the source or the translation if it isn't cited. Christian works are full of chapter-and-verse numbers after every biblical quote.

To many people, the Buddha becomes a screen on which they project their own ideas. ("He was enlightened, right, so he has to have agreed with me") The Buddha was a real person, a specific teacher with specific teachings and not a foil for every cranky idea that comes down the pipe.

And for the record, there is no such thing as a "Just War" doctrine in Buddhism. If you want one, you're looking in the wrong religion.


May all beings be happy

[varkam]

5. It's a distinction that I've always found fascinating.

Many people, or English-speakers at least, tend to equate non-violence with pacifism but that non-violence (or non-violent resistance) is not inaction. Many other languages have words that connote non-violence much better than English (interestingly enough, if I recall correctly from a book I read a while back, the word jihad means non-violent struggle, though it has much different meanings in the modern world).