RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE IN ASIA:
INDIA, SRI LANKA, TIBET, CHINA,
AND JAPAN
A Book Prospectus by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho
This book will consist of an introduction and three parts. The Introduction will summarize religiously motivated violence in the Abrahamic religions, and then indicate how it has been manifested in post-colonial Asian movements such as Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism in India and Sri Lanka. One chapter will show how the Yellow Hat sect fused religious and national identity and violence followed with armed monks and Tibetan troops. Another chapter will show how Chinese Christians appropriated all the ways in which Euro-American fundamentalists have justified violence and discrimination. Yet another chapter will show that religious and national identity had a long history in Japan and manifested itself most dramatically in the Japanese militarism of the early 20th Century. In addition, mystical monism not found in Euro-American fundamentalism was the basis of a distinctively Japanese Buddhist call for the individuals to identify totally with the emperor.
Part I will be a detailed response to incidents in Asian history where such violence has been alleged or is apparently evident. Except for the violence caused by the fusion of state and religion in Tibet and Japan, the analysis will show that most religious violence in Asia came after colonial incursions there. Anticipating that there has been far more of this violence in the Abrahamic religions, Part II will be a theoretical investigation of why this has been the case. Part III will consist of a Gandhian proposal to teach nonviolence as a civic virtue as well as personal virtue.
Some commentators have claimed that the violence of Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalists in India and Sri Lanka has proved that these religions are not as peaceful as they were once thought to be. I will show that religiously motivated violence in Asia was rare before the arrival of Muslim armies and European colonialists. I will further show that Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism is the result of a "reverse" Orientalism by which some Hindu and Buddhist thinkers proposed theories of religious and cultural superiority by giving a racial interpretation to the Aryan hypothesis of European linguists.
Most Hindus and Buddhists who chose to focus on Aryan superiority also embraced a modernism that reformulated their religions as rational, humanistic, and even scientifically based. Indian thinkers such as Rammohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya claimed that caste divisions, child marriage, idol worship were not part of original Hindu philosophy. In Sri Lanka Anagarika Dharmapala, under the influence of theosophists Annie Besant and Col. Henry Steele Olcott, reformed Buddhism along similar lines. These modernizing trends in the late 19th Century produced at least two distinct movements: socially progressive organizations such as the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta and the first generation of Dharmapala's monks in Sri Lanka, but also the reactionary Hindutva movement in India and an equivalent Sinhalatva in the revolutionary Buddhist nationalism of Sri Lanka.
In my work on Sri Lankan Buddhism I discovered that premodern forms of assimilating the other--primarily Tamils and the indigenous tribes of the island--proved far less violent than the judgmental and exclusivist views of Buddhist nationalists, who learned to dichotomize selves and others just as radically as Europeans did. As a general methodology for this book I will continue the constructive postmodernism of my previous books--Spiritual Titanism and The Virtue of Non-Violence--both published in the SUNY Press Series on Constructive Postmodern Thought.
Constructive postmodernism represents a synthesis of premodern and modern ideas, focusing on reformulating modernist dichotomies such as inner/outer, subject/object, private/public, religion/science, means/ends, and reason/emotions. Not all religiously motivated violence can be attributed to modernist dichotomizing, but I am confident that I can demonstrate that much of it can be.
The task of Part Two is to test the following hypotheses about religiously motivated violence in the Abrahamic religions:
! Abrahamic prophets claimed to have had direct communication with God and were very much concerned with following his commands, while Asian devotees rarely spoke about what God actually said for us to do.
! Abrahamic religions are primarily religions of obedience, while the Asian religions are either religions of knowledge (Jainism and some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism) or religions of praxis (Confucianism, Daoism, and Zen).
! The Abrahamic religions have also been more concerned with maintaining the purity of divine revelation, while the Asian religions have generally allowed, even welcomed, other religious influences.
! The Abrahamic religions have viewed the origin of evil as located in the will or even body and matter, but the Asian thought, particularly the Chinese, see evil as a matter of imbalance and disharmony.
! The Abrahamic religions have focused on God's capacity to actively intervene in history, while Asian religions emphasize an inner spiritual power that is rarely viewed as coercive.
! Most likely modeled after ancient rulers, the Abrahamic God is viewed as having a monopoly of power, while Asian deities, particularly the Hindu Goddess, share power with all other beings.
! The Abrahamic God has usually been viewed as a transcendent "other," while Asian divinities have generally been viewed as immanent in each person.
! Abrahamic monotheism, while theologically and conceptually appealing, may create more religious intolerance than the Asian religions that tend to recognize many deities and spiritual powers.
! Whenever religious and national identities are fused, one will find religiously motivated violence. This is also the case in Buddhist and Hindu fundamentalism, as well as Tibetan and Japanese nationalism and militarism.
! Finally, there is what I call a "Gospel of Weak Belief" in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, which counters the tendency to "strong belief" in Christian and Islamic fundamentalism.
After thorough analysis and debate, I may find some of these hypotheses better supported than others, but I am confident that some of these differences do indeed correlate with less religiously motivated violence in Asia. The Asians have gone to war just as often as any other peoples, but I believe that I can demonstrate that they have, before Muslim and European incursions, rarely done so for religious reasons. To my knowledge no scholar has addressed this difference in motivation for violence, nor has anyone constructed theories about why some religions are more violent than others on this basis.
In Part III I will present Gandhi's view of nonviolence as a civic virtue and criticize the claim that personal virtues cannot remain privatized in the morally neutral procedural liberalism that has infected the body politic.
Table of Contents and Chapter Summaries
Introduction. The completed text will be an expansion of the summary above. The first section of the Introduction will be an account of my experience in a Muslim village that was the site of a Hindu Goddess temple in Harayana province. The day I visited that peaceful village, December 6, 1992, was the day that Hindu fundamentalists tore down the Barbri Mosque in the North Indian city of Ayodhya. I was with a group of Hindu and Sikh students who were offering English and/or Hindi lessons to the village children, whose only good meal of the day was from the temple's curry kitchen. That village was Gandhi's India and Ayodhya unfortunately was not.
The bulk of the historical analysis will be devoted to violence in the Asia, and I will assume Abrahamic religious violence as a given. I will, however, summarize that violence and demonstrate differences from as well as similarities with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Introduction will also expand on the points in the following piece I wrote as a column, commenting on Christian nationalism in my own town of Moscow, Idaho. The journalistic tone of what follows will be modified for the book.
There are some chilling parallels between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. Both divide the world between believers and unbelievers, and by deciding for themselves who is saved and who is damned, they think that they can play God with our lives. Both have also declared war on the secular culture of liberal democracy, the most peaceful and prosperous means of social organization ever devised by humankind. They both reject the separation of church and state and would set up governments based on their own views of divine laws.
Of greatest concern, however, is the fundamentalist view of the violent end of the world. A common scenario is a great war in the Middle East in which the armies of God destroy the armies of Satan. Radical Muslims of course identify Israel and the US as the forces of evil, but Christian fundamentalists see Islam as the ultimate enemy. The horrifying implication is that the Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the Middle East will be the primary victims of this holocaust.
Some conservative Christians make yet another division: an ethnic one that declares that one culture is superior to all others. Michael Hill, founder of the League of the South, proposes that an independent neo-Confederacy of fifteen states would have the duty to protect the values of Anglo-Celtic culture from black Americans, who are "a compliant and deadly underclass." A key word for the League is "hierarchy," the God-given right for superiors (read "white males") to rule over inferiors.
Since 1998, the League of the South has had close ties with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in 2000 elected Kirk Lyons to its national executive board. An outspoken racist, Lyons was married by neo-Nazi Richard Butler in 1990, when Butler still had his compound in Hayden Lake. Lyons has led an amazingly unsuccessful legal campaign to have Southern whites defined as a "protected class." The League and the Sons of Confederate Veterans organize public protests with the Council of Conservative Citizens whose website decries "negroes, queers and other retrograde species of humanity." One League leader said that we "need a new type of Klan."
Moscow pastor Douglas Wilson Steve Wilkins of Monroe, Louisiana wrote a booklet entitled Southern Slavery as It Was in which they describe the Antebellum South as the most harmonious multiracial society in history. Two University of Idaho history professors took time from their busy schedules to refute this piece paragraph by paragraph. It was later discovered that 20 percent of the essay was lifted from Robert Fogel's and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross.
Both Wilson and Wilkins deny that they are racists or neo-Confederates, but Wilkins is a founding director of the League of the South. The League's website uses small Confederate flags as hot buttons for information about the board members. Wilson used to have a Confederate flag in his office, and the flag has been displayed at social functions of his K-12 school and college.
Christian nationalist George Grant, who believes in the death penalty for gays and lesbians, has joined Wilson and Wilkins at earlier Moscow conferences. Grant and Wilkins are promoting a novel entitled Heiland, whose hero leads a violent overthrow of a "godless" federal government. Heiland has been compared to the Turner Diaries, which inspired the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building. Grant's evangelism has as specific political goal: "Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land--of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God's Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations. True Christian political action seeks to rein the passions of men and curb the pattern of digression under God's rule" (The Changing of the Guard [Dominion Press, 1987], pp. 50-51).
Another parallel between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism is a desire to make religious laws the laws of the land. In his regular column in Wilson's Credenda Agenda (vol. 3: nos. 9, 11), Greg Dickison, member of Wilson's Christ Church and a Moscow public defender, states that "if we could have it our way," then there would be capital punishment for "kidnapping, sorcery, bestiality, adultery, homosexuality, and cursing one's parents." Dickison also quotes biblical passages (without qualification) that support slavery as "ordained and regulated by God," death for apostasy (Deut. 13.6-9), and cutting off a woman's hand for touching a strange man's genitals (Deut. 25.11,12).
PART I
Chapter 1: From Mongols to Mughals. This research is under way and here is the abstract of a paper I will present at a regional American Academy of Religion meeting in May. A draft chapter may be read here.
Even though Chinggis Khan personally worshipped a sky god, the Mongol court was a model of religious tolerance. All the major religions were allowed to build temples, churches, and mosques within the walled capital of Karakorum. The Mongol Empire split into four parts: the Golden Horde of Russia, the Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq, the Mughal Empire of India, and the Chinese Yuan Dynasty ruled by Kublai Khan. Before the six great Mughal rulers (1527-1707), India was repeatedly invaded by Muslims armies, led first by Afghans and then by the Seljuk Turks. Destruction of temples occurred during this early period and continued under most of the Mughal emperors, but there were few forced conversions or liquidation of non-Muslims. In fact, Muslim clerics followed the Hanafi school of Islamic law that allowed Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains to be considered People of the Book. The religious tolerance of Chinggis Khan returned full circle in the enlightened rule of Akbar the Great, who gathered sages from all of India's faiths in his court and even allowed the Jesuits to build a church within the compound at Fatipur Sikri. The chapter will focus on religiously motivated violence, which Indian armies committed as well, and determine whether this was essentially new to India and the result of Indian outrage for Muslim offenses.
Chapter 2: Hindu Fundamentalism and Reverse Orientalism. This chapter will expand upon the following summary essay.
Let me begin with some observations that should give any reasonable person pause. In 1998 Hindu fundamentalists proposed that a new Goddess temple be built at Pokharan, 50 km from the site of the atomic bomb tests that were conducted in April of that year. According to their program this would be the 53rd example of Shaktipeeths (seats of strength, literally Goddess power) of Hindu preeminence. (Another power center is the new temple to Rama in Ayodhya, being built on the site of the Babri mosque, destroyed by a Hindu mob in December 1992.) Some suggested that radioactive sand from the test site should be distributed as prasad, the Hindu sacrament, but cooler heads vetoed that idea. Some Hindu fundamentalists also believe that ancient Indians actually possessed atomic weapons, which they call "Om-made" bombs.
The Indian military helps to fuel this religious enthusiasm by having named its long-range missile after the Vedic god of fire Agni. (The Pakistanis countered by appropriating the power of the Hindu Goddess by naming their missile Ghauri, a name for the Goddess in Southern India.) The followers of Shiv Shena, a fundamentalist organization in Mumbai, proudly proclaim that, after the bomb tests, Hindus were no longer eunuchs and now could stand up to the world as real men. At the 1999 Durga festival in Calcutta celebrants found new figures in the traditional tableau of the Goddess Durga and her attendants. They saw life size figures of brave Indian soldiers who won a victory in the mountains of Kashmir because of Durga's divine grace. Hundreds of years ago Hindu kings went into battle only after receiving Durga's blessing by sacrificing dozens of water buffalo to her.
Another concern is the plan to recover the original Hindu Empire, extending West into Afghanistan and Central Asia encompassing all Buddhist sites; extending North to recover Tibet, the original land of the Aryans according to Dayananda Saraswati, extending Northwest to Cambodia to recover the Hindu Khmer kingdoms of Angkor Wat and North Vietnam, where Shiva lingas have been found; and extending Southeast to Java, where a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom once flourished, and Bali where three million Hindus still live. This reminds me of Zionist maps of Greater Israel or plans by some Calvinists for a new Confederate States of America where God-fearing Anglo-Celtic top males will rule their households and their nation of fifteen states.
The origins of Hindu religious nationalism are quite recent considering the long history of advanced cultures in the Indian Sub-Continent. V. D. Savakar's Hindutva (literally "Hinduness") was published in 1923, but the ideas of this book go back to the beginning of the 19th Century. The supreme irony about Hindu fundamentalism is that its first writers were profoundly influenced by European Orientalism and its archeological and linguistic discoveries. The same Orientalism that gave Europeans the excuse to view Asians as effeminate and impotent, thereby lacking the capacities for self-rule, was used by Indian writers to create a view of India as a unified nation that gave birth to not only to the European languages but also to its first civilized peoples and the world's greatest religion. The idea of India as the cradle of civilization and spirituality is, amazingly enough, found in Voltaire, Herder, Kant, Schegel, Shelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Some scholars argue that the Indian philosophy that we now know as neo-Vedanta found in Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Gandhi, is just as much German idealism and Indian philosophy.
Hindu fundamentalists were flattered by Aldous Huxley's idea of the Perennial Philosophy and its mystical monism, originally found in the Upanishads and only later, according to their views, spread to other cultures. Theosophists such as Annie Besant turned Orientalism on its European creators, claiming that what they perceived as weaknesses--namely, nondualism, nonviolence, renunciation, meditation, and tolerance--were precisely what was needed for the salvation of Western societies. In the 1870s there was a concerted effort on the part of English theosophists to merge with the Indian Arya Samaj (Society of Aryans) as part of Annie Besant's vision of a World Federation of Aryans. Ironically, in another move of reverse Orientalism, members of Arya Samaj vetoed this idea because they insisted that Indians were the only true Aryans! Interestingly enough, both Indians and Europeans agreed on at least one proposition: Hindu civilization was indeed corrupt and suffering a long decline, but Hindu fundamentalists believed that the solution to that problem was not Christian capitalism; rather, it was the recovery of a glorious Hindu past that Europeans had conveniently rediscovered for them.
Even before Arya Samaj there was the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma, the Hindu Creator God) founded in Calcutta in 1828 by Rammohan Roy, who, although still preserving the idea of Vedic authority, developed a fully modernist, that is rationalist and humanist, approach to Indian identity and nationhood. Debendranath Tagore, father of the more famous Rabindranath Tagore, broke with Roy over the issue of Vedic authority, and another nationalist Keshab Chandra Sen proposed that Hinduism ought to be Christianized. The result of these developments within the Bengal Renaissance was a growing view of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity. One of the most dramatic examples of these views came from Bajnarain Basu, who waxed eloquent as follows:
The noble and puissant Hindu nation rousing herself after sleep, and rushing headlong towards progress with divine prowess. I see this rejuvenated nation again illuminating the world by her knowledge, spirituality and culture, and the glory of the Hindu nation again spreading over the whole world.
Rajnarain was insistent that the Hindu Motherland could have no place for Muslims because their religion was alien to India. India's religion should be a cultural Hinduism based on the Upanishads but allowing for the mediation of the one true God by means of the traditional idols. The Brahmo Samaj proposed gradual but sure reform on the elements that had tarnished the image of Hinduism word wide: caste problems, widow remarriage, untouchability, and child marriage.
Arya Samaj was founded by Dayananda Saraswati in 1875 in Bombay, now renamed Mumbai because of pressure from Hindu nationalists. (Madras is now called Chennai and Hindu nationalists want to change all English street names to Hindi and do not want their children to attend English medium schools.) Dayananda's philosophy is sometimes called neo-Hinduism or Semitized Hinduism, what I would call an Abrahamic Hinduism. Dayananda claimed that the Aryans originated in Tibet, an hypothesis that the Nazis tested by sending Ernst Schaefer and Bruno Beger on two expeditions there in the 1930s. (The Nazis were also captivated by an alternative bizarre idea that the Arctic was the home of Aryans, an idea promoted by Hindu nationalist B. G. Tilak.) While in Tibet the Aryans, according to Dayananda, purged themselves of inferior people (identified as the dasyus in the Rigveda) and then spread to the rest of the world. In India they established the Hindu Golden Age described in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This great age came to an end with the Bharata War, the beginning of which is dramatically described in the Bhagavad-gita and the result, according to the text, was over a million deaths. Hindu civilization then descended into a long decline that was exacerbated by the pacifism and nihilism of Buddhism and Jainism, which were seen as failed off shoots of Hinduism and not separate religions from Hinduism. During the Second Millennium CE a weakened Hinduism was easy prey for the Muslim invaders and European colonists.
Dayananda saw the Aryans as paragons of virtue and the world's first monotheists. Even though he uses the Hindu epics as proof of the Golden Age, he argued that only the Vedas and the Upanishads have religious authority. (Oddly enough, the members of the Ayra Samaj retained the Vedic fire ritual for their services.) He rejected the authority of the priests to interpret scripture and set himself up, in a way very similar to some preachers in the Abrahamic religion, as the only one that could interpret the Vedas correctly. He saw the Vedas and Upanishads as the literal Word of God and as the infallible text of the one true Hindu church, a concept alien to the Indian religious tradition, but one again very similar to the Abrahamic religions. Setting the stage for 20th Century Hindutva, Dayananda launched systematic attacks on traditional Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists.
On the other hand, Dayananda believed that the subjugation of women came with the decline of Hinduism and declared that this was a social ill that needed corrected. He also spoke out against over one thousand sub castes (jati) that divide Indians according to specific vocations and prevent lateral movement in Indian society. With regard to the four main castes Dayananda thought that it was a mistake to think of them as hereditary, a position that was an advance over Gandhi, who, while rejecting the oppression of the Dalits, still maintained the hereditary nature of the four main castes.
After Dayananda's death there was a campaign to reconvert Dalits whose families had gone over to Christianity and syncretistic Muslims who, because they so fully participated in Hindu celebrations, ought, according to Arya Samaj, to return to the fold of the true faith. This campaign of reconversion is still at the forefront of Hindu fundamentalist efforts today, especially among the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
A key figure in the transition from the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj is Chandranath Basu who is the author that coined the term Hindutva (Hinduness) and he turned Hindu nationalism in a decidedly conservative and reactionary direction. In 1892 he published Hindutva: An Authentic History of the Hindus in which he defended traditional views Hindu ritual, caste, restriction of women's education and civil rights, and the maintenance of male authority. Chandranath was firmly committed to demonstrating the superiority of Hinduism over Christianity, especially after the wide spread concern that conversions to Christianity were increasing in the latter half of the century.
In the novels and commentaries of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya we see again the profound influence that European philosophy had on the rise of Indian nationalism. Particularly important was the work of Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Auguste Comte. Interestingly enough, Bankim's early support for women's equality, presumably under Mill's influence, disappeared in his later works, which also contain stronger claims to Hindu supremacy and more stringent anti-Muslim comments. He criticized Mill and Comte for their atheism and substituted Krishna's religion of love as the key to human spiritual cultivation and progress. Nineteenth Century Indian nationalists were fully caught up in the idea of evolution and Bankim proposed that Hinduism was the perfect candidate for Comte's idea of "positive religion," the final stage of human perfection. Huxley's Perennial Philosophy finds a new Indo-European home, but it has a new theistic twist. Bankim rejects both the abstract monotheism he finds in Abrahamic religions and the impersonal monism of his own Brahmo Samaj in favor of the divine incarnation of Krishna as a human being.
At the turn of the century one of the most important Indian nationalist figure is B. G. Tilak, whose importance and standing in the Congress Party was second only to Gandhi. For purposes of our study of Hindu fundamentalism, Tilak was instrumental in inventing a powerful new form of devotionalism centered on the elephant god Ganesha. Tilak's strategy was calculated and very effective: the new Ganesha festival (first celebrated in 1893) would compete with the Muslim festival of Muharram, which Hindus had always attended. Hindu nationalists in the state of Maharastra were successful in creating a new division between Muslims and Hindus that would intensify decade by decade into the new century. The Ganesha festival in Bombay is now so huge that it is common to see pictures and stories of it in the international press.
Tilak also resurrected King Shivaji, who, by the grace of his patron goddess Bhawani, was by far the most successful Hindu warrior king against the Mughal Empire during the 17th Century. Hindu fundamentalists admire Shivaji's courage and excuse his ruthlessness against the Muslims he defeated. Tilak also instigated celebrations honoring Shivaji but many of them in the 1890s turned violent, the beginnings of the communal conflict that was to increase in the next century but was an uncommon occurrence in earlier times. Tilak used the Bhagavad-gita to justify Shivaji's campaigns against the Mughals, but also the violence that may be necessary to keep the Muslims of his day in line. Shivaji has become a hero and a model for a militant leader who will bring back the glory of all things Hindu. It is significant, however, in terms of the historical Shivaji that while Muslims repeatedly declared jihad against him, Shivaji principal motivations were Maratha nationalism rather than a broader Hindu nationalism based on the concept of the Indian Sub-Continent as one nation and the idea of Hinduism as a universal religion. Tilak also ignored the fact that Shivaji not only had Muslim allies but employed Muslims in his army and administration, demonstrating that his concept of a Martha nation included non-Hindus as well. Nonetheless, the revival and revision of Shivaji's reign resulted in a number of Shivaji societies that believed that violence against British rule was a religious duty.
Tilak was also involved in researching and writing about the origins of Hinduism and the Hindu nation. I have already mentioned his wacky thesis, defended in a book entitled The Arctic Home of the Vedas, that Aryan culture actually goes all the way back to the last Ice Age. Drawing on astronomical allusions in the Vedas, Tilak takes Vedic history back 8,000 years and argues that the Vedic gods were polar deities worshiped by arctic Aryans. From all of his research he drew the same conclusion that many other 19th Century Indian nationalists did, and I will conclude with this illustrative but problematic passage:
During Vedic times, India was a self-contained country. It was united as great nation. That unity has disappeared bringing great degradation and it becomes the duty of the leaders to revive that union. A Hindu of this place [Varanasi] is as much a Hindu as one from Madras or Bombay. The study of the Gita, Ramayana, and Mahabharata produce the same ideas throughout the country. Are not these. . . our common heritage? If we lay stress on forgetting all the minor differences that exist between the different sects, then by the grace of Providence we shall ere long be able to consolidate all the different sects into a mighty Hindu nation. This ought to be the ambition of every Hindu.
The sects of which Tilak speaks are the Sikhs, the Jains, and the Buddhists. Not at all included, unless they pledge allegiance to Hindutva (conversion itself is not mandatory), are India's 40 million Christians and 120 million Muslims. Interestingly enough, America's Christian nationalists suggest that conversion will not be necessary in their theocracy, but obedience to Old Testament laws will be enforced.
Chapter 3: Buddhist Nationalism and Religious Violence in Sri Lanka
This chapter is a completed article and can be read here.
Chapter 4: Religious Violence in Tibet, Bhutan, and Mongolia. Here I will research the Mongolian influence on consolidating the power of the Yellow Hat sect and Tibetan military incursions into Bhutan and elsewhere. This is yet another example of religiously motivated violence being caused by the identity of religion and nation.
Chapter 6: By God's Word and Direct Command: Religious Nationalism, Violence, and Taiping Christianity. A rough draft of the chapter may be read here. Initial research and consultation has convinced me that Chinese persecution of Buddhists, mainly during the Tang Dynasty, was done primarily for economic reasons. One focus of this chapter will be the Taiping Rebellion where a Chinese Christian named Hong Xiuquan led his armies on a crusade that caused the death of millions. Hong's particular focus was the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven that his army would help come to pass. What is interesting is that Daoism has similar apocalyptic views but it did not produce any widespread violence. Christian exclusivism may be a key in solving this puzzle.
Chapter 7: Buddhism and Japanese Nationalism: A Sad Chronicle of Complicity. A draft of this chapter can be read here.
PART II: Why do the Abrahamic Religions Produce More Violence? This part will be divided up according to full chapters or sections on each of following hypotheses. It is not clear yet whether each of these topics can be developed into full chapters.
Abrahamic "Ought" and the Asian "Is"
If we look at the conceptual foundations of the Abrahamic and Asian religions, we find in general a significant philosophical difference. The former make God the "axiological" ultimate, i.e., the highest good. The latter--especially Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism--make God (or sometimes simply a divine One) the "metaphysical" ultimate, i.e., the highest being or reality. Abrahamic prophets exhort us to worship the holy "ought," while Asian yogis and sages invite us to meditate on the holy "is." The trinity of Vedantist values expressed in satchitananda (being, knowledge, bliss) contrasts with the Thomistic one, good, and the beautiful derived from the Greeks. It is oddly ironic that people who worshiped the highest good would tend to commit more violence and be more intolerant than those who do not have such a moral focus.
Divine Commands vs. Divine Sounds
Mohammed called the Abrahamic faiths "Religions of the Book," and it is here that we can find a clue for our inquiry. Jews, Christians, and Moslems all claim to have received a linguistic revelation, i.e., direct words of God. Moses claimed to have talked to God "as a friend," and the angel Gabriel's first command to Mohammed was "Read!" In contrast are the Hindu Vedas, literally divine sounds, but they are used more for meditation and spiritual discipline than moral and political action. Indeed, the typical Indian worshipper does not understand the Sanskrit their priests recite, just as most Christians did not understand their services until the Reformation, when scripture and sermons were read and heard in the vernacular. In the Asian religions there has been very little debate about what God said for us to do. Hindu and Buddhist dharma is rarely ever connected to divine will and command.
Abrahamic religions are primarily religions of obedience, while the Asian religions are either religions of knowledge (Jainism and some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism) or religions of praxis (Confucianism, Daoism, and Zen).
Revelational Purity At All Costs
Religions of the Book also have been more concerned with maintaining the purity of divine revelation. Even though the revelational integrity of each has been compromised by religious syncretism, most of their followers find it very difficult to believe that their faiths have been adulterated in such a manner. In Asia religious syncretism has not only been accepted, but in some cases celebrated. (For example, the Rev. Sunyung Moon claims to be a good Buddhist, Confucian, a Korean shaman as well as a good Presbyterian.) Here there has been no fetish about revelational purity. This may be a key to widespread religious tolerance in Asia as opposed to the Middle East and Europe.
A study of Ancient Hindu polity demonstrates that Hindu kings, descendants of original Aryan immigrants, preferred to hold new territory by forging religious alliances with the indigenous people rather than by military occupation. For example, Hindu kings appropriated local goddesses cults that later spread throughout India as veneration of the great Hindu Goddess, tribal variants of whom were fully assimilated into high Hindu religion. Herman Kulke explains the results: "Although the relationship between. . . Hindu society and the tribals was never without tensions, its generally peaceful character-- especially if we compare it with the annexation of northern America by European settlers--was certainly one of the great achievements of Indian history" (Kings and Cults [New Delhi: Manohar, 2001], pp. 4-5).
Good and Evil as Dichotomous
A difference in the level of violence might also be due to the way in which religions view the origins of evil. A recent examination of the worldview of Muslim terrorists found that they divided the world into the forces of light and the forces of darkness and evil. This way of looking at the origin of evil is called Manicheanism, named after a Persian prophet by the name of Mani. Mani saw the universe as a cosmic dualism between good and evil, with evil being found primarily in bodies (specifically in their sexual function) and all matter in general. Apart from of this radical dualism the Abrahamic religions have seen the origin of evil in human agents with deficient moral wills.
The Chinese, on the other hand, view evil as a matter of imbalance. Yin is dark, female, and negative and Yang is light, male, and positive, but rarely ever is Yin called evil or the origin thereof. The good in Chinese cosmology and Chinese medicine is balance and harmony between Yin and Yang; evil is not located in a will or a thing. An imbalanced person will do evil, but it is primarily because of the lack of harmony in that person's soul. (The irony is that of all the Asian religions, Jainism, the originator of the ethics of nonviolence, Jainism tends to be most Manichean.) Furthermore, the pre-Socratic Greeks actually assumed the Chinese view, but this culture did not produce any noticeable philosophies of peace or politics of peace.
Divine Power as Political and Monopolistic
"I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." The initial words of the Apostles' Creed testify to the prominence of divine power in Christian theology. Placing omnipotence first, even before divine goodness and wisdom, is the preference not only of Christianity but also Judaism and Islam. Anna Case-Winters observes that in Judaism "power becomes a paraphrase of the divine names, a kind of euphemism for God."
In these Abrahamic religions, more so than in the Asian, divine power has been conceived in terms of political power. In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity God is seen as a cosmic king, exerting absolute and uncontested rule over the universe and everything in it. Political terms such as pantokrator ("all -ruling"), sovereignty, and kingship dominate Abrahamic descriptions of God. In his book Kingship of God Martin Buber argues that Yahweh is different from the other middle eastern gods in that he demanded control in all areas of human life, not just the religious.
In the Abrahamic religions God's power is externally applied, but in Asia power is expressed more in terms of one's inner spiritual power--a power that is rarely ever used coercively. Furthermore, if people are is taught to view God as a distant "other," they might learn perceive other people as "other" as well. Indeed, this sociopsychological dynamic is taken by some scholars to be at the root of modern racism as well as general cultural intolerance. As Christopher Chapple observes: "When the other stands opposed to self, violence can proceed. When other is seen as self, nonviolence can prevail." But one does not have to go all the way to absolute monism to get the same results. Indeed, the social-relational self of Buddhism and Confucianism offers a middle way between social atomism and the complete loss of self in absolute monism. Even though Gandhi associates himself with the monistic Vedantist tradition, he is more in line with the neo-Vedantists, who affirm both the reality of the world and the individual. The thesis of my book The Virtue of Non-Violence is that Gandhi's ethics of nonviolence is best interpreted in Buddhist terms, a position completely in line with his great admiration for the Buddha and his commitment to a real but changing self that must move from attachment and egoism to compassion and nonviolence.
The Gospel of Weak Belief. The following is a short essay that will be expanded. Some of its journalistic tone will be moderated in the book.
Exclusionary Christian theology is epitomized in Jerry Falwell's outrageous claim that God does not answer the prayers of Jews. (His supporters cannot say he never said it: we have it on videotape.) One can see here the incredible excesses of "strong belief": not only is Falwell claiming to know God's mind, but he is also undermining divine omnipotence (God certainly has the power to defend Israel) and divine freedom (God is free to answer any prayer that he chooses).
Fundamentalists condemn secular humanists because they put human beings in the place of God. But Falwell's preemption of divine prerogatives is an egregious violation of what I call the "Hebraic" principle: the qualitative difference between God and creatures. One is reminded of a political cartoon in which Sen. Helms, after trying so hard to get prayer in the schools, asks the Lord how Christian values can possibly survive. God's answer is simple: "Don't worry, Jesse, I can take care of it."
With his concept of "weak belief" British philosopher Richard Swinburne has offered an attractive way of formulating a response to the "strong belief" of fundamentalism. In Faith and Reason Swinburne states: "For the pursuit of the religious way a [person] needs to seek certain goals with certain weak beliefs." For Swinburne all that a good Christian needs is a "weak" belief that Christianity is probably true and other religions are probably false. In the context of a "world theology" (ŕ la John Hick or Wilfred Cantwell Smith), I prefer to revise Swinburne's proposal along more universal lines: some sort of divine being probably exists and that all religions at their best are in tune with the divine.
The phrase "weak belief" is most certainly an infelicitous phrase, and I do not recommend that anyone start a church using this. (And weak belief definitely does not mean weak conviction--Gandhi is our brief on that charge.) One might interpret the strong belief of fundamentalism as a new form of gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis=knowledge), although contemporary fundamentalists do not share the esoterism of the ancient Gnostics. The Gospel of Weak Belief could be seen as a form of agnosticism, or more accurately, as a reaffirmation of fideism, putting faith before knowledge claims.
Ancient Gnosticism has a continuing presence in India, where the jnana yoga of the Upanishads is still very much alive. Although the texts and general teachings are open to all, the tradition of being initiated secretly by a guru is still very strong. In his works Aurobindo uses the term gnosticism, and his belief that we can become supermen with perfect knowledge appears to be an overinflated epistemology. In the following passage from Aurobindo's spiritual companion "The Mother," strong belief does not get any stronger: "What is remarkable is that once we have had the experience of a single contact with the Divine, a true, spontaneous and sincere experience, at that moment, in that experience, we shall know everything, and even more." If this is mystical knowledge of undifferentiated unity, then the claim is not as egregious as it looks on its face.
If there is a Gospel of Weak Belief, who are its prophets and preachers? I submit that the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Mahavira, Jesus, and Gandhi are the leading historical figures. The Buddha was frequently asked questions such as the following: (1) Is the world eternal or not eternal? (2) Is the soul the same as the body or different from the body? (3) Is there life after death or no life after death? The secret of the Buddha's famous Middle Way is to ascertain the difference between desires that can be fulfilled (they are not karma accruing) and cravings, i.e., desires that cannot be satisfied and hence karma crediting. One of the most subtle and deep-seated desires is a "craving for views," typically expressed in metaphysical queries such as the ones above.
The Buddha called such problems "questions that do not tend to edification," and he usually answered with what I call "neither/nor dialectic": (1) The world is neither eternal nor not eternal; (2) the soul is neither the same as the body nor different from the body; and (3) there is neither life after death nor no life after death. This dialectical technique was perfected by the great Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna, but its effect was just as powerful in the Buddha's original words. "Neither/nor dialectic" essentially destroys "craving for views" by negating it to death.
Another tactic the Buddha used against nonedifying questions was simply to sit in silence. When pressed why he was silent, the Buddha answered that these questions are "not calculated to profit, [they are] not concerned with the Dharma, [they do] not redound even to the elements of right conduct, nor to detachment, nor to purification from lusts, nor to quietude, nor to tranquillization of heart, nor to real knowledge, nor to the insight of the higher stages of the Path, nor to Nirvana." In so far as both Zen Buddhists and Jesus move beyond ethical goals, they can be seen as the most radical preachers of weak belief. (One might say that Zen masters understood the Buddha better than he himself.)
When Confucius was asked about the existence of spirits and divine retribution, he, too, answered as the Buddha did: concentrate instead on the affairs of the world and develop your virtues. But Laozi thought that Confucius claimed far too much knowledge, especially in ethics and politics. He was also a master of dialectical thinking, especially what might be called the dialectic of reversal: e.g., power when exercised to an extreme becomes impotence; whereas weakness and softness (like a water slowly eroding the elements) is real strength. As the Daodejing states: "Time will show that the humblest will attain supremacy, the dishonored will be justified, and the empty will be filled, the old will be rejuvenated, those content with little will be rewarded with much, and those grasping much will fall into confusion" (chap. 22).
Mahavira's doctrine of the "many-sidedness" (anekantavada) of things is the greatest Jain contribution to the Gospel of Weak Belief. Jain agnosticism is most vividly expressed in the Parable of the Five Blind Men and the Elephant. Each man had a hold of one part of the elephant, so to one reality was tail-like; to another it was trunk-like, and so on. Each man had a different, but equally valid perspective on the same reality. The Jains use this story as a lesson for universal tolerance of all beliefs. Ironically, anekantavada does not seem to have prevented Jains from holding a rather one-sided dualism of mind and matter, or from imputing absolute knowledge to their own Tirthankaras--those who have passed out of the wheel of existence.
In a response to queries about apparent inconsistencies--e.g., holding to nondual Vedanta and dualism at the same time--Gandhi answered that he believed in the Jain view of the many-sidedness of reality, and that his "anekantavada is the result of the twin doctrine of truth and nonviolence." If one thinks of Gandhi's view of relative truth and how this would preclude one thinking ill of others with differing beliefs, then the alliance with Jain anekantavada is a natural one. In the same passage Gandhi continues: "Formerly I used to resent the ignorance of my opponents. Today I can love them because I am gifted with the eye to see myself as others see me and vice versa."
Although the practical effects of such a view are obvious and salutary, it is, I believe, philosophically unsatisfactory. I suggest that the Buddha's "neither/nor" dialectic would better serve Gandhi's purposes. To be a bit uncharitable to the saint, his terribly loose "I am everything" position could be called "all of the above" dialectic. Gandhi may have been untidy in his philosophical commitments, but no one could say that his many-sidedness meant holding weak convictions. Gandhi developed the Indian concept of ahimsa (nonviolence) beyond its previous world-denying expressions into a world-affirming political philosophy, one that drove an imperial power from India. The culmination of his philosophy was the principle of "soul force" (satyagraha), its principal implication being that soul force will always, in the end, win over brute force.
Jesus' commitment to weak belief is found in the indirect discourse of his parables. Parabolic language is the perfect medium for anekantavada. Parables offers many-sided and many-leveled meanings, and they preserve the freedom of the respondent. Jesus and the Zen monks were more radical than the Buddha: the point of a parable or a koan is not an ethical one, but a provocation for people to transform their lives spiritually. The early church made the parables into allegories (e.g., Jesus is the sower) and turned rich, polyvalent discourse into the univocal dogma of strong belief. Even today Christian ministers too often interpret the parables in a conventional ethical way that obscures their transforming power.
Unlike the Buddha, Jesus was not a sophisticated dialectician, but like Laozi, he was fond of the dialectic of reversal: "So the last will be first, and the first last" (Matt. 20:16); "For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Lk. 18:15). There is another less noticed, but equally powerful reversal in Jesus' rebuke of Thomas: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believe" (Jn. 20:29). Jesus' point, I believe, is clear: Thomas was wrong to demand the evidence of strong belief. (Weak faith is the real partner of strong belief.) Here Jesus is condemning the first fundamentalist and essentially saying "Blessed are those of weak belief."
PART III: Non-Violence as a Civic Virtue
This part now exists as an essay that has been accepted for the International Journal for Hindu Studies. It can be viewed at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/nvcv.htm. This article will be edited and expanded to fit the flow and thesis of the book. Specifically, this article uses the same constructive postmodern methodology that urges overcoming modernist dichotomies self/other, private/public, inner/outer, reason/emotion, means/ends, and government/morality. Specifically, I will criticize the loss of civic virtue in a society that privatizes the virtues and allows any action not covered by law. Citizens will not develop a full complement of virtues, including the virtue of nonviolence, under the threat of punishment; rather, they will learned them only in families and schools that nurture virtuous behavior and parents and teachers who model it.