The task of this chapter is to test the following hypotheses about religiously motivated violence. The evidence supports the theses in the Abrahamic religions and Taiping theology, but one finds, except for the last one, limited validation in the Asian religions.
The Abrahamic religions make God the “axiological” ultimate, i.e., the highest good, while Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Daoism make God (or sometimes simply a divine One) the “metaphysical” ultimate, i.e., the highest being or reality.
If we look at the conceptual foundations of the Abrahamic and Asian religions, we find a significant philosophical difference. In general the 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 Vedāntist 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 worshipped the highest good would tend to commit more violence and be more intolerant than those who do not have such a moral focus. Those Tibetan Buddhists who have personalized Chenrezig and claim that he intervenes in history and guides the Tibetan people are one exception to the Asian norm. The fact that some lamas can determine the divine will from oracles and scriptures brings Tibetan Buddhist theology much more in line with the Abrahamic faiths and the hypotheses discussed below. Significantly enough, the Bible does not mention any cases of prophets being dismissed for false predictions, but Tibetans and Bhutanese captured, tortured, and/or murdered each other’s prophets for bringing bad news.[1] As we have seen, Tibetan oracles could be dismissed for providing false predictions.
In his magnum opus Process and Reality Alfred North Whitehead draws an instructive contrast between the teachings of Jesus and the theology of divine omnipotence derived from them: “The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. . . . But the deeper idolatry, of fashioning God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”[2] Whitehead is certainly not original—Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Feuerbach preceded him—in proposing that God is a psychological projection of the father, or, in Whitehead’s version, a powerful king. Even the best of fathers or kings are not fully good. If an omnibeneficent God exists apart from this misguided projection, then a good deity may be excused from ordering or executing violence. Tibetans Buddhists are told that Chenrezig has chosen them to spread the Dharma throughout the world and that he promises to care for them. But they also learn, even from the current Dalai Lama, that Chenrezig’s plans included the assassination of ninth-century lama Lang Darma. I will repeat His Holiness’ justification: “Theoretically speaking, in order to achieve a greater benefit for a greater number of people, you can use a violent method.”[3]
In chapters 5 and 6 we saw that high lamas used the same reasoning to send armies against rival sects or to use tantric magic against them and their leaders. Chenrezig’s wrathful deities always do his bidding in war and intrigue. One of the great puzzles for believers and unbelievers, the former agonizing about it and the latter even more determined in their atheism, is the proposition that an omnipotent and omnibeneficent deity either wills evil or allows it to happen. While most Christian theologians have devised ingenious arguments to avoid imputing evil to God, Martin Luther did not: “Since . . . God moves and actuates all in all, he necessarily moves and acts in Satan and godly man.”[4] Earlier I suggested that Chenrezig, just like the Whitehead’s God, may not omnipotent (he can persuade but not coerce), but justifying preemptive strikes against some for the long term benefit of all—the goal of all Bodhisattvas—is still deeply problematic.
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.
Except for Tibetan Buddhism, Asian religions rarely ever speak about divine will and God’s commands. Taiping Christianity was unique in Chinese religion in having leaders who claimed to have direct contact with God: Hong, visiting God and his family in heaven; Yang, the eastern king, speaking for God on earth; and Xiao, the western king, channeling for Christ until his untimely death. Hong stated that “I have received the immediate command of God in his presence; the will of Heaven rests with me.”[5] We have already seen how powerful Yang was in establishing his role as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit and declaring that the Bible was not inerrant.
Chinese rulers claimed their authority as a general mandate from heaven (tian), not as a personal command of God, and it is often as subtle and inexplicable as the Delphic Oracle. In the case of Bao Lisheng it led to a humility and agnosticism, and even the Qing emperor Xianfeng was humble and apologetic before an inscrutable Shangdi. In stark contrast, the instructions that Hong, Yang, and Xaio received were unequivocal, and they instilled a confidence and a militancy that obviously motivated their troops to a high degree. Furthermore, the practice of congregational worship, virtually unknown in Asian religion, was just as effective in the discipline and motivation of Taiping troops as it was for Islamic and Christian soldiers in their battles for their respective faiths.
Bhutan’s Shabdrung believed that Chenrezig could appear in three different simultaneous incarnations as his mind, body, and voice. In chapter 5 we learned that the great Bodhisattva spoke to him through the Kharspani image, which he eventually smuggled, to the great consternation of fellow Drukpas, out of Tibet. Speaking from the image, Chenrezig told him that he was to establish a Buddhist kingdom in Bhutan, and the raven form of Mahākāla, the Drukpa’s protective deity, led him in a vision to this “southern land.” With this divine mandate the Shabdrung used everything in his power—his army and his tantric magic—to attack other sects and to ward off invasions from Tibet. As we also learned, a rather obscure prophecy of Padmasambhava was also used to justify the Shabdrung’s move south.
The Book of Kham predicted that there would be only six Dalai Lamas, and the decline of the office for two centuries was presumably a sign that the Tibetan leaders had disobeyed Chenrezig; but also, interestingly enough, that Chenrezig’s plan had failed. Recall that the current Dalai Lama said that setting up a monarchy would have been better, presumably because Chenrezig wished it that way. Does that also imply that Chenrezig did not want him to be one of the greatest ambassadors for Buddhism in world history? Discerning the divine will is an extremely difficult theological exercise, which can have violence consequences if it is enacted by powerful religious and military agents.
The Abrahamic religions emphasize the authority of written scripture much more than Asian religions do.
Muhammad called the Abrahamic faiths “Religions of the Book,” because Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim to have received a linguistic revelation, i.e., direct words of God. Moses talked to God “as a friend,” and the angel Gabriel’s first command to the illiterate Muhammad was “Read!” In contrast are the Hindu Vedas, literally divine sounds, which are used for meditation and spiritual discipline and not political action. Indeed, typical Indian worshippers do not understand the Sanskrit their priests recite, just as most Christians did not understand their Latin services until the Reformation, when scripture and sermons were read and heard in the vernacular. In the Vedas or the Buddhist scriptures there is no “propositional” revelation over which Asian devotees can argue endlessly and sometimes come to blows about. Many conservative evangelical Christians believe that they are reading God’s literal words; and that they have an individual right to interpret it, even against the received tradition or established church authority. This of course is a sure recipe for conflict and potential violence.
Taiping scholar Thomas Reilly confirms this point in his claim that “the Bible . . . was to propel Hong’s . . . transformation of his Society of God Worshippers from a religious movement with political overtones into a full-fledged political rebellion.”[6] The other revolutionary Chinese religious sects did not have any direct link to scripture in this way. Before Hong visited the Baptist mission in Canton in 1840, the only biblical verses he knew were the scattered references, mainly New Testament passages from Liang Afa’s Good Words. From his Canton visit Hong also, most likely, obtained his own copy of Gutzlaff’s translation of the Bible. From then on, biblical verses, some of them “corrected” for Taiping sensibilities, were a major guide for the Taiping military campaigns.
Even though Hindu scripture, by its very diffuse nature, resists “canonization” in the Judeo-Christian sense, Hindu nationalist and fundamentalist Dayananda attempted to accomplish this anyway. Rejecting most Vedic ritual and insisting on a theistic interpretation of the Vedas, clearly a modernist and reverse Orientalist trope, Dayananda moved to establish the Vedas as revealed scripture containing all truth—spiritual, moral, and scientific. Dayananda was influenced by a blind guru named Virjananda, who divided Hindu scripture between the Vedas, which he was convinced were dictated by the sages (ṛṣis) 5,000 years ago before the great war described in the Mahābhārata, and all other texts composed after that time. In his book Satyārth Prakāś (The Light of Truth), as Daniel Gold explains, “the Swami gives a long list of Hindu writings that should not be read, ‘condemned by the author’ [Dayananda] in his scheme of studies.” Modeling “a rational theism congruent with beliefs found in western Protestanism and scientific literal-mindedness,”[7] as Gold phrases it, Dayananda followed Christian fundamentalists in claiming that the Vedas contained vast amounts of cosmological and mathematical knowledge—truths that anticipated European discoveries by thousands of years.
In chapter 8 we have seen that, even though the Sikh scripture has the status of a divine guru, there are no divine commands or directives in what is mainly poetry set to the meters of the Hindu rāgas. The Adi Granth was originally and primarily aesthetic and non-discursive, and not conducive to systematic theology, which the British wished it to be, let alone a revelation of divine will. It is worth reiterating Mandair’s point that the aesthetic component of the Adi Granth is not simply a supplementary ornament to scripture, as biblical poetry is; rather, it is the very essence of the gurus’ experience of God. It was the Sikh modernizers who made Nanak a mediator between God and the Sikhs, now viewed as a separate people defined by a scripture, the Punjabi language, and a Sikh nation. We also learned from Mandair that speaking Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi became a way, many times mistaken, of identifying as Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh.
Abrahamic religions are primarily religions of obedience, while the Asian religions (Jainism and some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism) are religions of knowledge (gnosis) or religions of praxis (Confucianism, Daoism, and Zen).
A central feature of Taiping Christianity, as well as many other Christian denominations, is obedience to God primarily through strict adherence to Hong’s version of the Ten Commandments. Taiping congregants were publicly executed for violating these divine rules. In his revision of the Ten Commandments Hong added gambling, wine drinking, and opium smoking to the other prohibitions. Always the strict moralist, Hong eliminated Old Testament stories that told of wine drinking and sexual improprieties by godly people. As far as I have been able to determine, this legalistic view of religion is not found in the other Chinese sects that fomented rebellion. No South Asian religion, not even Sikhism, requires that its devotees adhere to the dharma in this way. The exceptions of course were Sikh militants such as Bhindrawale.
With regard to religions of knowledge (gnosis), let us draw on Sri Aurobino as an example. Ancient Gnosticism, without a radical dualism of spirit and matter except for Jainism and Saṃkhya-Yoga, has a continuing presence in India, where the jnana yoga (the way of knowledge) of the Upaniṣads 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 Sri Aurobindo uses the term “gnosticism” frequently, and he believes that we can become supermen with perfect knowledge. Here is a passage from Aurobindo’s spiritual companion “The Mother”: “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.”[8] If this is mystical knowledge of an undifferentiated unity, then the claim is not as egregious as it looks on its face.
The Abrahamic religions have been more concerned with maintaining the purity of divine revelation, while the Asian religions have generally allowed, even welcomed, other religious influences.
We have seen that early Taiping religion was heavily influenced by Confucianism and, to a lesser extent, Buddhism, but direct links and validation from the Chinese Classics were eventually eliminated as the Taiping Christians became increasingly exclusive and militant. Only the general and deep-seated influences of Chinese culture, especially the central idea of hierarchical family relationships, remained. In Asia religions syncretism has not only been accepted, but in some cases celebrated. For example, the late Reverend Sunyung Moon claimed to be a good Buddhist, Confucian, Korean shaman, as well as a good Presbyterian. Here and elsewhere in Asia there has been no fetish about revelational purity. This may be a key to widespread religious tolerance in Asia and to less religiously motivated violence than in the Middle East and Euro-America. Syncretism may, in some instances, also lead to intolerance and violence, as we have seen with the influence of Manicheanism in Chinese and Euro-American religions. A radical dualism of the righteous and the wicked may easily lead to conflict, as I argue in the next section. The exceptions are non-violent Jainism, where contemporary Jain philosophers oppose evil matter/body against pure spirit. There is no question, however, that the pursuit of revelational purity has led to sectarian strife all over the world.
In chapter 4 we learned that Buddhist kings had the prerogative of disciplining the Saṅgha and “purifying” the scriptures to avoid heresy. Concerning King Bodawpaya, Myint-U elaborates: “He supported growing attempts to arrive at a more ‘authentic’ Buddhism, a Buddhism of greater textual accuracy, one which was believed to be closer to that of the religion’s founder.”[9] In 1817 Bodawpaya sent out envoys, which, interestingly enough included brahmin priests, to India and Sri Lanka to cross reference all the existing Pāli texts. Under Bodawpaya’s guidance, the Burmese Theravāda was held in such high esteem in the Buddhist world that the Burmese ordination ceremony was established in Sri Lanka (the traditional seat of Theravāda orthodoxy) as the Amarapura Nikāya. Significantly, Bodawpaya’s focus on a “pure” Buddhism, in a way that might be called “fundamentalist,” did not lead to intolerance of other Buddhist sects or religions. He de-emphasized the search for relics, suspecting that many were fakes; and he reversed the purging of the old Mahāyāna rituals, “permitting” them, as Myint-U explains, but not “encouraging” them.[10]
The Abrahamic religions have viewed the origin of evil as located in the will or even body and matter, but Asian thought, particularly Chinese, see evil as a matter of imbalance and disharmony.
Manichean dualism, which spread both east and west from its Persian origins, offered a radical cosmic dualism of good and evil, which convinced many people in the Abrahamic faiths that they represented the forces of good and had a duty to defeat the forces of evil. Sadly ironic, however, is the fact that Manicheanism produced pacifist religious sects that were sometimes persecuted for their heresy in Europe, while it inspired militant apocalyptic movements such as the White Lotus and Yellow Turban sect in China. The Manichean mind-set, still implicit in many conservative Abrahamic sects, makes it easy to demonize entire groups of people and becomes a strong motivating factor in religious violence. There is certainly sufficient evidence to prove that Hong was captured by a Manichean worldview that allowed him to brand all of his opponents as thoroughly evil. Interviews with Muslim terrorists have revealed that they generally divide the world into the forces of goodness and light and the forces of darkness and evil. It is obvious that a belief in a cosmic dualism is sometimes internalized as battle between good and bad parts of the human self. The “wolf” self of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (discussed in the next chapter) is a good literary example of this phenomenon.
This radical cosmic dualism, the creation of a Persian prophet Mani, is inconsistent with the traditional Chinese view of evil as imbalance and disharmony, and not the result of a separate evil power or deficient will. Contrary to some Euro-American misconceptions, yang, for example, is not good and yin evil; rather, it is the imbalance between them that brings discord to human beings and their world. There is, however, one important mitigating factor in Christian and Buddhist views of Satan, namely, the fact that the forces of evil are not separate, as in Mani’s original view or later Gnostic religions; rather, the Chinese Buddhist and Christian Satan is under the power of God. For example, Yan Lou was demoted to the fifth place in hell because he had been too compassionate and lenient to some sinners. In the Hebrew scripture Satan was originally one of the subordinate deities and still appears as such in the Book of Job. Closer still to Asian polarities and evidently derived from the Hebrews, is Martin Luther’s dipolar view, mentioned in chapter 6, that Satan is a “mask of God” who expresses the Wrath of God.
In addition to the pacifist Christian medieval Manichees, one finds, surprisingly enough, this radical dualism in Jainism and Gandhi. A contemporary Jain philosopher J. L. Jaini states: “God versus Satan becomes Pure Soul versus Matter. God is Pure Soul. Satan is Pure Matter, the tempter, seducer, deluder and Jailor of the Soul.”[11] Gandhi frequently affirms a strict dualism between soul and body, and he speaks constantly of a Manichean battle between our spiritual natures and our animal natures. The body is given to us because of our karma: “We are enslaved in the body because of our sinful deeds.”[12] The body is “a filthy mass of bones, flesh and blood”; and “when it is under the control of God it is a jewel, but when it passes into the control of the Devil, it is pit of filth.”[13] Gandhi’s Manicheanism is pervasive and it may have come from Christian influences as well as his own Indian tradition: “In God there is no duality. But as soon as we descend to the empirical level, we get two forces—God and Satan, as Christians call them.”[14] Shifting from “forces” to “faces,” one might see a hint of Luther’s Satan as a “mask of God.” In concluding this section it is essential to note that there is no necessary connection between belief in a radical dualism of good and evil and religiously motivated violence.
The Abrahamic religions have focused on God’s capacity to actively intervene in history and human wills, while Asian religions emphasize an inner spiritual power that is rarely viewed as coercive. The Abrahamic God has a monopoly of power whereas the Hindu goddess shares power with all beings.
“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.”[15] In these Abrahamic religions, much more so than in the Asian, divine power has been conceived in terms of political power: God is conceived 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. Roman authorities insisted that its citizens worship Ceasar as Lord and devout Christians resisted and many lost their lives insisting that only Jesus Christ was Lord.
With regard to divine power most Asian religions are compatible with contemporary process theology, drawn from Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The process God is cocreative with all other creatures, including blooming flowers, singing whales, and insect architects. The source of power and creativity is ontologically distinct from God, and both God and finite beings draw on the same source of creative energy. This precludes the idea of God as the source of all power and creativity and gives finite beings and nature as a whole an independence and an autonomy of their own. There is no beginning to creation; God and the universe are coeternally creative. Whitehead is also the source of the constructive postmodernism that is the hermeneutical framework of this book.
In other work I have argued that divine omnicausality undermines the freedom of the will and leads to the inevitable conclusion, explicitly stated in the Hebrew scriptures, that God is the cause of evil. This succinct theological statement from the Book of Isaiah, as I have already referenced, expresses divine omnicausality and its full implications: “I form light, and I create darkness: I produce wellbeing, and I create evil, I Yahweh do all these things.”[16] In the Book of Job, God does not only allow Satan to tempt and cause violence to Job and his family, but in the end, the author(s) write that its was God who brought “all the evil . . . upon him.”[17] It is Martin Luther who confirms the biblical view of divine power: “By the omnipotence of God . . . I do not mean the potentiality by which he could do many things which he does not, but the active power by which he potently works all in all. . . . This omnipotence and the foreknowledge of God, I say, completely abolish the dogma of free choice.”[18] Avoiding Manicheanism, which attributes a separate power to evil, Luther also supports divine omnicausality with regard to the actions of Satan: “Since . . . God moves and actuates all in all, he necessarily moves and acts in Satan and godly man.”[19]
As we have seen, divine intervention is found in Tibetan Buddhism in which Chenrezig, incarnated in each of the Dalai Lamas, has, according to the current Dalai Lama, a “master plan” for the evolution of Buddhism in the world. In his ten incarnations Viṣṇu does intervene in history with increasingly violent ways culminating in Kalki’s apocalyptic battle with the evil forces of the Kālī Age. It is significant to stress that, in constrast to Christianity and Buddhist messianism, Kalki’s goal is not to establish a universal empire of Hindus. Curiously, Viṣṇu’s primary tasks in most of his incarnations was to punish asura kings (wrongly translated as “demons”), who had, by hard-won karmic purifications, earned the right to rule as virtuous monarchs. The Vedic devas and asuras do not battle about religion, unless one views it as a conflict between the dark old deities and the bright shiny new ones, very similar to the war between the Greek Titans and Olympians.
The power of the devas and the asuras is tejas, which Wendy Doniger defines as “fiery splendour, glory, fiery destructive power, energy.”[20] Interestingly enough, especially for those used to European ideas of divinity, tejas is not a necessary attribute, i.e., it is not inherent in the nature of the gods themselves. This explains why the devas and the asuras both need soma or amṛta to keep themselves “energized.” Śakti, the power of the great goddess, is ontologically different, and it, as Thomas Coburn explains, “is not something that a deity has, but something that the Goddess is . . . .”[21] Śakti is a power that the goddess has as a necessary attribute and, panentheistically, something that everything else in the universe has by virtue of her omnipresence. (That is also the reason why the asuras still continued to exist even though the devas stole all the amṛta they produced together in the Churning of the Ocean myth.) The goddess’ agenda is not the zero-sum power game that the patriarchs play, but a game with totally different rules. Sakti is not a power that is won, but one that is simply given unconditionally to all beings. Once again, Whitehead’s process theology, which posits “creativity” as a shared source of cosmic power, captures the essence of śakti from a Euro-American perspective. If power is shared and one agent does not monopolize all of it, all beings are therefore free and responsible for their use of it.
The Abrahamic God is conceived as a transcendent being, while Asian divinities have generally been viewed as immanent in each person. Some Asian theologies solve the problem of divine transcendence and immanence with views resembling the panentheism of process theology.
Except for their minority mystical traditions, the Abrahamic religions have viewed God as transcendent, sometimes radically so, while Asian divinities have generally been viewed as immanent in each person and the world. In chapter 8 I have argued that Sikh theology may be interpreted as a panentheism that makes both divine transcendence and immanence intelligible. Scholars have frequently noted that Hindu theology, most often that of Rāmānuja, may be interpreted as panentheistic. Many scholars have argued that a transcendent deity makes way for secularism and a desacralized world that can be exploited for its natural resources. (If the earth is a goddess how could you possibly agree to breaking open her body?) The American Puritans, who accepted John Calvin’s principle of the radical separation of God and the world, considered the wild tracts of their adopted country Satan’s domain and the native inhabitants as cursed by God and less than human. Clearing the wilderness of trees, game, and indigenous people was therefore viewed as a divine mandate. Not only was nature “other,” its wild inhabitants were also beyond the pale of humanity and civilization.
Not only did Calvin’s theology make nature an alien other, it arguably led to human alienation in the modern world. Process theologian Catherine Keller argues that “the atomic ego is created in the image of the separate God.”[22] I have proposed that Democritean atomism also must have played a role in the rise of the modern autonomous self—one that is self-legislating in Kantian morality and libertarian political philosophy. In Euro-American philosophy and theology the ideal self is modeled on the concept of God as a self-contained, self-sufficient being of pure thought. If God is viewed as wholly other, then it may be easier for atomistic selves to see each other in the same way. Radical nationalism, racism, intolerance, and violence may be the result. As Christopher Chapple observes: “When the other stands opposed to self, violence can proceed. When other is seen as self, nonviolence can prevail.”[23] Although I agree with the rhetorical power of this statement, I actually take issue with Chapple’s Vedāntist implication (and Gandhi’s in many statements) that, only when the individual self is completely erased and seen as a universal ātman, is nonviolence possible. I believe that a Buddhist/Confucian social-relational self can achieve the same goal without losing the individual identity to which basic rights and agency properly belong. (I will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter.) We have already analyzed the effects of this mystical monism as many Japanese gave up their selves for the emperor and the military state.
Religions with a future messianic ruler and strong apocalyptic visions will cause more violence. Divinely initiated premillennial views may also be less violent than human-led postmillennial theories.
We have seen that Chinese sects that worshipped Maitreya Buddha and integrated Manichean dualism did indeed cause religiously motivated violence. Even though Hong claimed a Confucian Mandate of Heaven, his apocalypticism is thoroughly Christian. More specifically, it is postmillennial, which means that Christ will not come until the saints have established the Kingdom of God on earth. No Confucian could conceive of “Shangdi as a Holy Warrior leading his armies to victory,” or “a great apocalyptic battle led by a conquering king,”[24] certainly not at the direct command of an impersonal heaven (tian). Hong’s apocalypticism is not Chinese Buddhist, because Maitreya is never portrayed as a violent, conquering king. (We have seen, however, that the chakravartin of the Tibetan Kālachakra Tantra is indeed such a monarch.) Maitreya iconography reveals symbols of Buddhist political and religious power, but Maitreya does not carry a sword or any other weapons. Even the sword of Manjuśri is used for slaying ignorance and killing spiritual demons, not for political rebellion and the killing of imperial “imps,” as enemies in the Taipings' campaigns were called.
In several pronouncements, Hong makes it clear that he envisions his new Chinese dynasty to include all the nations of the world. Hong claims that he has divine authority to “unite all elements whether up in heaven, down beneath the earth, or in the human world to be one grand dynasty at all times and in all places.”[25] Philip Wickeri discerns the difference between the premillennialism of the Christian Rapture and Hong’s postmillennialism: “They did not wait upon the will of God to bring in the new order, but instead sought to usher it in themselves as the active agents of God in this world.”[26] Hong himself proclaimed: “The New Jerusalem, the Heavenly capital [tianjing] is where God and Christ descended into the world, bringing both myself and the Young Monarch [Hong’s son Tiangui] to be the sovereigns. . . . God’s Heaven [Shangdi Tiantang] now exists among men.”[27] Hong’s followers were, as the New England Puritans phrased it, the “visible saints.” Contemporary Reconstructionists/Dominionists, inspired by theologians such as Rousas Rushdoony, believe that godly men have a duty to prepare a Kingdom of God on earth and administer divine rule according to biblical laws.
It is clear that premillennial views may cause far less human-initiated violence than postmillennial eschatologies. In the Rapture it is God that initiates it and directly causes all the violence and destruction. There is a significant difference between early Chinese Christian Liang Afa’s premillennial view of the Last Judgment. According to Liang Afa, the sheep will stand on the right hand of God and receive their eternal reward while the goats on God’s left will burn in hell. Only then would the Kingdom of God begin, and it would not be of this world, because all earthly things would be consumed in the fire of the Rapture. Liang Afa was following the eschatology that the Cantonese missionaries had taught him, and these Euro-American Christians were not pleased with Hong’s postmillennial views and especially the potential threat they posed to imperial prerogatives. Reilly recognizes the postmillennial character of Hong’s eschatology very well: “Hong[’s] . . . conception of the millennial kingdom was more earthly, present, and dynamic than that presented in Liang’s tract. He believed in a kingdom that was coming, even now, through the instrumentality of the Taiping [army].”[28] Political postmillennialism posed a direct threat to imperial rule, just as contemporary Christian dominionists are not shy in opposing the U.S. federal government and even, among some, threatening violence.
Whenever religious and national identities are fused, one will find religiously motivated violence.
I submit that this hypothesis has been firmly proved in this book. It is true not only for the Abrahamic religions (including of course the Taipings), but, as we have seen, time and time again, it has been confirmed wherever Buddhists, Hindus, Shintonists, and Sikhs have attempted to fuse religion and state. Except for ancient Tibet and Japan, it was primarily European colonial influence that led to the rise of religious nationalism and fundamentalism in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and China. Ironically, it was a Euoprean theory about the origins of the Indo-European languages that inspired the view that some Hindus and Buddhists now have about their cultural, religious, and racial superiority. I have also made much of the current Dalai Lama’s admission that a secular king with religious advisers would have been preferable after the Fifth Dalai Lama. He has now gone further to endorse a Tibetan Parliament in which he would have no authority at all. Furthermore, I have demonstrated that Bhutan’s Dharma kings have a much better record than the violence committed by the First Shabdrung and the chaos created by concealing his death for fifty-one years. The British recommendation that the Bhutanese establish a secular monarchy has paid rich dividends for this small Buddhist nation.
A mystical monism, found primarily in some Asian religions but only on the fringes of the Abrahamic faiths, may have played a major role in the Japanese losing their personal autonomy by identifying with their emperor during the violent nationalism of the twentieth century.
In addition to a Zen actualism that fuses the Ought and the Is, thereby eliminating the difference between good and evil, there is an absolute monism that dissolves the individual self into a undifferentiated whole; or, for Zen political theology, into the emperor himself. As Zennist Ekijū Yamazaki states: “When imperial subjects meld themselves into one with the august mind [of the emperor], their original countenance [Buddha mind] shines forth.”[29] This is a widely held Mahāyānist concept of no-self, meaning only no substantial self in the Pāli texts, but now indicating no self at all. Ekijū had been the Zen master of Lieutenant Colonel Sugimoto Gorō, one of the most celebrated soldiers of the Chinese campaigns of the 1930s. Sugimoto believed that Japanese expansionism was a holy war prosecuted in the spirit of Buddhist compassion. He explained that “war is moral training for not only the individual but for the entire world. It consists of the extinction of self-seeking and the destruction of self-preservation.”[30] Appealing to the Sōtō Master Dōgen, Sugimoto declares that one must discard body and mind “until there is nothing left to discard.”[31] Ekijū maintained that his student’s zazen practice was equal to that of Bodhidharma, the first Zen Patriarch, but Sugimoto was unique in perfecting what he called “Soldier Zen,” which stressed “the unity of sovereign and subjects, eliminating their ego and getting rid of their selves.”
Intimately connected to the fusion of selves is the principle of the divine immanence of the emperor. This concept is just as politically dangerous as a transcendent God intervening, as Yahweh did, as a divine warrior fighting the Israelites battles for them.[32] In his classic work Religion in Japanese History Joseph Kitigawa observes that Japan established an “immanental theocracy” in which the imperial throne represents “God and Caesar . . . rolled into one.”[33] He contends that Meiji Confucians and Shintoists attempted to “uphold the principle of ‘immanental theocracy’ in order to defend the nation from dangerous elements of ‘modernity.’”[34] But it appears as if Buddhism was able to accomplish this is in a non-theistic way, although one could say that the putative deity of the emperor would still make it theocratic even for Buddhists. Kitigawa argues that it was the Japanese “ethnocentric belief in the superindividual which was the Japanese nation itself” that “drove Japan down the dreadful and fateful path toward the Second World War.”[35]
It is essential to keep in mind, however, that the imperial government did not require belief in the divinity of the emperor until 1935. It is also important to note that Hirohito himself rejected deification and predicted correctly that it would only cause trouble. Although certainly not divine, he was definitely prescient in this prediction. In the next and final chapter I offer an antidote to religious nationalism and fundamentalism: the Gospel of Weak Belief. I will also propose that there is a better way to overcome “otherness” than dissolution into God or his representatives on earth. The solution I submit is the social-relational self of Buddhism, Confucianism, and major twentieth-century Euro-American philosophers.
See John Ardussi, “Formation of the State of Bhutan,” 11–12.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 520.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 70.
Luther’s Works, eds. N. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–76), vol. 33, 189.
Quoted in Wickeri, “Christianity and the Origins of the Taiping Movement,” 13.
Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 77.
Gold, “Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation” in Fundamentalisms Observed, 544.
Collected Works of the Mother (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobiondo Ashram, 2nd ed., 2001), vol. 10, 34.
Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 86.
Ibid., 86.
J. L. Jaini, Commentary on Kundakundāchārya’s Samayasara in The Sacred Books of the Jainas, ed. J. L. Jaini (New York: AMS Press, 1974), vol. 8, 43.
Gandhi, The Collected Works, vol. 12:375. “We are born in sin, and we are enslaved in the body, because of our sinful deeds” (ibid.; a letter dated March 7, 1914).
Ibid., vol. 12, 165.
Gandhi, Young India 8 (January 21, 1926): 121.
Anna Case-Winters, God’s Power, Traditional Understandings, and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1990), 27.
Isaiah 45:7, The Anchor Bible.
Job 42:11, RSV.
Luther’s Works, eds. N. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–76), vol. 33, 189.
Ibid.
Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Śiva: The Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 325.
Thomas B. Coburn, Devī-Māhātmya: The Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 147.
Catherine Keller, “Warriors, Women, and the Nuclear Complex” in Sacred Interconnections: Postmodern Spirituality, Political Economy, and Art, ed. David R. Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 72.
Christopher Key Chapple, Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), xiv.
Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 114.
Quoted in Shih, The Taiping Ideology, 89.
Wickeri, “Christianity and the Origins of the Taiping Movement,” 30.
Quoted in Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 112.
Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 111.
Quoted in Victoria, Zen at War, 123.
Quoted in ibid., 120.
Quoted in ibid.
See Millard C. Lind, Yahweh Is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel (Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 1980).
Joseph M. Kitigawa, Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 248.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 261.