The first nine chapters contain detailed analyses of Asian religious history in six countries where religiously motivated violence has been alleged or is apparently evident. Except for the violence caused by the fusion of state and religion in Tibet, Bhutan, and Japan, I demonstrate that most Asian religious conflict came after colonial incursions in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma. Even though I will conclude that there was far more faith-based violence in Asia than most people believe, the Abrahamic religions still have the worst record. Chapter 10 will be a theoretical investigation of why this has been the case. Only one factor—a mystical monism not prevalent nor favored in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—was the basis of a distinctively Japanese Buddhist call for individuals to identify totally with the emperor and to wage war on behalf of a divine ruler. The Asians have gone to war just as often as any other peoples, but I believe that my research will show that they have, before Muslim and European incursions, done this far less for religious reasons.
The final chapter offers an analysis of one fundamental reason why there was and continues to be less religious violence in Asia. Playfully, I call it the “Gospel of Weak Belief,” where the religious praxis of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism counters the “strong” belief—one could say the religious gnosis—of various forms of fundamentalism, Asian and Euro-American. Philosopher Richard Swinburne has coined the phrase “weak belief,” and I argue that the biblical view of faith supports Swinburne’s fideism—a primary emphasis on faith, not justified belief. Many Christians miss the importance of Jesus’ rebuke of the “doubting” Thomas, the disciple who demanded proof: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,”[1] or to be more precise, “and yet have faith.” Even Thomas Aquinas, the Christian theologian who most trusted reason, defined faith as a theological virtue, that is, “a habit of the mind . . . making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent.”[2] I submit that those who view their faith in this way will more likely refrain from committing violence in the name of their deity. For many of them weak belief leads to a strong faith in the basic moral principles of their religions.
When I started this project in the late 1980s, the original title was “The Peace of the East.” I had taught Asian philosophy and religion for nearly twenty years, but I knew Asian history only in broad outlines. When I did consult the historical record, I initially found data such as the following crime statistics from a British census. In 1881 the frequency of crime by religion was as follows: one of 274 Christian Europeans; one of 799 Christian Indians; one of 1,361 Hindus; and one of 3,787 Buddhists. If the Jains had been included in this count, one would have expected an even higher ratio for them. With regard to the native Christian count, an English official made the following wry observation: “It appears from these figures that while we effect a very marked moral deterioration in the natives by converting them to our creed, their natural standard of morality is so high that, however much we Christianize them, we cannot succeed in making them altogether as bad as ourselves.”[3] An 1899 statistical dictionary reported that for every 100,000 people in Western Europe there were from 10 to 230 prisoners; 190 for England; and 38 for India. My general thesis for non-violent Asians continued to hold.
While on sabbatical in India in 1992, I did research for my Gandhi book at Punjab University in the Department of Gandhian Studies. When I first arrived in Chandigarh, I saw Indian troops at every main intersection and was warned that Sikh militants were still active. I was also dissuaded from visiting the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the famous Hindu pilgrimage sites in the mountains. On December 6, 1992, a group of Hindu and Sikh graduate students invited me to spend the day at a Muslim village fifteen miles outside Chandigarh. The students’ semester project was to teach English or Hindi lessons to the village children. The most prominent structure in this village was not a mosque (it appeared to be in ruins), but a temple dedicated to the nine forms of the Hindu Goddess Durgā. While touring the temple, I learned that most of the villagers accepted the free daily meals that the priest and his cooks offered. This is the “Peace of the East” I had been seeking: Gandhi’s India of village republics where all faiths and all castes would be living in peace and harmony.
When I returned to my faculty hostel at Punjab University, I noticed that everyone was gathered around the TV. There was dramatic footage of Hindu militants, using pick axes, sledge hammers, and bare hands, destroying the Babri Mosque in the North Indian city of Ayodhya. Local police stood by passively, and, by the time the army was called in, the mosque lay in ruins. Hindus had long held a deep-seated grievance at this site, because it was allegedly the birth place of Rāma, the divine king celebrated in the grand epic Rāmāyaṇa. In 1528 a Muslim general Mir Banki destroyed the temple at the site, and on it he built the Babri mosque to honor the first Mughal Emperor Babur. Hindu nationalists had given clear warning that Mughal monuments, including the Taj Mahal, were on their hit list. After the Ayodhya incident, I was now fully aware of the dangers of Hindu fundamentalism, and in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Mosque, 2,000 (mostly Muslims) lost their lives in sectarian violence across India. Ironically, before I left Bangalore in Karnataka state for my stay in Chandigarh, I was warned not to travel there because of Sikh militants, but after the destruction of the mosque, the Punjab was one of the few states in India that did not have any Ayodhya-related deaths. In Karnataka, however, seventy-eight were killed and thirty-three deaths were due to direct fire from police.
My naive thesis of peaceful Asians was dissolving before my eyes. Later I would read about Zen soldiers in Imperial Japan and Buddhist militants in contemporary Sri Lanka. More recently my research uncovered violent lamas in Bhutan and Tibet. The greatest surprise of all was 1,000 years of “war” magic in Tibet and the use of military and tantric weapons by the Shabdrung, Bhutan’s highest lama. And now with Buddhist attacks against Muslims in Burma (now called Myanmar), I am forced to conclude that Buddhism was the Asian religion that had the worst record of religiously motivated violence. However, as I demonstrate in chapter 9, the Taiping Christians have the world record for the number of religious killings by one single sect. From 1850 to 1862 an estimated 20 million Chinese died in the brutal Taiping campaigns.
In his ground-breaking book Sinister Yogis, David Gordon White deconstructs the modern Euro-American idea of peaceful yogis practicing the physical postures, controlling their breath, and sitting in meditation. (The yoga that many Euro-Americans now practice was introduced by Indian practitioners in the 1930s.) The ancient Vedic yogi was instead a warrior (yogayukta) “yoked” to his chariot—the wounded would tie themselves to it—and his ultimate goal was the ride through the sky and “pierce” the sun. (Many medieval theistic texts interpret this as union with the Śiva, Viṣṇu, Mahadevī, the great goddess.) White notes the close association of the verbs *yuj “to yoke” and *kram “to step,” most famously in the three cosmic steps of the wily dwarf priest, the fifth incarnation of Viṣṇu, the “cosmic strider” and solar deity par excellence. White mentions in passing the English word “joust” is related to the Sanskrit verb *yuj, and he finds yogayuktas jousting in the Mahābhārata. In this text the word yoga is mentioned 900 times, and it has in many instances taken on the new and broad meaning of “way,” as the way of meditation (dhyanayoga), the way of works (karmayoga), and the way of devotion (bhaktiyoga.) However, White finds fourteen narratives “with the practitioner of yoga either entering the disc of the sun or penetrating the body of another.”[4] The latter siddhi power is of course the “trick of choice” of the sinister yogis that White finds in the medieval literature.
White refers to an aphorism that is repeated widely in the literature and one that bridges the Vedic and Epic traditions: “These are the two people in this world who pierce the solar disc. The wanderer and the yogayukta who is [slain] while facing [his enemies] on the field of battle.”[5] Their spiritual goal, however, was the same: to overcome death, an undeniable physical fact that supports a religious universalism, that, White correctly argues, is immune any variation of French deconstruction. So, in addition to the yogic warriors of the Mahābharāta, there are ascetic wanderers—spiritual warriors in their own way—who practiced the siddhi powers mentioned in the Yoga-Sūtra. The passages that mention these powers are usually passed over by both medieval and modern readers of the text. It was an eleventh-century commentator of the Yoga-Sūtra who codified the famous grammarian Pāṇini’s preference that verb root *yuj means to separate the body-mind from the pure puruṣa spirit. As White explains: “The hermeneutical strategy of the Yoga-Sūtra and its principal commentators was . . . to elide yoga practice [particularly the use of siddhi powers] in favor of meditation.”[6] White finds it ironic that these philosophers—they were not yogis themselves—turned Vedic yoga into its opposite: viyoga, which “means ‘separation,’ ‘disunion,’ and ‘disjunction.’ Ancient accounts of yogis . . . never portray them as . . . introspective—but rather always as extrovert, if not predatory.”[7]
The Buddha developed and practiced siddhi powers (e.g., making a thousand copies of himself and flying to Sri Lanka and Burma), but warned against their misuse. The qualifier “sinister” is White’s way to describe the many accounts of yogis-gone-bad, which modern Hindu and Euro-American commentators have brushed off as isolated aberrations or literary inventions. It is more difficult to ignore the use of siddhi powers in the Buddhist tradition, especially among the tantrics. In his book Buddha’s Lions James B. Robinson has translated stories of the eighty-four Siddhas of Tibetan Buddhism. The major themes of these playful and delightful stories are the breaking of brahamic purity rules (“let all the visible world be edible and drinkable”),[8] an emphasis on the low caste origin of many of the Siddhas, and the use of non-violent means. The stories also make clear that the use of siddhi powers is valid only as a means to the liberation of all sentient beings. As we shall see in chapters 5 and 6, Tibetan and Bhutanese lamas have abused this ethical rule as a way to justify the practice of black magic against invading armies and even against other Buddhist sects. Conventional violence in the name of religion was also committed by armed monks and competing armies. Here we have notorious examples of a putative good end justifying violent means.
There is no evidence that Kṛṣṇa ever sat in meditation, controlled his breath, or practiced the asanas; but, because of his use of siddhi powers, he is called the “Lord of Yoga.” At the end of the Bhagavad-gītā, Sanjay declares this “yoga from [great] Kṛṣṇa, Yoga’s Lord himself.”[9] R. C. Zaehner acknowledges that Kṛṣṇa is using his siddhi powers because in the chapter on Kṛṣṇa’s transfiguration—revealing his divine cosmic body—he translates yoga as “creative power.” Arjuna asks: “Show Thou forth, Lord of creative power (yoga), [this] Self that passes not away.”[10] Kṛṣṇa’s penetration of all beings by residing in all souls and his taking over the identity of all beings in his cosmic body is celebrated by all his devotees. As a young lover in Vrindaban he was able to make as many copies of himself as was necessary to satisfy his gopi-girl admirers. As an adult he maintains, according to the stories, 16,000 wives in separate households. Śiva is also a master yogi, but his use of siddhi powers is not as constructive as Kṛṣṇa’s. Śiva destroys his enemies with laser-like vision, and he wears the skulls of those whom he has penetrated with his siddhi powers. Did some Śaiva sādhus use their patron deity as a model for their anarchic behavior?
The siddhi power most favored in Hindu literature is taking over the body of another person, sometimes for nefarious purposes. Incredibly enough, the great philosopher Śaṅkara (788–820 CE) used this technique in his debate with Ubhaya Bharati, who challenged, as William Pinch tells the story from a fifteenth-century biography, the great sage that he could not “claim to be . . . a ‘fully realized being’ without knowledge of . . . . ‘the art and science of sexual desire.’”[11] In response Śaṅkara entered the body of a recently deceased king, experienced all the delights of sexual play and intercourse, and eventually returned, fully “enlightened,” to his own body to win the debate. It was said that he became so expert in these matters that he was able to write a commentary on the Kamasūtra, ancient India’s famous sex manual. One could say that in this case the use of siddhi powers was for the greater good of obtaining the most knowledge possible.
At the end of his life the Mughal emperor Akbar became more and more intrigued by the yogis and their reputed powers. (Even the fanatical Muslim emperor Aurganzeb tried some of their magical remedies.) Akbar gave them land grants and built a “City of Yogis” for them. He would spend much time among them, learning about their practices and witnessing their feats. One account has Akbar boasting about some gold that an alchemical ascetic had made for him. According to what Pinch describes as a “fabulous tale” recorded by John Marshall of the East Indian Company,[12] Akbar asked a yogi to put his soul into the body of a deer after the yogi had done the same with his own soul. So shaken and anxious was the emperor by these incredible feats that he ordered that the yogi be executed. Before the yogi was killed, as the story is told, he managed to trade souls with Akbar and everyone noticed that the “king [was] extremely altered” for the rest of his life.
Wandering ascetics also teamed up with other yogic warriors to form armed militias, which are, outside the epic accounts discussed above, referenced as early as the seventh century CE Harsacharita. It records the fact that King Pushpabhuti of Thaneswar had two armed yogis in his royal guard. About a century later Śaṅkara allegedly founded the ten groups (dasnamis) of India’s sādhus, although the word dasnamis is not found until 1600. Śaṅkara divided ascetics into two groups: “weapon-holders” and “ scripture-holders,” presumably with no condemnation of the former. The most notable of the weapon-holders were the dasnamis nagas (naked ascetics), who organized themselves, according to G. S. Ghurye’s translation of akhara, into “military regiments.”[13] In his book on Indian wrestlers, who also follow strict ascetic discipline, Joseph Alter reports that “for the nagas, fighting became an integral feature of their identity.”[14]
In addition to battles among themselves, these ascetic battalions often allied themselves with Mughal, Hindu, and British forces, most often during the last half of the eighteenth century. Because of their training in severe austerities, they were superb soldiers with ferocity, incredible stamina, and immunity to pain. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the nagas had opened their ranks to the lower castes and their numbers swelled dramatically. As we shall see, Anupgiri Gosain’s naga army was sometimes 30,000 strong, equipped not only with typical sādhu weapons (tridents, swords, and deadly iron discs) but also muskets and rockets. The discs (chakras) are replicas of Viṣṇu’s famous weapon, which, as depicted in his icons, spins on his upper hand index finger. They are like electric saw blades, but large enough to carry around the neck. They are flung with great accuracy and deadly force by slings—sometimes splitting bodies in half.
Thaneswar is a sacred site located near Kurukṣetra, the alleged site of the great battle in the Mahābhārata in Northwest India. Razed by Mahmud of Gazni in 1011 on his way to even greater destruction in Delhi, the Śiva temple and Sufi shrine has since been rebuilt. In 1657, Akbar, according to four different sources, witnessed a fierce battle between armed ascetics identified as 500 yogis and 250 sanyāsis. The former laid claim to the shrine but the latter, “trusting in God,” believed that they could prevail. The phrase “trusting in God” (Kṛṣṇa?) suggest that they were perhaps theistic Vaiṣṇavas, and the yogis might have been tantric Śaivas or Śaktas (followers of the goddess), whose goal was to become gods themselves. (The original Sāṃkhya philosophy of the great yogi Kapila was atheistic.) Acknowledging his weakness, the leader of the sanyāsis appealed to Akbar to negotiate a truce, but the two sides could not agree and fought it out instead. When it was clear that the sanyāsis were going to lose, Akbar ordered his troops to intervene on their side. There were high casualties and the leader of the yogis, described as a “miserable creature” in one Mughal account, was decapitated. The same source reported that Akbar, on his way back from war himself, “greatly enjoyed” the battle.[15]
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Śaiva ascetics had the upper hand over their Vaiṣṇava counterparts, and Pinch explains that Śaiva “Gosains would retain control of the Hardwar [kumbha mela] festival, including the right to tax pilgrims, police the gathering, and dispense justice, until 1796.”[16] In 1789 Śaiva ascetics attacked their Vaiṣṇava counterparts with swords at the kumbha mela in Nasik, and a British court decided that they must have separate bathing areas. Most people know of sādhus from videos of the triennial kumbha mela festivals in which sādhus have first “dip” in the Ganges at Hardwar, Nasik, Ujjain, or Allahabad, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna River. Even today some of the ascetics are armed with weapons: trisuls (Śiva’s trident), chimtas (long metal tongs), and swords; and, as with Sikh weapons, the antiques of these weapons are displayed at kumbha melas and worshipped as deities. As we shall see, the descendants of the ascetic warlord Anupgiri Gosain still venerate his weapons in their village in northern India.
Armed Vaiṣṇava sādhus, described as marching in battalions, dominated the kumbha melas of the nineteenth century, and British forces had to intervene frequently to separate them from the Śaivas. At the kumbha mela at Ujjain in 1850, the sectarian tension was so extreme that the British had to bring in troops to keep the two factions from fighting, and they stationed brahmin priests between two separate bathing sites. At the 1954 kumbha mela in Allalabad, some pilgrims attempted to get ahead of the nagas, who in retaliation killed a number of them with their trisuls and chimtas. In the ensuing melee an estimated 800 people were killed. In the early 1980s naga leaders were active in the campaign to restore the Rāma temple in Ayodhya. Although Rāma is not their patron deity, it appears that these sādhus did not want to be outmaneuvered on such an important issue and wanted a piece of the action. Pinch remarks that “beneath the . . . Hindu-Muslim fractures in Ayodhya today lies a deep, and oblique, Śaiva-Vaiṣṇava fault line.”[17]
Until the British introduced the modern concept of “pure” religions and religious identification at census times, India’s ascetics, as well as the populous in general, did not always emphasize or live by sectarian differences. For example, until 1861, Sikhs were identified as Hindus; and after the 1872 census, a separate Sikh religious identity became the basis for many to forge a militant Sikh nationalism and fundamentalism. At the same time Muslims objected to “outcastes” being counted as Hindus, which would have included many of the sādhus; and, as we shall see below, British authorities started counting them as non-religious vagrants. (The ascetics did not conform to the British concept of proper religious theism.) Once the religious divisions were created and emphasized, Muslims were eager to establish a more favorable ratio with Hindus, but Hindus grew anxious about losing the Sikhs and Dalits, as the “outcastes” and “untouchables” are now called, as part of their large majority.
In the Punjab, where most of India’s Sikhs live, Hindus were particularly concerned. Daniel Gold explains: “Certainly they had reason to fear for their community’s political strength—and, some thought, even for its very survival.”[18] Having its roots in the Punjab and perceiving threats from both Muslims and Sikhs, the nationalist and fundamentalist Ārya Samāj intensified its efforts in the late nineteenth century. Modernist categories of religious identity, introduced by the British, led to religious conflict and violence. Before the British census, as R. B. Bhagat surmises, “the group did not know how far it extended and what was its strength in numbers, therefore, had less accurate and less aggressive self-awareness.”[19] It is certainly conceivable that millions of Hindus did not even understand that they were a “majority” community let alone that they were “Hindus.” Bhagat continues: “Numbers became a political tool as Hindus were told that they constituted a majority and an effort was made to persuade them to act as a uniform community regardless of sect, caste or class affiliation. . . . There is a little historical evidence of sustained communal hatred operating at the popular level prior to colonial rule.”[20] The separation of a western Hindu and eastern Muslim Bengal in 1905 led to constant sectarian (Indians call it “communal”) violence, which Gandhi famously quelled temporarily in late 1946 and 1947 by walking from village to village in East Bengal.
Before the nineteenth century Śaiva nagas, Vaiṣṇava bairagis, and Muslim fakirs blended in ways that baffled Europeans. When Muslim Sufis came to India they learned ascetic practices from the nāth yogis, named after their thirteenth-century founder Goraknath. White explains that “the two groups quickly coalesced, with the Perso-Arabic terms faqīr (fakir, “poor man”), dervish (mendicant), shaikh (chief) becoming virtually synonymous with the Indic jogi in the minds of the Indians masses.”[21] Ascetic armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accepted all-comers, regardless of “religion,” caste, or virtue. Even though sādhus are supposed to be celibate, there was a large retinue of women and children in Anupgiri Gosain’s army, and he claimed a legitimate heir through a Muslim “wife.” In 1766 the British were defeated by armed ascetics in the Bengali district of Dinhata, and they condemned them indiscriminately as sādhus and fakirs. Many of them took full advantage of their fluid identities, aiding them in their additional vocations as India-wide merchants and spies. Incredibly enough, as White relates, “by the late 1780s ascetics had become the dominant money lending and property owning group in Allahabad, Benares, and Niazapur.”[22] For example, at one time nāth yogis owned more property and temples in Marwar than the princes and landed gentry did.
Much to the consternation of twentieth-century Hindu sectarians, it was Padmakar, a poet once in the service of Vaiṣṇava king Arjun Singh, who wrote the following lines praising the presumed Śaiva Anupgiri: “When he sees the needy he is compassionate, when slaughtering the evil he is merciless. . . . He is a remarkable horseman and an unsurpassed archer. He chants Śiva bhajans with such excellence and equanimity—no one can compare. His occupation is world conquest. . . . He is notorious in the lands of his enemies.”[23] Demonstrating the fluidity of religious affiliation, Padmakar was also associated with the goddess Tārā, Śiva’s consort in his tantric form as Bhairava, the patron deity of the naga yogis. (She is also a major goddess in Tibetan Buddhism.) Pinch reports that, while employed by the Vaiṣṇava king Arjun Singh, Padmakar blessed his king’s sword “with thousands of incantations to the goddess Chandi, another manifestation of śakti [cosmic feminine power] often associated with violence, devastation, and weaponry.”[24] At a visit at a Vaiṣṇava village of Anupgiri’s descendants, Pinch witnessed the worship of Anupgiri’s weapons at a Śaiva lingam, Śiva’s symbolic phallus. Pinch links both Padmakar and Anupgiri to the Hindu goddess (Kālī, Chandi, Tārā, and many others) in her violent forms. He states that Anupgiri and his descendants developed “an attractive bhakti [Vaiṣnava] pedigree, and their “Śaiva-Śakta habits are covered over with a proper Vaiṣnava veneer.”[25]
The ever-resourceful Anupgiri managed to build a temple-palace right in middle of Vrindaban, a Vaiṣṇava holy area which tourists call “Hare Krishna Land.” In order to resolve the confusion, some commentators thought that Gosain, meaning “complete control of the emotions,” was in Anupgiri’s case, a corruption of Goswami. This is a Vaiṣṇava honorific for “Lord of the Cows,” from Kṛṣṇa’s time with the cowherds of Vrindaban. Pinch believes that this solution is blatantly false, but that did not prevent the descendants mentioned above to proudly claim Vaiṣṇava lineage. They possess a drove of Kṛṣṇa images that they claim goes back to Anupgiri himself. In the city of Jhansi a Vaiṣṇava family claims ties to Umraogiri, Anupgiri’s brother in arms. During a visit to India, leaders of this family showed Pinch a remarkable portrait of the naked ascetic, riding on a horse with a sword raised in his right hand. Close examination of his forehead show the addition of a Vaiṣṇava tilak (red dot) just below the three horizontal white lines that indicate a Śiva devotee.
Pinch calls Anupgiri “the most successful military entrepreneur in the eighteenth century.”[26] From the 1760s to the turn of the century, Anupgiri’s troops were allied with the Muslim Mughals against the Hindu Marathas in 1761, and then again with the Mughals against the British in 1764. In the 1790s he joined the Marathas in their invasion of Bundelkhand, where he became so powerful that he and his men were able to collect crops as tax. Recognizing the rising power of the East India Company, Anupgiri’s final alliance before his death in 1803 was with the British. When the British reneged on the substantial pensions that Anupgiri’s commanders received, these naga warriors joined other ascetics in the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion against the British. Kanpur was the site of one of the bloodiest events of that war, and 120 British women and children were slaughtered by the rebels, some of whom were Anupgiri’s soldiers. The British response was so brutal and so comprehensive, plus the fact that colonial administration became even more entrenched, meant that ascetic mercenaries were essentially put out of business.
At this point readers might interject and say “these warrior yogis were obviously not motivated by religion,” and they would probably be correct. The battle at Thaneswar may simply have been a conflict about rights to occupy a sacred shrine, although sectarian differences between God-lovers and spiritual Titans, as I would call them,[27] may have played a role. Like many of India’s ascetic soldiers, Anupgiri and his brother did not choose to be yogis; rather, they, after their brahmin father died, were either sold to or adopted by Rajendragiri Gosain and brought up in his army. Thousands of others were volunteers, but they took on the guise of ascetics in order to participate in the lucrative occupation of mercenary warfare, and they would return during the monsoon to their families with the season’s booty. British authorities concluded that most of the yogis in their districts were not serious devotees of anything; and in the 1891 census, after many years attempting to get an accurate count of them, they placed them in a different category. They were neither Hindus, nor Jains, nor Buddhists, nor Muslims, nor Sikhs; instead, they were identified under “Miscellaneous, and Disreputable Vagrants.”[28] Since the Vagrant Act of 1840, police had been given the right to arrest any person who sought to “extort alms by offensively exhibiting any bodily ailment or deformity, or by any offensive or indecent practices, or by inflicting, or threatening to inflict, bodily injury upon themselves.”[29] Travelers to India today can see for themselves how difficult it would be to enforce such a law.
Viewing the 1657 battle at Thaneswar through twentieth-century eyes, however, makes a significant difference that validates the thesis of this book. Oral traditions among today’s sādhus identify the yogis at Thaneswar as Muslim fakirs, who attacked their Hindu predecessors and forced them, for the first time, to arm themselves. With this convenient twist, Hindu yogis were then, and wherever and whenever they now are threatened by Muslims, justified in using violence in self-defense. (This argument fails because we know that many Hindu ascetics were armed and violent as early as the seventh century CE.) The rise of sectarian conflict between Muslims and Hindus in the twentieth century has obviously re-colored this battle in a way that favors Hindu nationalism and excuses Hindu violence. Blaming every evil on Muslims is a familiar contemporary trope, even in America and Europe, and in chapter 4 we shall also see it playing out in the current violence against them in Burma.
In his long dialogues with Thomas Laird the current Dalai Lama shared this remarkable confession: “The Sixth Dalai Lama disrobed according to some [divine] plan. If he had disrobed and still remained the Dalai Lama, then he would have had a son who would have become king. That would have been better.”[30] This statement raises a host of issues, but let me suffice with one rhetorical question: Does his Holiness actually believe that Tibet would have been better without his wise and enlightened guidance? As we shall see in chapter 5, the recent Bhutanese monarchs have been arguably the most righteous Dharma Kings since Indian King Aśoka (304–232 BCE). They stand in stark contrast to the first Shabdrung (the Bhutanese equivalent of the Dalai Lama) and his use of both military and magical means to wreak havoc on his internal and external enemies in the seventeenth century. The alleged magical results—disease, snow storms, etc.—were obviously natural events, but the intentions by these lamas and monks were nonetheless violent. In chapters 3 and 4, I discuss the history of Burmese and Sri Lankan kings and the relatively harmonious relations they had with their Christian, Muslim, and ethnic minorities, and I will now discuss briefly similar developments in Nepal and Thailand.
The eighteenth-century Hindu King Jaya Prakash Malla formed an intimate alliance with Nepal’s Buddhists by instituting the cult of the Living Goddess. The story goes that every night the king played dice with the goddess Taleju (a Nepalese form of Durgā). One night the king made some sexual advances, and as punishment Taleju withdrew from his presence. She then declared that she would now appear only as a Buddhist virgin girl (kumarī) from a Kathmandu family that claims to have descended from the Buddha himself. Each royal kumarī has Shakya, the Buddha’s clan, as her surname. There are at least ten other Living Goddesses in the Kathmandu Valley, and ten-year-old Sajani Shakya, the kumarī of Bhaktapur, recently lost her crown by traveling to the United States to promote a film on the Living Goddesses of Nepal. According to the priests of Bhaktapur, Sajani became impure by leaving her home and traveling half way around the world.
The royal kumarī of Kathmandu would become, as the Emerald Buddha is in Thailand, the very seat of national sovereignty. Until the monarchy was abolished in 2008, the kings of Nepal, considered to be incarnations of Viṣṇu, were obliged to visit the Living Goddess for her blessing. One year the goddess placed the tika, a sacred mark just above the middle of the eyebrows, on the crown prince rather than the king himself. Her act proved prophetic because the king died later that year. In 1999, during a short course on Hinduism and Buddhism in Nepal, I took my students to have darśana (a viewing of a deity) with Amita Shakya, who was very reluctant to come out and greet us. Our guide told us she always preferred, as we could hear clearly that day, playing with her siblings. The goddess did give the traditional blessing to King Gayanendra when he ascended the throne after the crown prince shot his father and six other family members in 2001, so it is unclear whether or not she now acknowledges the legitimacy of the new republican government.
The relative peace in Nepal’s religious communities has now been shattered. Hindu nationalist organizations from India have recently registered with the government, and they may have had a role the May 2009 bombing of Kathmandu’s Church of the Assumption. Two women were killed and over a dozen were wounded. An interfaith vigil was held at the church and Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims attended the service. At the scene of the violence the National Defense Army, a Hindu militant group, left pamphlets calling for the return of Hindu kings and the end to religious freedom. This group was also responsible for the death of a Hindu priest in eastern Nepal in July of 2008.
In 1992 I visited Thailand for the first time, even though the U.S. State Department had issued a warning to tourists traveling there. The military dictatorship had just been overthrown, and in the previous protests fifty-two had been killed and hundreds wounded. Later investigations revealed that many protesters, mostly students, had been tortured and/or “disappeared.” The Buddhist King Rama IX—U.S. born, Swiss educated, and the world’s richest and longest living monarch—intervened and insisted that General Suchinda Kraprayoon and opposition leader Chamlong Srimuang put an end to the hostilities. In a demonstration of ultimate respect for the royal office, both men prostrated themselves at the feet of the king. Everywhere I went in the country I experienced incredible national pride and faith in their monarch to bring peace and democracy to the Thai people. Americans are still well received, even though previously the United States kept the military rulers in power, primarily so the U.S. Air Force could use Thai air bases during the Vietnam War. U.S. fighter-bombers from nine Thai bases delivered 80 percent of the ordnance dropped on Vietnam.
Rama IX has now lost his credibility and role as mediator among Thai political factions, because in 2010 he sided with the pro-monarchy “Yellow Shirts.” This faction forced a very popular Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra into exile, and his “Red Shirt” supporters led nation-wide protests calling for his return. Early on Red Shirt demonstrations were peaceful, even festive, and one leader’s Gandhi T-shirt was a constant reminder that the protests were supposed to be non-violent. When the army moved in to break up their encampment on April 10, 23 people were killed and about 400 wounded. (The final death toll from the protests was 88 with over 1,800 wounded.) The king now finds his closest allies in the military and business community, and he now faces Thaksin’s sister as the duly elected head of government. With regard to the Buddhist-Muslim violence in southern Thailand, Thaksin was severely criticized in 2004 for the brutal tactics that the Thai army used to put down the Muslim insurgency.
In his field work in southern Thailand, German social anthropologist Alexander Horstmann has found that there was, in the Thai-speaking provinces, a premodern, precolonial harmony between the Buddhists and Muslims living there. Their “inter-confessional relations” were such that “30 years ago, it was hardly possible to distinguish Buddhist and Muslims according to their dress or houses.”[31] Although Horstmann does not use the term “premodern,” his description of the situation fits the definition perfectly:
In the Thai-speaking parts, Buddhists and Muslims share a homologous structure and do not differ in the political, economic or social sphere. Social relations are organized according to local parameters of reciprocity and redistribution, whereas the integration of the stranger in local systems of exchange provides a crucial mechanism for the integration of the other within the self.[32]
Horstmann found a very different situation in the Muslim-speaking provinces: “While Buddhists and Muslims coexist harmoniously in the [Thai-speaking] provinces . . . and relations are characterized by ritual exchange, no such relations could ever develop in Patani, Yala and Narathiwat, where southern Thai Buddhists settled in the wake of state military intrusion into Malay systems.”[33] Horstmann also discovered something else significant: “Malay-speaking Muslims often regard Thai-speaking Muslims as inferior and complain that Thai-speaking Muslims would eat unclean food, neglect the mosque and prayers.”[34] The parallels to Burma are instructive: some international jihadists are hesitant about coming to the aid of their Burmese brethren, because they, too, believe that they are not true Muslims and that they have been polluted by Buddhist culture.
What distinguishes the Thai and Sri Lankan conflicts from the current Burmese violence is that both the Sri Lankan Tamils and the southern Thai Muslims have waged war against the government. (Significantly, Thai-speaking Muslims in syncretistic southern Songkla have not joined the insurgency.) Understandably, those governments can justify their actions on the principle of self-defense. In Burma the Muslims have, by and large, not provoked the violent response they have experienced. Furthermore, the religious motivations are far less clear in southern Thailand than in Sri Lanka or Burma. Many Muslims are not anti-Buddhist; rather, as it was described by Don Pathan, “our citizenship shouldn’t come at the expense of our identity.”[35] What distinguishes Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhists from their Thai counterparts is that only some southern Buddhists have formed armed resistance against the Muslims in their provinces. About 5,000 lives have been lost since 2004, and Buddhist temples have become armories that supply Buddhist militias, which fight in concert with 30,000 Thai soldiers. “Yet,” as The Economist reports, “it is remarkable that the armed struggle has aroused no wider Buddhist backlash against the Muslim minority in the rest of the country.” The anonymous author offers a reason: “Thailand’s Buddhist structure is more hierarchical. The monarch and the political establishment keep the monks on a tight leash.”[36] I would have had more confidence in this assessment ten years ago.
In the course of this book we will see that British influence set the conditions for religious violence committed by Hindu nationalists against Muslims; Sri Lankan Buddhists against Tamils, Christians, and Muslims; southern Thai Buddhists against Muslims and vice versa; Burmese Buddhists against Indians; and the rise of Sikh nationalists and fundamentalists. (Farther afield, Fiji has never experienced political harmony since the British brought Indians there to work in the sugar plantations.) In 1906, in a typical divide-and-conquer colonial maneuver, the British, without consulting the people involved, took four northern provinces from Muslim Malaysia and gave them to Buddhist Thailand, and the conditions for the current violence there were then set in place.
In this book I will demonstrate that, except for Tibet and Bhutan, religiously motivated violence in Asia was rare before the arrival of Muslim armies and European colonialists. I will further show that Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh fundamentalism is the result of a “reverse” Orientalism by which some thinkers, under the influence of modernist concepts, proposed theories of religious and cultural superiority by giving a racial interpretation to the Indo-Aryan hypothesis of European linguists. In this heuristic the word “modernist” will be used, rather than the less precise “modern,” which in many instances simply means “contemporary.”
One of the defining characteristics of modernism is the tendency to dichotomize: to separate fact from value; to view religions as distinct from one another; and, modeling individuals as social atoms, to separate people from each other. The existentialist alienation expressed in the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre represents the extreme results of this social atomism and fragmentation. Christian missionaries introduced the idea of one religion being superior to another, and Hindu and Buddhist intellectuals, reversing the direction of Euro-American Orientalism and, ironically, claiming Aryan superiority following the Indo-European hypothesis of European linguistics, reformulated their faith traditions in a modernist nationalist framework. (Under the modernist view, nations became social atoms writ large.) It is significant to note that the Sikhs did not separate themselves from Hindus until the British praised what they mistakenly viewed as a Judeo-Christian monotheism in their scriptures.
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 Bankim Chattopadhyaya claimed that caste divisions, child marriage, and 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 nineteenth 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, and the reactionary Hindutva movement in India and an equivalent Sinhalatva in the Buddhist nationalism of Sri Lanka. In chapter 4 I will demonstrate that a similar development occurred in Burma.
In my work on Sri Lankan Buddhism, and the brief research I did on Thailand summarized above, 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 follow the constructive postmodernism of the Claremont philosopher/theologian David R. Griffin and the authors in the Series on Constructive Postmodern Thought at the State University of New York Press. Explanation and applications of this heuristic are found most often in chapters 2, 3, 4, 9, and most extensively in chapter 11. Constructive postmodernism represents a synthesis of premodern and modern ideas, focusing on the rejection of modernist dichotomies such as inner/outer, subject/object, private/public, religion/science, means/ends, and reason/emotions, while at the same time re-appropriating premodern ritual repetition, organicism, and holism. Not all religiously motivated violence can be attributed to modernist dichotomizing (certainly not in premodern Tibet and Japan), but I am confident that I can demonstrate that much of it can be.
The answer to one methodological question is essential to the success of this book’s analysis: What constitutes religiously motivated violence? First, one can infer violent intentions from direct quotations. When Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Elle Gunavamsa sings the following lines—“the sword is pulled from the [scabbard], it is not put back unless smeared with blood”—to troops as they went into battle against the non-sectarian Tamil Tigers for the defense of a Buddhist motherland, this is, I submit, religiously motivated violence. The material evidence—destruction of temples, scriptures, and other religious artifacts—is also solid evidence. Furthermore, there is circumstantial evidence that early tantric rites by both Buddhist and Hindu practitioners involved human sacrifice and sectarian violence. Finally, even though many of the results of tantric rites against external and internal enemies of Tibetan Buddhist sects were storms, earthquakes, and disease, which we moderns would say were due to unrelated to natural causes, the lamas’ intentions were religiously motivated. The violent consequences were attributed to the power of “war magic” and the will of the Bodhisattva Chenrezig (Avalokite in Sanskrit) and his attending wrathful deities. Hindu armies—in ancient times as well as even today—go into battle with the blessings of the Great Goddess Mahadevī. (Buddhist militants in Sri Lanka also call on her power.) The parallels to Yahweh the Warrior, who brought down the walls of Jericho at the sound of trumpets, are chilling, compelling, and instructive.[37]
John 20:29. Revised Standard Version. RSV hereafter.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Benzinger Brothers, 2nd and revised ed., 1920), 2. 2. question 4, article 1.
Quoted in J. Head and S. L. Cranston, eds., Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery (New York: Julian Crown Publishers, 1977), 69.
David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68.
Quoted in ibid., 60.
Ibid., 41.
Ibid., 38.
James B. Robinson, ed. and trans., Buddha’s Lions: The Lived of the 84 Siddhas (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1979), 232.
R. C. Zaehner, trans. and ed. Hindu Scriptures (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1966), 18.75.
Ibid., 11.4.
William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 198.
Ibid., 54.
G. S. Ghurye, Indian Sadhus (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1953), 116.
Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 223, 224.
Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, 29.
Pinch, “Subaltern Sadhus? Political Ascetics in Indian Myth, Memory, and History,” paper presented at The Peasant Symposium, May 1997, accessed at www.virginia.edu/soasia/symsem/kisan/papers/sadhus.html on November 23, 2013. Cited with MS pagination, 11.
Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, 9fn15.
Daniel Gold, “Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation” in Fundamentalisms Observed, eds., Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 539.
R. B. Bhagat, “Census and the Construction of Communalism,” The Economic and Political Weekly (November 24, 2001), accessed at www.sacw.net/2002/CensusandCommunalism.html on April 17, 2014.
Ibid.
White, Sinister Yogis, 199.
Ibid., 226.
Himmatbahadur Virdavali, 2–8 (selections from vv. 3–50), quoted in Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, 124.
Ibid., 207.
Ibid., 223, 229.
Ibid., 5.
See N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000).
White, Sinister Yogis, 240.
Quoted in Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, 239.
Thomas Laird, The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 184–85.
Alexander Horstmann, “Transformation of Buddhist-Muslim Coexistence in Southern Thailand” accessed at http://www.uni-muenster.de/Ethnologie/South_ Thai/resource/Transformation.pdf on November 30, 2013.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Thailand Grapples with Deadly Tensions between Muslims, Buddhists,” The PBS News Hour (February 21, 2012).
“Fears of New Religious Strife,” The Economist (July 27, 2013).
See Millard C. Lind, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Isreal (Scotsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1980); and Tremper Longman and Daniel G. Reid, God is a Warrior (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995).