*1.2. Double E*ff*ect*

Pacifism does not mean passiveness, for Buddhism mandates not just refraining from evil deeds (*discipline*), but also doing good (*kindness*, *compassion*) and benefitting others through skillful means ("Text of Bodhisattva Disciplines", *Yogac¯ arabh ¯ umi ¯ S´astra ¯* ).<sup>18</sup> Acts must be judged by both the motivating intentions (compassion for saving others or even the person being killed) and the ensuing consequences.<sup>19</sup> This opens the door to *properly-motivated* utilitarian calculation: for example, one story of a bodhisattva who saved 500 merchants by slaying dozens of pirates is commonly interpreted to mean that one is permitted to kill "with compassion in order to save many" ( 一 殺 多 生, *yisha duosheng*).<sup>20</sup>

There remains, however, innate tension between the act of killing (and the politics that often entangle it) and fundamental Buddhist ethics such as non-violence. In a move that should be familiar to scholars of Christian just war theory, resolution is attempted by focusing on the compassionate intent with which one should wage war. There is, various sutras say, merit in su ¯ ffering and sacrificing oneself and one's worldly comforts and wealth for the sake of protecting one's family or other living beings: for example, says the *Arya-Satyakaparivarta ¯* , when "the action [is] conjoined with intentions of compassion and not abandoning", then warfare may become meritorious.<sup>21</sup>

These doctrinal developments do not satisfactorily resolve the inherent tension between violent act and Buddhist principle any more than the doctrine of double e ffect reconciles the same problem in Christian just war ethics; many adherents of both religions would agree with this statement, even as some of their co-religionists take up arms for various causes. The parallel doctrinal elaborations, however, show that religious creeds have always struggled with the demands of human society, and I will return to this in the discussion of Burma/Myanmar.

### **2. Asceticism to Overcome Human Su** ff**ering**

The practice of rigorous self-discipline or self-denial appears in many religions and can take di fferent forms, including meditation, fasting, and isolation; its primary purpose is to overcome the confines of human nature and the su ffering that inevitably follows from it.

Of the di fferent Buddhist schools, the Western world is probably most familiar with Mahay¯ ana, ¯ which dominates northern Asia (especially Tibet, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan), or secondarily with Vajrayana, which is mostly practiced in India. Theravada is the major strand in southeast Asia ¯ (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka). All three schools share core Buddhist beliefs,<sup>22</sup> including the Four Noble Truths: life inevitably entails su ffering, which is caused by ignorance and unsatisfied craving and can breed vices such as anger, hatred, greed, and envy; this su ffering can only be alleviated with enlightenment and overcoming of desire, which is achieved "by a course of carefully disciplined and moral conduct, culminating in the life of concentration and meditation led by the Buddhist monk."<sup>23</sup> This process is the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment, which entails right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right e ffort, right

<sup>17</sup> (Rackett 2014).

<sup>18</sup> (Yu 2005, pp. 48, 224n11–12).

<sup>19</sup> (Yu 2005, p. 50).

<sup>20</sup> ((Yu 2005, pp. 48, 224n13: Agamas, ¯ *Fo hai deng* 佛 海 燈 Land of the Buddha-Sea, v. 2 n. 4 (1937): pp. 3–6)).

<sup>21</sup> (Jenkins 2010, pp. 68, 74n34).

<sup>22</sup> These major branches of Buddhism differ in significant ways, as well. Theravada Buddhism is grounded in the extensive ¯ and varied *Pali* canon, which includes some works of uncertain origin but is generally considered to have derived from the Buddha and his own disciples. The canon is usually divided into "three baskets" (*Tipitaka*): the Basket of Discipline (*Vinaya Pitaka)* covering the rules of the *sangha* and its monks and nuns, the Basket of Discourses *(Sutta Pitaka*) recounting Buddha's teachings, and the Basket of Higher Teachings (*Abhidhamma Pitaka*) providing philosophical and scholastic underpinnings and explanations, each of which consist of multiple works.

<sup>23</sup> (de Bary 1972, p. 9).

mindfulness, and right concentration; these eight paths fall into three different themes—conduct, mental development, and wisdom.

To help one follow the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment,<sup>24</sup> the *Pali* canon advocates *dhutanga* (renunciation), whose accompanying practices include wearing only robes of secondhand clothing, fasting intermittently, eating only food offered as alms, living in seclusion or away from people and distractions, and living simply by sleeping anywhere that can be used as a sleeping place, among other behaviours.

*Dhutanga* is not required for all people, but it is common for laity to adopt some of its measures temporarily, whether in the letter of *dhutanga* or with actions in the spirit of its guidance. In Theravada ¯ practice, including in Myanmar, many if not most males become novice monks for a period of time.<sup>25</sup>

The path to enlightenment is ultimately a personal one, and the earliest Buddhist monks were "wandering mendicants" and thus more individualistic, as they were not part of "orders" in the sense of being in organized communities.<sup>26</sup> Buddhist monks eventually formed groups, however, which yielded both internal hierarchies amongs<sup>t</sup> the monks as well as a structure for relating to the laity.

With society comes not only social hierarchy but also physical infrastructure such as temples. While Buddhist temples are intended to inspire and promote practices that can lead to enlightenment, they—like most religious architecture—have evolved in ways that inadvertently promote the achievements of men. In part, this is because religion is only one of many claimants on society, and even individualistic, ascetic religions can be used as vehicles for exerting influence on others.

Here, one broad difference between Mahay¯ ana and Therav ¯ ada is worth noting: Mah ¯ ay¯ ana doctrine ¯ encourages everyone, including lay people, to reach Enlightenment and to follow the Bodhisattva's Eightfold Path by also teaching others, because aspirations for mere personal liberation from earthly impurities and wanderings can be selfish. (This process often includes lay people entering retreats.) Doctrinally, Mahay¯ ana is more spiritually-egalitarian. ¯

In contrast, Theravada thought focuses on meditation and one's own achievement of ¯ *arhat* and subsequent freedom from rebirth after death, which has the tendency to exclude laity from achieving *arhatta.*<sup>27</sup> In comparison to Mahay¯ ana practice, these aspects of Therav ¯ ada doctrine might lend itself ¯ to greater hierarchy and tribalism. (These are relative differences, of course, and we will see how Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar attempts to bridge the gap between clergy and laity). ¯

### **3. Limits of Ascetic Withdrawal from Worldly Societal Concerns**

Buddhism originated partly in response to existing social and political circumstances: Buddhist doctrine rejected the Hindu caste system by deeming the different classes and castes all equal, because men achieve respect with their moral virtue and spiritual merit, and not by accident of birth. It also denied the divine right of kings and monarchical divinity, as sovereign legitimacy depends instead on one's ability to protect and lead the people.<sup>28</sup>

Obviously, this had limited effect in practice. Buddhist aloofness from society sits in tension with political demands and natural social attachments, and even the Buddha could not escape this dilemma: there is a canon story in which the Buddha, although he had already renounced his place in and ties to the Sakya clan into which he was born, once rushed to the clan's assistance and put himself in danger ´ in order to protect his kin from attack by the kingdom of Vaisana (*Ekottaragama ¯* , chap. 26), and he was saddened and disturbed when the clan was later destroyed.<sup>29</sup>

<sup>24</sup> Despite the precept of non-violence in Buddhism, some might interpret certain ascetic practices such as fasting as doing violence to one's body in pursuit of liberating one's mind, e.g., (Olson 2014).

<sup>25</sup> See fn97 on temporary novitiation practices.

<sup>26</sup> (D. Smith 1965, p. 5). 27

(Katz 1989, p. 280). 28

(de Bary 1972, p. 45).

<sup>29</sup> (Yu 2005, pp. 53–54).

Both physical and spiritual withdrawal from society should follow from renouncing its existing social and political structure. But despite the apolitical essence of Buddhist doctrine and its emphasis on individual enlightenment, Buddhist monks eventually formed communities with each other and organized over time. In a sense, these monastic communities function as substitutes for familial and tribal communities, and it is not uncommon for monks who give up their family names to consider themselves "sons" of the Buddha—to enter into his lineage, so to speak. Especially in community form, even ascetic Buddhism must come to some accommodation with broader society's social and political arrangements, and sometimes draws from those structures to do so.

### *3.1. Syncretizing Social Influences*

Religious doctrine is often perceived as a Platonic Form—a timeless and immutable idea that transcends and shapes the essence of objects on this earth—but religious insights are also influenced and manipulated by circumstances, and religious doctrines and practices evolve over time as people contest them. One common adaptation is accommodation with existing folk and pagan religions in various ways, perhaps by scheduling major holy days to coincide with events that are already significant (e.g., Jesus was unlikely to have been born on December 25, or even in the winter).

### *3.2. Functional Polytheism and Its Influences*

Buddhism, too, is influenced by external forces: in contemporary practice, Buddhism is a moral philosophy to which a syncretic polytheistic religion became attached. This is more obvious in Mahay¯ ana practice, for example, in which Bodhisattvas are worshipped in addition to the Buddha. ¯ In contrast, Theravada deifies the Buddha while all others aspire to become ¯ *arhats*, but it still acquires polytheistic elements in practice when it mixes with animism, as in Myanmar, where ancestors, spirits, and personified universal forces (*nats*) are given supernatural abilities and worshipped within Buddhism.<sup>30</sup> So even if Buddhist doctrine constitutes a moral philosophy more than a religion, it would be a disservice to ignore the functional polytheism with which it is often practiced.

Given the non-violent and ascetic content of Buddhist credo, one might assume that any such deviation from pure doctrine would largely explain Buddhist turns to nationalist violence. But religions do not operate by doctrinal content alone.

I argue that the merger with folk religion should counter-intuitively mitigate against Buddhist absolutist violence, because an overlying polytheism *may* serve as a structural check. In polytheism, gods come in all di fferent kinds: there are "high gods" who created the universe, gods that look after more or less literal realms (e.g., sky, ocean, winds, hearth, other gods), gods that inhabit even the smallest of things (e.g., trees, reeds, animals), and gods of abstract concepts (e.g., fate, love, wisdom, compassion, justice).

While there have always been gods who accept or advocate violence in their service, the call to arms is even more threatening when it comes from moralizing gods, who will punish moral transgressions between human beings. Moralizing gods appear in some local religions as early as 2800 bce, but they spread more widely during the Axial Age (1st millennium bce) and in the post-Axial Age with Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, in response to the growth of large societies of around one million or more people, and their accompanying social complexity.<sup>31</sup> When violence

<sup>30</sup> Anawrahta Minsaw, the first king of a united Burma (1044–77 ce), helped ease the imposition of Theravada Buddhism on ¯ his people by o fficially promulgating the assimilation of 37 *nats* into Buddhist worship. The admixture continues to this day, but recently to the increasingly violent consternation of some fundamentalist Buddhists, bearing some resemblance to ongoing anti-Muslim campaigns there (Economist 2019).

<sup>31</sup> The association between large, complex societies and adherence to moralizing gods has long been noticed, but the causality has been di fficult to determine; recent research, however, shows that moralizing gods and their "prosocial" supernatural punishment have followed large increases in a society's social complexity (at around a population of one million), rather than the other way around, perhaps because they help sustain and order those societal intricacies and reduce free-riding (Whitehouse et al. 2019).

is condoned not to appease the gods' personal interests but rather to fulfill some mandate of earthly justice and morality, it can take on particularly dangerous, millenarian forms.

*Disagreement* among moralizing gods, however, can mitigate this by demonstrating the possibility that one's preferred god (and therefore oneself) might be incorrect in the moral judgment. This is only possible where there are multiple gods within a religion, even if those gods sit in hierarchical relationship with one another.<sup>32</sup>

Monotheism, in contrast, does not require that its one god be infallible, but that is the dominant approach to monotheism.<sup>33</sup> Polytheism's inherently competitive structure permits gods to be mistaken, whether they are moralizing or not; after all, they will disagree with each other, and they cannot all be right all the time.<sup>34</sup>

The syncretic plethora of gods disagreeing with each other and therefore demonstrating reasonable pluralism within the structure of the religion itself *should* naturally raise doubts about the absolutism of any religious proclamation. Gods in polytheistic universes compete and/or overlap in their jurisdictions. Few, if any, of them are omni-anything: omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent. As a result, although polytheistic religions have no shortage of moral precepts, no single answer and few absolutes are possible. Both circumscription and circumspection are built into the structure of polytheistic religious belief.

Do polytheistic religions actually yield less nationalist religious violence, however? Knowing the history of Hindu nationalist violence (e.g., pre-partition and contemporary India) and Buddhist nationalist violence (e.g., Myanmar today), it is a di fficult claim to make—save for the comparison to monotheistic nationalist violence, which has seen arguably even more brutality against both adherents of other religions and those who interpret their shared religion di fferently (e.g., sectarian vendettas between fellow Christians or fellow Muslims).<sup>35</sup>

### **4. Religion as Lived Experience**

Circumstances sometimes render it impossible for religion to avoid political entanglement, through no fault of the religious adherents, especially with the e ffective monopoly of nation-states on forms of legitimate political organization in modern international politics.

Buddhism has other-worldly and inner-worldly, as well as world-rejecting, principles and practices,<sup>36</sup> and while it advocates freeing oneself from natural desires and earthly temptations and su ffering, it does not fall into nihilism,<sup>37</sup> so its practitioners must find a way to live in this world.<sup>38</sup> All non-nihilistic philosophies of asceticism (e.g., Buddhism, Stoicism) advise people on how to live in

<sup>32</sup> Because monotheistic religions' gods tend to be both "high gods" and moral arbiters, they are more easily co-opted for extreme moralistic judgments, and the violence that can accompany them.

<sup>33</sup> Fallible monotheism is a decidedly heterodox approach. For example, (Segal 2007)'s interpretation of the Old Testament is considered radical, because he portrays God himself developing, learning, and changing his ways through the course of his struggles with humanity, e.g., when Abraham tries to persuade God to uphold a justicial principle of sparing the innocent and challenges God to be a just deity, both of which God does not immediately take onboard (*Joseph's Bones*, pp. 58–69).

<sup>34</sup> For example, both deities and demons fought wars against each other in ancient Greek, classical Roman, and Hindu mythology.

<sup>35</sup> Theocratic political rule is likelier to emerge when the religion in question is monotheistic. (Co¸sgel and Miceli 2013) found that theocracies are more likely to be established where religion can serve to legitimize the state and where the society's religious market is monopolized by one dominant religion. They found that monotheism alone seemed to be a robust (but not necessarily statistically significant) factor in contributing to the development of theocratic rule; although, unsurprisingly, if the ruler was also considered a god, then the results became significant. They speculate that the insignificance of monotheism alone as a factor may result from the scarcity of monotheistic religions in their sample, constituting only 8% of the ancient polities in their dataset, as the effect of monotheism became clearer and more consistent when looking just at contemporary societies, after the development of the major monotheistic religions.

I would maintain that one reason monotheism becomes a significant factor once it develops as a serious competitor to polytheistic religions is because the structure of monotheism functions equivalently to monopolizing the religious market.

<sup>36</sup> Weber's traditional ideal types of religion would put Buddhism in the class of mysticism, but this does not encapsulate the complexities of Buddhist thought and practice. Furthermore, in practice, Buddhism can manifest as polytheistic, monotheistic, pantheistic, or not theistic at all.

<sup>37</sup> For example, it does not advocate suicide.

<sup>38</sup> Mahay¯ ana doctrine especially advocates trying to improve the world and help others along the path to enlightenment. ¯

and engage with the world, and that generates internal tensions that are perhaps easily exploited by political interaction.

So it should disappoint, but not surprise, when non-violent religions resort to force: they, too, compete not only within themselves, as we have seen, and with other religions, but also with other objects of allegiance and centers of power, including familial, tribal, and political units.

For example, during Cambodia's short-lived Khmer Republic (1970–1975), general-turnedpresident Lon Nol, who seized power in a military coup, cultivated a reputation as a devout Buddhist,<sup>39</sup> and his regime sought legitimacy against both monarchical and communist challengers by employing Buddhist iconography and public displays of Buddhism and by claiming support from the country's two major Buddhist sects (Mohanikay, Thommayut).<sup>40</sup> A crucial difference between Myanmar today and Cambodia then, however, is that Buddhist monks in Cambodia during that time were only "passively" important politically,<sup>41</sup> as "it was mostly the army that did the killing then—Buddhist monks were not leading the charge there",<sup>42</sup> in sharp contrast to present-day Myanmar.

Other examples of militant, nationalist Theravada Buddhism include aforementioned Thai monk ¯ Kittivuddho's anti-communist Nawaphon movement in the 1970s, as well as the ongoing persecution the largely-Hindu Tamil population in Sri Lanka by the predominantly-Buddhist Sinhalese, especially by Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and other nationalist organizations. Sri Lankan Buddhists sometimes interpret the epic *Mahava ¯ m. sa* to claim that the island of Sri Lanka itself is sacred because the Buddha made three "magical" visits, clearing and unifying the island by force in anticipation of the introduction of Buddhism there after his death, and therefore, the island is the Sinhala sacred home in a way that ties the territory to Buddhist religion.<sup>43</sup>

### *4.1. Religion, Nationalism, and Modernity*

All religions can be manipulated for nationalist purposes. Ironically, Donald Eugene Smith argues that Buddhism's lack of worldly attachments may render it more susceptible to nationalism: while Hinduism and Islam, for example, have their own primary loyalties (Hinduism to caste, Islam to the caliphate), Buddhism has none.<sup>44</sup> All three religions have been exploited in various nationalist struggles, but perhaps Buddhism's doctrine does not save it from that fate as one might expect, because it does not offer any worldly alternatives to nationalism.

As Peter Mentzel notes, scholars of nationalism have long debated its relationship with religion, and the very definition of "nation" remains contested.<sup>45</sup> Despite modern nationalism originally arising partly as an anti-religious force, and despite the most influential early sociologists (Durkheim and Weber) placing nationalism in a secular, modern context, the modern nation-state has been far from necessarily or primarily secular<sup>46</sup> and its nationalism is often intimately connected with religious belief even when it is not explicitly religious in nature.

Modernity does not secularize society by ridding it of religion, but rather transforms the objects and purposes of religion as ways with which people search for meaning.<sup>47</sup> Some theorists of nationalism conceived of it as a distinct and secular "civic" or "primordial" identification (Geertz 1973) and thought that it would lead to the marginalization or disappearance of religious worldviews (Gellner 1983). However, nationalism and its object, the nation, have turned out to be more contingent and malleable. Instead of nationalism being "engendered by nations" as "enduring collectives", nationalism

43 (Bartholomeusz 2002, p. 20).

<sup>39</sup> (Kann 1970).

<sup>40</sup> (Whitaker 1973, p. 188; Harris 2008, p. 166). 188).

<sup>41</sup> (Whitaker 1973, p.42

(Kiernan 2019).

<sup>44</sup> (D. Smith 1965, pp. 82–83).45

(Mentzel 2020). 46

(cf. Gellner 1983).47

(Weber 1978).

operates more as a "practical category", "as contingent event", or "as cognitive frame" (Brubaker 1996).<sup>48</sup> Nations emerge out of a complex of elements, including shared myths and religious beliefs (A. Smith 2000), and some have traced nations and nationalism to pre-modern origins (Hastings 1997; Grosby 2005), which would tie them even more closely to their associated religions.<sup>49</sup>

In practice, nationalism can be and certainly has been religiously-based,<sup>50</sup> but conceptions of religious nationalism can vary widely, ranging the spectrum from civic religion to radical religious nationalism. Entanglement between religion and nationalism in modern nation-states can blur the distinctions between civil identity and primordial identity<sup>51</sup> (especially if the civil identity is not itself fully secular in practice), and can lead to conflating these two identities.<sup>52</sup>

### *4.2. Modern State Capacity*

Another factor to consider is that the rigidity of territorial boundaries in a geopolitical landscape dominated by modern states can combine with modern religious nationalism to tie that religious sentiment to territory in a more inflexible manner; it is not an actual return to pre-Axial age "monolatry", in which each nation and its land has its own distinctive god,<sup>53</sup> but it can be experienced that way and can enhance the mutual influence that religion and polity have on each other.

The modern state's greater *capacity* to exercise more extensive reach into the lives of its population<sup>54</sup> than traditional or pre-modern polities possessed, as well as its monopoly on the use of legitimate violence within its borders, will lend itself to greater political and cultural separation between people of di fferent states, and it will tend to funnel societal issues through a nationalist lens that may coincide with state boundaries. When religious impetus is further added to a state's potential reach and parameters (whether the state is a full-fledged theocracy or merely has strong associations between religion and politics, e.g., legislation that favors certain religious doctrine, overlap between religions and political authority/officials, etc.), it can generate a flammable combination. Nationalist sentiment does not inevitably lead to violence, and the violence has never been solely motivated by nationalism; but there is an undeniably strong historical correlation between nationalism and the use of violence, as well as between religion and the use of violence.

Religiously-based nationalism in general is no longer a surprise, but the content of Buddhist tenets means that Buddhist nationalism still confounds and Buddhist nationalist violence especially continues to shock. Pure doctrine is often overcome when it meets societal phenomena, however, and organized violence in the Buddha's name in Myanmar is partly accounted for by some particular characteristics of Theravada Buddhism as practiced there and the history of the phenomenon of religion as lived ¯ experience in political society.

<sup>48</sup> Explains (Brubaker 1996): "We should focus on nation as a category of practice, nationhood as an institutionalized cultural and political form, and nationness as a contingent event or happening, and refrain from using the analytically dubious notion of 'nations' as substantial, enduring collectivities". He adds that "a strong theoretical case can be made for an eventful approach to nationness." (pp. 19–20, 21).

<sup>49</sup> While this article takes "national" identity and "nationalism" to be modern ideological constructs, it also follows A. Smith's "ethnosymbolism" in the belief that nations arise from existing ethnic foundations (with differing relative emphases on shared language, religion, culture, history, race, etc.). What matters for the purposes of this article, however, is how Burmese Buddhist nationalists tend to view their "nation": they justify their nationalism by reference to "perennial" or "primordial" origins (along the lines of Hastings 1997; Grosby 2005).

<sup>50</sup> (van der Veer 2015).

<sup>51</sup> cf. Geertz.

<sup>52</sup> While distinct civil identities are most commonly found in secular, democratic states, they are possible in every type of state, including theocracies, if there are citizens who do not share the dominant religion. (In Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, there are citizens of minority religions who have civil identities such that they can still say they are Iranian or Saudi).

<sup>53</sup> (Jaspers 1953).

<sup>54</sup> While the capability is not always used to its full extent (e.g., in more decentralized liberal democracies, and for principled reasons), modern technology and bureaucracy give every state—even weak ones—a greater capacity to enforce on and intervene in their populations.
