Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia

The Five Precepts, starting with "I undertake the training-precept to abstain from onslaught on breathing beings," make no exceptions, under any circumstances.

Here’s a verse from the Dhammapada, the short poetic summary of the Buddha’s teachings:

    All tremble at the rod,
    all are fearful of death.
    Drawing the parallel to yourself,
    neither kill nor get others to kill.
    
    All tremble at the rod,
    all hold their life dear.
    Drawing the parallel to yourself,
    neither kill nor get others to kill.

> A. K. Warder notes that the Mahāyāna Sūtras are highly unlikely to have come from the teachings of the historical Buddha, since the language and style of every extant Mahāyāna Sūtra is comparable more to later Indian texts than to texts that could have circulated in the Buddha's putative lifetime. Warder also notes that the Tibetan historian Tāranātha (1575–1634) proclaimed that after the Buddha taught the sutras, they disappeared from the human world and circulated only in the world of the nagas. In Warder's view, "this is as good as an admission that no such texts existed until the 2nd century A.D."

I certainly do regard the actual expressions of faith by its many communities, but not all are correct, and one need look no further than to compare the actual root texts to the monstrous actions of people determined to burn the world down in its name. You are invited to do so for yourself, as the Buddha has always done, and compare the words to the actions of those who claim lineage.

> na haneyya na ghātaye

There is the Pali in a handful of words. Now you have the tools to discern for yourself: what does it tell us to do or not to do?

Technically, Buddhism is not a single religion, and even Theravada is not a monolithic tradition to get "the tone set by states". If anything, worldwide Buddhism is quite decentralized, and this has played a key role in preserving the Dhamma from being co-opted by state agendas.

> Sabbe tasanti daṇaḍassa sabbe bhāyanti maccuno Attānaṃ upamaṃ katvā na haneyya na ghātaye. Sabbe tasanti daṇaḍassa sabbesaṃ jīvitaṃ piyaṃ Attānaṃ upamaṃ katvā na haneyya na ghātaye.

> This isn't to say Buddhism is a violent religion, but to deny that there is a very mainstream thread of majoritarianism in two of the largest Buddhist countries is ridiculous.

I never denied "majoritarianism". I denied that Buddhism condones violence, both in a plurality of Buddhist cultures and in the suttas themselves.

You appear hellbent on conflating humans doing bad things on behalf of religious causes with Buddhism itself, which does not, in any way, condone any of the acts you've highlighted.

> $massacres highlights a significant strain of violence in Buddhism

If I tell you that a book that declares in the strongest possible language that no harm shall be done to rabbits was in fact a trick of the demiurge and that only true believers could discern the true message for why the mass murder of all rabbits in the world was good and then I tell you that I am the Prophet of the Book, the religion and its teachings would not change. I would just be some idiot who had murdered all the rabbits in the world.

The one who had lied and cheated and schemed would be responsible, not the author of the book or their teachings. They would have created a Bizarro World of their own creation that took its root in the misery of their own heart.

This Bizarro World is not Buddhism, was never Buddhism, and could not be Buddhism and I have the evidence from the words themselves that Buddhism is not of genocide, of hatred, and of bloodshed.