in International Situations, Religion 345 Words

What Do You Think When I Say ‘Buddhist’?

Does violence come to mind?

For me I think of the monks in their orange robes….I think of the chanting….the temples and the meditative state the monks go into…a non-violent group if there ever was one.  When I was serving in the Far East I ran into the monks almost daily…..they were serene and soft spoken and mostly friendly and accommodating…..is that pretty much your experience of thoughts on Buddhists?

I ask these question because of some things I have been reading in the past year or so…..Myanmar (Burma to the rest of us).  It seems that there is an uptake of violence in the country and it involves Buddhists……

This from AJE…….

More than a dozen people may have been killed after a Buddhist group rampaged through a town in an isolated corner of Myanmar, hacking Muslim women and children with knives, a rights group reported Friday.

Tensions have been building in the region since last month, when monks from a Buddhist extremist movement known as 969 toured the area and gave sermons by loudspeaker advocating the expulsion of all Rohingya, who make up 90 percent of the population in northern Rakhine. It’s the only place where the religious minority is in the majority.

…………sources reported that Rohingya women and children had been hacked to death, but the numbers varied widely. Some put the death toll as low as five or 10, but one source who works for the administration in Maungdaw town said it is widely believed 40 died, mostly women and children.That some of the victims appeared to have been stabbed with knives, not shot or beaten, “would clearly indicate the massacre was committed by (Buddhist) Rakhine villagers, rather than the police or army,”

This story just caught me off guard….never would I consider a Buddhist a threat to human life or for that matter in violent practice.

To me the term “Buddhist violence” is an oxymoron…….

Am I just naive?  Or maybe the world has become more violent than I care to admit.

This needs more thought.

19 thoughts on “What Do You Think When I Say ‘Buddhist’?”

  1. Probably those people have tricked themselves to believe that they are engaging in “self-defense”, the only reasonably excuse to kill or use violence in Buddhism.

    Reply

    1. Morning Mordanicus…my experience, most in southeast Asia, is they would accept a situation as some sort of karma they need to transcend…we are talking about people that set themselves on fire to protest a war….to me it is an oxymoron.

      Reply

  3. ” … a Buddhist group rampaged through a town in an isolated corner of Myanmar, hacking Muslim women and children with knives …,”

    Oh my. Looks like “Grasshopper” has gotten out of control. But like you my first instinct is that religious extremism in Buddhism seems an oxymoron.

    Reply

      1. you know its been some time all my friends went through this phase to become Buddhists and all, and the major argument was that Buddhist are the only ones who are not violent, then recently the east asian attack of Buddhists on Muslims occured as well as the long and infamous killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka by Buddhists, Moron was a bit extreme a word to use for them, but nevertheless they are not as saintly as they are represented, they are humans like all of us, and they can be good or bad, regardless of their religion, but they have gained this saintly status, that one wants to counter by using a word like :moron”: 😀 I hope you got my point

      4. Please feel free to look around and comment on anything that interest you…always open to an exchange of ideas….chuq

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