EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST

“All tremble at violence; Life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should neither kill nor cause another to kill.”

The Buddha, Dhammapada

If we turn our attention to the wisdom traditions of the East, we find what first appears to be a different story. Indeed, some of the most profound examples of nonviolence have arisen out of the mystical depth of the Asian mind. The Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of the Jains, were actually contemporaries in sixth-century BCE India. Over the course of their lives, they delivered some of the most renowned teachings ever given on nonviolence, teachings that have deeply influenced not only India but the rest of the world for countless generations.

“Avoid killing or harming any living thing” is a principle that lies at the foundation of Buddhist morality, and ahimsa or nonviolence is a fundamental tenet for anyone who practices Jainism. Legend has it that Mahavira would even allow insects to crawl upon his body and bite him, so resolute was his intention to kill no sentient being. Simply put, Buddhism and Jainism are unmatched by any other tradition in the emphasis they have placed over the centuries—in their teachings, scripture, and practices—on upholding a nonviolent relationship to life. And it is perhaps not surprising that today's most famous advocate of nonviolence, the Dalai Lama, is a Buddhist—though it must be said that he also has not taken a purely nonviolent position, recently acknowledging that it might indeed be necessary to fight terrorists with violence and withholding his judgment regarding the war in Iraq.

Hinduism has also long been a strong promoter of nonviolent principles. “To be free from violence is the duty of every man. No thought of revenge, hatred, or ill will should arise in our minds. Injuring others gives rise to hatred,” said the great twentieth-century Hindu sage Swami Sivananda. And he is but one of hundreds, if not thousands, of great mystics and religious leaders in Hinduism's rich history who have nurtured its tradition of nonviolence down through the centuries. One of those leaders was Guru Nanak, the sixteenth-century founder of the Sikh religion. Born a Hindu, he enshrined pacifist sentiments in the very heart of his new faith, exhorting his followers to “take up arms that will harm no one; let your coat of mail be understanding; convert your enemies into friends; fight with valor, but with no weapon but the word of God.”

However, violence—including religiously justified violence—is hardly absent in the spiritual legacy of the East. Hindu scripture is replete with references to war, from the Vedas to the Mahabharata. One of the greatest philosophical inquiries into the morality of war and peace is contained in the legendary battlefield conversation between Krishna and Arjuna. At the end of the long dialogue between spiritual master and student, Krishna tells Arjuna that sometimes it is necessary to resort to physical force. “If you do not fight in this just war, you will neglect your duty, harm your reputation and commit the sin of omission,” he says. “Having regard to your duty, you should not hesitate, because for a warrior there is nothing greater than a just war.”

“When all other means have failed, it is but lawful to take to the sword,” wrote Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru in the Sikh tradition, who was also a great general. Sikhism, despite its founder's strong pacifism, has over the years developed a more militant culture: Strict practitioners carry a ceremonial dagger as part of their attire; the symbol of the religion is made up of five weapons; and there are clear teachings on when and how to fight “righteous wars.” And it has also engaged in more than a few. Moreover, it has earned the dubious distinction of fostering within its ranks one of the most violent extremist movements in recent decades, the Sikh militants in the Punjab region of India.

Buddhism and Jainism, with their extraordinary emphasis on nonviolence, are in a fundamentally different category than most of their brother and sister religions. Neither has developed teachings on “just” or “righteous” wars, and neither has ever engaged in anything remotely resembling a holy war or crusade. It is hard to imagine a Buddhist jihad or a crusading army of fierce and righteous Jain monks. At the same time, part of the reason these traditions have managed to keep their reputations unstained is that they have generally steered clear of politics and have been relatively unburdened by the difficult issues of war and violence that inevitably arise in the wielding of state power. It is something that Buddhism, at least, has come under increasing criticism for. Sulak Sivaraksa, a celebrated Thai Buddhist activist, points out that pacifism has long provided an important moral touchstone in Buddhist life but has also effectively kept the tradition from playing any greater role in affairs of state. This lack of political consciousness, he explains, has resulted in what often amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the governing status quo. And in pre-war Japan, that uncritical acceptance devolved into the most reprehensible kind of warmongering. According to Buddhist scholar Brian Victoria, author of Zen at War, Japanese Buddhist leaders in World War II, far from being antiwar, in fact happily supported some of the worst elements of war-fevered jingoism. The recent violence on the part of the Buddhist government in Sri Lanka has been another problematic marriage of Buddhism and politics. Jainists, for the most part, have steered clear of such entanglements, but they have also stayed even further away from the machinery of government, especially in recent years.

Now just because the overall message of our religious traditions regarding peace and pacifism has been inconsistent down through the ages does not necessarily mean that God does not prefer nonviolence. Perhaps God has been desperately pulling his or her hair out for millennia, watching our violent history unfold. As Brother Wayne Teasdale puts it, “Violence is not part of the divine reality. It's part of the human reality in the state of ignorance.” Yet it is also clear that no spiritual tradition has ever promulgated a teaching of pure pacifism, or pure nonviolence. They have all concluded that a perfected state of nonviolence is, for all practical purposes, unattainable. So does that mean that we are destined to live lives aspiring for a state of existence that we will never reach, looking for salvation in an ideal of peace and harmony that will lie forever beyond our grasp, at least on the physical plane? Even Gandhi believed that complete nonviolence was impossible in this world, convinced that there was some inherent violence in even the “will to live.” The best we can do, he felt, is to minimize the violence we commit during our sojourn in the flesh.

But some see a different lesson to be gleaned from the history books. “We have this notion that God is pacific and we are violent; that God is eternal and we are temporal; that God is the great exception to everything that we witness in nature and in the universe,” says Jim Garrison. “But I think Jung's great insight was that we are part of a universe and part of a divine drama that is in deep struggle with itself. And the struggle inside the inner heart of the individual is a microcosm of the struggle that one sees in nature, in the universe, and by projection, in the Godhead itself.”

THE WILL OF GOD

“What puzzles me is not why bad things are done by bad people, but rather why bad things are done by people who otherwise appear to be good—in cases of religious terrorism, by pious people dedicated to a moral vision of the world.”

Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God

“Not my will, but Thy will be done” is the timeless declaration of surrender—spoken by Jesus, the Bible tells us, in the Garden of Gethsemane, before the drama of his arrest and crucifixion. For Jesus, “Thy will” meant pacifism, at least on that particular morning. He did not resist the Roman guards, and he stopped his disciples from drawing their weapons. Now, if scripture is correct, he seemed to have a clear sense of what God intended for him to do. But ascertaining the “will of God” has long been one of the most delicate and dangerous challenges of the religious life.

“At a given moment, any two religious actors, each possessed of unimpeachable devotion and integrity, might reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the will of God and the path to follow,” writes religious scholar Scott Appleby. “Violent as well as nonviolent acts fall readily within that range.” Appleby is pointing out that even suicide bombers—however much we decry what they do—could very well be acting on the inspiration of genuine moral and religious conviction. That does not mean that Osama bin Laden is doing the will of God. But it does challenge some of our usual conclusions about what constitutes religious action and what does not. Indeed, as we witness the horror of car bombs, smart bombs, and human bombs exploding like firecrackers across the Middle East, it is tempting to automatically declare all religious violence immoral and inherently bereft of any spiritual authenticity. But that would be a mistake, says Appleby. “To define all acts of 'sacred violence' as ipso facto irreligious is to misunderstand religion and to underestimate its ability to underwrite deadly conflict on its own terms,” he explains.

Consider this statement by Marc Gopin soon after 9/11:

Politically incorrect or not, this war is about religion. In case anyone thinks that it is not about religion then they should take a good hard look at the document written by the terrorist mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, Mohammed Atta, in order to help his soldiers prepare for their sanctified deaths. It is one of the most profound religious documents I have ever seen, and its preparation for a beautiful death and afterlife is so compelling that I almost forgot, as I read it transfixed, that it was really about mass murder. I felt tempted to join the journey myself. If I felt tempted as a non-Muslim, how much more tempting to tens of millions of alienated young Muslim men in search of significant lives and meaningful deaths.

Martyrdom has long been a hallowed act of religious sacrifice, sacred in almost all traditions, and even in some secular movements—“Give me liberty or give me death” was the great declaration of the martyr's instinct during the American Revolution. But few would grant Mohammed Atta anything but the distinction of being one of the more brutal and misguided killers in modern history.

Some acts of religious violence, however, express not only authentic religious conviction but a deeper and higher morality. When the German pacifist and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer abandoned his nonviolent principles and attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1943, it was an act of great courage that, if successful, would have been praised around the world. As we commemorate the sixty-year anniversary of the Normandy invasion and honor those who gave their lives to liberate the world from the Nazi threat, we can only imagine how many might have been saved had Bonhoeffer's act of principled violence succeeded. It is the regret of history that he failed and was martyred for the cause.

So if we cannot condemn religious terrorism merely on the grounds that it is violent, where does that leave us? Are we destined to live in this fragile global society with religious actors running around the world stage committing spiritually “justified” acts of violence based on some very dubious interpretations of the sacred? At the very least, it is important to understand, as Appleby points out, that one can have authentic religious devotion and still manage to draw some extremely dangerous conclusions about the “will of God.” As he puts it, “The numinous power of the sacred—conveyed through the imperfect channels of intellect, will, and emotion—does not come accompanied by a moral compass.”

The well-known Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki echoed this sentiment in 1946 when he lamented the profound lack of critical thinking employed by Zen priests before and during World War II. They had happily joined the emperor's jingoistic parade and were waking up after the fact, realizing that the power of their own enlightenment had done little to stem the moral disaster of their complicity in Japanese warmongering. “With satori alone it is impossible for [Zen priests] to shoulder their responsibilities as leaders of society,” Suzuki declared. “By itself, satori is unable to judge the right and wrong of war. With regard to disputes in the ordinary world, it is necessary to employ intellectual discrimination.”

In our postmodern world, we have begun to deconstruct the idea that spiritual experience and moral development always go hand in hand. Some contemporary philosophers such as Ken Wilber have even explicitly separated the states of spiritual experience from the stages of moral development. But whatever model we use, it is becoming more and more clear that how we interpret spiritual experience may in fact be much more important than the experience itself, more significant even than direct contact with “the numinous power of the sacred.” As Suzuki wrote over a half-century ago, “I wish to foster in Zen priests the power to increasingly think about things independently. A satori which lacks this element should be taken to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and sent straight to the bottom!”