Paper short abstract:

Systematic violence against religious minorities in Buddhist majority states in recent years raises crucial questions about Buddhism and violence. What has the Anthropology of Buddhism to offer to our understanding of 'Buddhist violence'?

Paper long abstract:

The civil war in Sri Lanka, the violence in Southern Thailand and the recent waves of anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, raise questions about how we are to understand Buddhist engagements with violence. Taking as its departure monastic engagement with the military during the Sri Lankan civil war as well as Burmese monastic engagement with Tatmadaw soldiers during the Rohingya crisis in 2017, this paper seeks to explore to what extent the anthropology of religion/Buddhism can offer new insights into scholarly as well as public debates about Buddhism and violence. For long, such debates focused on 'Buddhist violence' as 'un-Buddhist', that is, as a norm-deviation from 'true' Buddhism. More recently, public as well as academic debate has rendered Buddhism 'as violent as any other religion' without offering any substantive analysis of how this might be the case, or how Buddhists themselves might justify or rationalize the use of violence. Rather than investigating what Buddhist texts say about the use of military means, an anthropological approach to Buddhism and violence would explore the ways in which Buddhist monks and nuns act in relation to violence and war, and moreover, how they relate to institutions of violence like the military. Finally, by moving beyond any radical deconstruction of the categories of 'Buddhism' and 'violence', this paper seeks to explore to what extent the Anthropology of Religion/Buddhism - ethnography and ritual theory in particular - might offer useful tools for further theorizing about the relationship between Buddhism and violence.