Buddhist Beliefs Funny Memes Abiut Buddhism
The darker side of Buddhism
By Charles Haviland
BBC News, Colombo
Image source, AFP
Photo: AFP
The principle of non-violence is primal to Buddhist teachings, but in Sri Lanka some Buddhist monks are being defendant of stirring up hostility towards other faiths and indigenous minorities. Their hard line is causing increasing business organisation.
The small temple in the suburbs of Colombo is tranquillity. An prototype of the Buddha is surrounded with purple and white lotus flowers. Smaller Buddhas line the walls.
Only upstairs, a burly monk in a brilliant orange robe holds along - for this is i of the main offices of a hard-line Buddhist organisation, the Bodu Bala Sena or Buddhist Power Force (BBS).
The peaceful precepts for which Buddhism is widely known barely figure in his words. Instead, the monk, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, talks of his Buddhism in terms of race. Most Buddhists here are ethnically Sinhalese, and Sinhalese make up iii-quarters of the island's population.
"This country belongs to the Sinhalese, and information technology is the Sinhalese who built upward its culture, culture and settlements. The white people created all the problems," says Gnanasara Thero angrily.
He says the country was destroyed by the British colonialists, and its current issues are also the work of what he calls "outsiders". By that he means Tamils and Muslims.
In fact, while a minority of the Tamils did indeed come from India as tea plantation workers, near of them, and most of the Muslims, are as Sri Lankan as the Sinhalese, with centuries-old roots here.
"We are trying to... become back to the land of the Sinhalese," says Gnanasara Thero. "Until we right this, we are going to fight."
Image source, AFP
Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero. Photograph: AFP
This firebrand strain of Buddhism is non new to Sri Lanka. A key Buddhist revivalist figure of the early 20th Century, Anagarika Dharmapala, was less than complimentary about non-Sinhalese people. He held that the "Aryan Sinhalese" had made the isle into Paradise which was and then destroyed by Christianity and polytheism. He targeted Muslims maxim they had "past Shylockian methods" thrived at the expense of the "sons of the soil".
And later, in 1959 Prime Government minister SWRD Bandaranaike was assassinated by a Buddhist monk - the circumstances were murky but ane contentious issue was the government's failure to do enough to ensure the rights of the Sinhala people.
The long war against the Tamil Tigers - a tearing rebel group purporting to speak for the Tamil minority - brought the difficult-line Buddhists into their own over again. Portraying the war as a mission to protect the Sinhalese and Buddhism, in 2004 9 monks were elected to parliament on a nationalist platform. And information technology was from the monks' main party that Gnanasara Thero later broke away, in time forming the Bulletin board system. Information technology is at present the most prominent of several organisations sharing a similar ideology.
Since 2012, the BBS has embraced direct action, post-obit the example of other like-minded groups. Information technology raided Muslim-owned slaughter-houses claiming, incorrectly, that they were breaking the constabulary. Members demonstrated outside a police force college alleging, over again incorrectly, that test results were being distorted in favour of Muslims.
Now that a Tamil adversary has been defeated, Muslims seem to be these nationalists' main target, along with evangelical Christians whom they accuse of deceitfully and cunningly converting people away from Buddhism.
But can the BBS be called fierce? "Whenever there is something wrong done by a Buddhist monk everything [is blamed on] us because of our popularity," says BBS spokesman Dilantha Withanage.
"Bbs is non a terror organisation, Bbs is not promoting violence against anyone... but we are against certain things." He cites threats past Islamic State to declare the whole of Asia a Muslim realm.
Time and once again he and his colleague bracket the word "Muslim" together with the word "extremist".
"Bulletin board system is not promoting violence against anyone" - Dilantha Withanage
They are not the only Sinhalese who express discomfort at a visible ascension in Muslim social conservatism in Sri Lanka. More than women are covering up than before and in parts of the state Saudi-influenced Wahabi Muslims are jostling with more liberal ones.
Still there is no evidence of tearing extremism among Sri Lankan Muslims. Rather, they have been at the receiving end of attacks from other parts of gild.
In the small-scale town of Aluthgama last June, iii people died in clashes that started when the BBS and other Buddhist monks led an anti-Muslim rally in a Muslim surface area. At the fourth dimension, I met Muslim families whose homes and shops had been burnt and utterly destroyed, and who were cowering in schools as temporary refugees.
Moderate Buddhists accept also been targeted past hard-line ones.
Final year Rev Wathareka Vijitha Thero was abducted, rendered unconscious, tied up and forcibly circumcised - he says this was meant equally a gesture of ridicule because he had worked for closer cooperation between Buddhists and Muslims.
He believes Buddhist monks - he doesn't know who or whether they were aligned with any particular group - were responsible.
In a dissever case, a few weeks earlier, Vijitha Thero had held a news conference to highlight the grievances of the Muslim community - the gathering was broken up past the BBS. Gnanasara had hurled insults and threatened him: "If you are involved in this blazon of stupid treachery again, y'all volition be taken and put in the Mahaweli River," he said.
The reference to the Mahaweli is significant - there was a left wing coup against the Sri Lankan government in 1989 - information technology's estimated lx,000 people disappeared and many dead bodies were dumped in the river.
Another country where fierce Buddhism has recently made headlines is Myanmar, formerly known equally Burma. A Buddhist faction there, the 969 movement, is known for strident anti-Muslim campaigns that have triggered widespread violence.
Prototype source, AFP
Shin Wirathu (centre) arrives with Gnanasara Thero (left) for the Buddhist Power Force convention in Colombo in 2014. Photo: AFP
Its leader, Shin Wirathu, was recently invited to Sri Lanka by the Bbs. Both organisations say that even if Buddhism predominates in their ain countries, overall it is nether threat. "We want to protect it, therefore we signed a memorandum of understanding on forming alliances in the Asian region," says Withanage.
In January, Sri Lanka unexpectedly elected a new president, Maithripala Sirisena. He told me that "everybody knows" who gave rise to the Bbs - implying that information technology was the administration of his predecessor, Mahinda Rajapaksa. The previous government was, at to the lowest degree, strongly supportive of the organisation.
And the group thrived because the rule of law had broken downward, according to the new minister for Buddhist affairs, Karu Jayasuriya. He has told me that the Bulletin board system will exist reined in. On Tuesday, Gnanasara Thero was arrested for taking part in an unauthorised demonstration but later freed on bond. Thus far, the new government - which, like the old one, includes a strongly Buddhist nationalist party - seems timid nigh taking on the men in orange.
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The Nighttime Side of Buddhism is on BBC Radio 4 on Sun 31 May at 13:30 BST, or catch up afterward iPlayer.
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Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32929855
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