Buddhism and war
Re: "When Buddhism falls silent during war", (Opinion, Dec 27).
I am a great admirer of Sanitsuda Ekachai's body of work at the Bangkok Post. She writes with intelligence and compassion, especially about Buddhism. Here she makes an impassioned and cogent plea for peace which does this paper credit.
Emphasising the blatant lack of support from the Buddhist clergy, she notes their clarion calls emphasising non-violent solutions to this unnecessary war are nowhere to be heard.
However, the following struck me as an unconscious confession of the root of this dissonance. She wrote to the effect that Thais "claim Buddhism as the heart of gentle Thainess".
What is "Thainess" if not an expression of collective self-obsession with a veneer of falsely positive attributes? "Thainess" is a word (akin to "whiteness") which epitomises braggadocious ethnic egoity collectively presumed to be true. Just so, where is the equally absurd moniker "Cambodianess" used for balance in this article?
Furthermore, recounting stories from the Buddha's life, Khun Sanitsuda writes: "When his own relatives prepared to wage war over water from the Rohini River, he did not take sides. He changed the question.
What is more valuable, he asked: water, or human life?" If the author is not shamed by her own lack of self-understanding, how can she expect the army to lay down their weapons when "shamed by the (Buddha's) logic"?
The point here is not to criticise the author, but to correct a common misconception. Buddhism is not a collective religion in the sense that everyone is exhorted to follow the Buddha's commandments.
It is a philosophy where each one is given Gautama Buddha's teaching and individually takes up the practice of the teaching voluntarily to the point of self-understanding and ultimately self-transcendence.
There is no shame in the failure to understand the ego in any moment. This is common to everyone with virtually no exceptions. The ego is self-destructive and other-destructive. Thus, there is suffering and war. The only alternative is to observe one's own activity moment by moment, to understand it as the cause of suffering, and spontaneously relinquish the separate self-position. This is not a societal command; it is Buddha's gift to humanity.
