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Session 44: Histories of Violence in Buddhist Southeast Asia
Organizer: Anne R. Hansen, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Chair: Katherine A. Bowie, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Suwanna Satha-anand, Chulalongkorn University
Keywords: Southeast Asia; Buddhism; violence; memory; cross-disciplinary.
Post-September 11th has seen a new scrutiny of connections, real and imagined, between religion and rhetorics and ideologies of violence, as well as the relevance of religious ethical ideas for conflict resolution. Work by scholars of Sri Lankan, Tibetan, and Japanese Buddhism has already begun to problematize the representation of Buddhism as a "peaceful" religion that has long dominated western popular understandings of the tradition. In Buddhist Southeast Asia, however, little attention has been paid to the historical connections between Buddhism, Buddhists and violence, and aside from Hue Tam Ho-Tai’s work on millenarian rebellions in southern Vietnam, little consideration has been given to the question of how these experiences connect with Southeast Asian Buddhist ethical understandings of harm and violence, or with prophetic histories that conceive of human moral degeneration and violence as part of the inevitable experience of temporal cycles known as kappa.
This panel aims to construct a cross-disciplinary and transnational discussion and examination of local histories of violence in different historical moments and contexts in mainland Southeast Asia: the glorification of violence against the Burmese in northern Thai temples; prophetic interpretations of violence in Cambodia under the French and Pol Pot regimes; the historical antecedents and tensions surrounding Buddhist self-immolations in Vietnam; and the silence of history toward the 1976 student massacre in Bangkok. As a group, the papers raise questions about how violence has been perpetrated and interpreted by Southeast Asian Buddhists, and the relationships between Buddhist ethics and violence in Buddhist states and Buddhist-influenced legal frameworks.
Two Bullets in a Balustrade: The Glorification of Violence, the Ethics of Reaction, and the Place of Burma in Thai Buddhist History
Justin T. McDaniel, University of California, Riverside
There are two bullet holes in the balustrade surrounding the main stupa of Wat Phra That Lampang Luang Monastery in Lampang Province (Northern Thailand). They mark the spot where Dippacak, a local rebel shot the commander of the Burmese garrison holding the monastery grounds in 1732. The Burmese garrison of about 300 soldiers had been occupying the monastery for a few weeks. They had been using this monastery because it had a formidable wall surrounding its large grounds. The monastery was a perfect fortress. Dippacak and his men gained access to the walled and fortified monastery by crawling through an earthen drainage pipe on the base of the rear wall. Under the cover of darkness, about 300 armed rebels climbed in through this very narrow passage, and after a very bloody battle, the Burmese commander, Thao Mahayot, was executed in front of the stupa.
In this paper, I look first at how violence against the Burmese is glorified at this monastery in various monuments and murals. Second, I discuss the ways in which Buddhist nationalist discourses from the eighteenth century to the present have both attempted to erase the Burmese history of Thailand and glorified violence against the Burmese in Buddhist contexts using Buddhist ritual imagery. Finally, I suggest that understanding Buddhist ethics as a highly contextualized "ethics of reaction" helps explain the glorification of violence in the Buddhist history of Thailand.
Prophetic Histories: The Buddh Damnay and Violence in Cambodia
Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University; Anne Hansen, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Buddhist prophetic texts known as Buddh Damnay were composed in the context of mid-nineteenth century rebellions in colonial Cambodia, and have since been put to a range of interpretive, ritual, and political uses in contemporary society. Most importantly, the texts are used to explain the horrific violence and loss of life during the Khmer Rouge period in the 1970s: Buddhism had reached the mid-point in the cycle between two buddhas, at roughly 2,500 years since the death of the Buddha Gautama. The Buddh Damnay predicts a time of terrible suffering followed by the arrival of a new just and righteous ruler, the Preah Bat Dhammik; thereafter conditions will steadily improve until the coming of the next buddha, Maitreya.
Our paper outlines the ethical vision of the text, and how it served (in the nineteenth century) as a Khmer Buddhist analysis of the inevitability of past and future human violence and moral degeneration. Drawing on new ethnographic and oral historical research, we then turn to accounts of uses of the texts during the DK regime itself, when it was widely believed that knowledge and possession of the text could protect one from the violence that permeated everyday life. More recently, imagery drawn from the texts has been employed by politicians to lay claim to the mantle of the Preah Bat Dhammik. As such, the Buddh Damnay has been used to explain or justify violence both by state actors against competing opposition political parties, and by the opposition political parties to inspire resistance to the state.
Self-Violence as Non-Violence: The Suicide of Thích Quàng Ðúc
Edward G. Miller, Dartmouth College
Accounts of the 1963 Buddhist protest movement in South Vietnam have long emphasized its non-violent qualities. In order to mobilize domestic and international support for their campaign against the government of Ngô Dình Ðiêm, the clerical and lay leaders of the movement relied heavily on non-violent tactics, which they described as natural expressions of Buddhist doctrine. Histories written since 1963 have frequently reinforced the representation of the movement as an application of "traditional" Buddhist principles. Ironically, however, the emphasis on non-violence has obscured the fact that the movement’s most famous episode involved an act of profound self-violence: the suicide of Thích Quàng Ðúc, a monk who burned himself to death on a Saigon street. Although a photo of Quàng Ðúc’s self-immolation became one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, scholars have not adequately explained why he chose to take his own life nor shown how this act can be squared with Buddhist "traditions" of non-violence.
This paper seeks to analyze Quàng Ðúc’s self-immolation by placing it into historical context. I will examine the connections between the 1963 movement and a long-running "revival" of Buddhism in Vietnam which began earlier in the twentieth century, which will show that the movement can be understood as the expression of a distinctly Buddhist form of Vietnamese nationalism, and that the actions such as the suicide of Quàng Ðúc should therefore be viewed as an intervention in a multi-sided political contest over Vietnam’s modern destiny. At the same time, I will also undertake to understand Quàng Ðúc’s action as inspired by a particular way of reading classical Buddhist texts about self-immolation, notably the Lotus Sutra.
Healing with Silence: Buddhism and the Memories of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok
Thongchai Winachakul, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The October 6, 1976 massacre of students in Bangkok has been one of the traumatic cultural and political events in modern Thai history. Yet throughout the past three decades in Thailand, the response to the tragedy has been minimal and evasive. There are several obvious reasons for the relative silence—political, cultural, historical, and religious. My interest is not in these many reasons for silence.
Over the years I have observed a number of distinctive ways in which survivors and their families deal with the painful past. Most draw their strength and understanding from Buddhism. This paper is a preliminary effort to understand how Buddhist beliefs and discourses serve as mental (intellectual and spiritual) resources for dealing with traumatic memories of the event, and how they contribute to silence. What does it mean to "come to terms" in the Buddhist, particularly Thai Buddhist, environment? How do Buddhist ideas address issues of justice, punishment, impunity, accountability, and historical truth? What are the tensions, in Thailand, between the legal/secular approach to the traumatic past and these Buddhist ways? What is the significance of "forgiveness" in these Buddhist views? How are forgetting and remembering connected with these Buddhist ways of healing? Does Buddhism encourage forgetting? Or particular notions of remembering? If so, what may be the effects of these Buddhist ways of healing on social memories and historical understandings of the event? Rather than a philosophical or psychological approach, this study takes the form of a cultural and intellectual history. It is not interested in doctrinal explanation or disapproval, but rather in examining how people have dealt with the traumatic past in particular cultural and historical contexts.