Buddhist Arsonists in Medieval Japan and the Burning Temples

Soldier Monks from Mt. Heie burned rival temples in 1536 by the Western calendar.

My trusty Wikipedia historical calendar, the secret weapon of a blog that most frequently offers almanac style history posts, informs me that, Buddhist monks from Kyoto, Japan’s Enryaku-ji Temple in what is known as the Tenbun Hokke Disturbance burned the temples of rivals. The event is traditionally ascribed to this date in 1536.   Now I know next to nothing about either Buddhist history or medieval Japan, but that grabbed my attention.  After all, isn’t Buddhism supposed to be about peace and harmony?  At least that’s what my friends who spend their time squatting cross-legged on mats chanting and/or meditating tell me.  So the idea of rampaging monks wreaking havoc on rivals is a source of cognitive dissonance.

The details I could quickly discover in English without being sent scurrying to thick and dense tome of Japanese history are sketchy but go like this.

The Enryaku-ji Temple, which grew to be the largest, most influential, and powerful temple complex in Japan, was founded about 788 at the height of the Heian Period, the last epoch of classical Japanese history in the Imperial capitol of Heian-kyō, modern day Kyoto.  It was an era of great Chinese influence on the court and broader culture, particularly the flourishing of Taoism and Buddhism in a country long dominated by ancestor worshipping Shintoism.

The monk Saichō, given the posthumous honorific Dengyō Daishi, studied in China and introduced the Tendai  tradition of Mahayana Buddhism to his native country with the support of the Emperor Kammu.  Tendai differed sharply with already well established schools of Buddhism in the Hinayana.  He was granted permission to establish a teaching monastery on Mount Hiei.  The monetary at first was instructed to train devotees in two distinct and rival traditions—a ploy by the Emperor to bring peace between contentious sects.  But Saichō wanted to train and ordain his monks in the Tendai traditions instead of at the Tōdai-ji Temple under the ancient Vinaya Code.  This request was finally granted only after the master’s death in 822.

Tendai Buddhism was based in the teachings of the Bodhisattva Precepts.  I am informed also that it emphasized Esoteric Buddhism which aimed at achieving enlightenment through disciplined meditation and study in one lifetime rather than over eons of death and rebirth, the Exoteric Tradition.  All of this is fuzzy to me, but I am sure is clear to my many Buddhist readers.

Under Saichō, his disciples, and successors training at the Enryaku-ji Temple was extremely rigorous and based on the principles of his personal vows composed when he was only 20:

So long as I have not attained the stage where my six faculties are pure, I will not venture out into the world.

So long as I have not realized the absolute, I will not acquire any special skills or arts [medicine, divination, calligraphy, etc.]

So long as I have not kept all the precepts purely, I will not participate in any lay donors Buddhist meetings.

So long as I have not attained wisdom, I will not participate in worldly affairs unless it be to benefit others.

May any merit from my practice in the past, present and future be given not to me, but to all sentient beings so that they may attain supreme enlightenment.

Saichō, Founder of the Temple.

Monks lived in seclusion from the world for 12 years on remote Mt. Hiei where they undertook a rigorous program of study and meditation.  More than half of the students left in their first year.  After completing their studies, only the best and most promising students were accepted for ordination and sent to the 3000 sub-temples that were eventually established throughout Japan.  The remaining students were also highly valued and most entered the Imperial Service as civil servants and soldiers.

Things continued in this way for almost 300 years when a split occurred and competing schools of Tendai monks were established by the followers of Ennin and Enchin.  Both had been first generations disciples of Saichō and the teaching of their respective lines did not differ in many essentials.  Enchin was said to have promoted the worship of native Japanese Gods—essentially Shinto—as consistant with Confucian wisdom in addition to Buddhist spiritual practice.  Over the centuries the followers of the two schools with Ennins followers still based at the Enryaku-ji Temple known as the Mountain Order and Enchins at Mii-dera which was at the foot of Mt. Hiei, down slope from the mountain top temple.  Enchis’s followers became known as the Jimon sect or Temple School.

The conflict was more than anything about influence at court, prestige, and territorial conflicts.  Periodic clashes between monks escalated and each group assembled armies of soldier monks that often clashed and which also became entangled in court intrigue and dynastic disputes.  Sometimes the monk armies were supplemented with paid mercenaries including samurai and ronin warriors. 

But these disputes were only a prelude to a more deadly rivalry that began with the rise of Nichiren Buddhism in the 13 Century.  Founded by the monk Nichiren in 1253 who had studied at Tōdai-ji and other teaching centers, the new sect revolved heavily around the Lotus Sutra, which was also honored by Tendai monks.  But the Nichiren were highly sectarian to the point of being what we would now call fundamentalist.  They denied the legitimacy of all other Buddhist Schools and accused them of heresy to the original teaching of the Buddha.  They engaged in polemical wars with rivals, but also physical confrontations.  Their targets not only included both the Mountain Order and Temple School, but newer developing sects including emerging Zen, Nembutsu, Shingon, and Ritsu.    

In other words the Nichiren were sanctimonious, self-righteous, and a pain in the neck to just about everyone who did not agree with them.  That included the monks of Enryaku-ji Temple.  It is probably wise not to piss off a powerful and established sect with its own army.  Things came to a head in 1536 with Tenbun Hokke Disturbance, the burning of all of those temples, and attendant violence. 

The conflict came amid the chaotic period of Japanese history known as Warring States when feudal lords clashed for supremacy and Japan lay disunited.  A powerful, would-be uniter arose in the person of the War Lord Oda Nobunaga.  Warring temples and armies of monks represented the social chaos he strove to squelch as well a potential rival centers of power.  Oda attacked several contentious Temple centers, but Enryaku-ji was the most powerful.  In 1571 he attacked the Temple complex slaughtering all of the monks he could find and leveled the ancient buildings. Only one small shrine, the Ruri-dō or Lapis Lazuli Hall, isolated up a narrow and obscure path from the rest of the complex survive.

One of the many buildings the  UNESCO World Heritage site, Enryaku-ji Temple complex which were rebuilt after the arson fires.

After Japan was ultimately unified and the Tokugawa Shogunate was established in 1601, the monks returned to Mt.  Hiei and rebuilt the Enryaku-ji Temple complexes.  Those are the buildings that have been declared a United Nations International Cultural Site.

All of this sounds more like the familiar religious wars of Europe than what we expect of peace loving Buddhists.  The Japanese Buddhist wars were mostly confined to clashes between monks and armies, sparing the wide spread civilian slaughter as punishment for inappropriate worship that characterized the West.   Still, it was brutal enough.

And it was not entirely isolated in history.  Just a few years ago rival Korean Buddhists made world-wide headlines for pitched battles with clubs, knives, and swords over the possession of holy temples.  The brutal military masters of Miramar—Burma—were always said to be passionately observant Buddhists with great reverence for the tens of thousands of Temple monks, yet they not only turned their guns on their restive populations, they raided the temples, beat, murdered and imprisoned hundred of monks.  

I personally know Sri Lankan Buddhist monks who have converted our old Unitarian church in Woodstock, Illinois to the Blue Lotus Temple and I have never met such gentle spirits.  But the orders of monks from which they sprang back in Sri Lanka are militant in their opposition to and hatred of the dark-skinned Hindu Tamil minority and have resisted all attempts to find peace and reconciliation between the communities.  They can’t let go of the decades of tit-for-tat violence, terrorism, and military atrocities that still grip the country.

Ethnic Rakine buddhist monks in Myanmar demonstrate against minority Rohingra Muslims and have led ethnic cleansing and massacres according to the United Nations.

Sri Lankan Buddhists have also attacked minority Muslims and in Myanmar—former Burma—Rakine monks are engaged in what the United Nations has charged is brutal ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims including several documented massacres of minority villages.

The point is not to bash Buddhism.  Rather it is to point out that no philosophy, religion, or faith traditions, whatever the teachings of their founders and the continuing good will of their most spiritual leaders, are immune from falling into mere sectarianism and resorting to violence against those who can be seen somehow as others. 

Despite the spasms or Buddhist violence, these episodes are aberrations, not the norm.  The teachings of Buddhism are rooted in peace and tranquility and modern Buddhists like the Dalai Lama and Titch Nhat Hahn have been world leaders for inter-faith peace and respect.  

I don’t believe that religion itself is only that murderous spirit of some or that it is defined by its worst members and moments.  As a teenager who discovered the horrors of the Inquisition, European religious wars, and the fresh evidence of the Holocaust I fell into that easy, juvenile trap.  I screamed “a pox on all your houses”, avowed my atheism, and literally went out of my way to piss on churches for the next decade.  Foolish me.

There was nothing in the teachings of Jesus or the Buddha that was war-like.  Quite the contrary, both taught and sought peace and reconciliation.  The problem seems to come later, when prayers and incantations become empty words of ritual, when personal identification with the form of religion takes center stage, when holy institutions vie for power and wealth, and when those who do not share your prayer book are dehumanized into the monstrous other, that the problems arise.

Militant atheism as opposed to rationalism, free thought, true skepticism, humanism, or agnosticism easily becomes its own certain faith too eager to tell others that they should not/can not/will not have their heretical faith.  These type of  atheists scream with protest when horrors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et. al. are laid at their doorsteps, even as they are eager to hold every pew sitting Christian task for every murderous fanatic who ever carried a cross.

We are not much different than either those who have made peace or waged war.  We could go either way, given the circumstances.  If we want to choose peace, we must be on guard against our own certainties and our own eagerness to cast those with whom we differ as innately evil and undeserving of either compassion or consideration. 

It’s a lot harder than it looks. 

Getting Past Cowardice—Time to Act in the Name of Humanity

Coward

If you were to look up the word coward in a magic dictionary you would find my picture.  For weeks now this supposed peacenik and old anti-war activist has watched with mounting horror and simmering outrage a bloody eruption in the seemingly endless cycle of violence between the State of Israel and Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and now even in the sacred old city of Jerusalem itself.  And I have not uttered a word.  I have not taken to the streets or even signed a hollow petition.  I have not shared on Facebook the endless pictures of dead children, smashed homes, and blood on the pavement.

I grew up on The Diary of Anne Frank, Exodus the book and the movie, tales of the Holocaust and the idealistic establishment of a Jewish refuge and homeland.  I lived in my teen years in Skokie where almost all of my friends were whip smart and creative Jews and where men and women you passed on the street had faded numbers tattooed on their arms.  I was there when the Nazis tried to march there.  I sat at Seders and was invited to open the door for Elijah.  I learned to say never again! and mean it.  I was as good of a goyish ally as Jews or Israel could expect.

I still have many Jewish friends all over the world, including some in Israel who live close enough to hear the explosions of Hamas rockets fired from the Gaza and who now spend hours daily in shelters.

But I have also learned the other side of the story—the story of the Palestinian people made suddenly alien in their own land, of their displacement by war, made stateless and refugees, been made pawns in proxy battles between east and west, having their homes and orchards simply stolen from them, become pent up in ever shrinking islands surrounded by miles upon miles of mighty fortress walls, and penned in Gaza into the world’s largest prison.  I have come to understand their righteous anger and to admire the plucky courage of the intifada and facing tanks and overwhelming might with stones and slingshots.

I have also been repulsed by acts not of resistance but of terrorism whose sole aim seems not to be the advancement of the Palestinian people, but simply the murder of Jews, their allies, and any one unlucky enough to be standing by.

There are no clean hands in the supposed Holy Lands.  Halos are badly tarnished.  It is easy, far too easy to just say a pox on both your houses!  and walk away.  Or, worse yet, to fall into the trap of false even handedness—the familiar on-the-one-hand-an-on-the-other supposed neutrality of the American press and establishment that always somehow ends up supporting the powerful side that has come to deal in death and destruction on a wholesale level rather than in dribs and drabs.

I always pinned my hopes on the peace process, whatever that might be at the time.  Surely, I said to myself time after time, that people of good faith would see their way to end the madness.  But I learned, time after time, that each side was always the hostage of the most extremist who would inevitably provoke the other into new, and always escalating round of violence.  Simple despair seemed the only option.

The courtyard of a UN School in Gaza where 15 civilian refugees were killed,

At long last I concluded that there was no equality in abominations.  Over many years what started out as self-defense and self-preservation has morphed into something quite different.  In the occupied West Bank an aggressive campaign to build new settlements has resulted in the virtual theft of Palestinian property; the well-publicized bulldozing of homes with all of the possessions of the displaced inside; the carving up of the territory into smaller and smaller and more isolated enclaves; the erection of walls that separate villages from their fields, children from schools, family members from each other;  restrictions on movements that make ordinary daily life a nightmare; and, although the Israelis stream with outrage at the suggestion the imposition of conditions that make South African apartheid pale by comparison.

When the victims of this naturally protest, they are met by overwhelming military and police force.  The slightest and protest, including non-violent ones are immediately suppressed.  Nor is dissent in any other way—writing and publishing, public speaking, teaching—tolerated.  Sweeps of villages and arrests for unlimited preventative detention are routine.  Thousands of Palestinians are in prison.  Occasional releases as “good will gestures” are often followed within weeks or months by re-arrests.  Family members are arrested.  And over the past two years increasingly children as young as nine have been swept off the streets.  Palestinians on the West Bank simply have no civil or human rights that the State of Israel recognizes.

And in Gaza, the most densely populated few square miles on earth, things are worse.  Much worse.  In addition to repeated military assaults, including the current brutal attack, residents have for years been subject to strict embargos on most items, including construction materials to rebuild smashed homes, most consumer goods, and even many medicines and medical supplies.  Power and water sanitation facilities have been repeatedly targeted.  Fishermen are killed in their boats.  International aid is largely forbidden and the Israelis have shown they will kill to prevent the delivery of relief supplies.  Gaza is, at best, a huge prison.

To grasp the huge disproportion of the Israeli response to Palestinian threat one only has to look at the death tolls on each side.  Palestinian casualties—most of them civilian—dwarf Israelis.  And events transpiring as I type are multiplying those disparities. 

The result of all of this has not bought Israel peace.  It has driven the Palestinians into the open arms of the most extremist on their side.  Every bomb, every smashed home, every dead child earns the burning and unremitting hatred of survivors.  No one recruits more future terrorists than does the Israel Defense Force.  The most extreme forces on both sides find their greatest allies among their counterparts on the other. 

Many years ago Golda Meir said “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”  Current political leadership in Israel seems to have taken this as a directive to kill the children to make them stop hating.  Worse, in widening sectors of Israeli public opinion there is no longer a shred of regret. 

A recent article proposed a “total war” on Gaza and its entire population, explicitly calling for the mass death of the “mothers of terrorists,” children, old people.  The response?  In 48 hours the article received more than 40,000 positive, nay enthusiastic comments on line.  This week leading right wing Rabbi Dvor Lior issued a religious ruling stating that the total destruction of Gaza is justified if military leaders consider it necessary:

Therefore, in a time of war, the attacked nation is permitted to punish the enemy population with whatever measures it deems proper, like blocking supplies or electricity. It may bomb the entire area based on the judgment of the war minister and not wantonly put soldiers at risk…deterrent measures to exterminate the enemy are allowed.

This is still a minority voice in Israel.  But it is one that is increasingly sympathized with.  For those of us who once treasured the great humane promise of Israel this is heartbreaking.  But many Israelis and Jews the world over, have resisted the siren call to genocide.  Many are standing up and proclaiming “Not in my name!”  Even at great personal risk.

Where they have been bold, I have been a coward.  Why? Partly because in this country to offer the slightest criticism of Israel or its war policies is to be instantly branded an anti-Semite.  Who want’s that?  I didn’t.  So I stayed silent.

But I can no longer.  This is my declaration of independence from fear and intimidation.  I will stand with the oppressed, not the oppressor.  I will seek peace and justice—for all sides. 

During the incursion in Gaza poet Lena Khalaf Tuffah wrote:

Running Orders

They call us now.

Before they drop the bombs.

The phone rings

and someone who knows my first name

calls and says in perfect Arabic

“This is David.”

And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies

still smashing around in my head

I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?"

They call us now to say

Run.

You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.

Your house is next.

They think of it as some kind of war time courtesy.

It doesn’t matter that

there is nowhere to run to.

It means nothing that the borders are closed

and your papers are worthless

and mark you only for a life sentence

in this prison by the sea

and the alleyways are narrow

and there are more human lives

packed one against the other

more than any other place on earth

Just run.

We aren’t trying to kill you.

It doesn’t matter that

you can’t call us back to tell us

the people we claim to want aren’t in your house

that there’s no one here

except you and your children

who were cheering for Argentina

sharing the last loaf of bread for this week

counting candles left in case the power goes out.

It doesn’t matter that you have children.

You live in the wrong place

and now is your chance to run

to nowhere.

It doesn’t matter

that 58 seconds isn’t long enough

to find your wedding album

or your son’s favorite blanket

or your daughter’s almost completed college application

or your shoes

or to gather everyone in the house.

It doesn’t matter what you had planned.

It doesn’t matter who you are

Prove you’re human.

Prove you stand on two legs.

Run.

Courtesy Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Israel still claims to be issuing such warnings.  And bragging that it is proof of their humanity.  But more than ever there is no place to go.  Indeed places of refuge have been specifically and repeatedly attacked—witness the bombing of a United Nations School this week which was sheltering refugees from the bombing.  Officials three times communicated the schools exact coordinates to the IDF so that it would not be targeted.  It was anyway:

…as the Palestinians gathered in the courtyard on Thursday, believing they were about to be bused elsewhere, blasts tore through the crowd, killing 16 people and sending scores of wounded, mostly women and children, streaming into local hospitals.—Ben Hubbard and Jodi Rudoren in the New York Times. 

The very precision that the IDF boasts about when it warns residents of specific home to evacuate, belies any attempts to claim error or confusion in the attack.  As do other recent attacks on a facility for crippled girls, hospitals, and a gathering of World Cup Soccer views at a beach far from the supposed conflict zone.  And as do sniper shooting of children playing on a beach, family members frantically digging through rubble for loved ones, and emergency rescue teams—all of which have been documented on tape and/or witnessed by reliable Western reporters.

Far from showing any signs of letting up, the government announced more troops will be added to the attack and has called up more reservists.  Major demonstrations against the killing erupting in the West Bank have drawn live ammunition fire killing several and wounding hundreds over the last few days.  Now there are calls for a new full scale attack on the West Bank as well.

I draw inspiration from Israelis and Jews who have been braver than me.

Hero

Noa, a singer/songwriter of Yemenite/Israeli/American origins concluded a thoughtful and even handed blog entry on Wednesday with these words:

Where is God now?? Has he been driven to numbness by the abomination of his sacred teachings, by all extremists on both sides???

If we refuse to recognize each other’s rights and embrace our obligations, if we continue to each cling to his own narrative with contempt and disregard for that of the other, if we again and again choose swords over words, if we sanctify land and not the lives of our children, we shall soon be forced to truly seek a colony on the moon, for our land will be so drenched in blood and so cluttered with tomb stones there will be nothing left for the living.

I wrote these words, and sang them together with my friend Mira Awad. They stand truer than ever today:

“when I cry I cry for both of us,

My pain has no name.

When I cry, I cry to the merciless sky and say:

There must be another way”

Hero

Naomi Wolf is a noted American feminist, journalist, and recently the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a historical look at the rise of fascism, outlining 10 steps necessary for a fascist group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state and subvert the social/political liberty previously exercised by its citizens.  She posted this explanation of why she walked out of a Shabbat services at a synagogue when no mention was made of the ongoing mayhem in Gaza.

Challenged below for why I am mourning genocide in Gaza. I mourn genocide in Gaza because I am the granddaughter of a family half wiped out in a holocaust and I know genocide when I see it. People are asking why I am taking this ‘side’. There are no sides. I mourn all victims. But every law of war and international law is being broken in the targeting of civilians in Gaza. I stand with the people of Gaza exactly because things might have turned out differently if more people had stood with the Jews in Germany. I stand with the people of Gaza because no one stood with us. I went to synagogue last Friday night and had to leave because I kept waiting for the massacre of Gaza to be addressed. … Nothing. Where is god? God is only ever where we stand with our neighbor in trouble and against injustice. I turn in my card of faith as of now because of our overwhelming silence as Jews…I don’t mean Israelis, a separate issue…about the genocide now in Gaza. 

I want no other religion than this, that is, seeing rather than denying my neighbor under fire and embracing rather than dismissing those targeted with annihilation and ethnic cleansing.

For this Wolf will pay a much deeper personal price than I ever will.  She will be attacked as a self-hating Jew, compared to the collaborators in the Ghettos and extermination camps, shunned by former friends, and be harassed at every public appearance.

So what, after all, do I have to fear?

For the love of the Palestinian people, for the love of the Israeli people, for the love that binds us all together in the end, from this day forward I will be silent no more.