IB World Religions 2.6.2. Ethical Practice: Karuna, Ahimsa and the Response to War and Conflict Notes

2.6.2. Ethical Practice: Karuna, Ahimsa and the Response to War and Conflict

Karuna and the brahmaviharas

1. Karuna (compassion) is the wish that beings be free of suffering, and Buddhists treat it as the motive that turns a moral rule into a practice.
2. It sits second among the four brahmaviharas (divine abidings), after metta (loving kindness) and before mudita (sympathetic joy) and upekkha (equanimity).
3. The four are cultivated deliberately. In metta bhavana a practitioner extends goodwill first to themselves, then to a friend, then to a stranger, and finally to someone they find difficult.
4. Reaching the difficult person is the point of the exercise rather than its optional last step, since karuna is defined by having no exceptions rather than by strength of feeling.
5. Mahayana Buddhists move karuna to the centre of the path, and the bodhisattva vow commits a practitioner to work for the release of all beings before taking their own.
6. Compassion is checked by panna (wisdom) so that it does not collapse into sentiment. A compassion that harms through poor judgment counts as a failure, not as an excess.

Ahimsa and the first precept

1. The first of the Five Precepts is a training rule to abstain from taking life, and it is the precept Buddhists name first when asked about war.
2. Behind it stands ahimsa (non-harm), a principle Buddhism shares with Hinduism and Jainism, stated here as a refusal to injure any being capable of suffering.
3. The Dhammapada grounds it in a comparison anyone can run on themselves: all beings fear violence and all hold life dear, so a person who takes that seriously neither kills nor causes to kill.
4. The precept reaches ordering, encouraging and approving a killing, not only performing one, which is why Buddhist discussion of war takes in commanders and citizens as well as soldiers.
5. Diet is where the branches differ visibly. Theravada monastics may accept meat under the threefold rule that they neither saw, heard nor suspected the animal was killed for them, while East Asian Mahayana monasteries are usually strictly vegetarian.
6. Right Livelihood carries the precept into work. The Anguttara Nikaya names trade in weapons, in living beings, in meat, in intoxicants and in poison as occupations a lay follower should avoid.

The path applied to conflict

1. The Noble Eightfold Path supplies the working framework, since its moral factors reach the speech, action and work that lead into a conflict as well as the fighting itself.
2. Right Speech functions as conflict prevention. Abstaining from lying, harsh speech, divisive speech and idle talk removes much of what escalates a quarrel into a fight.
3. Buddhists trace conflict back to the Three Poisons, greed, hatred and delusion, so a war is analysed as those states enlarged rather than as a purely political event.
4. The Dhammapada states that hatred never ends through hatred but only through non-hatred, and Buddhists cite it as a claim about consequences rather than only about virtue.
5. Ashoka, the third century BCE Indian emperor, is the tradition's standard historical case. His edicts record remorse after the Kalinga campaign and a turn to rule by dhamma.
6. Contemporary work ranges from monks mediating village disputes to Buddhist organizations campaigning on disarmament, with the precepts supplying the shared vocabulary.

Buddhists in actual wars

1. The precepts describe an ideal, and the historical record includes Buddhist communities that have fought, funded and blessed wars. Buddhists discuss this openly rather than deny it.
2. Several Zen institutions in Japan supported the country's wars in the first half of the twentieth century, and a number of Zen organizations issued formal apologies for that support in the 1990s.
3. In Sri Lanka a strand of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism drew on the Mahavamsa chronicle during the civil war, while other Sri Lankan monks worked publicly for a negotiated settlement.
4. In Myanmar monks led the mass protests of 2007, and other monks have been associated with movements that Buddhist critics inside the country have condemned as hostile to Muslims.
5. The doctrinal question is whether defensive killing can ever satisfy the first precept. Buddhist writers answer differently, with most holding that killing carries kamma even when the motive is protective.
6. Buddhism has produced no developed just war theory of the Christian kind, so arguments about permissible force are built case by case out of the precepts and the Path.

Tibet and China

1. The dispute over Tibet is the standard case for Buddhist ethics under conflict, and it is contested at the level of historical fact as much as at the level of values.
2. Chinese forces entered Tibet in 1950, and the Seventeen Point Agreement of 1951 affirmed Chinese sovereignty while promising that the existing religious and political system would remain. Tibetan exiles hold that it was signed under duress, while the Chinese government holds it valid.
3. After the Lhasa uprising of 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India and set up an exile administration at Dharamsala, where a Tibetan refugee community has lived ever since.
4. The Chinese government's position is that Tibet has long been part of China. It points to the ending of a serf based social order and to later investment in infrastructure, health and education.
5. Tibetan exile organizations point to controls on monasteries, on displaying the Dalai Lama's image and on recognizing reincarnate teachers, and they argue the case in the secular language of human rights.
6. The Dalai Lama's Middle Way Approach asks for genuine autonomy inside the People's Republic rather than independence, and he defends it on ahimsa grounds. The Tibetan Youth Congress and others press for full independence and regard the middle way as too concessive.
7. Since 2009 more than one hundred and fifty Tibetans, many of them monks and nuns, have died by self-immolation in protest. Buddhist teachers disagree about whether the act can be squared with the first precept.

Compassion as public action

1. Twentieth century Buddhists developed Engaged Buddhism to apply karuna to war, poverty and injustice as a form of practice rather than as an opinion held privately.
2. Thich Nhat Hanh and his community stayed in Vietnam through the war to evacuate and rebuild villages, describing that work as meditation continued by other means.
3. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship, founded in California in 1978, and Sarvodaya Shramadana, the Sri Lankan village self help movement founded in 1958, show the same impulse in organized form.
4. Buddhist chaplains now serve in hospitals, prisons and armed forces in several countries, which puts the precepts into settings the Canon never anticipated.
5. Interfaith and secular partnerships have become a standard vehicle, and teachers including the Dalai Lama present compassion as a value religious and non-religious people can share.
6. The open question inside the tradition is how far compassion licenses confrontation. Buddhists answer it differently while agreeing on what they are aiming at.