Ethnic Conflict In Buddhist Societies

Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma

Kinglsey M. De Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429718632
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at a South and South-east Asia regional workshop on 'Minorities in Buddhist Polities: Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma', organised by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), Sri Lanka, and the Thai Studies Programme of Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. The tenor for 'Minorities

Part I: Theoretical Issues

1 The Logic of Identity Profiles and the Ethic of Communal Violence: A Buddhist Perspective

Padmasiri de Silva

Introduction

For those who are beset with the sense of incongruity, disharmony, suffering and tribulation embedded in the human predicament, the Buddha has a message with a perennial cast. For those who make a temporary pact with the social order, attempting to find the Buddha's distinctive contribution to the development of social relationships, the ideals of righteous government and inter-group harmony, there is a message of sorts. Some have found his insights on society and polity revealing and useful. Others have even constructed socio-political orientations for guiding and enhancing political and social activity.

However, there appears to be a kind of interim, provisional—even transient — quality in the norms we use to deal with questions pertaining to society and polity. There is a great deal of taxing our imagination and reason. Situations and contexts demand special attention. The spirit of what we do emerges as more important than the letter of ethical rules, and conflicting alternatives agonise our consciences. The Buddha's own teachings about morality, society and polity have no fundamentalism or any absolutism; they have a restrained pragmatic outlook, but one which would not embrace complete value relativism. This is a significant point in the context of our times, as the world in which the Buddha lived was somewhat or even greatly different to ours. The complexities of our time were not present in their intensity and extent in the world in which the Buddha preached. In formulating a lay ethic, he was not disturbed by issues such as nuclear war, genetic engineering, artificially manipulated sex changes, biomedical and population ethics and, more crucial, sporadic brands of insurgency and terrorism as found today. The ethics of intervening and managing questions of this sort are born and bred within crisis situations. It is true that the Buddha has a very rational, analytical critique of caste and its application to race and other group concepts,¹ including a very frank, compassionate, considerate and tolerant view of other religions.² But even minority issues of the kind that plague us today did not exist at that time. This is an important point for reflection.

Discussing minorities in Buddhist polities, we can present some very rational, analytic inquiries the Buddha made regarding irrational group concepts such as caste and race. We can also cite the Discourse on the Parable of the Water Snake,³ which brings in the parable of the raft: the Dhamma is like a raft meant for crossing the river, not for carrying on one's shoulders after crossing the river; it is not meant to be converted into a label, an ornament, a bone of intellectual contention, a moribund institution and an object of infatuation and conceit. In spite of great doctrinal contributions, socio-historical data clearly illustrate the tremendous distortions, reversals and contradictions found in actual practice. A number of articles in this volume will perhaps betray this duality. But this article will examine a third dimension — the tension points, the conflict, the dilemmas which emerge as doctrinal resources encounter problematic social realities. Conceptualisation of these issues is in relation to two problem areas. The first deals with the logic of identity profiles, which is even more than a set of emerging dilemmas because it is a veritable tangle. The second problem area is more specifically called the 'dilemmatic' because it has reference to the norms of managing inter-group conflicts and violence.

Identity profiles and inter-group conflicts

This analysis is rooted in the Sri Lankan experience of group conflicts, where over the years people have had to cope with religious, linguistic and ethnic differentiations of varied types. Sri Lanka is a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic community with conflicting profiles of collective identities. Within the major religious orientations of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam — as well as the ethnic groups, Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — the concept of Sinhala-Buddhist identity has been the subject of prolonged discussion, especially so in the context of Sinhala Tamil conflict. The practice of religion often results in the formation of communities and collectivities. The relationship between such a community and another religious community can generate tension and conflict. In general, during recent years conflict between religious groups has been minimal, but ethnic conflicts have figured in a very prominent way. In understanding inter-group ethnic conflicts between Sinhalese and Tamils, perception of group identities is the crucial point: 'The real dilemma concerning the relation between the two communities lies in the mutually conflicting historical perceptions they have of their own and each other's identity.'⁴

In general, the teachings of the Buddha present a critique of personal identity, which is one of the deepest and richest facets of the doctrine, though its logical implications for what may be called collective identities at the doctrinal level has not been probed extensively. There are interesting logical strands in the Buddhist concept of personal identity which throw their own shadows on understanding collective identities, both in the context of the doctrine as well as certain historical realities.

This concept of personal identity within Buddhism as religion is even more basic than its counterpart expression of collective identity in socio-political contexts. As Bardwell Smith observes:

At the heart of identity always is what it means to be a person, a community, which is a religious more than it is a social or political or ethnic issue. In fact, it is significantly religious to the very degree that it not only takes seriously these other aspects of personhood (i.e., one's communal, national and cultural roots) but does not bestow ultimate status upon them.⁵

He adds that this authentic quest involves continuous self-criticism: 'While religious traditions may or may not address themselves to these sorts of issues, the problem at its deepest is inescapably religious, for the identity of persons is corporate as well as individual.'⁶

Historically, in the development of many nation states, there were stages of re-examining the roots of culture, and thus occurred the uneasy drift, from cultural diversity to ethnocentricism. This ambivalence is built into our perception of history. The movement towards modernity by the revitalisation of tradition raises the danger that healthy pride in one's heritage is converted into fanaticism. The semantic bridge between healthy national pride and fanaticism has become hazy and clouded and has to be penetrated by the process of continuous self-criticism. The discussion which follows attempts to unravel some points of tension, both at the doctrinal level and at the challenges of real situations.

Two conflicting strands in our identity profiles

According to the Buddhist diagnosis of human suffering, the deepest roots of suffering emerge from the futile attempt at preserving a false conception of self, with its attendent diverse forms of selfidentification. The fivefold identification emerging from corporeality, feeling, perception, dispositions and consciousness manifests in four different ways, thus generating twenty kinds of personality belief. The ideologies which feed forms of group identifications and feelings, and the desires which feed ideologies (ditthi), have a central place in the Buddhist analysis of conflict. The emergence of fear, anxiety and aggression in terms of certain defence mechanisms has been discussed in recent works on the psychology of Buddhism.⁷

In spite of all these complex forms of identification, these identity manifestations are seen as part of a grand illusion. Yet the problem arises: Are we a kind of protoplasm with no sense of direction, purpose and goal?

On the one hand, the doctrine of egolessness focuses attention on the basic indeterminacy, ambiguity and formlessness in human existence:

the basic indeterminacy of the human creature, the ambiguity and formlessness at the center of their lives, and with their tendency to try to fix their identity upon some cluster of transient identifications with which they become involved in learning to live in a particular time and place.⁸

On the other hand, within the ruins and the debris of the illusion, we have to generate a lifestyle without falling into the traps of these transient identifications. For the dissolution of the ego does not imply a dimunition of one's co-ordinating and cognitive powers. Somewhere within the narrow ridge between the paths of chaos and nihilism and the traps of identity illusions, one has to penetrate through a razor's edge,⁹ a realm of interim and critical unities, dissolving them as we cross them, transcending them as we cut across their inner dialectic. The reality of personal and group identities all flounder on this narrow ridge, and to steer clear of the traps is the greatest challenge. The fact that the so-called ego is a bundle of five factors does not mean that man is a psychological protoplasm without directionality, self-criticism and patterning. Perhaps the metaphor of an arrow, conveying the idea of 'directionality without fixation', is useful. But as Clifford Geertz remarks:

The power of a metaphor derives precisely from the interplay between discordant meanings it symbolically coerces into a unitary conceptual framework and from the degree to which that coercion is successful in overcoming the psychic resistance such semantic tension inevitably generates.¹⁰

These are the paradoxes which emerge in the study of identity profiles. The notion of involvement without fixation has been discussed in an analysis of 'The Scarcity of Identity' by Joseph Tamney.¹¹ He raises the question whether a strong religious identity prevents a person from developing an identity with a non-religious nation state.

This duality can be seen in more technical contexts such as the contemporary encounter between psychotherapy and Buddhism. While psychotherapy considers the 'lack of a self as inherently problematic, the Buddhist psychologists find the presence of a self a crucial problem. While the therapeutic issue in psychotherapy is how to regrow a basic sense of self, the therapeutic issue in Buddhism is how to see through the illusion of self. The conflict between the illusionist and the integrative notions of identity formation runs through both issues of personal identity and corporate identity.

In the Western clinical scene today, the inability to feel a real or cohesive being represents a disorder of the self. In the Buddhist context, heightened, overdone and bolstered identities generate many forms of fixation, anxiety, fear and aggression. Perhaps this is only an apparent duality, and the tension between the two ways of looking at personal identity would dissolve at a deeper level. The two goals need not be mutually exclusive. To present the situation in a simple way, the acceptance of the doctrine of egolessness does not imply that people should not struggle with the notion of 'Who am I?'. The case has been well-presented in this manner:

If, as Buddhism teaches, I do not have a self and am not a self, and if I should abandon all identifications based on any sense of the self, this is often misrepresented to mean 1 do not need to struggle with the task of identity formation or with finding out who I am, what my capacities are, what my needs are, what...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction — Ethnic Conflict in Buddhist Societies: Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma
• Part I: Theoretical Issues
• Part II: Buddhism, Minorities and Public Policy
• Part III: Buddhist Institutions and Minorities
• Part IV: Case Studies of Minorities in Buddhist Polities
• Index