Don't you have to be a special kind of dangerous...

...to turn Buddhists into racist haters?

//“These pictures are here to protect our religion and our national interest,” the monk calmly explained to a BBC reporter in a 2013 documentary. “If we do not protect our own people we will become weak, and we will face more mass killings of this kind when they grow to outnumber us.”

“Muslims are only well behaved when they are weak,” he adds, contemplating another poster. “When they are strong they are like a wolf or a jackal, in large packs they hunt down other animals.”

Wirathu is the leader of Burma’s 969 movement, a radical nationalist group that’s been accused of inciting violence against the Rohingya. Rights activists have called him a neo-Nazi and Time ran a 2013 profile of him under the headline “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” In that article, Time said he had “taken the title of ‘the Burmese bin Laden.'” Wirathu contested the quote, but it was too late. The moniker stuck.//

The Incorruptibles - Buddhist Division.

This scores high on the "eww, yuck" index - Sokushinbutsu: the Buddhist art of self-mummification.

Hundreds of years ago in northern Japan, a sect of Buddhism practiced a now-illegal form of burial. Existing only in fairy tales until its recent discovery, Sokushinbutsu was a slow, painful death that monks practiced on themselves, resulting in a near-perfect preservation of their bodies.


The process was long and arduous; taking almost 6 years to complete. For the first 1,000 days, the monk would change his diet to consist of nothing but nuts and seeds while exercising daily to eliminate as much body fat as possible. After 666 days, he would move on to an even more restricting diet; eating nothing but roots and tree bark. Finally, as the 1,000 days came to a close a special tea made of toxic sap was drunk; slowly poisoning the body and making it inedible to maggots.


The final step consisted of locking oneself in a small tomb in the lotus position with nothing but an air tube and a bell. After the bell stopped ringing on a regular basis, the monk was presumed dead and the tomb was sealed. 1,000 days later, the monks would uncover the tomb to assess the success of the mummification.


Fully-preserved monks were venerated as a Buddha, given a permanent viewing platform within the temple. The majority who decomposed as normal were still praised for their dedication. With only a handful of preserved bodies left, we can only guess how many monks attempted this.

Religious Persecution - it's not just for Monotheists anymore...

...Buddhists in Myanmar (Burma) persecute Christians.

According to Catholic Culture:

Military forces in Myanmar (Burma) disrupted Mass in Namsan-yang, a village of Kachin State on October 16, shooting at worshippers, beating one, and detaining five for forced labor. After releasing Father Sara Doi Awng, the soldiers burned the parish and a Baptist church.


According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, the Burmese army has been engaged in a campaign of “rape, forced labor, and killing civilians on a widespread and systematic basis” in Kachin, the nation’s northernmost state. Since 1962, the nation has been ruled by authoritarian military regimes, which expelled missionaries and nationalized Catholic schools and hospitals in the 1960s and abolished constitutional religious freedom protections in the late 1980s. Myanmar has gained a reputation for brutality: in 2005, the United Nation’s International Labor Organization estimated that 800,000 citizens are subjected to forced labor.

According to the US State Department, this atmosphere of repression is particularly unfavorable to non-Buddhists, for “the Ministry of Religious Affairs includes the powerful Department for the Promotion and Propagation of Sasana (Buddhist teaching).” Buddhist prayer and doctrine are part of the curriculum of all state-run elementary schools. The government pressures students to convert to Buddhism and rarely permits non-Buddhists to rise in the civil service. Monitoring church services and controlling the publication of all religious literature, it forbids the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages and at times has censored the Old Testament, citing its violent language. The construction and even the routine maintenance of churches often depend upon the whim of local administrators.

Only 1.2% of Myanmar’s 53.4 million people are Catholic, according to Vatican statistics; in all, 89% are Buddhist, 4% are Christian, and 4% are Muslim.

Clearly, nationalism poisons everything.

Dalai Lama supports killing of bin Laden.

No, really!

Apparently Buddhism is not as pacifistic as we think:

How could the Dalai Lama, who hesitates to harm mosquitoes, endorse killing Osama bin Laden? The terrorist deserved compassion, the Dalai Lama said, but "if something is serious … you have to take counter-measures". The apparent inconsistency here is with idealistic western fantasies of pacifist Buddhism, not with Buddhism itself. The power of those fantasies is so strong that it even affects Tibetans themselves. Some young refugees blame Buddhism for losing Tibet. Saying "we were warriors once," they invoke their history of empire and incorrectly think their ancestors did not resist Chinese invasion. Those fantasies also cause us to fail to appreciate how extraordinary the Dalai Lama is. We take his values as those of a typical Buddhist or a typical dalai lama, and he is neither.


Buddhists work out their values through stories of Buddha's past lives, which show him in myriad roles, such as a battle-elephant or minister defending his besieged city. The following story is analogous to a terrorist situation. It is known throughout northern Buddhism. Communists even used it to rouse Chinese Buddhists to fight in Korea. The Buddha, in a past life as a ship's captain named Super Compassionate, discovered a criminal on board who intended to kill the 500 passengers. If he told the passengers, they would panic and become killers themselves, as happened on a Southwest Airlines flight in 2000. With no other way out, he compassionately stabbed the criminal to death. Captain Compassionate saved the passengers not only from murder, but from becoming murderers themselves. Unlike him, they would have killed in rage and suffered hell. He saved the criminal from becoming a mass murderer and even worse suffering. He himself generated vast karmic merit by acting with compassion.

The story is double-edged. Killing protects others from the horrific karma of killing. At Harvard in April 2009, the Dalai Lama explained that "wrathful forceful action" motivated by compassion, may be "violence on a physical level" but is "essentially nonviolence". So we must be careful to understand what "nonviolence" means. Under the right conditions, it could include killing a terrorist.

Interesting.