This volume is a tribute to the work of Michael Jerryson, one of the initiators of the academic discourse on Buddhism and violence whose intellectual pursuits have resulted in a trailblazing shift in the academic study of Buddhism. Preconceived in the modern west as a pacific, chiefly meditative practice aiming for personal salvation and world peace, Buddhism has been exposed in the last few decades for its manifold legacy of violence. This is apparent not only in Buddhist groups’ history of support for actual military aims, but in Buddhism’s association with religious nationalism and in its more subtle expressions of discursive and structural violence. This exposure is due in significant part to Michael Jerryson who, in addition to exploring this perhaps surprising Buddhist history, has investigated the dynamism of Buddhist authority. Most recently in his critique of U Wirathu, the Burmese Buddhist monk whose advocacy of Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar has stirred a boiling pot of anti-Muslim resentments, Michael Jerryson has shown that reverence for Burmese religious authorities transcends respect for traditional Buddhist doctrine and monastic accomplishments. It emanates instead from the phenomenon of religious authority itself and from the cultural institutions which support it. His examinations have resulted in heightened sensitivity to the sociology of religious authority and violence. The scholarly contributions in this volume include discussions of Buddhism and violence, religious authority and nationalism, whether Buddhist, Christian, white, or other.

This chapter will comment on Buddhism and violence and the contributions to Part I.

The Buddha Dharma has been just as marked by cruelty and violence as any institutionalized socio-cultural movement. In this paper I examine such Dharmic cruelties in the life and teachings of a particular figure, the Kuchean monk Kumārajīva (ca. 450-504 CE), probably the most important foreign monk in the history of Chinese Buddhism. An unparalleled translator and exegete, his work propagating the Mahayana in China ushered in a more mature understanding of the Dharma. More intriguingly, though, Kumārajīva’s colorful life made him an international Buddhist celebrity and no doubt contributed to his legacy. According to traditional accounts, Kumārajīva was orphaned at a young age, and held prisoner for many years during which he was mistreated (and forced to violate his monastic precepts several times). He also he served as a military dictator’s “war prophet,” and even inflicted physical harm on his own body. Moreover, he conducted all of his influential work under direct imperial supervision, essentially operating under constant threat of punishment and/or death. Certainly, accounts of Kumārajīva’s life have all the trappings of a grand epic and betray the exaggeration typical of hagiography. Perhaps because of this fact, his life story provides ample of evidence of the sheer pervasiveness of violence in Buddhist history, rhetoric, and practice. In truth, careful study of the narratives portraying Kumārajīva’s life makes virtually impossible to take simplistic claims that Buddhism is “a religion of peace” at face value.

In this chapter, I examine connections between Buddhist law and international law not from a theoretical or philosophical perspective (as tends to be the case in scholarship) but from an empirical perspective. In particular, I look closely at the story of a single Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka whose domestic arguments about Buddhist law ended up forming the groundwork for a United Nations’ Resolution relating to the status of religious symbols. Drawing on legal archives from Sri Lanka and the UN as well as other monastic legal texts, I hope to illustrate how and why Buddhist monks in the contemporary world might work as agents of international law, even unwittingly. I also hope to add a consideration of processes, persons and institutions into a discussion of Buddhism and international law that has, to date, been largely abstract, disembodied and speculative.

Goden Ejen (Tib. Lha sras go tan rgyal po, 1206–1251) was Chinggis Khan’s grandson and a military leader involved with Mongol campaigns against the Song Dynasty. The second son of Ögedei Khaan and a brother of Güyük Khan, Goden Ejen ruled over large swaths of China prior to the rise of Khubilai Khan and the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271. According to later Tibetan and Mongolian memorialization, it was Goden who directed the Tangut military general Doorta to lead Mongol troops into eastern Tibet in 1240. In time, Goden summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Paṇḍita, by then already an old man, to his court at Liangzhou. The elderly Tibetan master is said to have converted Goden to Buddhism, which then opened the great dispensation of the Dharma into Mongol lands that deepened over the course of the Yuan, the Northern Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing periods. In honor of Michael Jerryson’s field-building work to center violence in Buddhist thought and society as a way to trouble modernist and Eurocentric presumptions in the study of Asian religions, this chapter examines 13-20th century monastic memorialization of the bodily violence enacted upon Goden Ejen at the center of this “Buddhist conversion of the Mongols.” This chapter examines the therapeutic practices and metaphors used in these sources to describe the bodily afflictions that besot Goden and counter-violence enacted by Sakya Paṇḍita as a critique of the usage of Christo-centric “conversion” in the study of pre-modern Inner Asian Buddhist history.

In this paper, I present an alternative method for teaching the Intro to Buddhism class, inspired in part by Michael Jerryson’s work on Buddhism and violence. The standard way of teaching this class is to divide the semester into two halves. The first half gives a three-fold doctrinal history of Buddhism in India: early Buddhism, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna. The second half of the semester then explores the three major regional traditions of Buddhism outside of India: Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Tibet and Mongolia. This model allows little room for non-normative aspects of Buddhism such as violence, and insofar as it does, it implicitly frames them as “aberrations” from “real Buddhism.” In my syllabus, I began by having students read The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh, which teaches them about Buddhist doctrine with a seductively modernist approach. At the mid-point of the semester, I then reveal to them that Thich Nhat Hanh’s book leaves out a great deal of what is found in actual traditional Buddhist practice, including reincarnation, gods, spirits, miracles, the supernatural, patriarchy, and violence. We then do a brief theoretical excursus into “Protestant presuppositions” and Orientalism so as to understand how the modernist view of Buddhism came about and why we need to take traditional forms of Buddhism seriously. In the second half of the semester, we then study regional forms of Buddhism, with a special eye towards practice, including the practice of violence.

In If You Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence, Michael Jerryson reports that his research on Buddhist violence is frequently met with two responses. The first is that the violence he has analyzed is not really Buddhist because true Buddhists are non-violent. The second is that instances of putatively Buddhist violence are not really Buddhist because they are ultimately about something besides religion, such as ethnicity, politics, or economics.[1] In this paper, I offer a comprehensive and detailed refutation of these responses, which I classify under the heading of the skeptical question, “But Is it Buddhist?” First, I argue that there is no good grounds for the claim that true Buddhists are non-violent. Second, I argue that the claim that putatively Buddhist violence is ultimately about something besides religion, such as ethnicity, politics, or economics, does not provide reason against classifying the violence as Buddhist. Third, I offer some reflections as to why, contrary to the skeptical challenge, we ought to expect Buddhist violence.

In 2014, I began working on my MA Thesis titled, The Gender Problem of Buddhist Nationalism: The 969 Movement and Therāvada Nuns. The project was based on an analysis of interviews with U Ashin Wirathu and Buddhist nuns and Buddhist nationalist discourses of gender and violence against religious and ethnic minorities in Myanmar. It argued that Burmese Buddhist nationalists’ marginalization of the Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority is inextricably linked to their attempts to control Buddhist women. In 2018, I began to explore a fundamental issue that continues to plague the Rohingya—the emphasis on the Rohingya as victims of nationalist systemic Buddhist violence. This paper sets out to bring Rohingya agency to the forefront. Rohingyas are characterized as immutably foreign and Muslim—that is, they are labeled with an identity convenient to state-sangha oppression. Through interviews with relocated Rohingya society members and the mentoring of Dr. Jerryson, this work is dedicated to the rehumanization and devictimization of the Rohingya.

This chapter will reflect on the sociology of religious authority and the contributions to Part II.

As scholars of religion wrote about white evangelicalism in the U.S. they too often defaulted to a definition of the movement put forth by historians who were themselves elite, white, male, evangelicals; policing the boundaries of their movement. As intellectual elites, their definition was almost entirely rooted in beliefs and functioned to legitimate their clam to the authority to delineate authenticity. The most influential formulation of this definition became known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral, which asserted that evangelicalism is characterized by four emphases: the bible, the cross, conversion, and activism. And while we can see all these emphases in the movement we call evangelicalism, nothing in the “Quadrilaterial” can account for why some 80% of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump to be president, So, as a definition of the movement, it seems lacking. Instead, as this paper will argue, there are other key dimensions to this movement that are much more salient, and that this movement is best understood when we see it in cultural terms. This paper will explore one aspect of a cultural definition of (white) evangelicalism; a shared temperament that rests on an adversarial understanding of themselves in relationship to “the world.” It will show how, rather than being based in a seemingly fixed creedal formulation, evangelicalism is malleable and in a never ending process of social construction.

This chapter draws on Jerryson’s insights as a heuristic to illuminate the religio-cultural violence in “U.S. war-culture.” Jerryson’s revelation of inadequate yet dominant patterns of analysis of Buddhism has surprising application to “the lived practice of Christianty” in the United States. As the editors of this volume emphasize, for too long, scholars in the west, because of their vision of Buddhism as “a pacific, chiefly meditative practice aiming for personal salvation and world peace,” missed seeing deeper destructive dynamics at work. (Prospectus) Jerryson’s “trailblazing study” shows how studies of Buddhism centering largely on doctrine and tradition, were insufficient. Meticulously and courageously drilling into patterns of discursive practices and institutional structures in “lived Buddhism,” his work shines light on the innerworkings of violence. This is indeed to “reexamine uncomfortable areas.” I will reflect on Jerryson’s discoveries about Buddhism in light of my own about Christianity, regarding exploration that I began, not long after Sept. 11, 2001, of widespread cognitive assumptions that link religion, militarism, war and national identity in the United States. I argue that scholars and citizens in the United States also miss seeing and adequately responding to the innerworkings of this religious violence in U.S. war-culture of the post 9/11 era. Jerryson’s work inspires and informs my attempts similarly to “expose” a reality that largely remains hidden from dominant consciousness in scholarship and popular imagination — U.S. war-culture, and its direct, structural and cultural systems of violence that are glorified, justified and concealed by way of Christian (civil) religious discourse, logic, doctrine and ritual.

Michael Jerryson’s work on religion and violence in Buddhist traditions insists on an appreciation of how various actors gain authority to advocate for the violent interpretation of religious texts. A contextual understanding of the dynamic forces involved in the construction of authority can also help us to understand the ubiquitous phenomenon of charismatic religious authority across religious traditions more broadly, a concept that has been under theorized in the study of religion. Using examples from lesser-known apocalyptically charged movements in classical Islam, this article examines the relationship between the construction of authority and various phases of the apocalyptic myth (its imminence, its distance and its reinterpretation). My examples are drawn from three rival movements (the Fatimids, the Abbasids, and the Almohads) who each deployed iterations of the apocalyptic myth to build and consolidate authority.

Affect theory is often defined as the study of the non-linguistic elements of human experience. What, if any, aspects of our subjectivity are not related to language, and how do we study them? While studies on affect theory have taken a wide range of approaches that stretch across the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences, most have been concerned with contemporary events, communities, and rhetoric. What has been missing in studies on affect theory is how affect relates to texts—that is, how do texts convey affect, and how do readers respond to textual affects? While affect theory promises to explore what lies outside of language, texts are inevitably bound to the written word. Texts from premodern societies present even more challenges, as they come from the distant past and often little is known about their origins or authors. This essay will explore how scholars could approach the affective dimensions of premodern texts. In particular, I will analyze two late ancient apocalypses, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the Book of Main Points. Both were composed in Syriac during the seventh century by anonymous Christian authors living in the aftermath of the Islamic conquests. Both texts are also famous for their terrifying and violent imagery of the end of the world. Drawing upon insights from the field of religion and violence (particularly Michael Jerryson’s process of authorization), I will suggest a mode of reading these texts that accounts for their representations of intense violence. Ultimately, rather than presenting consistent narratives, both texts show how violence produces diffuse, paradoxical, and inconsistent affects, particularly in the absence of a stabilizing, “authorizing” voice.

Throughout his scholarly career, Michael Jerryson has been an attentive and trenchant critic of the hegemony of Western conceptions of religion in knowledge production about non-Western religions. While his research focused primarily on Theravada Buddhism, this essay contends that through such critique Jerryson has at the same time been a perceptive, if indirect, investigator of secularism and the theologico-political foundations of the West. One may discern in Jerryson’s work, as is also discussed in secular studies, secularism’s creation of religion and thus the erasure of the very conceptual basis of religious studies, while at the same time discerning the continuing urgency of religious studies, making Jerryson’s work salient and timely far beyond the study of Buddhism.