Day 69 : Book Excerpt : The Taming of The Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism

The Rudra myth revels in a litany of violent imagery: in its account of the wild and bloodthirsty lifetimes that precede Rudra’s final birth, in how the newborn demon eats his dead mother’s flesh, in the details of his hideous visage, in the carnage and the disease he wreaks upon the world, in the descriptions of his vile palace, and in the conflagration of monstrous violence that ends his terrible reign. We are supposed to be repulsed by this dreadful demon and the bloody imagery intended to reflect the horrors of his evil ways. Yet the myth’s violence is not entirely one-sided, for the compassionate buddha also appears in the same demonic form and is equally vile in his own horrific manner. He too has massive wings, nine hideous heads, and eighteen hands bearing an array of terrifying implements. He too is crawling with spiders, scorpions, and snakes. He too breathes fire and tramples beings beneath his feet. Surely we are not meant to be repulsed by the buddha as well. There must be more to this violent imagery than meets the eye; it must not be just for the purpose of portraying evil. That the buddha shares Rudra’s terrifying aspect should give us pause.

Indeed, the myth itself states that a superficial understanding of the tantras was precisely what led Rudra to his evil and destructive end. During his previous life as Black Liberator, while studying the tantric teachings of uninhibited spontaneity, the demon-to-be took literally the words of his master, Invincible Youth, and thereby misunderstood their deeper meaning. His fixation on literal readings and surface appearances drew him into a downward spiral of egotism in which nothing else mattered. “Though he wore the outward costume of an excellent [monk],” the myth relates, “he followed a path of evil-hearted beings.” Whereas his servant, on the other hand, “despite his outward appearance as one of low rank, remained on the path to ascertaining the excellent mind.” In therealm of the tantras and their antinomian teachings, one must proceed carefully. Appearances may not be what they seem.

Early Western condemnations of Tibetan Buddhism as bloody demonolatry, such as those of L. Austine Waddell, were driven in large part by scholars’ own violent reactions against precisely the kind of imagery that fills the Rudra myth. Despite the strength of such visceral negative responses, however, the Rudra myth suggests that some forms of violence may be more complex. The extreme reactions that violence often engenders can obscure its nobler features. The superficial appearance of tantric violence, we are told, can mask a supremely compassionate intention. This chapter investigates the nature of this concealment, this disjuncture between the unsettling appearance of Buddhist violence and its hidden pacific intention. How can violence be both destructive and compassionate? How have Buddhists distinguished compassionate violence, this supremely dangerous form of virtuous activity, from its evil twin, the demonic violence we all fear and loathe? This chapter explores these questions, all the while attempting to remain open to the ambiguities that are inherent to violence.

Violence, as Hannah Arendt has observed, is instrumental by nature. It is a means to an end and as such is neither good nor evil in itself. It is justifiable only in its end, in the purpose for which it is enacted. By means of violence, one may accomplish aims that are either positive or negative. Yet violence is not just any instrument; it is the ultimate of means, the activity of last resort in the Buddhist tantras. Its methods are dramatic, and its spectacular appearance can easily distract from and obscure its merely instrumental nature. The horror of violence thereby often seems gratuitous and fundamentally evil. In spite of its powerful appearance, though, violence remains merely a morally ambiguous means. The Rudra myth involves us in all these issues, in the tensions and the concealments that lie within violence itself, and it thereby provides an opportunity for us to investigate the Buddhist approach to violence in all its complexity.

COMPASSIONATE VIOLENCE IN THE SUTRAS

On the surface, killing is forbidden in Buddhism, as is clear from the very first precept to be observed by all Buddhist devotees (upasaka): to abstain from killing living beings (Skt. pratigahtad virati). Yet what this has meant in practice has not been as simple as it might seem. The idea that killing may sometimes be permissible within Buddhism appears in the tantras, but it is by no means unique to these works. Violent rituals multiplied dramatically with the emergence of the tantras from the seventh century onward, but already the earlier Mahayana sutras had made similar ethical allowances. Even certain non-Mahyna Abhidharma and Vinaya commentaries had left the door open for forms of killing that were not necessarily negative. Such early sources distinguished moral from immoral killing on the basis of the mental intention (cetan) that accompanied the act. Killing was only immoral if it was intentional, and conversely, unintentional killing did not break the first precept. As the Samantapsdik, a fifth-century collection of Pali commentaries on the Vinaya, explains: “The intention to kill as a result of which one produces the activity that cuts off [a being’s] life-faculty is called ’killing a living being’; ’the one who kills a living being’ should be understood as the person [who kills while] possessing that intention.”

~~The Taming of The Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism -by- Jacob P. Dalton