Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?<br />One notion central to this discourse, though, is the idea<br />that Buddhism is under threat in the contemporary world — an idea that appears not only in Myanmar’s history but also in the Buddhist texts, written in the Indic language of Pali, that are taken as canonical in Myanmar.<br />In this period, Buddhist religious leaders, often living under colonial rule in the historically Buddhist countries of Asia, together with Western enthusiasts who eagerly sought their teachings, collectively produced a newly ecumenical form of Buddhism — one<br />that often indifferently drew from the various Buddhist traditions of countries like China, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Japan and Thailand.<br />The widespread embrace of modern Buddhism is reflected in familiar statements insisting<br />that Buddhism is not a religion at all but rather (take your pick) a “way of life,” a “philosophy” or (reflecting recent enthusiasm for all things cognitive-scientific) a “mind science.”<br />Buddhism, in such a view, is not exemplified by practices like Japanese funerary rites, Thai amulet-worship or Tibetan oracular rituals<br />but by the blandly nonreligious mindfulness meditation now becoming more ubiquitous even than yoga.<br />While history suggests it is naïve to be surprised<br />that Buddhists are as capable of inhuman cruelty as anyone else, such astonishment is nevertheless widespread — a fact that partly reflects the distinctive history of modern Buddhism.<br />By “modern Buddhism,” we mean not simply Buddhism as it happens to exist in the contemporary world<br />but rather the distinctive new form of Buddhism that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries.<br />To be really changed by a belief regarding one’s relationship to all other beings, one must cultivate<br />that belief — one must come to experience it as vividly real — through the disciplined practices of the Buddhist path
