Dharma World Buddhist magazine

Religion and Peace

by Fumihiko Sueki

An abstract, universal ideal of peace cannot be successful. Peace must be considered from the standpoint of what sort is desirable and under what conditions.

Although religions actively preach peace, they are also often the source of war and violence. Why should this be? There are many ways to answer this question. One way is by saying that there are religions that seek peace and religions that approve of war and violence. Lately it is often said in Japan that monotheistic religions are intolerant and bring about wars, whereas polytheistic religions are tolerant and seek peace. This explanation is well suited to Japanese nationalistic concepts and is thus readily accepted and easily popularized; for this very reason, it is dangerous. It was the polytheistic Japanese, after all, who conducted an extremely brutal oppression of Christian believers during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Before World War II, Japan was a militaristic nation where brave combat was glorified. We say that Buddhism is peaceful, yet during the war years of the Showa era (1926-89) Buddhists supported the war effort most fervently, seeing it as a manifestation of the spirit of Mahayana Buddhism.

Another answer would be that religions have primarily sought peace, but some deviant elements often provoke violence and wars. The Aum Shinrikyo sect, for example, cannot be said to have been a true religion; it is considered a fraud passing itself off as a religion. Moreover, it is frequently noted that although some extremist practitioners of fundamentalist Islam provoke violence, Islam actually is primarily a religion that seeks peace. But even if we grant this, there are too many religions that are aberrations. Historically, religions have more often caused wars than they have brought about peace, and so it cannot possibly be said that religions have been inherently peaceful.

Is Peace Truly Desirable?

I wonder to what extent we should take for granted the assumption that all people love peace and seek peace. All wars are waged with the declared objective of bringing about peace. One can safely say there are no wars conducted for the sake of war. Even the war of the Showa era waged by Japan was declared to be for the purpose of bringing about peace by means of unifying the world in the spirit of hakko ichiu (all eight corners of the world under one roof). Nevertheless, that is why one cannot jump to the conclusion that all people seek peace. There have been too many situations in which peace was only paid lip service.

Approaching this from the opposite viewpoint, are all wars bad? When Japan invaded China, the Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties cooperated in a war of resistance against the Japanese forces. The Japanese thought of themselves as seeking peace and believed that some Chinese were disrupting this peace and thus were at fault. Would that mean, however, that we could say that peace-seeking Japan was good and that China, resisting with military force, was bad? The opposite was true, wasn't it? How could the Chinese be blamed for resisting a military invasion on the grounds that such resistance was contrary to the doctrine of peace? At the time, Chinese Buddhists under the leadership of Taixu (1889-1947) joined the war of resistance against the Japanese. The Buddhist clerics cannot be accused of doing something they should not have done, as if they had cooperated to cast aside peace and make war. As one can see, there are situations in which war cannot be avoided. Merely insisting on abstract pacifism is without meaning.

Is It Wrong to Kill People?

This question can be understood by comparison with individual violence. At a time when Japan was experiencing a series of particularly vicious juvenile crimes, one youth was reported to have asked, "Why is it always wrong to kill someone?" In response, adults debated the issue on television and in magazines; philosophers even published books on it. The point everybody overlooked, however, was that "it is wrong to kill someone" has meaning only within a certain limited scope and is not necessarily a universal truth. To begin with, "it is wrong to kill someone" does not have meaning on the battlefield during wartime. If you think that is an extreme example, I can give another one. Japan has legally sanctioned capital punishment, a practice that is prohibited in most of Europe and is increasingly losing favor in the United States; killing by the state is legitimized. At present, however, genuine opposition to the death penalty as a social movement has not gained much force in Japan. So, while murder by individuals is prohibited, the taking of life by the state is sanctioned to maintain order among individuals.

Looked at this way, it can be seen that "it is wrong to kill someone" has meaning only within a very limited scope. That is to say, it is only within the scope of civil society, protected externally by the institutions of the military or of capital punishment, which are premised on "killing," that it has meaning. Even within the scope of civil society, there are difficult questions as to what extent we should permit killing for legitimate self-defense. A few years ago, there was an incident in America in which a Japanese exchange student, invited to a Halloween party at a private home, mistakenly approached the wrong house and was shot dead by the householder, who saw him as a threat. The shooter was not held legally responsible. Homicide to protect one's family and property is recognized in American society. As can be understood from the above, "it is wrong to kill someone" is a rule that has meaning only within a certain scope and certainly does not apply universally.

The issue of peace is exactly the same. An abstract, universal ideal expressed by "peace must prevail" cannot be successful. It must be considered from the standpoint of what specific sort of peace is being sought and under what conditions. If peace is good no matter what form it takes, then realistically the most likely form of peace is one in which a single superpower dominates the world, totally suppressing all resistance and exercising strict control. But is that kind of peace desirable?

The actual situation during the cold war was that instead of a single superpower, there was a balance of power between two camps, and both sides feared to start a war against the other. It is also true that there were fewer regional wars during the cold war than we have seen in recent years. However, if we are asked if the situation was better during the cold war, I doubt that anyone could answer that it was.

Then What Should Be Done?

Nevertheless, of course I am not trying to say that seeking peace has no value or that war is desirable. Rather, what I am saying is that simply insisting that peace in the abstract is good or that one will continue to pray for peace is, ultimately, nothing more than a rallying cry and merely offers self-satisfaction. One risks the danger that, if anything, aggressors or repressive regimes or the domination of a single superpower will thereby be rationalized, and resistance to them may even be blocked.

If that is the case, then what should be done? One thing we can say first is that we should not consider politics or moral values to provide the final answer. We cannot declare that religions should never make pronouncements about political issues. Yet it would be somewhat strange to insist that religions give priority to political values or comply with political values.

If nothing else, war and peace are issues at both the political and the moral level. Morality and politics are based on rules about which there is general understanding among people. Peace is something that emerges, even when there are differences in values, when an understanding is reached through people getting together and talking to each other. Consequently, it is predicated on people expressing their positions verbally and discussing them rationally and logically. People do not always operate within the framework of rational mutual understanding, however, and from time to time may deviate from that course. At such times they may encounter the Other, who is totally frank and unreserved and goes beyond mutual understanding. Encounters with such an Other can arouse extreme alarm and intense concern, which can lead to close attachment or deep hatred, resulting in unpredictable actions that are not governed by reason.

Religious feelings are something that materializes from that type of involvement with the Other. That is why religious sentiment does not necessarily conform to accepted moral values but instead always harbors the possibility of deviating from them. That religion can sometimes provide the energy for peace, but can also at times be the source for war and violence, is due precisely to the fact that religions deal with the Other, those who go beyond the framework of rational mutual understanding. Religion destroys the conceited thinking that people control their own actions rationally, demonstrating the limitations of accepted public and presumably rational rules.

Religion, however, is not simply a deviation from rules. While on the one hand it does deviate from the world of mutual social understanding, on the other hand it returns to that world. Religion rationally devises its doctrine in the latter dimension. And since religion must operate within society, it must follow the rules that arise out of mutual understanding. Moreover, it has the right to speak out on issues concerning how those rules are determined.

Yet, for religion the issues of war and peace are not simply matters to be relegated only to the mutual understanding of the worlds of morals and politics. These are issues that confront the most basic elements of religion. This is born from confronting the dead. When we pursue the matter of the Other, we come to the issue of the dead. The reason is that the dead are the "Other" who are most difficult for the living to comprehend and with whom no type of mutual understanding can materialize. Yet the living cannot go about their lives without dealing with the dead. When we devote our thoughts to war and peace, it is those who died in wars that we think about first. We cannot think about issues of war and peace without remembering the dead who were wantonly killed at Auschwitz or Hiroshima, to give two examples. The future always builds on an accumulation from the past. If we are to talk about peace, we must start by asking how it involves the dead of past wars. There has been enough of abstract pacifism. We must go beyond that. The question we ought to ask today is, how far can we go into the past to create a true peaceful future by successfully interacting with the dead?

Fumihiko Sueki obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1994. Since 1995 he has been a professor in the university's Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, where he teaches Buddhism, in particular Japanese Buddhism. He works mainly on the reconstruction of the intellectual history of Buddhism in Japan from ancient to modern times. He is an author of a number of books and articles, and his recent research also covers Zen philosophy and comparative studies of modern Buddhism.

This article was originally published in the July-September 2006 issue of Dharma World.

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