May all beings be happy and free from suffering!
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May all beings be happy and free from suffering!
Animals Rights has a nasty under-belly of far-right membership.
Criticism is an important and central aspect of Buddhism. However, the Buddha taught that such a process should be ‘truthful’ if it is to be effective.
When this faction of Buddhist monks are not directly committing the violence themselves, they often incite poorly educated lay Buddhists to carry-out the destruction on their behalf. This faction of Buddhist nationalists believe that they are defending the Sri Lankan nation from foreign invasion, despite the fact that many of the Muslims they attack are from families that have been resident in Sri Lanka for generations.
There are a number of Buddhist monks from Myanmar and Thailand, who are advising the lay people in their communities to attack and kill their fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim. A recent BBC Radio Four documentary investigating this phenomenon found that it was a minority of high ranking Buddhist masters (in Myanmar) who were responsible for this behaviour, and that the majority of masters did not agree, or had no opinion. This demonstrates that theses rogue masters are behaving in an unBuddhist manner and not only creating hellish karma for themselves, but also causing hellish karma for all those who unthinkingly follow their delusion without question.
These events have occurred in predominantly Theravada Buddhist countries, and have led to an intellectual climate which feels comfortable enough to routinely express sentiments of Islamophobia – an expression that legitimises itself by masquerading as a manifestation of Buddhist wisdom, when in reality it is nothing more than the product of greed, hatred, and delusion.