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Attitudes to War in Indian Tantric Buddhism

Iain Sinclair, University of Hamburg

ABSTRACT

In early Buddhism, war and other forms of mass suffering are regarded as problems whose solutions lie exclusively in the domain of personal spiritual cultivation: ‘there would be no war if we all followed the Buddha’s teaching’. Later developments, however, show that this approach was no longer considered adequate. War in the medieval period was a fact of life, and Buddhists could not realistically expect that their dharma would be followed by everyone: one may be a victim of war without advocating it personally. Correspondingly, tantric Buddhists devised a variety of war spells and rituals, in parallel with similar developments in other religions, though war itself is not advocated. By the eleventh century, Indian Buddhism faced annihilation by foreign armies, and the Kālacakra-tantra, revealed in this period, sees war in terms of a clash of civilizations. War for Buddhists is permissible, it says, but only if waged to defend territory; wars of aggression remain forbidden. Personal cultivation is still emphasized as the main antidote to suffering, though in the Vajrayāna, this is not a purely individual activity, but one which has a direct relationship with the world. In short, the tantric Buddhist view of war differs radically from early Buddhism in permitting reasoned acts of self-preservation, while refusing to endorse wars waged out of chauvinism or ‘in the name of the dharma’.

BIOGRAPHY

Iain Sinclair (M.A. Hons.) is a specialist in Indian Tantric Buddhism and Newar Buddhism. He studied the living Buddhist traditions in Nepal and Southeast Asia for over ten years. Currently he is pursuing doctoral research on the late Vajrāyana text, Kriyāsamuccaya, at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He works as a research associate with the University’s Centre for Tantric Studies.

His publications include several reviews of books on Newar Buddhism, and he has recently presented papers at conferences on tantric Buddhism in Nepal (2005) and Japan (2006), to be published in forthcoming Proceedings volumes