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Good Morning.

I was deeply saddened yesterday to hear that the Myanmar military had seized power, arresting civilian leader, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, and other leaders in her party. Myanmar is dear to my heart. My last visit there was to research a British person who, in 1901, became a Buddhist monk in the country, taking the name Ananda Metteyya. He wrote of the ‘ever-present sunlight’ of the Buddha’s teaching in the country, penetrating the everyday lives of ordinary people, helping them to cope with suffering.

Myanmar has faced much suffering. It has endured colonial rule administered from British India. It has known military dictatorship and the attempted, violent elimination of the Rohingya Muslims in Rakkhine State. And now it seems military rule has returned, crushing democracy, in the words of one UN spokesperson.

A question that I am often asked is how such violence can happen in a country that is majority Buddhist. Isn’t Buddhism pacifist? I’m someone whose faith is informed by both Buddhism and Christianity, and I’ve spent most of my academic life teaching Buddhism, after many years of studying Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Buddhism has taught me to understand violence in a new way, throwing light on violence wherever it happens.

One popular reaction to violence is to say ‘How could any individual or group do that?’ We tend to place the violent ones in a sub-human category far away from us, the peaceful ones. Buddhism has taught me that I will never understand violence if I stay at this level. Our world is in the grip of greed, hatred and delusion – what Buddhists call the three poisons. According to Buddhism, they are so deeply rooted that most of us, including Buddhists and Christians, are not free of them. If this is so, violence should not surprise us, in spite of religious teachings about how to eliminate it. I’m not speaking about an acceptance of violence or a refusal to confront it but of understanding that human greed leads to blindness and violence.

Buddhism has also taught me that perpetrators of violence are caught within a web of causes and conditions. Causal analysis beats through Buddhism. What is happening in Myanmar has not arisen in a vacuum; behind it lies a web of causal factors, both historical and contemporary. So, I do not condone. I seek to understand. And it is only through hard analysis that we will understand what is happening in Myanmar and elsewhere, and so be able to act wisely, in solidarity with those who suffer.

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