Indeed. Look no further than our nation's capitol for appalling evidence of that!

No, you're not.

Brad, no offense, but that's the most ignorant fucking thing I've ever heard a Buddhist say.

We don't practice nonviolence because we think that even though violence works, it is bad. We practice nonviolence because violence doesn't work.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. I've heard plenty of Buddhists say ignorant things, and I've even sheltered in my own heart the notion that maybe, somehow, things will get better as a result of Bush's war. Mea culpa. That thing, that fucking ignorant thought that I sheltered in my heart, is the enemy that Buddhism seeks to destroy.

But this is why I get pissed off when people say Buddhism is about being calm, or some shit like that. It's not. Buddhism is Satyagraha. It's letting the fucker break your hand in front of a crowd so that the crowd will withdraw their support from the fucker. It's running when you have to to avoid being murdered. It's walking en masse, unarmed, into the face of an army, because you are right and they are wrong. And it's being murdered, if that's what your karma is, instead of murdering and collecting new karma.

If Buddhism isn't satyagraha, then what's the point? To feel better? God bless. Your right to practice comes from your past good acts, not from a legal construct, and not from the barrel of a gun.

As someone who's studied Chinese, Japanese and Thai Martial arts since I was 13, I have to ask then, why did every style I studied have a foundation in Buddhism? Why before every Thai boxing match, are Therevada rituals practiced by both fighters? Why is Bodhidharma often (albeit, flasely) connected with the birth of Shaolin Kung Fu? Is it because maybe, Buddhists of that age realized that defense of the self was as skillfull a means as doing chores, eating right, and behaving properly?

Every time the shaolin temple was burnt down, the monks didnt just say, "Come on in!" They fought back. For the countless times the Buddhist peasents of thailand were confronted by hordes of Burmese invaders, they didnt lay down their farming tools and cry, they fought back.

Now I am very much against this war for several dozen reasons. Same goes for the administration. But since you're the one who's apllying the Buddhist ideology to a number of scenarios, I think its fair for me to call shenanigans. It's insanely easy for you to say that your principles somehow guide you to a state that lies somewhere above the need to defend your life. But if you think that you could "let the fucker break your wrist" without having a primal physiological response, you're out of your goddamn mind. Do any small bit of reading on the startle/flinch response or the forensics of defensive wounds, and you'll see that the desire to defend ourselves is as engrained as eating or crapping.

Let's say you run away from a dude with a knife. And you run right into a corner. There's no escape, and nothing between you and said fucker. No problem, its your karma to die, right? That's victimhood, and that's not skillful means. Now if you're capable of saving your life without ending his, that's clearly the way to go. But when I was 17 I saw a cop put a round in a dude's leg, that was carrying a knife and chraging at him. The guy was so hoped up on drugs that he didnt even limp. He had already cut the officer prior to me witnessing it. The cop emptied his clip, and the guy slowly went down. Should the cop have died because of Satyagraha? Someone was going to die in that scenario. Based on your myopic view of pacifism and its relation to buddhism, who should it have been?

some good points, however I don't beleive the Buddha was teaching LOVE, unless your reading some poor translations. " LOve will save us all" that was Robert Smith and I don't think he meant it. This love stuff is a bunch of christian crap, thank you.

Lucky, my myopic view of Buddhism is that people die. Everybody. Without exception. Always. Dies.

Of course you should learn Aikido if you are in a violent situation. I didn't say you shouldn't defend yourself - I said that violence doesn't work. Not the same thing.

If your goal is to just be a guy who says "I am a Buddhist," and feels good about himself because he is a Buddhist, then yeah, when the guy with the knife comes at you, shoot him in the heart. Fuck him. It's better that you live than him.

If it was your mom with the knife, would you find another way?

El Truco, maybe you should learn Tibetan. Or Sanskrit. Figure out what nyingje and karuna mean.

And of course, it IS your mom with the knife...

I really, seriously, don't know what to say about this piece. except "Thank you for the teaching. It most certainly was enlightening..."

Thanks, Brad. A worthy attempt to address a difficult and sometimes paradoxical issue. I think you are right in implying that there would be no Buddhism currently if there had not been governments through the centuries to protect the rights of religious people.

Of course everybody dies. Im just saying that if someone is trying to help facilitate your death, you shouldn't aid them.

I'm not a buddhist and I never claimed to be a buddhist. I've read extensively, and I do sit Zazen, but in no way claim to be an expert on the subject. What I am saying is that my experinces have told me that defending your life and buddhist teachings are not in direct opposition. You seem to think they are. Again, its incredibly easy to say what you would and wouldn't do when you've never been in any of these situations. But many buddhists who came before you have, and guess what, they defended themselves, and sometimes that defense of self includes hurting your attacker. Without pleasure, wihtout ego, they did what needed to be done. You seem to think this is unforgivable. I tend to not see the world in such absolute tones.

Oh, and as for my Mom, like that would ever happen. Besides, I could totally take her.

Oh, I don't know, moms can be crafty. Especially when armed.

When did I ever say anything was unforgivable? What Brad said wasn't unforgivable. It was just wrong. Tibetan Buddhism persists despite the Chinese killing 50k monks and destroying virtually every monastery in Tibet. As with the Tibetan diaspora, around the turn of the tenth millenium there was a Buddhist diaspora from India when the Moguls trashed Nalenda monastery and killed most of the monks there. I don't really know the history of the Pali Canon, but I bet there are similar stories.

Buddhists have been massacred many times. You could say it comes with the territory. Being a pacifist isn't some pansy-ass thing where you just calmly submit to being murdered. You run. You slap the knife out of your attacker's hand. Whatever you can.

But if you have refuge, you don't kill your attacker, because you know that that can't be the cause of you living or dying in the moment, but that it will definitely be the cause of you dying in some future moment. That's all. I'm not asking you to accept that this is true; all I'm saying is that this is the basis for the Buddhist practice of not harming others. We don't do it because we're "nice." We do it out of self-interest.

And harming others definitely isn't why Buddhism persists to this day, because if that were so, the moguls wouldn't have massacred the Indian monks, and the Chinese wouldn't have massacred the Tibetan monks.

Lama Zopa told me once that he absolutely would not kill someone who was trying to take his life because he cannot judge which of the two have more of a right to live. I guess that's the Tibetan take on it, although I know that past Dalai Lamas have had armed guards protecting His Holiness and the temple. My Zen teacher would have put it more as a dilemma rather than an absolute.

The armed guards are willing to die to protect His Holiness. Lama Zopa's answer is a nice, skillful answer, but it's probably not what he'd tell a monk. I think expressing it as a dilemma is good, because it puts your mind on the heart of the issue, but it's still a little too easy.

The fact is that unless we're bodyguards to the Dalai Lama, the question has little meaning for us in practice. So when we mentally masturbate on the question, it's probably good to realize that because it's not a visceral issue for us, living under fairly effective rule of law, we aren't likely to come up with an honest answer anyway.

This is why I mentioned Satyagraha. Just look at what Gandhi did when he was in South Africa. *That* is pacifism. That is honest. There's no powerlessness in Satyagraha.

Thank you for the article-- there can be a tremendous amount of skill and transcendance in violence. I don't believe compassion and non-violence are always at odds. Sometimes, the correct act of compassion is being the consequence for another.

The only way to truly become detached from the fear of violence is to have enough exposure and experience within it to overcome the lizard-brain.

Exactly. I think the early Shaolin Monks, Muay Thai Kru's, and Samurai had this concept down pat. It's funny, I can watch a full contact match and have no reaction, in spite of blood, knock outs, choke outs, or anything of that sort. But I can't stand watching two people yell at each other.

Like most things in life, there's no set answer either way. But to me, what Brad is talking about is no more wrong than early Buddhists designing systems of Martial Arts that contain fatal techniques.

Of course their is strength in pacifism. That should be the first weapon deployed in any scenario. But I dont believe that we can unilaterally say that violence in te name of self preservation is bad under any circumstance.