Reflections On Violence in Asian Religions

Abstract

T cross-cultural study of religions goes beyond narrow culture-bound perspectives, categories, and methods, and provides scholars with concerns, practices, and special features outside exclusively Western, usually Judeo-Christian, traditions. However, it is still common to find scholars drawing primarily from the European religious heritage in their use of categories of faith, belief, myth, ritual, eschatology, deity, and so forth. These categories can be useful in the study of mainstream Asian religious traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism. But some categories, like violence, do not easily map onto Asian religious traditions. As it is understood in the Asian tradition, violence comprises such a wide range of themes that using Western traditions of scholarship to understand it will simply leave out or distort too much. Of course, while there are many categories that manifest differently in different cultures, there are also aspects of the human condition that are intelligible throughout any number of human civilizations. In our postmodern academic milieu that favors difference, fragmentation, nuance, and heterogeneity, it would be foolish to make grand claims across the huge expanse of the world that is Asia. Yet in parts of Asia where various religious traditions have enduring effects on cultures, I do see familiar configurations of religious tenets and cultural practices, particularly in premodern times and at the junctures between traditional premodern practices and